Do teenagers really say social media is bad for them?
Why don’t we ask teens themselves to rank what’s harming and depressing them?
Back in the halcyon 1980s, I and Montana 4H colleagues presented workshops refuting Tipper Gore’s famous Parents’ Music Resource Center video whose supporters declared, "There certainly are many causes for these ills in our society, but it is our contention that the pervasive messages aimed at children which promote and glorify suicide, rape, sadomasochism, and so on, have to be numbered among the contributing factors."
The PMRC especially accused rock, punk, and rap music of driving Jonathan Haidt’s and Jean Twenge’s generations of the 1970s and ‘80s to unheard-of crises of adolescent depression, mayhem, pornography, and suicide. Now, psychologists Haidt and Twenge resurrect the same emotional claims that social media drives 2020s teens to unprecedented depression, self-harm, and suicide. Haidt insists the old culture-war panics were bogus; teens back then never joined those crusades.
Wrong. While a large majority of teens back then – like today – defended their cultural choices, a significant minority insisted “devil music” was destroying their own younger generations, and thousands joined mass burnings of records, books, and magazines. Some 1980s teens criticized my presentations, insisting popular culture and music indeed cause violence, depression, and suicide. When I asked for harmful examples, a few ventured songs like, “Imagine” and “Lean on Me.” (What?)
The young people whose voices grownups amplify are the ones selected to help advance grownup agendas, which San Jose State library and information science professor Anthony Bernier dubs, “the teen panel syndrome.” When we want to know what teens in general think, we ask them in scientific surveys that offer a broad range of possible answers instead of pre-selecting the result.
An excellent series of 2022 surveys by Pew Research found 32% of teens thought social media had a negative effect on other “people their age” – but only 9% thought social media negatively affected them personally. (Many American teenagers apparently harbor adult attitudes: “it’s okay for me, but not for you.”)
As for today’s girls on whom fear of social media centers, 83% said social media made them feel “more connected to what’s going on in their friends’ lives;” 77% said it gave them “a place where they can show their creative side;” 72% said it put them in contact with “people who can support them through tough times;” and 61% said it made them feel “more accepted.” Fewer than half cited negative effects in any category, such as “drama.”
And the bottom line: 6 in 10 teens said social media had neither positive nor negative effects on their lives. It’s there; a tool.
Gen Z is taking smartphones and online life in stride. We see that same dynamic in the Centers for Disease Control’s 2021 Adolescent Behaviors and Experiences Survey, the only one that examines a wide range of alternative causes. Compared to girls who never or rarely use social media, girls who use social media frequently (5+ hours a day) are more likely to report “poor mental health” (47% vs 30%), sadness (63% vs 46%), and considering suicide (31% vs 23%).
Those who blame social media for girls’ self-destructiveness stop there. They should go on to the big questions, as Haidt’s colleague, research scientist Zach Rausch, suggests: “If we want to get a clear view of adolescent mental health, we need to look at a range of measures.”
There, a surprise emerges. Compared to girls who rarely/never use social media, girls who frequently use social media are less likely to attempt suicide (15% vs 19%) and self-harm (3% vs 7%), perhaps because they avail more online contacts (49% vs 29%). In fact, girls who are violently and/or psychologically abused by parents and household adults are also more likely to be online a lot (66% vs 45%) – which, to complete the circle, is a big reason why girls who are online frequently are more likely to report being depressed (go back two paragraphs).
We don’t know the reason why fewer than half of the girls who contemplate suicide and who are online frequently go on to actually attempt suicide, compared to nearly all suicide-contemplating girls who don’t go online. We never asked girls about this unexpected finding – in fact, Haidt and colleagues seem completely uninterested in why, as Rausch acknowledges, teen girls’ real-life suicide rates are so “low.”
However, the 9% of teens who tell Pew researchers that social media harms them (the ones Haidt features) have the absolute right to help in developing alternatives that avoid screen worlds. The other 91% likewise have the right to use iPhones and online resources at their own discretion. Affording young people a broad range of alternatives is how society improves.
Improvement is certainly needed. Since the 1980s, grownups have gotten tragically worse. We certainly don’t want today’s young people to turn out like today’s middle-agers (the ones Haidt asserts enjoyed idyllic, pre-cyberwired childhoods).
Using indexes of major risk as another measure of the type I’ve been featuring, ages 45-54 (the parents of teens) death rates from suicide, homicide, overdoses, and guns skyrocketed from 1990 to 2022. Among teens, such deaths fluctuated, from higher than their parents’ rate back in 1990 to well below their parents’ violent death rate today.
Some would argue that the 2020s suffer deadlier instruments such as AR15s and fentanyl; alternatively, modern medicine saves lives that would have been lost in 1990. In any case, both the post-1990 social-media era and the post-2010 mass-iPhone eras have accompanied much worse grownup than youthful trends.
Source: Centers for Disease Control 2024.
Figure 1. High-risk violent death trends, young versus parent ages, 1990-2022.
Of course, social-media critics fixate only on the upward young-age trend from 2010 to 2022, which they blame on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. They ignore the far worse trends afflicting the older generations raising them.
Do they just not see the “grownup problem”? Or is their pretense that it doesn’t exist deliberate? Future posts will break down the real causal factors in teens’ depression and why I contend we’re getting these issues all wrong. Thank you to all who subscribe and comment on these posts.
Mike, what are your thoughts about this?
https://drmcfillin.substack.com/p/what-the-hell-is-society-doing-to?pos=4&utm_source=%2Fbrowse%2Frecommendations&utm_medium=reader2
Well-said, Mike