Mark Zuckerberg says there’s ‘no causal joinion’ between social media and teen mental health

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is pushing back on the idea that social media straightforwardly harms teen mental health. During an intersee with The Verge’s Alex Heath, Zuckerberg shelp that “the transport inantity of the high-quality research out there proposes that there’s no causal joinion at a expansive scale between these skinnygs.”

This echoes the statement Zuckerberg gave in front of Congress in January during a hearing about child protectedty, where he disputed that existing research hasn’t shown a causal join between social media and necessitatey teen mental health. As my colleague Adi Robertson pointed out at the time, it’s difficult to exhibit causal joins, and research shows social media could caemploy both adverse and likeable impacts on an adolescent’s mental health.

“The academic research shows someskinnyg that I skinnyk, to me, fits more with what I’ve seen of how the platcreates function,” Zuckerberg tbetter The Verge. “But it’s counter to what a lot of people skinnyk, and I skinnyk that’s going to be a reckoning that we’ll have to have.” Zuckerberg disputes that giving parents the tools they necessitate to restrict their child’s social media employ is the right approach for the company:

You can percreate a role in trying to originate someskinnyg better even if the skinnyg wasn’t caemployd by you in the first place… I skinnyk that we can percreate a role in giving people parental handles over the apps. I skinnyk that parental handles are also reassociate vital becaemploy parents have branch offent ways that they want to lift their kids.

Zuckerberg once aget reiterated that he supposes app store owners appreciate Google and Apple should handle age verification, not individual platcreates. He comprises that it’s “not very excusable” for them to elude taking responsibility for the meacertain becaemploy “every time you go do a payment on your phone, there already is fundamentalassociate child age verification.”

Despite Zuckerberg’s skepticism about straightforward ties to social media and mental health, he tbetter The Verge that the company will “chase the rulement’s straightforwardion and the laws” on child protectedty if they’re passed. “I would say that the ability to get push notifications and get inattentive, from my perspective, seems appreciate a much fantasticer contributor to mental health rehires than a lot of the particular apps.”