The book that currently tops the list New York Times The nonfiction bestseller list is The anxious generation, a jeremiad against social networks and their impact on young people. His thesis is that applications like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok have unleashed an epidemic of mental illness among children, preteens and teenagers. Immediate and extreme measures are required to reverse this deadly trend. The author, New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, has been promoting it everywhere. Parents have rallied around his thesis, and Haidt’s claims have added fuel to a latent movement to pass new laws limiting social media. But a review on Nature, one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world, took a more critical note. “The book’s repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness,” wrote Candice L. Odgers, a professor of psychological sciences at UC Irvine, “is not supported by science.”
This academic fight has real consequences: let’s think about the children! When I contacted Odgers for more information, she was happy to oblige. She and her fellow academics seem to view the mass public acceptance of Haidt’s book as a slow-motion horror show. “I’ve been researching adolescent mental health for 20 years, and since 2008, I’ve been following young teens, ages 10 to 14, on their phones,” she says. “So I’m a little old in this game. It’s new”. Odgers says the consensus of the community that actually studies this stuff for a living is that there’s no evidence for Haidt’s claims that social media has sparked a mental health epidemic among a generation whose brains were scrambled by swiping. on smartphones. She pointed me to a number of studies, including one 2022 meta-analysis from 226 studies involving 275,728 participants. “The association between social media use and well-being was indistinguishable from zero,” she and her co-author reported. A study completed last year band the National Academy of Sciences concluded that there was not enough evidence to link social media to changes in adolescent health. (It calls for more research, measures to minimize any harm caused by social media and also measures to maximize its benefits.)
Odgers and a colleague found some studies indicating that social media could have health effects, but when they investigated them, those experiments weren’t necessarily aimed at children. “Participants were often middle-aged women recruited online or small samples of college students who were asked to leave social media and report how they felt,” Odgers and his collaborator wrote in an article titled “Let’s stop shaming teenagers for using social media.” His conclusion is that while there is a worrying rise in mental health problems among young people, especially girls, nothing beyond a visceral reaction tinged with nostalgia indicates that social media is to blame.
When I explained this to Haidt himself in a telephone interview, he was well prepared. He describes the rejection of his work as “a normal academic dispute.” Admittedly, he has faced some of the criticism in his Substack Posts. He is not planning to withdraw from his thesis. “I’m not going to convince them and they’re not going to convince me,” she says. “We each make our best arguments, and then the rest of the academic community will tune in and decide whether there is evidence of harm here.”
One of Haidt’s strongest arguments is that it seems obvious how social media would play a role in the rise of mental health problems, even if other causes are equally likely. “We can safely say that teenagers are susceptible to the moods and beliefs of other teenagers; it’s been true forever,” she says. “We can also say that girls are more so than boys; They share each other’s emotions more. So I think the idea that girls are getting depression and anxiety from other girls is not controversial. The question is: what else are they collecting? And we don’t know. Nobody knows.”
It would be helpful if we knew. This argument is important in part because lawmakers and regulators in the US, EU and UK are considering imposing restrictions on how (and whether) minors access social media. It would make some sense if the threat was determined or debated on solid scientific grounds. In the United States, the main potential bill is Child Online Safety Act (Kosa). The Senate majority has supported this bill, but some civil liberties and free speech organizations believe the bill goes too far. After objections from LGBTQ+ organizations that the bill would deny young people access to resources, its authors made rewrites to mitigate that danger. But critics feel the bill will still give too much authority to state and local officials to censor content on social media in the name of protecting children. A different bill would ban social media entirely for anyone under 13, though some worry that if passed, stealth apps would appear that offer even less protection than traditional ones.
The question of correlation versus causation aside, some of Haidt’s criticisms of social media aimed at children seem beyond doubt. Meta’s own studies. show that Instagram can have a negative effect on teenage girls. It’s also clear that companies like Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, haven’t done enough to protect children. During Mark Zuckerberg’s painful appearance at a Senate hearing last January, in which the CEO of Meta drowned regret to parents whose children committed suicide after interactions on their platform: Senator Richard Blumenthal revealed a damning 2021 email chain. Top Meta executives, including then-VP of global affairs Nick Clegg, chief product officer Chris Cox and then-COO Sheryl Sandberg, called for more resources to address child safety and well-being, laying out detailed plans that included more employees. . working on the problem. But Zuckerberg rejected the plan, basically because he didn’t want to spend the money. (Meta spokesperson Andy Stone says the company has developed more than 50 tools to help teens have safe experiences.)
