The ban-TikTok case reveals both sides’ bad faith

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s “After Babel” substack compiles a mammoth load of nonsense showing how politicians and interests exploit young people as profitable commodities

Imagine an institution with 20 million 13-17 year-old female members. Of these girls, 3 million encounter adults with criminal records, 5 million encounter adults who commit domestic violence, 6 million encounter adults who abuse drugs and/or alcohol, 7 million are themselves violently abused by adults, 8 million encounter adults who are severely depressed and threatening suicide, and 14 million are emotionally abused by adults.

Overall, four in five girls – some 16 million of the 20 million users – encounter adults with at least one of these problems, and 5 million encounter adults with three or more of the above problems.

We’d get girls (or better still, the abusive, troubled adults) the hell away from that institution.

Actually, we don’t even talk about it

That institution is the American family, and the numbers above are taken directly from 7,000 girls’ real answers to the Centers for Disease Control’s definitive 2023 Youth Behavior Risk survey. The CDC’s own analysis associates adults’ violent, abusive, and troubled behaviors with two-thirds of girls’ depression and 90% of their suicide attempts.

It gets worse. Do other adults act to protect girls? No. Only rarely does anyone notify authorities that parents and other household adults are harming girls. Experts, leaders, and media commentators almost never mention girls’ victimizations – even though these grownups are well aware of them and the harm they cause.

Still more. Add the abuses teens encounter in other institutions. The Catholic Church admits 5% of its personnel are abusers, and other churches also have scandals. The Boy Scouts estimates thousands of its leaders were/are abusers. Sports programs at all levels up to universities and the Olympics have abuse epidemics. Schools are regularly the sites of adult sexual abuses of children and youth. Even the police are tied to hundreds of sexual abuses of teens in their custody. And these are just the reported cases.

Do institutional leaders act to protect children? No. Leaders of major institutions routinely deny and cover up abuses of children and youth and protect themselves and abusive personnel, even after receiving multiple reports.

Keep these family, church, community, school, sports, law enforcement, and other institutional abuses of children and youth in mind when perusing the roster of accusations featured on Jonathan Haidt’s “After Babel” site excerpted from state attorneys generals’ briefs in a Supreme Court case seeking to ban the social media platform TikTok.

TikTok: just another 2025 adult-run institution

After Babel details the terrible, terrifying things TikTok’s 3.4 million teenaged users could encounter on TikTok platform screens: “porn, violence, and drugs; sextortion, CSAM [child sexual abuse materials], and sexual exploitation,” which allegedly promote “addictive, compulsive, and problematic use; depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia, self-harm, and suicide.” Haidt and co-author Zach Rausch promise “evidence” and “statistics” proving TikTok “is causing harm to children, adolescents, and young adults at an industrial scale.” Further, “TikTok knows about underage use and takes little action.”

Here are the worst examples I could find in Haidt’s selections:

“There is widespread exposure to pornographic, violent, and drug-related content on TikTok. This content is often viewed on one’s newsfeed and through TikTok’s ‘live’ features. Although nudity, pornography, sexually explicit content, non-consensual sexual acts, the sharing of non-consensual intimate imagery and sexual solicitation violates TikTok’s guidelines, the content is easily accessed and recommended to users… Users reported that ‘streamer-led sexual engagements (often transactional) [were] commonly associated with TikTok LIVE.’ Users also reported ‘often seeing cam-girls or prostitutes asking viewers for tips/donations to take off their clothes or write their names on their body...’ That same month, TikTok employees admitted ‘cam girls’ (or women who do sex work online by streaming videos for money) were on LIVE and that these videos had a ‘good amount of minors engaging in it.’ TikTok leaders have known since at least 2020 that TikTok has ‘a lot of nudity and soft porn.’ An internal document from May 2020 also highlighted concerns about ‘camming’ becoming more popular as sex workers turned to online platforms during the COVID-19 pandemic. … TikTok has long known that virtual gifting is used as a predatory grooming tactic on LIVE. TikTok has internally acknowledged that ‘perpetrators tend to use tactics such as gift giving, flattery, and gifting money to win the trust of minors’.”

What “evidence” of “industrial scale…harm” from this pantheon of depravities does Haidt actually present? Instead of the promised “statistics,” the briefs he cites retreat over and over into non-specific vagueness like “often,” “a lot,” “a good amount [sic],” “widespread,” “tend to,” etc.

As one who worked directly with teens in families, communities, and wilderness programs for 15 years, investigated and wrote policy as a member of a child abuse prevention board, and now researches social science issues, I want to see purported horrors documented by real evidence. By real evidence, I mean standard conclusions from valid research worded something like this: “after controlling for relevant confounding variables, this study found that substantial proportions of teenaged TikTok users still suffer significant levels of harm attributable to use of the platform.”

Nothing like that is cited. Haidt presents no controlled, multivariate studies, either by TikTok, plaintiffs, or anyone else. The studies he has cited in other locales uniformly show that social media’s harm to adult and teen users is small, while better, more recent studies he doesn’t cite show social media use offers substantial benefits. The very few multivariate-regression analyses also fail to show social media use is a major factor causing teen or adult depression, and not at all a factor in suicide. Cyberbullying, which is closely linked to parent/adult emotional abuses, sometimes emerges as a small factor.

Speculative vs real harm

Instead, the harms the briefs Haidt cites blame on TikTok, assuming teens access the objectionable images and messages, are entirely speculative. Haidt’s curious conclusion states:

“We don't remove a product if a child or two dies from it each year in a freak accident. But the harms documented here are not freak accidents. They are the common effects of the normal use of TikTok by children, many of them younger than the legal age of 13. Due to its current design, TikTok is perpetrating harm to millions of children—harm at an industrial scale—in America and around the world.”

In fact, none of the “harms” Haidt alleges are “documented” at all.

Instead of presenting real evidence of harm, the plaintiffs’ “evidence” consists of a barrage of sensational assertions and a couple of individual quotes and anecdotes, mostly excerpted from TikTok’s internal TikTank marketing documents referring not to harms afflicting most users, but to the fraction who display “overuse” and “compulsive use.” Plaintiffs’ briefs, selected for their worst-case claims, provide no real-life cases of deaths, injuries, rapes, beatings, predatory encounters, suicides, self-harm, or mental health damage. Just speculations.

This omission effectively invalidates plaintiffs’ case and raises a damning contrast. Attorneys general typically are charged with overseeing registering and monitoring child abuse cases. In the 17 listed states whose attorneys general filed briefs against TikTok, the 2023 Child Maltreatment report shows 24,100 substantiated cases of violent abuse (including 756 murders), 10,300 substantiated cases of psychological abuse, and 13,000 cases of sexual abuse and trafficking victimizing children and youth perpetrated by their parents, family members, and caretakers. These are just the substantiated cases in families in one year’s time.

And yet, these authoritative state-government plaintiffs who have access both to state child abuse records and to TikTok’s internal documents fail to substantiate any real violence, deaths, predations, or injuries perpetrated as the result of teens’ TikTok or social media use. Other platforms have been speculatively blamed for an occasional suicide or predator encounter. One would expect at least some of TikTok’s 1 billion global users to suffer documented tragedies someone might blame on the platform.

In all the press accounts, I did find one case, which Haidt’s summary does not cite: “Earlier this year,” CNN reported, “a teen boy died in Brooklyn while riding on the outside of a subway train, a stunt known as ‘subway surfing,’ and his mother later ‘found videos promoting subway surfing in a challenge on his TikTok account… TikTok previously cooperated with New York authorities to remove subway surfing content’.”

Buried in plaintiffs’ filings is surprising factoid: TikTok submitted “362,108 reports in the last half of 2023” to child protective agencies worldwide of harms to children and youth its platform uncovered that were going on in the outside world. Instead of pausing to evaluate this shocking number in the context of the larger societies where these abuses occur, plaintiffs snark that “these efforts illustrate how wantonly negligent TikTok has been historically.”

This is so weird. Plaintiffs are blaming TikTok for not policing the abusive outside world – the one governed by traditional institutions they’re failing to hold accountable.

The plaintiffs’ brief resembles a podcast on YouTube (another platform probably slated for politicians’ next pitchfork-waving attack) highlighting scripture quotes proving “the Bible is barbaric” – except that critics of religious texts could cite thousands of real-life murders complying with Exodus’s “thou shall not suffer a witch to live” exhortation alone, along with millennia of massacre, mayhem, war, slavery, etc., in the name of some godly cause. Yet, churches have not deleted the harmful content in their scripture associated with frequent real-life destruction.

Are real-world harms the same as online ones?

I expect objections to my above comparison along lines like these: the family, church, school, sports, communities, etc., have been positive, indispensable elements of human culture and childraising for thousands of years. How can the harms these traditional institutions cause some kids be compared to those of an exploitative corporate social-media platform like TikTok?

Fair enough. The counter-case I present does involve apples and oranges – but not the ones critics invoke.

True, there are huge differences. A teenager using social media such as TikTok occupies a buffered environment. Even the worst imaginable images and messages of the kind Haidt and plaintiffs cite appear on a virtual screen. The teen can dispose of them with a simple <delete>, <unsubscribe>, <block user>, etc., keystroke, as well as demanding content removal as in the “subway surfing” instance.

In huge contrast, the many millions of documented harms attributable to the family, church, programs, schools, police, etc., involve real dead, abused, sexually assaulted, and injured bodies. They involve direct adult authority and power physically inflicted on the child and teenager in person. There is no easy escape, no button to push, nothing available but fighting back and after-the-fact complaint to often indifferent, corrupted, and self-interested authorities on behalf of children and teens suffering a vast power imbalance.

Beyond harms

Clearly, governments are not about to ban children and teens wholesale from contact with family adults, churches, schools, Boy Scouts, sports, law enforcement, etc., even if these institutions cause massive, real-life harm to millions of children and youth as opposed to the speculative harm blamed on social media.

When it comes to mainstream, traditional institutions, children and youth just have to weather dangers and abuses as part of growing up. Haidt acknowledges the real-life world into which he campaigns to push millions of teens is “risky,” though he nowhere provides comparisons of virtual versus physical world risks.

Traditional institutions like families, particularly healthy ones, also benefit their members in major ways. The same is true of social media, most of whose users also affirm large benefits. In 2022, 58% of the 1,300 Gen Z teenagers 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.” A detailed, 15-year, 2024 multi-institutional study of 2.4 million people worldwide ages 15 and older found “internet access and use predict well-being positively and independently” for all ages.

The unspoken agenda

The failure of anti-TikTok and anti-social-media complainants to document their case indicates larger, hidden purposes. One is to uphold the pretense that society’s powerful, approved-of institutions are healthy and well when, in many ways, social media serves as a safety valve on the harms many young people encounter in real life.

Another purpose is that officials and interests are exploiting sensational, speculative harm to children and teens as a smokescreen to banish a social-media entity they dislike for political reasons. Many congressional Republicans and Democrats supporting the ban or forced sale of TikTok invoked censorious motivations driving their zeal to prevent young people from accessing information that challenges official narratives.

Of course, while authoritarian pro-censorship arguments are fine to toss around the current Congress and mainstream media, judicially-savvy attorneys general know admitting such motivations would be hazardous before a Supreme Court that has considered itself a free-speech bulwark. So, plaintiffs invoke specious “mental health, “isn’t it awful?” and “save the children!” emotionalisms instead.

What emerges is that there are no good interests involved. Not traditional institutions, which dodge responsibility for perpetrating the vast majority of real abuses of and harm to children and youth and cruel, self-serving cover-ups; not social media giants, who treat users of all ages as exploitable commodities to grab more power and profit; and not pro-censorship nannies like many politicians and professionals who build careers by blaming cultural and social media innovations for teen troubles while enabling cowardly authorities to dodge real but uncomfortable dangers to young people.

The TikTok case exposes an all-around disgrace

In my own California, Attorney General Rob Bonta, a case plaintiff, endlessly, week after week, vilifies social media and smartphones as harming teenagers’ mental health and boasts about his legal filings. You’d never know from his public statements that Bonta is charged with overseeing the state’s Child Abuse Central Index and the Bureau of Children’s Justice, whose obscure webpage states: “One in four children are estimated to experience abuse or neglect. Child abuse or neglect can cause toxic stress that disrupts childhood development and increases risk of physical and mental health problems...”

In Bonta’s 3 years in office, well over 100,000 California children and youths have been victimized by substantiated violence, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, and severe neglect inflicted by parents, family adults, and caretakers, including nearly 500 murdered. Yet, I can’t recall a single instance in which Bonta has mentioned family violence and abuses as the real driver the CDC finds for teens’ mental health problems.

Bonta and other attorneys general, if you want to protect kids in your states, double down on your state-mandated duty to redress their abusive and troubled families. Your grandstanding over social media accompanies utter failure to protect young people from real threats, as thousands of girls told the CDC’s 2023 survey in no uncertain terms.