> the term of problematic use characterizes individuals who experience addiction-like symptoms as a result of their social media use. Problematic social media use reflects a non–substance related disorder by which detrimental effects occur as a result of preoccupation and compulsion to excessively engage in social media platforms despite negative consequences.

This study is taking "problematic social media use" as it's implicit given and then from this arbitrary base it is then saying this small subset of problematic people experience depression because of the fiat declaration of "problematic".

But then it goes on,

>While there exists no official diagnostic term or measurement, Andreassen et al [17] developed the Facebook Addiction Scale, which measures features of substance use disorder such as salience, tolerance, preoccupation, impaired role performance, loss of control, and withdrawal, to systematically score problematic Facebook use.

Which isn't even a real journal article but instead a comment in a non-research paper which hasn't ever even been cited by anyone else until this paper. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C29&q=Dev... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22662404/

This is not real science. This is anti-facebook political manipulation via science sounding words. I'm plenty anti-facebook myself but I am very pro-science so it's sad to see this successfully masquerading as real science.

By link you mean correlate, which doesn't mean anything.

Social studies are useless anyway. Academic social studies are so biased that anything they say on the matter should be discarded. They will always produce "evidence" on demand for whatever the left want to do.

Social media should be left alone. Parents who want to can block it on their children's devices. There's nothing more that needs to be done.