Maybe Social Media Isn’t Making Us Depressed After All. Here’s What Likely Is.

Moral panics over new technology always hide deeper problems we don’t want to deal with.

Nir Eyal
OneZero
Published in
6 min readApr 15, 2021

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Illustration of people reaching towards a smartphone with a rainbow over the smartphone to represent LGBTQ youth.
Image courtesy of the author

What do bicycles and social media have in common? Soon after being adopted, each of these technologies brought on a tsunami of unjustified moral panic. Let’s start with bikes.

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Nir Eyal
OneZero

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