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Causation, not just correlation, baby! And from the Ivy League! Also, 7 other things worth your time.

Facebook would be nothing without the Ivy League.

For its first year or so, you couldn’t sign up without an email address from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford,¹ and eventually other elite universities. It piggybacked on the most exclusive clubs in the world.

But as long as we’ve been beating up on Facebook the last few days—with good reason, I must say—there’s an Ivy League study I’d like to mention that spells trouble for Facebook, along with Instagram and related apps.

That's because this was the first study to show a "clear causal link" between using social media like Facebook and being lonely and depressed.

Now, other studies have certainly found that heavy users of Facebook and other social media sites suffered mental health issues. But that was about correlation, not causation.

In other words, it might simply have been that people who are already depressed and lonely wind up using Facebook and similar sites—as opposed to the sites themselves causing the issues.

This study, from t…