Meant to include these quotes from Masnick's essay:

The Markup recently published a story about schools that attempted to block problematic content such as pornography, cheating, and harmful content for kids. But what really happened was they ended up blocking sites that were useful for kids, including the Trevor Project (which provides suicide prevention resources and tools directed mainly at LGBTQ youth), Planned Parenthood, and more.

...

When even his former co-author, Lukianoff, pointed out that Haidt’s proposals clearly violate the First Amendment, Haidt’s only response is to suggest that if First Amendment advocates get together, he’s sure they can figure out ways to do age verification that is Constitutional.

This is the classic “nerd harder” demands of a non-expert insisting that if actual experts try hard enough, surely they can make the impossible possible.

posted by spamandkimchi at 1:01 PM on April 25 [7 favorites]

I heard a long interview with Haidt and got pretty suspicious, sure enough he thinks transgender kids are infected by social media/peers and is supportive of his colleagues who refuse to use a student's correct pronouns, under the guise that "truth" is more important than "social justice."
posted by muddgirl at 1:17 PM on April 25 [16 favorites]

Reading Haidt’s book, you might think the evidence supports his viewpoint, as he presents a lot of it. The problem is that he’s cherry-picking his evidence and often relying on flawed studies

as it is with just about every single gd NYT bestselling pop-science "non"-fiction book out there. I hate that there's about to be 500000 parenting blogs regurgitating this crap

wrt Haidt's comment that was basically 'kids don't deserve to have human rights', at least that's in line with the popular opinion by US political elites (ie ethically repellent and yet still normalized)
posted by paimapi at 1:18 PM on April 25 [4 favorites]

Rebecca Watson just released a video (20:15) on this that seems to be a nice summary.
posted by JSilva at 1:30 PM on April 25 [3 favorites]

My take is that the kids who came of age during the rise of social media are most impacted; children growing up now will have the broader understanding of what social media is - easily manipulated to curate an image, reactionary, nothing to base your identity on etc. that being said I’m avoiding the cel phone for my kids as long as humanly possible - anyone know of good analog phones that just call and text? I sense a market opportunity.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 1:34 PM on April 25

My take is that the kids who came of age during the rise of social media are most impacted;

there is a Nature editorial that is quite literally linked multiple times in both the posted article and directly in this post that addresses your claim lol
posted by paimapi at 1:50 PM on April 25 [4 favorites]

It seems clear that the 2008 housing crisis had an outsized impact on the US as a whole. In addition to the obvious financial calamities, it also caused new housing to pretty much stop being built, a major causative factor for the current housing crisis. And so the stressors of housing and financial precarity of course impact the mental health of those subjected to those stressors. Social media just happened to come of age at the same time.

What was interesting to me, as someone who grew up in the 80s and 90s, is the fact that suicides and depression were higher then than in the late 90s and 2000s.
posted by grumpybear69 at 2:12 PM on April 25 [5 favorites]

I should add, as a parent to a young child, Haidt's interview was very emotionally compelling, but when he started talking about (a) the innate difference between boys and girls and (b) his experiences at a college professor my skeptical sensor started to ping. I'm grateful so many other academics are doing the work to try and debunk his book.
posted by muddgirl at 2:13 PM on April 25 [6 favorites]

I am an adult who got my first smartphone at 25. I think it is a genuine addiction and a thief of both my joy and my attention span. I cannot imagine this isn’t having a significant impact on youth who have been on them all through their formative years.
posted by sibylvane at 3:06 PM on April 25 [12 favorites]

Our current furor over social media (and phones for kids) have all the trappings of a moral panic. They come and go every couple decades, and they are almost always wrong.

I feel pretty confident people will look back at this moral panic in 50 years and laugh.

I regularly get eviscerated by smart people when I say this, but I don’t much doubt that I am correct. I say this as an old.
posted by teece303 at 3:32 PM on April 25 [3 favorites]

It is possible that Haidt is fearmongering and distorting research to sell books, and that social media, as instituted, often has negative health consequences. The Nature article just says that the sweeping generalizations in Haidt’s book requires exceptional evidence, which does not exist. My opinion as a parent of 3 teens is that this book is largely bullshit, as are most parenting books, but that it is always a good idea to redirect as many activities away from virtual as I can, if only to provide variety of activity. Phones are addictive, particularly in my family’s flavor of neurodivergence. But I am not convinced my kids’ current environment is necessarily worse for their overall mental health than it would have been thirty years ago, when one of their gender choices wouldn’t even have existed.
posted by q*ben at 3:34 PM on April 25 [7 favorites]

Kids are depressed because every metric has them worse off than their parents and much worse than grandparents at their age. Everything is fucked. Don’t blame phones ffs.
posted by seanmpuckett at 3:43 PM on April 25 [7 favorites]

Kids are depressed because every metric has them worse off than their parents and much worse than grandparents at their age. Everything is fucked. Don’t blame phones ffs.

Bolded for emphasis? I mean, every metric? C'mon.

Also, why can't it be both the shittiness of the world and smartphones/social-media?

It's not anecdata to observe the vast reduction in attention span that has occurred in parallel with the rise of smartphones/social media! There is a clear mechanistic link! Members of this site and grownups self-report it constantly!, It's literally been engineered as a a dopamine reward system predicated on short highly emotion-valence bursts and intermittent-variable-reward (the latter of which has absolutely conclusively been shown to generate gambling addicts)..... and it's not an antiscientific suggestion that if it works on adults, it will have a profound effect on developing brains.
posted by lalochezia at 3:51 PM on April 25 [3 favorites]

This is and was the subject of my life's work. I've been online since I was 13. I've done case studies, and am a stepmom and have helped raise quite a few kiddos.

The online dangers are the loss of privacy and identity, the inherent dangers of posting something you can't erase, loss of real human interaction, and parents who have to rely on them for cheap We aren't for sale.
posted by lextex at 3:52 PM on April 25 [3 favorites]

Kids are depressed because every metric has them worse off than their parents and much worse than grandparents at their age. Everything is fucked. Don’t blame phones ffs.


All the cool kids like to say this, but it's pretty untrue. The biggest reason any kids believe it is because the grown ups like to sound cool, too. And kids are surprisingly interested in what grown ups are saying.

Frankly, the kids have no idea how good they got it. Nor do most adult Americans.
posted by 2N2222 at 4:14 PM on April 25 [3 favorites]

I mean, it goes without saying that social media is designed by weapons-grade engineers to completely fry the user's brain, irrespective of age, with a torrential onslaught of reward and stress signals that erodes the user's capacity for critical thinking... right?

I'm not keeping my hypothetical kids off social media because of some panicky nerd (unless you'd describe me as a panicky nerd, which... accurate), but because of my own repeatedly terrible experiences with it.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 4:16 PM on April 25 [2 favorites]

I wanted my kids high school to ban phones before Jonathan Haidt wrote his book. I haven’t read his book and I still want my kids high school to ban phones.

It’s kind of funny seeing people say, “Haidt’s data is bogus, ipso facto social media and smart phone usage by adolescents is benign. Let’s blame the 2008 financial crisis.”

Solid data will be hard to come by, and short of that, we have to operate on common sense, intuition, and anecdata. I think the possible harms of delaying smart phone use among kids are much lower than the possible harms of the virtually uncontrolled use we have now. And one thing Haidt is right about, it is a group problem. My daughter is the only kid in her middle school class without a smart phone. We think that’s the right decision, on balance, given her neuro makeup, but the fact that all the other kids have smart phones makes it harder and has its own price.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 4:43 PM on April 25 [4 favorites]

Yeah, those Oxford studies suck. The Facebook one on its positively bonkers age groups:

We examined 72 countries’ per capita active Facebook users in males and females in two age brackets (13-34yrs and 35+years).’

The ABCD one, on its self-reported data:

Their responses could range from no time at all to over four hours a day.

This shit just doesn't answer the question. It's hard and expensive to design a study that does, funders are chickenshits, etc, but this kind of research needs high-quality evidence, precisely so that it can smack down the Haidts of the world.
posted by McBearclaw at 4:44 PM on April 25 [1 favorite]

Also, the idea that "almost all" moral panics are wrong is really weird in the wake of the election of a cartoon villain primarily by Fox News viewers and a pandemic that was aggressively downplayed and also killed millions.
posted by McBearclaw at 5:00 PM on April 25 [1 favorite]

Also, the idea that "almost all" moral panics are wrong is really weird in the wake of the election of a cartoon villain primarily by Fox News viewers and a pandemic that was aggressively downplayed and also killed millions.

I don't think we are using the term the same way.

Social media and smart phones are a new social phenomenon. Every new social phenomenon like this was going to "destroy society" going back to the Romans and farther. Every time that idea was pretty much wrong. The kind of alarm we see now around smart phones and social media has been used in much the same way against: writing, novels, radio, tv, the internet, dungeon and dragons, etc.

An equally flawed corollary is "the kids these days..." (they suck, they are doomed, they are slackers, they have failing morality, etc, etc.). That is as old as time and as wrong as time, to abuse a term.

While certainly there are unique and problematic trends among our current set of new social technologies, yes, but that has been true for all of human history.

Fox News and cheeto man don't resemble a moral panic in any way, shape, or form to me, so I really don't know what you are trying to say there. The problem in that instance is a propaganda network and a bloc of voters that really, really dig the venality and xenophobia and racism, and vote for it.
posted by teece303 at 5:23 PM on April 25

Another important thing to remember here: the sentiment among teens that things are bad, or in rising suicidal ideation among teens, or in rising suicide rates among teenagers (girls in particular, iirc), predate by a bit the things they are being blamed on (social media or smart phones; if you hedge and say "screens" the broad data fits better, then, in that one respect, but you create a new problem in that the trend now post-dates the "screens" by a wide margin).
posted by teece303 at 5:47 PM on April 25

You are not currently logged in. Log in or create a new account to post comments.