An analysis of data from a longitudinal study of child development in Canada showed that girls who spent more hours on the internet at 13 years of age tended to have higher depressive symptoms at age 15. In the same way, girls’ internet usage at age 15 was associated with more depressive symptoms at...
Amazing how Lemmy users are just at bad as Redditors when it comes to jumping to conclusions from the header, rather than actually giving a look into the article.
About half of the participants were girls (...) The results showed that girls reported substantially higher depression scores than boys at all ages. They also reported more hours of internet use per week than boys at age 15. Average Internet use times of girls and boys were similar at 13 and 17 years of age.
Probably means they didn't take into account the fact that boys were just blasting people in online games whereas girls drowned themselves in social media? I reckon it's nothing to do with actual gender and more about what those genders spend their time doing online.
Disagree. There's good reasons to suspect it's causative. There's a facebook study showing instagram is absolutely toxic for teenage self esteem that was leaked (definitely wasn't meant to go public), and I've seen headlines of several academic studies indicating social media contributes to mental health issues in places like /r/science (I've not read them because not very interested).
Intuitively social media tipping pre-disposed people into depression seems awfully plausible from what I've seen
An analysis of data from a longitudinal study of child development in Canada showed that girls who spent more hours on the internet at 13 years of age tended to have higher depressive symptoms at age 15. In the same way, girls’ internet usage at age 15 was associated with more depressive symptoms at 17. These associations were absent in boys.