Thank you Dr. Stein for the reply (see below). First, my many posts on the subject never remotely implied anyone is an incompetent idiot or myself a towering genius; you’re the one indulging ad-hominem condescension.
Second, Haidt, Twenge, and everyone cite the same CDC survey I do, but only a few selected questions rather than the entire survey challenging their claims. If the National Academies did graph the CDC findings on social media and suicide and self-harm, as you and I both wish, they would show adolescents who are NOT on-screen are most at risk by far for suicide, self-harm, and major dangers.
Third, the Gallup survey you cite mashes “suicidal thoughts” with much-rarer self-harm into one number and then miscites its own numbers. What we need are actual suicide attempts and self-harm shown separately, as the CDC does.
Fourth, Haidt certainly does argue for “no social media before 16” – none of which, including legislation passed and pending, makes the distinctions for teens at risk you now argue for. Haidt’s claims about liberal teens are ideologically, not evidence, driven. See also psychologist Chris Ferguson’s meta-analyses debunking scores of “studies.”
Finally, no one – not Haidt or Twenge, or anyone else I can find – has provided evidence beyond “correlation equals causation” (Haidt promises causation, then doesn’t provide it). Instead, Twenge and Haidt correctly acknowledge the “correlation between social media” use and teens’ happiness is “small,” but she then states a “positive correlation” is all that matters. Of course, small correlates don’t prove causation, either, and cannot cause big effects or changes. Then, presenting no evidence of causality – not even correlation – all sweepingly blame social media for the teen suicide increase.
When 55% of teens (including 62% of girls and 74% of LGBQs) report abuse by parents and household adults, and parent/grownup abuse is associated with 13 times more depression and infinitely more suicide and self-harm by teens than anything remotely attributable to social media, it doesn’t take a “towering genius” to argue that we should prioritize analyzing domestic abuse, along with parents’ soaring drug-alcohol crises across the Anglo world. From 2011 through 2021, when teen depression and suicide rose, an appalling 722,000 US adults ages 30-59 died from self-inflicted overdoses and suicides, equivalent to the entire middle-aged population of Nebraska gone. Haidt’s claim that the virtual world is more dangerous to teens than the physical world is patently ridiculous – though the dangers of both are unconscionably exaggerated.
Bizarrely, major commentators refuse to touch parental issues beyond Twenge’s astonishing insistence that we don’t want to know the larger causes of teen depression. Do you see a Surgeon General’s alert or major commentator analysis of parental abuse/addiction and teen depression/suicide? That dereliction abrogates science and fundamental responsibility for adolescents’ safety. The best evidence (with some inexcusable gaps) indicates that teens’ unhappiness and suicide are functions of larger social forces: rising all-ages addiction, growing awareness of crises such as global injustices and climate change, and more difficult adults, and that social media helps teens deal with that unhappiness.
And just when those pushing broad stroke bans thought they were on philosophically stable ground, along comes Melanie Hempe, who as predicted effectively argues that even these bans don't go far enough. Note that her essay is cross-posted on Haidt's Substack as well:
I posted the following on Jonathan Haidt's After Babel substack:
Why do those on here blame more screen time for more teen suicide and self-harm when the definitive CDC and other surveys show just the opposite? For all ages, sexes, races, and statuses, teens who never/rarely go online (<1 hr/day) suffer greater risk of suicide attempt and self-harm than teens who go online regularly (1-4 hrs/day) or frequently (5+ hrs/day).
The CDC survey consistently shows that teens under age 16 who rarely/never go online suffer the greatest risks of suicide attempt, injurious self-harm, smoking, heroin use, methamphetamine use, cocaine use, school violence, domestic violence, dating violence, rape, gun-carrying, fights, prescription abuse, increased alcohol/drug use, missing school, exercising less than 3 days/week, and having few contacts with supportive people. While some risks like vaping and lack of sleep are similar or worse for online teens, on balance, the worst troubles are concentrated in non-online teens. (I invite downloading and analyzing the full CDC survey and the few broader ones, such as Pew’s.)
Offline teens are slightly more Black or Hispanic, demographics with low suicide rates. Overall, the most troubled teens – those reporting depression, sadness, abuse by parents/adults, suicidal ideation, and female, younger, minority, LGBQ status –are much safer if regularly or frequently online. For example, non-online LGBQ teens who consider suicide are twice as likely as their frequently-online counterparts to attempt suicide and self-harm.
True, the CDC survey associates more screen time with poorer teen mental health. That makes it even more fascinating that the same teens on the same survey associate more screen time with lower risks of suicide attempt, self-harm, and other troubles. Studies fixated on social media missed vital insights into what really generates teens’ unhappiness and how they use social media.
The dangers of both the virtual and real worlds have been wildly exaggerated. Teens don’t need more restrictions.
Well-said, Mike. Young people today are the most heavily monitored and (in many ways) restricted generation in all of recorded history overall. And while we know social media and such can indeed be toxic, for all ages, you do a great job of showing how it can just as likely be TONIC as well, especially for young people.
And unlike many of the other measures of harm or risk, which are often largely subjective and easily mismeasured, suicide is a cold, hard fact that is VERY difficult to explain away by the ubiquitous chattering classes and fearmongers.
True. Given that if all of the CDC's survey potential factors are combined, they explain just one-third of teens' depression and suicide-attempt levels -- which, even for social science, is very low. Clearly, our surveys like the CDC's are not asking the right questions, which I suggest should include more detailed queries on parents'/adults' troubles and global issues like social justice and climate change, which emerging studies suggest may be the biggest drivers of growing young-age unhappiness.
The real elephant in the room is that the *adults* are NOT alright. Anyone who thinks that arbitrary age gating and other such band-aids are on philosophically stable ground will soon find themselves eating crow. So if we really want to solve this all-ages collective action problem, how about we officially declare a state of emergency and quarantine all social media for "just two weeks". Also have a smartphone buyback program like they do for guns. I am only half-joking about that.
(As for phone-free schools, fine. And how about phone-free workplaces as well?)
Of course, those are not permanent solutions, only enough to break the spell that Big Tech has over We the People. We actually need to FIX the internet for good. We need to throw the proverbial One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom by passing comprehensive data privacy legislation for all ages, and especially banning surveillance advertising. We need to audit the algorithms and make them public. We need to rein in the deliberately addictive features and "frictionless sharing" of these platforms. And of course, we need to go antitrust on Big Tech as well. Yesterday.
To the adults in the room: the life you save may very well be your own.
Re today's post, I'm thinking of first posting this (the ages are Haidt's and Twenge's):
If I were dictator, the following warnings (like those on cigarette packages) would be mandatory at the top of every commentary in which an adult deplored teen mental health, suicide, self-harm, and/or social media:
- Warning: This commentator is male, and 60 [using a typical age of posters on here as an example]. A 60 year-old man is 6.4 times more likely to commit suicide and 12.6 times more likely to die from self-inflicted suicide or overdose than is a high-school girl (age 16).
- Warning: This commentator is female, and 52. A 52-year-old woman is 1.7 times more likely to commit suicide and 5.1 times more likely to die from self-inflicted suicide or overdose than is a high-school girl.
- Warning: According to the Centers for Disease Control’ comprehensive, multi-factor survey, girls who are violently and/or emotionally abused by parents or household grownups are 8 times more likely to attempt suicide and 27 times more likely to self-harm compared to girls who are not abused.
- Warning: Parents’ abuse, mental health, and rapidly increasing drug/alcohol problems across the Western world are by far the leading known cause of mental health and related self-destructive problems in girls. No other factor even comes close.
- Warning: According to the CDC, banning or restricting girls from screen time risks substantially increasing their risks of suicide, self-harm, and victimization by adults as well as isolating them from friends, families, and medical help.
- Warning: The CDC finds that girls who regularly or frequently use screens such as TV, cellphones, and social media are 23% less likely to attempt suicide and 51% less likely to self-harm compared to girls who spend little or no screen time.
All of the above statements are true and easily verified. Ordinarily, such regrettable warnings would be unnecessary. We would expect social scientists, leaders, and media reporters routinely to provide vital, balanced contexts when they discuss important issues like suicide and self-harm.
Unfortunately, American adults today have gone off the rails in a frenzy of prejudicial declarations. Authorities routinely demean powerless populations like girls as mentally disturbed and suicidal and demand sweeping restrictions on their freedom while shielding their own more powerful adult demographics from scrutiny. Sweeping restrictions are pushed on girls’ freedoms and behaviors without discussing the potential risks. Crucial information is systematically omitted. If we care about girls' safety, we need a balanced discussion.
I want to work a bit more on a reply to Haidt's complete reliance on single-factor experimental psychology studies, which reviews have found uniformly unreliable.
Well-said, Mike. You truly have a knack for being the voice of reason, and for using both sides of your brain (unlike the ultra left-brain-dominant talking heads and fearmongers). And if you were dictator even for a single day, the world would be a much better place indeed!
And also note how these commentators would never in a million years impose any such restrictions on themselves, at least not directly (even if mandatory age verification can backfire on adults too from a privacy and cybersecurity perspective, but I digress). Their hypocrisy is so thick you could cut it with a knife, and their sense of social responsibility seems to end at the tip of their noses. Or perhaps they themselves are hopelessly addicted to the very things that they seek to ban teens from doing? Either way, it is NOT at all flattering!
I do NOT NOT NOT support supported “broad-stroke bans” -- such accusation is absurd given that I'm on the record warning that such bans will not decrease excessive screen time. [See Senators on Social Media: The Screen Time Fallacy https://shoresofacademia.substack.com/p/senators-on-social-media-the-screen].
And again, there is no measure of social media use on the CDC YRBS or ABES.
Very glad to have that clarified, David. And btw, the National Academies is as guilty as Haidt, Twenge, the Surgeon General, et al, of ignoring the serious parent crises that are far more associated with teen depression, suicide, and other troubles than is anything attributable to social media use.
The CDC and Gallup findings on average screen time and patterns are so similar that it is clear both are measuring similar things. Where the Gallup survey falls short is in its selective picking of just those issues that are associated with more social media use while omitting all the serious issues (led by teen suicide attempt and self-harm) the CDC shows are strongly associated with teens not being online. In fact, Gallup lumps suicide ideation with much rarer self-harm into one number, when what we really need is actual suicide attempts and self harm shown separately, as the CDC does.
At the rate things are going these days, the following is a very likely conversation that will happen many times over in 2030, at the latest. At least in the USA:
18 Year Old: "I'm an adult now. Why am I still not allowed to go on social media or have a smartphone?"
Parent: "Because the law now forbids both until you are 21, and the law is the law."
18 Year Old: "But Canadian, Australian, British, and European people my age are allowed to. As are people my age in almost every other country as well."
Parent: "Well, we're not Canada, Australia, Europe, or any other country for that matter. Different cultures and such. America has too many problems as it is."
18 Year Old: "But your generation was allowed to at a much earlier age than me!"
Parent: "That was then. Life was cheap back then. We know better now. And your grandparents were allowed to drink and smoke too at your age, which we obviously no longer allow either, so your point is?"
18 Year Old: "And they were allowed to play outside with their friends unsupervised even when they were in single digits too, or so I have heard. Grandma and Grandpa actually got to enjoy the real world before they forgot how to, while you got to enjoy the virtual world at least. My generation had neither."
Parent: "Well, the real world was much safer back then compared to now, and as for me, we didn't know just how dangerous the virtual world really was."
18 Year Old: "Statistics say otherwise".
Parent: "You need to watch more news and true crime documentaries before you can argue statistics. It's really a jungle out there now. In any case, I see your statistics, and I raise you a "Because I said so!""
18 Year Old: "Statistics beat logical fallacies and anecdotes every time. Regardless, it's not fair in what is supposed to be a free country."
Parent: "Life isn't fair. Deal with it!"
18 Year Old: "But I'm literally old enough to get married, and yet I can't even post my own wedding on Facebook? That doesn't make any sense at all."
Parent: "If you're so mature and such an adult, then why don't you get married right now?" (Tries to trick the young person into saying they are "too young".)
18 Year Old: "Because as an adult, I know that just because you CAN do something, it doesn't mean that you SHOULD. Just like you raised me".
Parent: (speechless)
18 Year Old: (Mic drop)
This was meant to be satire, of course. But it also goes to show that Haidt's and Twenge's proposals may not be on philosophically stable ground. Only difference now is that the Overton window didn't shift quite that far--yet.
Note that there is an interesting analysis in a report titled HOW PARENTING AND SELF-CONTROL MEDIATE THE LINK BETWEEN SOCIAL MEDIA USE AND YOUTH MENTAL HEALTH.
That does seem to be a real challenge for Haidt to explain. The report concludes:
---
The strong relationship linking parenting to youth social media use and mental health raises questions about the broader role of parenting in explaining recent declines in youth mental health.
Across a vast literature in psychology, parenting has proven to be a strong, robust predictor of youth mental health at any given moment in time and longitudinally.
Unfortunately, there is no high-quality data showing how the quality of parent-child relationships or parenting practices have changed. There are only fragments.
---
This echoes what I've been saying for years. Unfortunately the paper is not peer-reviewed and the data is not public, so the work is unverifiable so far.
I sent an inquiry to its author but received no reply. Such data really needs to be accessible by other scholars so the analysis can be replicated. Without verification we can get no progress, and good data on parental impacts are criminally rare in this field.
This is not online time, it is screen time that includes watching TV and Netflix and playing video games etc.
The entire analysis depends on barely 1% of the sample (depressed teens with close to zero screen time). Associations with such tiny fractions of the sample are utterly unreliable on surveys since they can get overwhelmed by erroneous responses.
Even if these result were not just illusory, they would not present much of a challenge to Haidt. If a large portion of kids who are already severely depressed respond by withdrawing from teen activities, including entertainment (TV and games), then of course you'd expect such kids to be the most suicidal ones.
Of interest is that once controlled for depression, screen time seems irrelevant for suicide. Question is, was this true only during the pandemic?
BTW, people will start avoiding you if go on insinuating that everyone who ever investigated screen time is an incompetent idiot while you are a towering genius that just resolved a complex matter with a single post.
There have always been tons of people who have argued that online access is important for isolated teens, and for many teens during the pandemic. I never saw Haidt or really anyone argue we should ban kids from using Zoom etc. The controversy is over kids spending hours a day on Tik-Tok etc.
And it looks like the Florida teen suicide rate is about to go up starting January 1, 2025, if the new law they passed restricting social media before age 16 doesn't get struck down before then.
Regression analysis connects social media to only 1-3% of the variation in teen depression and also teen suicide attempts and self-harm (which means the real causes lie more in family and larger issues), so it would be difficult to expect a measurable effect on Florida's rates from their ban. Plus, teens have proven happily adept at getting around nannying. However, we can expect considerable hypocrisy. If teen suicide goes down, the social-media blamers will loudly grab credit; if it goes up, they won't take responsibility.
Any anyone who claims it is a "collective action problem" will have just opened a major can of worms here. If the problem is simply that young people need to use social media because everyone else is on it, then restricting only people below some arbitrary age (pick your poison) would backfire as it is both over- and under-inclusive. Short of banning social media for ALL ages, period (that is, shutting it ALL down), which would throw even more of the baby out with the bathwater, any age limit would do far more harm than good on balance.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has the right idea: Privacy First, for all ages. Comprehensive data privacy legislation for all ages would essentially throw the proverbial One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom, and force Big Tech to go on the much safer (AND freer) DuckDuckGo model. Before we even think about doing anything else, we absolutely need to do that first, and quite frankly, yesterday is not soon enough.
Indeed, if the talking heads are worried about "addictive features" of social media, they should simply target those features, and for all ages. The latest Florida bill is both over- and under-inclusive.
Thank you Dr. Stein for the reply (see below). First, my many posts on the subject never remotely implied anyone is an incompetent idiot or myself a towering genius; you’re the one indulging ad-hominem condescension.
Second, Haidt, Twenge, and everyone cite the same CDC survey I do, but only a few selected questions rather than the entire survey challenging their claims. If the National Academies did graph the CDC findings on social media and suicide and self-harm, as you and I both wish, they would show adolescents who are NOT on-screen are most at risk by far for suicide, self-harm, and major dangers.
Third, the Gallup survey you cite mashes “suicidal thoughts” with much-rarer self-harm into one number and then miscites its own numbers. What we need are actual suicide attempts and self-harm shown separately, as the CDC does.
Fourth, Haidt certainly does argue for “no social media before 16” – none of which, including legislation passed and pending, makes the distinctions for teens at risk you now argue for. Haidt’s claims about liberal teens are ideologically, not evidence, driven. See also psychologist Chris Ferguson’s meta-analyses debunking scores of “studies.”
Finally, no one – not Haidt or Twenge, or anyone else I can find – has provided evidence beyond “correlation equals causation” (Haidt promises causation, then doesn’t provide it). Instead, Twenge and Haidt correctly acknowledge the “correlation between social media” use and teens’ happiness is “small,” but she then states a “positive correlation” is all that matters. Of course, small correlates don’t prove causation, either, and cannot cause big effects or changes. Then, presenting no evidence of causality – not even correlation – all sweepingly blame social media for the teen suicide increase.
When 55% of teens (including 62% of girls and 74% of LGBQs) report abuse by parents and household adults, and parent/grownup abuse is associated with 13 times more depression and infinitely more suicide and self-harm by teens than anything remotely attributable to social media, it doesn’t take a “towering genius” to argue that we should prioritize analyzing domestic abuse, along with parents’ soaring drug-alcohol crises across the Anglo world. From 2011 through 2021, when teen depression and suicide rose, an appalling 722,000 US adults ages 30-59 died from self-inflicted overdoses and suicides, equivalent to the entire middle-aged population of Nebraska gone. Haidt’s claim that the virtual world is more dangerous to teens than the physical world is patently ridiculous – though the dangers of both are unconscionably exaggerated.
Bizarrely, major commentators refuse to touch parental issues beyond Twenge’s astonishing insistence that we don’t want to know the larger causes of teen depression. Do you see a Surgeon General’s alert or major commentator analysis of parental abuse/addiction and teen depression/suicide? That dereliction abrogates science and fundamental responsibility for adolescents’ safety. The best evidence (with some inexcusable gaps) indicates that teens’ unhappiness and suicide are functions of larger social forces: rising all-ages addiction, growing awareness of crises such as global injustices and climate change, and more difficult adults, and that social media helps teens deal with that unhappiness.
BOOM. Very well-said as usual, Mike!
And just when those pushing broad stroke bans thought they were on philosophically stable ground, along comes Melanie Hempe, who as predicted effectively argues that even these bans don't go far enough. Note that her essay is cross-posted on Haidt's Substack as well:
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/how-to-delay-the-age-kids-get-smartphones
The real elephant in the room, that people like her and Haidt and Twenge fail to address, is that the *adults* around them are NOT alright.
I posted the following on Jonathan Haidt's After Babel substack:
Why do those on here blame more screen time for more teen suicide and self-harm when the definitive CDC and other surveys show just the opposite? For all ages, sexes, races, and statuses, teens who never/rarely go online (<1 hr/day) suffer greater risk of suicide attempt and self-harm than teens who go online regularly (1-4 hrs/day) or frequently (5+ hrs/day).
The CDC survey consistently shows that teens under age 16 who rarely/never go online suffer the greatest risks of suicide attempt, injurious self-harm, smoking, heroin use, methamphetamine use, cocaine use, school violence, domestic violence, dating violence, rape, gun-carrying, fights, prescription abuse, increased alcohol/drug use, missing school, exercising less than 3 days/week, and having few contacts with supportive people. While some risks like vaping and lack of sleep are similar or worse for online teens, on balance, the worst troubles are concentrated in non-online teens. (I invite downloading and analyzing the full CDC survey and the few broader ones, such as Pew’s.)
Offline teens are slightly more Black or Hispanic, demographics with low suicide rates. Overall, the most troubled teens – those reporting depression, sadness, abuse by parents/adults, suicidal ideation, and female, younger, minority, LGBQ status –are much safer if regularly or frequently online. For example, non-online LGBQ teens who consider suicide are twice as likely as their frequently-online counterparts to attempt suicide and self-harm.
True, the CDC survey associates more screen time with poorer teen mental health. That makes it even more fascinating that the same teens on the same survey associate more screen time with lower risks of suicide attempt, self-harm, and other troubles. Studies fixated on social media missed vital insights into what really generates teens’ unhappiness and how they use social media.
The dangers of both the virtual and real worlds have been wildly exaggerated. Teens don’t need more restrictions.
"The dangers of both the virtual and real worlds have been wildly exaggerated. Teens don’t need more restrictions."
Shout it from the rooftops!
Well-said, Mike. Young people today are the most heavily monitored and (in many ways) restricted generation in all of recorded history overall. And while we know social media and such can indeed be toxic, for all ages, you do a great job of showing how it can just as likely be TONIC as well, especially for young people.
And unlike many of the other measures of harm or risk, which are often largely subjective and easily mismeasured, suicide is a cold, hard fact that is VERY difficult to explain away by the ubiquitous chattering classes and fearmongers.
True. Given that if all of the CDC's survey potential factors are combined, they explain just one-third of teens' depression and suicide-attempt levels -- which, even for social science, is very low. Clearly, our surveys like the CDC's are not asking the right questions, which I suggest should include more detailed queries on parents'/adults' troubles and global issues like social justice and climate change, which emerging studies suggest may be the biggest drivers of growing young-age unhappiness.
Very true
The real elephant in the room is that the *adults* are NOT alright. Anyone who thinks that arbitrary age gating and other such band-aids are on philosophically stable ground will soon find themselves eating crow. So if we really want to solve this all-ages collective action problem, how about we officially declare a state of emergency and quarantine all social media for "just two weeks". Also have a smartphone buyback program like they do for guns. I am only half-joking about that.
(As for phone-free schools, fine. And how about phone-free workplaces as well?)
Of course, those are not permanent solutions, only enough to break the spell that Big Tech has over We the People. We actually need to FIX the internet for good. We need to throw the proverbial One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom by passing comprehensive data privacy legislation for all ages, and especially banning surveillance advertising. We need to audit the algorithms and make them public. We need to rein in the deliberately addictive features and "frictionless sharing" of these platforms. And of course, we need to go antitrust on Big Tech as well. Yesterday.
To the adults in the room: the life you save may very well be your own.
(Mic drop)
Important pattern to document, even if obviously your explanation is necessarily somewhat speculative.
Haidt is at it again:
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epidemic
His article could really use your comments to set thing straight!
Re today's post, I'm thinking of first posting this (the ages are Haidt's and Twenge's):
If I were dictator, the following warnings (like those on cigarette packages) would be mandatory at the top of every commentary in which an adult deplored teen mental health, suicide, self-harm, and/or social media:
- Warning: This commentator is male, and 60 [using a typical age of posters on here as an example]. A 60 year-old man is 6.4 times more likely to commit suicide and 12.6 times more likely to die from self-inflicted suicide or overdose than is a high-school girl (age 16).
- Warning: This commentator is female, and 52. A 52-year-old woman is 1.7 times more likely to commit suicide and 5.1 times more likely to die from self-inflicted suicide or overdose than is a high-school girl.
- Warning: According to the Centers for Disease Control’ comprehensive, multi-factor survey, girls who are violently and/or emotionally abused by parents or household grownups are 8 times more likely to attempt suicide and 27 times more likely to self-harm compared to girls who are not abused.
- Warning: Parents’ abuse, mental health, and rapidly increasing drug/alcohol problems across the Western world are by far the leading known cause of mental health and related self-destructive problems in girls. No other factor even comes close.
- Warning: According to the CDC, banning or restricting girls from screen time risks substantially increasing their risks of suicide, self-harm, and victimization by adults as well as isolating them from friends, families, and medical help.
- Warning: The CDC finds that girls who regularly or frequently use screens such as TV, cellphones, and social media are 23% less likely to attempt suicide and 51% less likely to self-harm compared to girls who spend little or no screen time.
All of the above statements are true and easily verified. Ordinarily, such regrettable warnings would be unnecessary. We would expect social scientists, leaders, and media reporters routinely to provide vital, balanced contexts when they discuss important issues like suicide and self-harm.
Unfortunately, American adults today have gone off the rails in a frenzy of prejudicial declarations. Authorities routinely demean powerless populations like girls as mentally disturbed and suicidal and demand sweeping restrictions on their freedom while shielding their own more powerful adult demographics from scrutiny. Sweeping restrictions are pushed on girls’ freedoms and behaviors without discussing the potential risks. Crucial information is systematically omitted. If we care about girls' safety, we need a balanced discussion.
I want to work a bit more on a reply to Haidt's complete reliance on single-factor experimental psychology studies, which reviews have found uniformly unreliable.
Indeed
Well-said, Mike. You truly have a knack for being the voice of reason, and for using both sides of your brain (unlike the ultra left-brain-dominant talking heads and fearmongers). And if you were dictator even for a single day, the world would be a much better place indeed!
And also note how these commentators would never in a million years impose any such restrictions on themselves, at least not directly (even if mandatory age verification can backfire on adults too from a privacy and cybersecurity perspective, but I digress). Their hypocrisy is so thick you could cut it with a knife, and their sense of social responsibility seems to end at the tip of their noses. Or perhaps they themselves are hopelessly addicted to the very things that they seek to ban teens from doing? Either way, it is NOT at all flattering!
I do NOT NOT NOT support supported “broad-stroke bans” -- such accusation is absurd given that I'm on the record warning that such bans will not decrease excessive screen time. [See Senators on Social Media: The Screen Time Fallacy https://shoresofacademia.substack.com/p/senators-on-social-media-the-screen].
And again, there is no measure of social media use on the CDC YRBS or ABES.
And so on.
Very glad to have that clarified, David. And btw, the National Academies is as guilty as Haidt, Twenge, the Surgeon General, et al, of ignoring the serious parent crises that are far more associated with teen depression, suicide, and other troubles than is anything attributable to social media use.
The CDC and Gallup findings on average screen time and patterns are so similar that it is clear both are measuring similar things. Where the Gallup survey falls short is in its selective picking of just those issues that are associated with more social media use while omitting all the serious issues (led by teen suicide attempt and self-harm) the CDC shows are strongly associated with teens not being online. In fact, Gallup lumps suicide ideation with much rarer self-harm into one number, when what we really need is actual suicide attempts and self harm shown separately, as the CDC does.
Rhymes With "Brass Seagull"
just now
At the rate things are going these days, the following is a very likely conversation that will happen many times over in 2030, at the latest. At least in the USA:
18 Year Old: "I'm an adult now. Why am I still not allowed to go on social media or have a smartphone?"
Parent: "Because the law now forbids both until you are 21, and the law is the law."
18 Year Old: "But Canadian, Australian, British, and European people my age are allowed to. As are people my age in almost every other country as well."
Parent: "Well, we're not Canada, Australia, Europe, or any other country for that matter. Different cultures and such. America has too many problems as it is."
18 Year Old: "But your generation was allowed to at a much earlier age than me!"
Parent: "That was then. Life was cheap back then. We know better now. And your grandparents were allowed to drink and smoke too at your age, which we obviously no longer allow either, so your point is?"
18 Year Old: "And they were allowed to play outside with their friends unsupervised even when they were in single digits too, or so I have heard. Grandma and Grandpa actually got to enjoy the real world before they forgot how to, while you got to enjoy the virtual world at least. My generation had neither."
Parent: "Well, the real world was much safer back then compared to now, and as for me, we didn't know just how dangerous the virtual world really was."
18 Year Old: "Statistics say otherwise".
Parent: "You need to watch more news and true crime documentaries before you can argue statistics. It's really a jungle out there now. In any case, I see your statistics, and I raise you a "Because I said so!""
18 Year Old: "Statistics beat logical fallacies and anecdotes every time. Regardless, it's not fair in what is supposed to be a free country."
Parent: "Life isn't fair. Deal with it!"
18 Year Old: "But I'm literally old enough to get married, and yet I can't even post my own wedding on Facebook? That doesn't make any sense at all."
Parent: "If you're so mature and such an adult, then why don't you get married right now?" (Tries to trick the young person into saying they are "too young".)
18 Year Old: "Because as an adult, I know that just because you CAN do something, it doesn't mean that you SHOULD. Just like you raised me".
Parent: (speechless)
18 Year Old: (Mic drop)
This was meant to be satire, of course. But it also goes to show that Haidt's and Twenge's proposals may not be on philosophically stable ground. Only difference now is that the Overton window didn't shift quite that far--yet.
Note that there is an interesting analysis in a report titled HOW PARENTING AND SELF-CONTROL MEDIATE THE LINK BETWEEN SOCIAL MEDIA USE AND YOUTH MENTAL HEALTH.
https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/briefs/ifs-gallup-parentingsocialmediascreentime-october2023-1.pdf
That does seem to be a real challenge for Haidt to explain. The report concludes:
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The strong relationship linking parenting to youth social media use and mental health raises questions about the broader role of parenting in explaining recent declines in youth mental health.
Across a vast literature in psychology, parenting has proven to be a strong, robust predictor of youth mental health at any given moment in time and longitudinally.
Unfortunately, there is no high-quality data showing how the quality of parent-child relationships or parenting practices have changed. There are only fragments.
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This echoes what I've been saying for years. Unfortunately the paper is not peer-reviewed and the data is not public, so the work is unverifiable so far.
I sent an inquiry to its author but received no reply. Such data really needs to be accessible by other scholars so the analysis can be replicated. Without verification we can get no progress, and good data on parental impacts are criminally rare in this field.
This is not online time, it is screen time that includes watching TV and Netflix and playing video games etc.
The entire analysis depends on barely 1% of the sample (depressed teens with close to zero screen time). Associations with such tiny fractions of the sample are utterly unreliable on surveys since they can get overwhelmed by erroneous responses.
Even if these result were not just illusory, they would not present much of a challenge to Haidt. If a large portion of kids who are already severely depressed respond by withdrawing from teen activities, including entertainment (TV and games), then of course you'd expect such kids to be the most suicidal ones.
Of interest is that once controlled for depression, screen time seems irrelevant for suicide. Question is, was this true only during the pandemic?
BTW, people will start avoiding you if go on insinuating that everyone who ever investigated screen time is an incompetent idiot while you are a towering genius that just resolved a complex matter with a single post.
There have always been tons of people who have argued that online access is important for isolated teens, and for many teens during the pandemic. I never saw Haidt or really anyone argue we should ban kids from using Zoom etc. The controversy is over kids spending hours a day on Tik-Tok etc.
And it looks like the Florida teen suicide rate is about to go up starting January 1, 2025, if the new law they passed restricting social media before age 16 doesn't get struck down before then.
Regression analysis connects social media to only 1-3% of the variation in teen depression and also teen suicide attempts and self-harm (which means the real causes lie more in family and larger issues), so it would be difficult to expect a measurable effect on Florida's rates from their ban. Plus, teens have proven happily adept at getting around nannying. However, we can expect considerable hypocrisy. If teen suicide goes down, the social-media blamers will loudly grab credit; if it goes up, they won't take responsibility.
Any anyone who claims it is a "collective action problem" will have just opened a major can of worms here. If the problem is simply that young people need to use social media because everyone else is on it, then restricting only people below some arbitrary age (pick your poison) would backfire as it is both over- and under-inclusive. Short of banning social media for ALL ages, period (that is, shutting it ALL down), which would throw even more of the baby out with the bathwater, any age limit would do far more harm than good on balance.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has the right idea: Privacy First, for all ages. Comprehensive data privacy legislation for all ages would essentially throw the proverbial One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom, and force Big Tech to go on the much safer (AND freer) DuckDuckGo model. Before we even think about doing anything else, we absolutely need to do that first, and quite frankly, yesterday is not soon enough.
Big Tech can go EFF off!
Indeed, if the talking heads are worried about "addictive features" of social media, they should simply target those features, and for all ages. The latest Florida bill is both over- and under-inclusive.
https://www.nbc-2.com/article/florida-lawmakers-pass-social-media-ban-bill-kids/60123784
BINGO. Very well-said as usual, Mike! Keep up the great work!