Meta is being sued, again, for harming minors through its addictive products. Lawsuits like this one pose serious threats to social media companies. (There are a lot of children out there using social media.) They also raise important and hard-to-answer questions about causality. Youth mental health may be suffering, but it’s tricky to prove that social media use is doing it. That is why science - the institution we depend on to answer hard questions about cause and effect - is so important to these cases.
That is also why industries that produce harmful products have so much interest in helping science answer questions about these products. We all know about how tobacco managed to delay consensus and regulation of cigarettes for decades. We know about how oil and gas is still fighting desperately to stop regulation of fossil fuels.
