Yes, and I have ears - and use them. I listened to what the kids were saying. I listen to the kids I work with in the youth organizations in which I'm involved. I listen to the kids on the teams I coach. If you haven't figured it out, I'm around a lot of kids.

You wanna know something none of these kids have ever complained about (and boy do they complain a lot!) - social media making them feel bad. I don't know a single kid that was like I may as well quit since I can't do X as good as some social media darling.

I can tell you what they do complain about, and I wrote about that elsewhere on this thread.

But I do know politicians love blaming social media so they can use it as fuel for their TikTok ban. They can use it as fuel to reign in "Big Tech."

Being a Gen X'er I can tell you in the 80's and 90's it was video games and heavy metal music they were blaming for the kids' woes. Today it's social media. All I can say is they were wrong then, and they're wrong now.

Yeah, 80’s heavy metal music (and D&D, though politically that was more at the local level, though like heavy metal it tied in with the Satanic Panic), 90’s video games and rap music (though obviously there was no clear cut over, just a gradual shift of focus.)

And the arguments were pretty much the same as with social media, including a whole lot of post hoc ergo propter hoc without good evidence of causation and where there were alternative and stronger causal explanations.