Social-media blamers are getting more extreme as their scientific case collapses

Jonathan Haidt now demands that teenagers must be totally “screen-free.” Jean Twenge blames falling school test scores on smartphones. No one has evidence. It just gets nuttier and nuttier.

Those who value young people’s (and ultimately, all of our) access to online information, expression, and communication have to take seriously the commentaries by leading media-blamers Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge. Unfortunately, worshipful media outlets, politicians, and powerful entities still do.

Haidt’s After Babel has steadily moved toward an extremist position of urging the banning of children and teenagers from ALL screens – not just computers and phones, but games and television as well. I don’t see After Babel adults pledging abstinence from screens themselves, even though parents’ screen use is powerfully correlated with their teenagers’ screen use.

But their truly weird view is that screen life is locked in an all-or-nothing death-struggle with public life – you must choose one or the other; you can’t have both.

I repeatedly return to the acclaimed Social Studies documentary (advertised as exposing the negative ways “social media has reshaped childhood”) for unintentionally refuting this zero-sum view. The featured teens not only fully integrate social media with a vigorous public life, constantly meeting face-to-face with friends, they employ social media to force derelict grownups to deal with real-life crises.

Amazing! Critic Jean Twenge admits social media raises school test scores?

Twenge’s latest Generation Tech post blames smartphones and social media for the recent small decline in student test scores. Her graphs on narrowly truncated scales designed to magnify changes show the opposite.

Students’ math and reading scores rose sharply from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s, according to her data source. During that same period, teens’ social media and cellphone use soared from zero to over 80% and internet access to 95%.

So, more social media and internet access actually boosts students’ test scores? Social-media-blamer Twenge is making an astounding admission.

But Twenge doesn’t apply her standard correlation-equals-causation fallacy to congratulate social media and cellphones for a quarter century of raising teenagers’ reading and math skills. Twenge then invokes the correlation fallacy to blame the subsequent slight downward trend in student scores on the 2010s rise of smartphones – without presenting a shred of evidence.

Since smartphones are just cellphones with online access – and 95% of students already had online access in 2013, accompanying rising test scores – it’s puzzling that she would clarion smartphones as some terrible new implement of generational destruction.

Further, her blame-smartphones post leaves out a more crucial trend. Here's my comment on her post:

Again, Dr. Twenge fails to acknowledge a crucial trend far more associated with increased student depression, sleeplessness, and poor school performance.

From the early 2010s to the 2020s, in the 25-64 age group comprising parents, parents’ partners, relatives, and other adults influencing teenagers, drug/alcohol overdose deaths surged from 55,000 to 134,000 and drug/alcohol hospital ER cases exploded from 2.8 million to 5.1 million.

Twenge initially dismissed the adult overdose death trend, the iceberg tip of the mammoth drug crisis, as probably not affecting parents and too “small” to affect teenagers. Those dismissals were demolished when the CDC’s 2023 YRBS revealed a shocking 30% of teenagers reporting histories of parents/caretakers’ drug/alcohol abuse, 41% “severe” parent/caretaker depression, mental troubles, and suicidality, and 35% violent and 62% emotional abuses.

These staggering numbers have been all but ignored despite their pivotal role in the teen mental health furor. While trends in violent and emotional abuse remain poorly measured, clear evidence does show parent/adult drug abuse rose sharply during 2010-2021 as teenagers reported more depression.

Standard regression associates parents’ drug/alcohol abuse with far more teenage depression, sleeplessness, poor school grades, and other risks than social media use. Add other adult abuses and troubles, and social media use disappears as a factor in teen mental health.

In 2023, the CDC found teens from homes with drug/alcohol-abusing adults are 1.8 times more likely to get school grades of D or F compared to teens raised by non-addicted adults, while teens who use social media heavily (daily or more) are no more likely to get poor grades than teens rarely on social media (weekly or less). That 85% of depressed teens come from troubled homes, and abused teens use social media more, means we have to untangle those effects on their mental health before we can delineate smaller (if any) social media issues.

Haidt’s crusade… be careful what you wish for

Haidt’s advocacy to force teens into austere “screen free” lives is widening beyond banning social media and phones to video games and television. Back to 1949! Or maybe 1909, if radio, cinema, and kaleidoscopes are next. Imagine all the porn, violence, corrupt values, and evil messages teens are exposed to by today’s radio songs or in PG-13 movies they can stroll in to… right here in River City.

So, imagine that social-media blamers succeed in their fondest goal of banning tens of millions of teenagers from all online and offline screens and flooding them out into public spaces. Streets, malls, coffee shops, restaurants, concerts, parks, fairs, stadiums, everywhere you go… teenaged mobs walking among us!

Get ready – again – to see how fast aging America (67% White) wants teens (majority Nonwhite) back home in their bedrooms. Just keep them away from our gentrifying froyo bars.

American adults’ endless cycles of phony panics vilifying their own kids (actually, Other People’s Kids, Margaret Mead wryed) validate the 1950s adolescent lament, “Pardon me for existing!” The alarms, from sensational 1940s government documentaries on teen horrors to Haidt’s lurid imaginings are not based on serious realities.

The decades-long crusades to ban teens from public space, and now, online life both reflect the same old fear and hostility that “kids today” (whenever “today” is) enjoy too much freedom, too many unregulated contacts, too many unsupervised options. Decade after decade, the nannies invoke the same baseless stereotypes, quips, anecdotes, and woefully weak research.

I say all the above despite strong agreement with Haidt on the benefits of “more unstructured play time, more solitude, more sleep, more in-person time with family and close friends, more leisurely afternoons to read a book or hang out on park swings” – except I’d apply it just as much to grownups, especially the park swings part. Real adults wouldn’t be pointing fingers, like the ones on After Babel; they’d be leading by example.

A nostalgic hoax

It’s sad that a few Gen Z posters on After Babel believe they suffer horrible screen-crushed lives because they swallow older-generation tales of idyllic, friend-hugging, screen-free past childhoods. These lies are generational abuse.

The bad behaviors of Haidt’s 1970s and Twenge’s 1980s teen generations were loudly clarioned by a growing youth-fearing nanny culture dedicated to banishing teens from public life. America vibrated with raised drinking ages, drastic nighttime and schoolday curfews, mall and park bans, harsh teen driving laws, anti-“cruising” ordinances, severe employment restrictions, on an on.

None of these made young people safer, but they did shove the frightening teenage presence out of public sight. The irony is that Gen Z teens, by all measures (crime, violence, unplanned pregnancy, school performance, etc.), would handle the greater public presence Haidt advocates much better than Haidt’s or Twenge’s Gen X teen generations did in the 1970s-80s or do now as middle-agers.

So, yes: more teens in public. To that end, I keep waiting for Haidt and other social-media blamers to propose repealing the slew of pointless restrictions on teens in public places, ones no other Western country imposes. Since the ban-teens mindset – whether directed at public life or social media – derives from the same age-old fears and prejudices, I’m not holding my breath.