9 Everyday Inventions That Caused Widespread Panic

1. Facebook Is Giving Your Kids Autism (Or Something)

One of the latest moral bandwagons on which people like to throw themselves is the social-media-is-somehow-hurting-our-kids one.

Beyond the vague paranoia surrounding sexting acronyms and happy slapping, Baroness Susan Greenfield has taken the novel stance. She thinks that the use of social media is giving kids autism because, if we've learnt anything from the anti-vaccination camp, throwing The A Word around is a good way to get noticed.

The only problem is that she doesn't appear to have any evidence. She doesn't have any peer reviewed research to back up her particular claim and instead limits herself to citing research about internet addiction (i.e. not typical usage) and drawing vague parallels between happy slapping (which I'm fairly confident died out in about 2001) and Twitter, or the rise in autism and the proliferation of social media. Someone please explain to this woman the difference between correlation and causation.

In much the same way old Socrates longed for the days before books, Greenfield actually, unironically, longed for the days when kids would simply sit staring at the TV as opposed to the screen of their iPad.

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