Social media-blamers’ bad logic and worse non-science

Their nonsense would be ignored if adult rights were at stake. Teenagers, unfortunately, are always easy to beat up on.

Suppose hypothetical researchers studying the causes of lung cancer decided to simply omit smoking, by far the largest factor, from their analysis. They’d wind up finding a few low-level correlates instead, many barely more than noise.

Suppose these researchers then fixated on just one low-level factor: listening to country music. After all, older, rural Whites are ardent country music fans and also suffer the highest rates of lung cancer.

Then, these researchers, powerfully supported by tobacco-state politicians and twang-haters, launch a furious crusade to ban country music, declaring that “science” shows country music is “positively correlated” with cancer.

Silly, right? Sure, there’s a “correlation,” but its effect size is vanishingly small and misdirected. Yet, this tactic of ignoring big factors is the same one those raising a furor over social media and teens’ mental health deploy.

Another analogy: Suppose researchers studying the causes of teenagers’ depression confine themselves to just one variable: whether their subjects had seen a psychologist. They then find that teens who see psychologists are significantly more likely to be depressed and anxious than teens who don’t. More alarming is the “dose-response”: those who see psychologists more often are more likely to be depressed than those who seldom see one.

These researchers then announce the “cause” of teenagers' poor mental health: psychologists! The more psychologists and more psychological treatment a society has, the more depression. We must ban those under 18 from seeing psychologists to protect their mental health.

Again, the fallacy is obvious. Sure, there’s a correlation, but it’s a reverse one. Psychological treatment isn’t the cause of depression; people who are depressed seek treatment. More psychologists means more depression gets diagnosed (radical Thomas Szasz followers might dispute that ideal).

And again, reversing the direction of teen social media use and depression is a standard, unexamined tactic by social-media blamers.

With those two common fallacies in mind…

Let’s review the logic and non-science of those who blame social media for teens’ poor mental health and suicide:

1. They start by completely excluding the biggest known factors in teens’ poor mental health: parental and grownup troubles, including abuse, violence, drug/alcohol abuse, mental health problems, criminality, and absence (together, these factors account for over 75% of those known to be associated with teens’ depression).

2. They then exclude another dozen of the most important factors such as sexual abuse, school alienation and failure, sports injuries, etc., that account for over 20% of the remaining factors associated with teen mental health.

3. They only include social media use in their studies, singled out as the only influence on teenagers.

4. They then announce a “positive correlation” in some (not all) of these studies, which is wildly hyped in a mass barrage of claims that social media damages teens’ mental health and therefore (with zero evidence) must promote suicide.

5. They fail to note just how miserably tiny that correlation is. The d and R-squared measures show that even analyzed by itself to maximize apparent effects, social media use is associated with just 1% to 2% of teens’ depression – barely more than “noise.”

6. They then ignore the possibility that even this small effect is a “reverse correlation” – that is, social media use doesn’t make teens depressed; depressed teens use social media more. (That is true: 40% of parent-abused teens report often being depressed and 85% use social media frequently each day; while just 15% of non-abused teens report being depressed and 68% use social media a lot each day.

7. Throughout, they employ rampant “correlation equals causation” nonsense, which Intro to Statistics students (and ancient Romans, “post hoc, ergo propter hoc”) recognize as clownish fallacy. Gee, they argue, teens’ social media use rose in the 2010s, and teens’ depression and suicide also rose. What else could the cause be? (Try the mammoth increase in parent-age drug and alcohol crises across the Anglosphere, and parents’ widespread mental health troubles documented in the Surgeon General advisory, both of which social-media-blamers abjectly refuse to acknowledge).

8. Also throughout, they relentlessly self-praise their own older ages and generations as models of human perfection, mature, healthy, raised in an idyllic pre-internet Garden of Eden before the social media/smartphone serpent intruded, and blameless for any teen problems.

9. Finally, supported by authorities eager to dodge the thorny issues of family abuses and older-generation troubles, they inflame a political hullaballoo over social media with such intensity that the real factors in teens’ mental health and suicide are suppressed.

Look at After Babel’s (Jonathan Haidt’s substack’s) latest pretense that the rigorous causal criteria and medical evidence linking smoking to lung cancer can be grossly stretched to justify the weak non-science surrounding social-media use and mental health. It’s another exercise in silliness, a distraction of the kind that accompanies every mounting social crisis.

Our repeated failures to confront real crises inevitably are followed by loud lamentations that the United States continues to suffer by far the worst, most intractable social epidemics of any developed (and most second-world) countries – though other Anglo nations like Australia and the United Kingdom seem eager to join us. That’s what happens when leaders indulge pleasing culture-war diversions and “save the children!” crusades.

Unfortunately, young people have no powerful lobby to pour big money into politicians’ campaigns and cajole lawmakers. Teens can only tell surveys how they actually use social media beneficially and what their real-life problems are. That is why social-media-blamers ignore what teens actually report, wall themselves in a narrow world that fears online life the way Puritans feared the evil, dark forest, and dismiss any substantive reality that contradicts their views as blasphemy taboo to mention. For examples (of many), social-media-blamers cannot admit obvious facts, such as 5 in 6 cyberbullied teens are bullied even more by parents and adults at home; social media may help deter teen suicide and self-harm; troubled teens overwhelmingly have even more troubled parents; etc.

And that is why America’s real-life problems will keep escalating, generating more insane political reactions.