@c_9 @mmasnick Right, but this is akin to the gun lobby actively preventing research on gun violence, and then claiming that guns don’t cause an increase in violence.
As a game developer who lived through the whole moral panic surrounding violence in video games, this is a different beast. The scale of social media makes it very difficult to ascertain whether it’s a net good or bad, or whether regulation can improve things if the big social media platforms won’t open their data to researchers.