Facebook and Instagram Don't Wreck Kids' Lives, Claims New Study

A new study from the University of Oxford claims screen time doesn't have a detrimental impact on young people's brains, like so many researchers have claimed. Instead, it says family, friends and school life all had a greater impact on wellbeing. An anonymous reader shares the report from ZDNet: The researchers' skepticism was based on the Grand Theory of Chicken and Egg. As one of the lead researchers, Amy Orben explained: 'The previous literature was based almost entirely on correlations with no means to dissociate whether social media use leads to changes in life satisfaction or changes in life satisfaction influence social media use.' Quite. Does social media make kids -- or anyone else, for that matter -- miserable? Or do miserable people turn to social media in search of, well, something?

These researchers spoke to 12,000 UK teens and concluded that the effect of social media on their life satisfaction was tiny. Indeed, as another of the lead researchers, Professor Andrew Przybylski told the BBC: '99.75 percent of a person's life satisfaction has nothing to do with their use of social media.' Nothing has really changed, he said. Family, friends and school life are still the dominating factors in teen happiness. Moreover, Przybylski took the time to completely contradict Apple CEO and his pained worries about screen time. Przybylski put it quite baldly: 'Parents shouldn't worry about time on social media. Thinking about it that way is wrong.' For perfect measure, he added: 'We need to retire this notion of screen time.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.