Weaponizing youth mental health

Congressional action on social media regulation does not require resolving controversy in psychology. It may even help young people.

Figure from Twenge (2020): Percent of U.S. 8^th, 10^th, and 12^th graders high in depressive symptoms, by sex, Monitoring the Future, 1991–2017.

A bit ago I started down the road on examining the rise of “climate anxiety” among young people. Much of it- the phenomenon and its study- is driven by advocacy oriented interests and is woefully detached from scientific knowledge on climate change.

Climate anxiety- the people, interests, and science involved-provides a window into the way anxiety and depression in young people is weaponized and intentionally fostered in mobilizing issue advocacy and as evidence of injury in climate litigation .

I’ll write more on the interests that fan the flames of climate anxiety some other time.

For now, I highlight some points on the broader context of current public and scientific discussion about youth mental health within which the niche realm of climate anxiety is situated.

The discussion about youth mental health and social media became fierce in recent weeks with the release of Anxious Generation by NYU social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt.

The premise of the book- I have yet to read it, but Haidt writes prolifically at

After Babel

- is that the rise of a “phone based childhood” and the decline of “play based childhood” has led to the the precipitous decline in indicators of youth mental health and rise in self harm and suicide in young people (variously defined as ages 10-24 depending on the study).

Haidt is not the only prominent voice to point to the trend in the rise of social media alongside the decline of youth mental health.

Jean M. Twenge

, San Diego State University psychologist, dubbed those born between 1995–2012 as the iGen. She too argues that social media is bringing teens down. Her book and 2017 article in The Atlantic were widely read, giving rise to the often heard headlines ‘the kids are not alright.’

But, another camp of researchers argue the link between social media and youth mental health is weak.¹ One of these researchers is psychologist, Candice Odgers, Associated Dean for Research at University of California Irvine.

Nature published a review of the Anxious Generation by Odgers which dismissed Haidt’s argument.

Odgers argued that the full body of research on teen mental health and social media is nuanced and open to more than one interpretation. She suggests issues related to social complexity, deepening income inequality and more:

Researchers cite access to guns, exposure to violence, structural discrimination and racism, sexism and sexual abuse, the opioid epidemic, economic hardship and social isolation as leading contributors

Haidt and fellow substack writer Zach Rausch met Odger’s review with in-depth rebuttals clearly miffed at the quick dismissal of Haidt’s argument, which if nothing else, has a lot of momentum even if the competing scientific views are legitimate.²

(Personally, I find it curious that Nature hosted only the one opinion.)

But even with the quick dismissal Odgers agrees that

Many of Haidt’s solutions for parents, adolescents, educators and big technology firms are reasonable, including stricter content-moderation policies and requiring companies to take user age into account when designing platforms and algorithms. recommendations to improve social media regulation are sound.

Odgers shies away from age-based restrictions and bans on mobile devices suggesting that such regulations could backfire.

One of Haidt’s policy recommendations is,

No social media before 16 (as a norm, but one that would be much more effective if supported by laws such as the proposed update to COPPA, the Kids Online Safety Act, state-level age-appropriate design codes, and new social media bills like the bipartisan Protecting Kids on Social Media Act, or like the state level bills passed in Utah last year and in Florida last month).

In coauthored work Odgers suggests that adolescent media consumption online mirrors their vulnerabilities and concerns offline. Elsewhere, in a review of depression and anxiety in adolescents by Katherine M. Keyes and Jonathan M. Platt write to this point,

there is growing consensus that the amount or type of social media exposure is likely to [sic] crude of a metric for assessing causal effects of exposure, but rather, that the information within consumed media may be a more salient direction for assessing impacts on youth. Adolescents are exposed to a wide range of information, from political news to thoughts and ideas, through technologies that are primed to keep adolescents watching, and serve them content that is aligned with their interests… The increasing silos of information by political affiliation and worldview, and the reality that monetization of online content is optimized by presenting the most extreme views on each political side, may push adolescents towards distress as they engage with content that further polarizes thought and belief. ³ [emphasis mine]

In other words, the problem is not social media per se but the messages people consume when on social media. Haidt, Raush, Twenge, Odgers, and the rest are arguing two sides of the same coin.

Differences in views about how to respond to problems with social media be tied to their own viewpoints.

Back in 2015, Haidt and colleague, Greg Lukianoff, Head of FIRE, the important higher-ed free speech watchdog, argued in the Coddling of the American Mind that social media was a serious problem in the quest for free speech and debate about challenging ideas.

From their perspective students are being too shielded from controversial ideas in the name of emotional well-being and are in turn taking to social media with campaigns against professors that present viewpoints counter to the students’ political ideals. In more recent words, Lukianoff believes that the decline in mental health is attributable to a strain of liberals discourse; “‘wokeness’, is inherently depressing.”

In the other corner, the likes of the American Psychological Association- psychologists touts social media platforms “from Facebook to Instagram to TikTok” and venture capital supported AI as the future of therapy and the frontlines of squashing “misinformation” campaigns. A promotional video makes it clear that such misinformation is intimately tied to politics by depicting imagery of public protests against vaccine mandates.

In a sense, the very flavor of discourse that Haidt and Lukianoff see as problematic for society and youth mental health is the flavor of discourse that APA and others may seek to protect.

This is why content moderation policies in the form of censorship is not wise. ⁴

Subcommittee Hearing

In 2022, Haidt gave testimony to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law. The hearing demonstrated civil bipartisan support for improving (creating?) the regulatory regime around social media. The subcommittee has held several hearings about algorithm governance.

The discussion was about improving platform transparency- in which there is solid bipartisan interest. Viewpoints clashed on how to improve transparency without compromising privacy and free speech. It was an all together a productive discussion.

In this regulatory context, young people are just one piece of a larger concern about social media in society, impacts on democracy, and legitimate political debate about how to establish a robust regulatory regime for this technology.

Improved regulation of social media does not require the scientific debates among psychologists to be settled. Nor does it seem likely that it is possible to settle them because depression/anxiety and adolescence is a complicated dynamic made no more tractable by linking them to large scale economic and political conditions.

Last year, writing in the Washington Post, a bipartisan group of senators said that the Kids Online Safety Act would prevent social media companies from feeding algorithmically personalized content or advertising to users under the age of 18.

Such a policy may be appealing to a broad range of political leanings and would reduce the effect of bombastic echo chambers. I would like such an option to be made available to adults, too.

1. Haidt in partnership with Twenge argue their is consensus developing that correlation between hours spent on digital media and variables related to well-being is about r=-0.15 (more hours, lower mental health scores) with some greater value for teen girls. Though weak in an absolute sense as far as r values go, Haidt points to arguments that when applied over the population, the value (actually the value of r=0.17 can increases depression among teen girls by 50%.

2. Twenge in her own rebuttal of Odgers provides an explanation fr why climate change and other “hellscapes” do not explain the rise in depression.

3. Part of the excerpted text from this passage is this:

Available evidence indicates that mental health problems have increased at a greater pace for adolescents who identify as political liberal compared with conservative (Gimbrone, Bates, Prins, & Keyes, 2022), which may be indicative of reactions to increasing awareness of inequality, unfair treatment of people with marginalized identities and historical oppression such as immigrants and racial/ethnic minority populations, climate anxiety, and other aspects of geopolitics that are distressing when considering long-term future prospects at an early age

The statement is a reflection of the “partisan happiness gap.” A good discussion on this is here by Musa al-Gharbi who is a colleague of Haidt’s at the Heterodox Academy.

4. Better is to alter the university reward structure that supports irresponsible scientific journal practices and advocacy oriented research that collectively undermines mechanisms of democratic accountability.