Here's a list of social panics that turned out to be nothing:
Kids being poisoned by halloween candy (no child was ever poisoned by a stranger on Halloween)
Kids being latchkey kids
Violent video games
Jazz
Hip hop
Rap
Heavy Metal
Satanists meeting up to cut up animals
Marijuana
Dungeons and dragons (really https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-1980s-media-panic-over-dungeons-dragons)
People gassing Euro trains and removing everyone's kidneys
The internet
Email (really)
Text chat like aol and yahoo messenger
Sms messages
The dark web
Jelly bracelets (really, on Good Morning America https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/the-great-sex-bracelet-scare-and-other-teen-myths/2197833/)
Most songs sung by black people
Many songs sung by Italian Americans
Homosexual men
Africanized Honey Bees
Facebook
Myspace
Pinball arcades
Video game arcades
Pool halls
You will probably die after 70 of old age stuff. If not then a car crash or falling. Your kids might get screwed up but we have no idea why and avoiding all the above won't change the odds at all.
Yeah but just because you made a list of unrelated things, doesn't mean I have to let my kids get addicted to some silly government controlled app. I wouldnt want them to get addicted to gambling, or drugs either. Thatd be a dumb thing to do. The power of marketing is real.
The difference with all of those things is it was parents "social panicking" about something they had no experience of, whereas parents are also on social media experiencing the negative effects for themselves.
If you want to look at past analogous campaigns, tobacco lobby arguments fit better: All the cool kids are doing it, so if you don't do it you're uncool, correlation between lung cancer/depression doesn't equal causation, the science can't prove anything, maybe people who are predisposed to lung cancer/depression are more likely to smoke/spend all day doomscrolling.
