#readwise # 291 – Jonathan Haidt: The Case Against Social Media  ## Metadata - Author: [[Lex Fridman Podcast]], [[Jonathan Haidt]] - Full Title: 291 – Jonathan Haidt: The Case Against Social Media - URL: https://www.airr.io/episode/629bd6ad04a177001157573c ## Highlights Haidt: **==Everything seems to kind of blow up in 2014, 2015 at universities==, and that's when Greg Lukianoff came to me in May of 2014 and said 'John weird stuff is happening, students are freaking out about a speaker coming to campus that they don't have to go see, and they're saying it's dangerous, it's violence like what is going on?** And so anyway, Greg's ideas about how we were teaching students to think in distorted ways that lead us to write the Coddling the American mind, which wasn't primarily about social media either, it was about, you know, this sort of a rise of depression, anxiety, but after that things got so much worse everywhere **and ==that's when I began to think like that something systemically has changed, something has changed about the fabric of the social universe==. And so ever since then I've been focused on social media.** ([Time 0:10:42](https://www.airr.io/quote/629cbe4dc33145d679f93e68)) - [[Banning University Speakers Literature and Other Forms of Censorship in Education]] --- Haidt: **There are two major areas that I study. One is what is happening with ==teen mental health: it it fell off a cliff in 2013, it was very sudden==. And then the other is ==what is happening to our democratic and epistemic institutions==, that means knowledge generating, like the ==universities, journalism==.** So my main areas of research, where I'm collecting the empirical research and trying to make sense of it, is what's happened to teen mental health and what's the evidence that social media is a contributor. And then the other areas what's happening to democracy, and it's not just America, and what's the evidence that social media is a contributor to the dysfunction. So, I'm sure we'll get to that because that's what the Atlantic article is about. But if we focus first on what's happened to teen mental health. So, before I read the quotes from Mark, I'd like to just give the overview and it is this: **there's a lot of data tracking adolescents, ==there's self reports of how depressed, anxious, lonely. There's data on hospital admissions for self harm, there's data on suicide==. And all of these things, they bounce around somewhat, but they're relatively level in the early 2000s, and then all of a sudden around, you know, around 2010-2013**, depending on which statistics you're looking at, all of a sudden **they begin to shoot upwards,** more so for girls in some cases, but on the whole it's like up for both sexes, it's just that boys have lower levels of anxiety and depression, so the curve is not quite as dramatic, but **==what we see is not a small increase, it's not like 10%, 20%, no, the increases are between 50 and 150%==,** depending on which group you're looking at. **==Suicide for preteen girls==**, thankfully it's not very common, but **it's ==2 to 3 times more common== now**, or by 2015 it had doubled between 2010 and 2015, it doubled. So something is going radically wrong in the world of American pre-teens. And what we, so as I've been studying it, I found, first of all, **it's not just America, it's identical in Canada and the UK. Australia, New Zealand are very similar**, they're just after a little delay. It's not as clear in the Germanic countries in continental Europe, it's a little different and we can get into that when we talk about childhood, but something's happening in many countries, and **it started right around 2012, 2013 and it wasn't gradual. It hit girls hardest, and it hit preteen girls the hardest. So what could it be? Nobody has come up with another explanation. Nobody.** It wasn't the financial crisis, that wouldn't have hit preteen girls the hardest. There is no other explanation. The complexity here, and the data is, of course, as everyone knows, correlation doesn't prove causation. The fact that television viewing was going up in the fifties and the sixties and seventies doesn't mean that that was the cause of the crime. So what I've done, and this is the work with [[Jean M. Twenge]], who wrote the book iGen, is because I was challenged, you know, when I, when Greg and I put out the book, the Coddling the American Mind, some researchers challenged us and said, 'oh, you don't know what you're talking about.' You know, the correlations between social media use and, and mental health, they exist, but they're tiny. It's, it's, you know, like the correlation coefficient of .03 or, you know, a beta of .05, you know, tiny little things. And, one famous article said 'it's no bigger than the correlation of bad mental health and eating potatoes,' which exists, but it's like, it's so tiny, it's zero, essentially. And that claim that social media is no more harmful than eating potatoes are wearing eyeglasses, it was a very catchy claim and it's caught on, and I keep hearing that. ([Time 0:12:55](https://www.airr.io/quote/629cbebbc33145d679f9518c)) - Note: Mark above is Mark Zuckerberg. He goes over several quotes of Mark from an earlier Lex Friedman podcast and tries to rebut Mark's arguments that overall social media is a force of good. --- Haidt: Let's be clear: connecting people is good. I mean, overall the more you connect people, the better. Giving people the telephone was an amazing step forward, giving them free telephone, you know, free, long distances, even better. So connecting people is good, I'm not a Luddite. And social media, at least the idea of users posting things it's great, it can serve all kinds of needs. **What I'm talking about here is not the internet, it's not technology, it's not smartphones, and it's not even all social media, ==it's a particular business model in which people are incentivized to create content==, and that content is what brings other people on. And the people on there are the product, which is sold to advertisers. It's that particular business model, which facebook pioneered, which ==seems to be incredibly harmful for teenagers, especially for young girls 10-14 years old==, is where they're most vulnerable, ==and it seems to be particular harmful for democratic institutions==, because it ==leads to all kinds of anger, conflict, and the destruction of any shared narrative==.** ([Time 0:16:26](https://www.airr.io/quote/629cbf6bc33145d679f96d30)) --- Haidt: A lot of people seem to think like 'what we would've done without social media and covid, like we would have been sitting there alone in our homes.' Yeah, **if all we had was, you know, texting, telephone, zoom, Skype, multiplayer video games, WhatsApp, all sorts of ways of communicating with each other. Oh and there's blogs and the rest of the internet. Yeah, we would have been fine. Did we really need the hyper viral platforms of facebook and twitter? Now, those did help certain things get out faster, and that did help science twitter sometimes but it also led to huge explosions of misinformation, and the polarization of our politics to such an extent that a third of the country, you know didn't believe what the medical establishment was saying** and, we'll get into this, the medical establishment sometimes was playing political games that made them less credible. So, on net, it's not clear to me that if you've got the internet, smartphones, blogs, all of the, you know, all of that stuff, it's not clear to me that adding in this particular business model of facebook, twitter, TikTok that really adds a lot more. ([Time 0:19:07](https://www.airr.io/quote/629cbff1c33145d679f98275)) --- Haidt: He talks about what Frances Haugen said, he said no, but that's mischaracterized. Actually on most measures, the kids are doing better when they're on Instagram, it's just on one out of the 18, and then he says, 'I think an accurate characterization would have been that kids using Instagram, or not kids, but teens, is generally positive for their mental health.' That's his claim, that Instagram is overall, taken as a whole, Instagram is positive for their mental health. That's what he says. Okay, now: is it really, is it really? ([Time 0:22:04](https://www.airr.io/quote/629cc085c33145d679f997b2)) - Note: He talks here about a counter argument by Mark Zuckerberg ---