Teenagers use the internet in much healthier ways than social-mediaphobes

Unlike Jonathan Haidt’s and colleagues’ wildly embellished paranoia toward the screen world, teens’ more practical views don’t grant social media apocalyptic power

Jonathan Haidt, Jean Twenge, Zach Rausch, David Blanchflower, Vivek Murthy, and like-minded social-mediaphobes are so panicked over keyboards and screens that they hype weak, clearly deficient “studies,” create sensational media splashes, and urge mass bans on online access for teens who need unfettered access to this important tool.

Why? Evidently, grownups highlighted on sites like Haidt’s After Babel, Twenge’s Generation Tech, etc., that sensationally blame social media for “rewiring childhood” and “destroy(ing) a generation” use the internet in deeply unhealthy ways. How else can we explain why social-mediaphobes (a few summary quotes below) fear the internet like Game of Thrones characters fear night?

·         “a 24 hour a day firehose of advertising, misinformation, propaganda and stupidity”.

·         “cheapen(s) and undermine(s) every basic human value. Friendship, family, love, self-worth—all have been recast and commodified by the new digital world.”

·         “blocks normal human development by taking time away from sleep, play, and in-person socializing, as well as causing addiction and drowning kids in social comparisons they can’t win.”

·         “an endless way for other kids to be cruel, they can never achieve the perfect bodies they see on Instagram, they are constantly judged for their appearance in the endless selfies they are compelled to post, unknown adults can sexualize them, they are continually stressed about how many likes they’re going to get, and some social media accounts glorify (and even instruct about) self-harm.”

·         “displacing other crucial activities, such as direct interactions with friends and, for some, even sleep.”

The way social-mediaphobes view the internet, which must result from their own experiences, explains their paranoia toward teens going online.  

Teens have much saner views on social media – and better behaviors

In 2022, 58% of the 1,300 Gen Z teens age 13-17 Pew Research surveyed said social media helps them feel “more accepted,” 67% said it connects them to “people who can help them get through tough times,” and 80% said it keeps them up with “what’s going on in their friends’ lives.” Teens use social media in much more nuanced and healthier ways than social-mediaphobes.

Most important, teens don’t attribute vast, apocalyptic power to screens: 6 in 10 teens regard social media in and of itself as neither good nor bad. It’s just a resource, depending on how it is used. You can use fire to make a gourmet meal, or to burn down your house.

Taken together, about 90% of the teenagers Pew surveyed showed how healthy people view and use online resources – overwhelmingly positive, putting cybertechnology in its place as a useful tool. They’re fine. Leave them alone.

What about the other side? Of the teens Pew surveyed, 9% said social media was bad for them. Around 3% of teens and adults (based largely on Asian samples) are projected to suffer screen “addiction”. Notably, these “disordered screen users” also have problems elsewhere in their lives. They merit individual attention.

Unfortunately, the latter fraction are the people you’ll see cited and quoted in social-mediaphobe sites as if they were typical. It is striking how often the online chapters of their horror stories (many of which originated and culminated offline) could have been greatly remedied by judicious use of the <delete> and <block sender> tabs – the type of solution too often implemented with guns in the physical world.

Sure, there’s bad stuff online – but not nearly as bad as real, up-close-and-personal threats in the offline world: crazies, violent abusers and rapists in churches, civic organizations, schools, sports, parks, and, worst of all, families.

Still, that danger has been wildly overhyped as well. Haidt is absolutely right that children in the physical world benefit from “a lot of risky unsupervised play, which is essential for overcoming fear and fragility.”

But that only begs the question of why Haidt recommends more “unsupervised play” in what he admits are “risky” physical-world environments while demanding severe restrictions on youths using safer, buffered social-media environments? (Want to overcome personal fragility? Open your inbox after posting a controversial article under your email address on, say, Gaza.)

The hangup is that social media is NEW. Haidt, Twenge, Murthy, worried parents, graying politicians, et al, didn’t grow up with it. To certain aging brains, new equals dangerous. Their visceral fear of the unknown renders them unable to rationally assess the risks and benefits of anything new.

Haidt’s et al’s paranoia toward the internet copies former First Lady Michelle Obama’s fear that the outdoors has become so dangerous that parents must not allow their children outside unsupervised. Like Haidt’s, Michelle Obama’s views rest heavily in nostalgic delusion. She sanitizes the Chicago she grew up in as enjoying “no violence” (in fact, it suffered 3,200 homicides during her high school years, 1978-81, among the highest murder and violence rates ever recorded, especially victimizing youth). In contrast, Chicago had much lower murder and violence rates during the Obama presidency years, especially among youth.

Nostalgic malpractice

Older-generation self-praisings resting in similarly delusional nostalgia, posted on Haidt’s After Babel substack, are summed up in a typical boast, “Phones? No. We had each other.”

Is that a joke? Were pre-internet brains miswired?

Of course older, postwar generations had phones, used them heavily, and were accused by their elders of being mass-damaged (comics, television, rock and rap music, and video games topped authorities’ culture-war escapisms back then). The biggest hater vilifying Haidt’s and Twenge’s teen generations was Haidt’s book-title (The Coddling of the American Mind, 2015) inspirer, Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind, 1987). Bloom lambasted 1970s and 1980s younger generations as mentally disturbed, suicidal, media-corrupted, pop-culture-shallow, selfish, uneducable, and unemployable.

By every major index, Baby Boomers, Haidt’s and Twenge’s Gen Xers (all gestated in smartphone-free childhoods) were troubled generations as teens and continue to be today. If younger Millennials and Gen Zers hadn’t reversed their disastrous trends, we’d be suffering national chaos.

Gen Z is still enduring older-generation pathologies that self-praising social-mediaphobes refuse to admit even exist. Just one example, self-inflicted suicides and overdose deaths from 1/1/2020 through the latest in 2024:

·         Haidt’s 60-year-old men (8,620)

·         Twenge’s 52-year-old women (3,522)

·         Murthy’s 47-year-old men (8,678)

·         17-year-old sons (2,103)

·         14-year-old daughters (446)

Just the iceberg tip of 2020s family troubles (see 2021 and 2023 CDC surveys) that social-mediaphobes quail from acknowledging – ones associated with Gen Z’s depression far more than anything social media does.

Social media and online life is a useful supplement to physical-world life. They are different in many ways, similar in others; not the bitterly oppositional, zero-sum worlds the Haidt and social-mediaphobes misrepresent. For the large majority of teens and adults, they work together. That’s a future topic researchers are exploring in increasingly productive ways.