“Social media” has become the contrived explanation for everything young people do

Commentators, distorting facts and ignoring real issues, blame social media for young people’s behaviors and attitudes they don’t like the way fundamentalists blame the devil

Part I: politics

A standard but far from unique example of “always blame social media” is New York Times columnist Ezra Klein’s 18 March 2025 Apple podcast with Democratic pollster David Shor, “Democrats need to face why Trump won.” An otherwise interesting analysis is marred by failings on young people in three major areas.

First problem: contrary to Shor’s “shocking” assertion, young people are not “potentially the most conservative generation,” nor are “Democrats getting destroyed among young voters” (Klein). The opposite is true: even in 2024, young people remained the most liberal of any age – by far.

Below are network exit polls of 15,000+ voters showing the percentages voting for Trump in 2016-2024, and for George Bush Jr in 2000:

Sources: CNN, 2024, 2020, 2016, 2004.

If 2024 voting was restricted to persons under age 45, and especially under age 30, Trump would have lost in an epic landslide. Middle-agers and men 30 and older, the peers of established commentators, elected Trump.

Maybe Klein and Shor are referring to a different development. Detailed age breakdowns show young voters did have the biggest shift toward Trump over the last 8 years (age 18-24, +18 net), but older age groups also showed large shifts: age 25-29 (+14), 30-39 (+12), and 50-64 (+8). Older voters veered right earlier; younger ones more recently. Note that Gen Z voters still aren’t as conservative as young Millennials were in 2004.

Second problem: while commentators attribute the shift toward Trump among older voters, women, and immigrants to practical issues like inflation and disdain for Democratic President Joe Biden, they universally blame the shift among younger voters solely on social media. These commentariat myths reflect two weirdly contradictory prejudices.

If young people fail to fulfill their responsibility to rescue Democrats from older ages’ right-wing voting, then commentators blame the young for the elections of Republicans like Trump. Then, commentators claim that older people vote rationally, but young people typified by young men are mindlessly herded by social media influencers. These upside-down narratives result from the powerlessness of young people in media discourse.

Third problem: the gender gap in voting is similar among all ages, yet commentators claim social media causes the young-age gender gap.

“Polarization among young men and women (is) driven by young men,” Klein suggested, “… who are online … Jordan Peterson is a big figure, Andrew Tate is rising, you have what is called the [right-wing] ‘manosphere,’” and Democrats “are perceived as becoming anti-young-men” – all of which “had a huge effect on young men’s political opinions.” Agreed Shor: Gen Z has “a lot more psychometric neuroticism and anxiety than the people before them… phones and social media have a lot to do with this… These kids grew up looking at social media influencers as role models… it’s a big shift.”

“Social media and online culture are splitting the media that young men and women get,” Klein continued. Young men might gravitate toward the “very intensely online male world” epitomized by UFC [Ultimate Fighting Championship] podcasts, while young women are algorithmically driven toward “the opposite world” of liberal sites. “The capacity to be in highly gendered media worlds is very different in 2024 than it was in 2004, and that’s true worldwide,” Shor added. “… Online communities are way more gender segregated than offline communities are,” so “it should be unsurprising that suddenly shifting a bunch of young people’s social worlds to be entirely online all at once caused the political situation to change.”

Are Klein and Shor seeing the same exit polls I am? Young voters were more conservative back in “pre-manosphere” 2004. Further, in 2024, young men voted considerably more Democratic than older men (including Klein’s and Shor’s 30-44 ages), while young women under age 45, particularly age 18-29, were the outliers, voting massively more liberal than the mainstream.

Part II. What else (besides the always-blamed “social media”) might explain why young women and men voted differently?

Although 2024 gender gaps are similar for voters of all ages, let’s focus on why young women in particular think and act very differently from young men. Monitoring the Future shows female high school seniors are more than twice as likely as males their age to identify as politically “liberal to radical,” a gender gap that widens further in the first year of college along with a steep drop in women’s depression.

One is the massive education gap. Young women have been outrunning young men and even adults over the last two generations in college enrollment and graduation. More education predicts more liberalism – in fact, education attainment has become the single biggest liberal-conservative political divider, yet even educated, astute liberal commentators ignore the gender-education divide.

Figure 1. Percentages of 18-24 year-olds enrolled in college or holding a college degree, by gender, 1950-2023.

Source: US Census, 2024.

This is not the whole story; even among college students, girls are much more liberal than boys. The 2024 American Freshman survey finds 44% of first-year women and 23% of men identifying as liberal or far-left, 18% of women and 32% of men as conservative/far-right. Among non-binary students, 87% were liberal/far-left; fewer than 1% conservative.

Strong evidence indicates higher education benefits girls’ mental health. While 75% of girls ages 13-18 reported poor mental health at least sometimes, just 15% of first-year college women reported feeling depressed in the past year. Further, boys could be suppressing real troubles, which is why girls are doing so much better educationally and career-wise despite the fact that depression usually hampers achievement.

Growing up in different worlds

The anti-social-media panic has crowded out discussion of far more important issues concerning attitudes, behaviors, and mental health as well as politics. The Centers for Disease Control’s 2023 Youth Risk Behavior survey asked 20,000 13-18-year-olds 108 questions. Here are the only 8 questions anyone shows any interest in discussing.

Source: CDC 2024.

Why do teenage girls report being so much sadder, suffering poor mental health, attempting suicide, harming themselves, getting bullied more, and getting less sleep? Because girls use social media a lot more than boys do, “experts” fixated on just these narrow issues declare. End of discussion.

That’s analytic malpractice. Let’s look at huge complications raised by the other 100 questions on the CDC survey no one talks about. See if you can spot many more important reasons why girls are expressing more distress than boys are.

Source: CDC 2024.

Right away, we see solid reasons why girls’ and boys’ politics are diverging.

Teenage girls and boys grow up in very different worlds. Girls are 2.5 times more likely than boys to report being LGBT and questioning toward their sexuality, which predicts more liberal political attitudes.

Girls also report being more emotionally and violently abused by parents and household grownups, and to live in homes with parents and adults who are more violent, drug- and alcohol-abusing, severely mentally disturbed, and criminal. That perception and reality is also likely to produce very different gendered attitudes, though how these would affect political thinking isn’t clear.

The CDC’s 2021 YRBS similarly found that when parents or household adults lost jobs during the COVID pandemic, girls were much more likely than boys (20%, versus 12%) to be psychologically and/or violently abused and to report poor mental health (48%, versus 23% for boys).

What explains these differing adolescent conditions? Girls and especially LGBTQ youth indeed might be abused more, but wouldn’t we expect afflictions like family violence, addiction, mental illness, crime, and unemployment to be more or less randomly distributed? Are girls forced by their gender roles to face these family issues more than boys are, yielding stronger perceptions?

Beyond official ignorance and insensitivity, there’s a crass pitfall to assuming girls’ reports of family abuses and troubles result from female over-sensitivity and exaggeration: these also are the same girls whose self-reported depression and suicidality authorities loudly clarion. If boys are toughing things out macho style while girls are just being drama queens, we’d have to toss out ALL their answers and with them documentation for the entire teenage “mental health crisis.”

Two gross examples of official dereliction

I’ve pointed out many times the complete refusal of authorities to factor in the massive increases in drug-alcohol overdose deaths and hospital emergency cases (nearly doubling after 2010 to over 5 million in 2023) among grownups ages 25-64 – the parents, parents’ partners, relatives, and others influencing teenagers – during exactly the period teens reported more anxiety and depression.

The 2023 CDC survey finally asked about drug/alcohol-abusing and mentally troubled parents and found teens in those family situations are twice as likely to be depressed. Girls are 1.4 times more likely to suffer parents and nearby adults who abuse drugs/alcohol and 1.6 times more likely to grow up with household adults with “severe” mental health problems than boys are.

These adult behaviors translate into real-world consequences. Professionals and commentators endlessly deplore school bullying and cyberbullying (all smugly attributed to young peers), which are 1.3 to 2 times more likely to victimize girls.

Yet, authorities are dead silent when the same CDC survey’s numbers show 84% of those same girls (and 73% of boys) who report being bullied at school, and 85% of girls and 77% of boys who report being bullied online, also report being bullied at home by parents and household adults – and parental abuses are 3 times more prevalent.

Officials’ and commentators’ silence (save for one obscure CDC analysis and brief mentions in one Surgeon General report on parents’ mental health crisis) on girls’ mistreatment by adults is a disgrace. I hope some future society (obviously, not this one) will shame them for it.

All of these pronounced differences in young women’s, men’s, and non-binary youths’ growings up predict divergences in attitudes and politics, as well as media habits. Yet, commentators remain obsessed with social media as the explanation for everything Gen Z, which is leading to their own press-herd commentary that obscures young-age issues.