"Despite several doomsday claims that the Internet is breeding a generation of morons, new analysis suggests the opposite may be true."
An uncontrolled correlation does NOT suggest the opposite is true.
The rest of the article is better though, and allows for various causes.
That's probably true for most cities. The way I phrased it does not imply causation.
What's the difference between the two sentences? The first one presents a situation where causation seems plausible to us, so we infer it automatically. Whereas, causation seems implausible between crime and IE, so we don't read my sentence as implying causation.
Our brains are wired to automatically see causation if it seems plausible and there's a correlation. I teach the LSAT, and this is one of the topics tested.
Normally, the testmakers go to great lengths to disguise what they're doing. But on causation/correlation questions, they just present the correlation. They know we're so bad at it that the question will fool people without any other special tricks.