Evidence base
PubMed
Closeness of Social Media Contacts and Loneliness Among US Adults: A Nationally Representative Study
What it found
This nationally representative study of US adults examined whether the closeness of a person's social media contacts moderates their level of loneliness, rather than treating online contact as a single undifferentiated category.
Why it matters for practice
The finding supplied only establishes that closeness was examined as a moderator, not the direction or size of the effect; readers should treat this as a signal that "screen time" framings of loneliness are too blunt, and should look for the fuller results before drawing programme conclusions.