The amount of time teenagers spend on social media has only a negligible effect on their happiness, the most comprehensive study yet has found.
Researchers at the University of Oxford blamed “sloppy science” for studies suggesting that time spent on social media could be linked to poor mental health. They called for the concept of “screen time” — curbs on phone use — to be abandoned after finding that only a tiny fraction of teenagers’ change in life satisfaction could be explained by the length of time they spent online.
However, they said that technology companies must be made to hand over their detailed data on what teenagers do online to discover whether there is a particularly harmful way of using social media, or some