The government is consulting on the merits of banning children under the age of 16 from social media and looks prised to do so. As with many such digital abstinence movements, politicians who advocate for this change are influenced by The Anxious Generation, a book of pop psychology written by Jonathan Haidt, which claims that social media has worsened young people’s mental health.
Far from ‘drowning in evidence’, real researchers – not pop psychologists – are scouring a great desert looking for puddles
Proponents of such bans tell us there is an overwhelming scientific consensus behind them, usually citing Haidt’s book. Kemi Badenoch, who is trying to push the ban through the House of Lords, said it would be ‘foolish’ to say that social media has no role in the deterioration of children’s mental health. One of her deputies, Laura Trott, has declared that we are ‘drowning in evidence’ of the harms of social media to our children.
This is news to many of us in academia. According to Dr Pete Etchells, a Bath Spa University researcher who is on the advisory board for the Australian eSafety Commission’s evaluation of the Social Media Minimum Age regulations: ‘There’s simply no consensus in the research community on the impact of social media or smartphones on youth wellness.’
The Anxious Generation presents convincing-looking graphs showing mental health going down while social media use goes up. These are a classic case of correlation not being causation. Using similar graphs, you could argue that Beyoncé’s salary increases have accelerated global warming.
The book’s graphs and claims don’t control for other variables, such as the opioid epidemic, income inequality or failing schools, nor even systemic changes in how people report mental health. And some are already looking obsolete. Teen mental health in the US and Australia had begun to improve even as the book came out. And there’s the irony that Haidt, who used to deride safetyism, now calls for a massive expansion of state censorship.
‘Throughout the 20th century, sudden surges of youth interest in just about anything was accompanied with hysteria.’
Far from ‘drowning in evidence’, real researchers – not pop psychologists – are scouring a great desert looking for puddles. The majority of studies have found either no relationship between social media usage and mental illness, or effects so small that they are practically meaningless. A Journal of Public Health study published just last month which examined 25,000 young people in the UK found no correlation between time spent on social media and worsening mental health.
In addition to the proposed ban on social media, there has been an effort to reduce the use of smartphones by children by banning them in schools, on the basis that they disrupt learning. Again, there is little hard evidence to back this up. One large British study from last year found that schools adopting phone bans had no better student outcomes in terms of learning, behaviour or mental health than those without bans. In the US, as bans have proliferated, our standardised testing scores for youth have continued to decline. In my home state of Florida, testing scores reached their lowest levels in 20 years following the introduction of bans. Smartphone bans seem similarly ineffective in your country as well. This week, the British Medical Journal published a study finding that Britain’s school smartphone bans have shown ‘little impact on pupils’ mental wellbeing or quality of life’.
Some advocates argue that social media and smartphones promote bullying among kids. In fact, according to the US National Center for Education Statistics, bullying among youth declined during the smartphone and social media age, even with cyberbullying included into the figures.
As with many moral issues, there is often a great gulf between people’s moral intuition and the science available to support it. Perhaps the best historical parallel to Haidt’s ‘anxious generation’ is Seduction of the Innocent by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, a bestselling book published in 1954 which declared that popular comic books had created a phenomenon of juvenile delinquency. Wertham claimed there were hidden sexual themes in popular comics, alleging that Batman and Robin were gay partners and that Wonder Woman was a subliminal lesbian – serious claims at a time when homosexuality was still a diagnosable mental disorder. People took all this seriously: a US congressional inquiry was even launched into the comic book industry. Wertham went on to appear before a senate subcommittee where he compared the comic book industry to Hitler.
Throughout the 20th century, sudden surges of youth interest in just about anything was accompanied with hysteria. In the 1980s parents feared Dungeons and Dragons was a cipher for satanism. In the 1990s, violent video games were blamed for school shootings. Ultimately, it would turn out that, statistically, mass shooters played fewer violent video games than other men or boys their age. But it can be difficult to get a hearing for cold, hard evidence when a noisy din of moral grifters and politicians are whipping up emotions about the safety of children.
Fear is an industry that makes money from our anxieties, fostering them in the process. Though I don’t doubt the good intentions, it’s worth noting that Haidt has made considerable profits from his bestselling book, charges up to $200,000 (£150,000) a day for speaking engagements and has created a nonprofit that seeks donations from the public.
You may look at the academic evidence and still believe that, with enough time, we will find a causal link between social media and mental illness in young people. But it would seem prudent for Britain to consider this question very carefully instead of implementing a ban immediately. If there really was an academic consensus that social media was causing mental health issues, there perhaps would be a case for rushing into action. But there simply isn’t.
Policies based on fear and moral table-pounding are doomed to fail. They will distract us from real causes of youth distress: dysfunctional families and failing schools. And they will do so wearing a bogus mask of empiricism.
Christopher Ferguson is a psychology professor at Stetson University, Florida
Comments