How Weak Evidence Is Fueling a National Push to Ban Social Media for Youth

If the evidence were undeniable would that be cause to ban social media for the youth?

We cannot simply ban things if they are bad, however weak or strong the evidence is. We have to examine access on the basis of rights alone. If the right exists then it could kill all kids and it would still be the correct decision to allow it.

The full title is:

> The Science is Not Settled: How Weak Evidence is Fueling a National Push to Ban Social Media for Youth

I don’t need 1000 studies from Harvard or MIT to confirm what I can see with my own eyes and hear with my own ears. Part of the reason we are in this mess at all is an over reliance on statistical modeling and peer reviewed literature etc and so on when if you are of a certain age you can literally just notice how things are different. I would vote to ban it, and a bunch of people with fancy regression analyses are not going to change my mind.

With subjects like this, the outcome variables are things like “suicide” and “eating disorders”. So, what, we have to wait until R² > .95 to be convinced of the utility regulation? Seems the least-harm approach is actually to index on the side of regulation first instead of pretending the null is true in this case.