One in five millennials are lonely and have 'no friends'

> “Here’s the bottom line: Using less social media than you normally would leads to significant decreases in both depression and loneliness,” says study author Melissa Hunt.

Maybe their words were taken out of context, but the study this refers to was done on a group of undergraduates [0] so besides it being, in my opinion, an overly simplistic solution, I'd be hesitant to draw this out to the wider population. This is especially apparent when looking at the YouGov poll stats where there's clearly a lot of different reasons why people feel they cannot make friends. This is not to say that overuse of social media is not problematic.

I'd be interested to see how this varies by country - loneliness is something I've struggled with a lot in my life as I've moved city/country many times and never lived in the US. I've found each place differs a lot in how easy or difficult it is to make friends and acquaintances, although this could be because I'm at different stages in my life when I've moved.

[0] https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/abs/10.1521/jscp.2018.37.10...