Yesterday it was the Mail and today it’s the Star; social media continues to fall foul of the papers.

Their outrage has been pointed at social networking sites which according to ‘an eminent scientist’ will ‘harm a child’s brain’.

Is Facebook carrying damaging subliminal messages? Is Twitter releasing invasive alien creatures through the screen? Not that I’ve noticed.

Actually what Susan Greenfield is saying is that because children are using social networking sites their attention spans are reduced.

I’m not a neuroscientist so I can’t make any claim to refute this. What I do refute is her extrapolation from this that children will lose the ability to communicate effectively.

She suggests that the rise in the use of both social media and autism may be linked and even my A Level Psychology tells me that correlation does not equate to cause and effect.

On the contrary surely social media encourages communication: children in the UK talking to Japanese, American and Kenyan children about their interests can’t be doing their communication skills any harm.

This story reminded me of another young girl who last week received 70% burns from a sun bed because she was too young to be using it and went on it for longer than instructed.

Her mother claimed in the media that the sun bed was to blame. However used safely and with a little thought, as they are by most people, sun beds do not cause 70% burns.

Blaming social media is like blaming the sun bed. Children can use sites like Facebook in moderation to share their interests, research their hobbies or catch up with friends or they can sit in front of them for 7 hours a day bully their peers and play computer game like applications.

Surely which of these happens is down to the child and their parenting not the network.