how to sell moral panics with bad science, jonathan haidt edition

Moral panics are very profitable for those who fan their flames. And Jonathan Haidt is going to disgusting lows to make sure his sells no matter what.

There comes a time in every 50 to 60 year old white male pundit’s life when they’re awakened by a sudden and profound realization that they now know everything. Yes, that’s right, no secret of the universe is immune from their omniscience. Armed with this key to life, the universe, and everything, they do the only thing someone who is all-knowing can do: start a podcast and write a book about what’s wrong with kids, the country, and the world, and how to fix it, according to them.

It seems that psychologist Jonathan Haidt had the same awakening as of late, which is why he wrote a book called The Anxious Generation, in which he argues that social media and smartphones have rewired kids’ brains to make them anxious, depressed, and pessimistic, and he can prove it. With science.

Now, this is all well and good. Science is, after all, important when you start making claims as grandiose as diagnosing the root cause of mental health conditions of an entire generation. Only one problem with that claim. It’s bullshit according to social scientists who looked at the same research and are very publicly calling Haidt out for cherrypicking his data and sources. Their worry is that he’s telling the equivalent of parental ghost stories to an already terrified audience instead of actually doing what responsible scientists should, and tell them the nuanced truth.

“And then, his TikTok notifications lit up! And his dopamine plummeted, sending him into a deep state of depression from which neither he nor his peers ever recovered. The end. Thank you. That will be $30 and don’t forget to subscribe to my Substack for more horror stories just like it.”

We’ll actually get back to his Substack in a minute, but right now the important thing is to dive into the actual science. Unfortunately for Haidt’s thesis, the research heavily leans on correlational surveys in which social media use and screen time are tracked alongside mental health phenomena to see if any relationship can exist between the two. That can tell us if a lot of screen time may have some sort of influence on a test subject’s mental health or vice versa, but it can’t tell us what came first.

You could interpret it like Haidt and decide that being plopped in front of social media all day is giving you anxiety and depression. Or, like his critics, you could just as easily note that teenagers who already have social anxiety and depression use social media very heavily and in ways their more mentally healthy peers don’t. No one says that a major increase in screen time for younger generations is good, or that it can’t lead to a whole host of problems. We’re just noting that if social media makes kids sad, angry, and depressed, just taking away their phones doesn’t fix the problems.

Even more interesting is that a recent study of mental health outcomes and internet access in 202 countries — which is, yes, basically all of them — found no consistent correlations between screen time and negative mental effects. On top of that, suicide rates among teenagers are down despite going up for all other demographics, and longitudinal surveys show no decline in life satisfaction among teenagers since 2012. Which is a bit of a problem for Haidt’s thesis because social media and smartphones did not vanish by 2013.

“one panic, extra manipulative sleaze please!”

If they did though, he’d almost certainly find a new culprit for a moral panic to stoke, which prompts the question of what else could be making teenagers, especially the American ones, so sad, depressed, anxious, and uncertain of their future.

“Well, my classmates are selling deepfake nudes of my friends, we keep practicing for school shootings because we’re expendable sacrifices to the Second Amendment, a standardized test score linked to household income could decide our entire lives, jobs have become an abusive, sick joke, college tuition is insane, buying a house will never be a thing, and there was a fascist coup against our government three years ago, and it’s almost certainly going to happen next year.”

“Hmm… Okay... Are you sure it’s not social media and smartphones? I wrote a whole book about it. Plus, look at all my studies. I have like 20 of them!”

And that brings us back to Haidt’s newsletter where he defended his new cash calf in a giant wall of text. To save you time, he throws out a lot of numbers and studies, but many of them are either much smaller, lower quality papers, or aren’t even about kids and social media usage at all but measuring the toxicity of excessive social media use, often with convenience samples, or by studying groups in isolation.

The studies that do focus on kids ask about mental health outcomes of teensagers in the U.S. to ring alarm bells about their rising levels of anxiety and depression, then ask them how much time they tend to spend on their phones. In other words, more correlational work which Haidt then tries to pass off as proof of causation because… umm… look at the correlation!

At the same time, he cites studies showing increases in negative mental health of kids in Nordic nations, ignores other studies saying that there’s no proof social media plays a big part in them, and demands explanations for how this could have happened if not for the evil big bad of those darn phones. This isn’t science or research, this is a prime example of a begging the question fallacy.

Effectively, this is his only trick. Point to all the bad things social media does — which I admit to have done as well — then take at the correlations in teenage depression and anxiety, and call it case closed because what else could it possibly be? Well, except all those other things I listed above as potentially way more damaging to any kid’s mental health than looking too much into the rectangle of doom bringing us terrible news in a bid to keep our attention, or get influencer bots to sell us crap we don’t need.

But just to make it all extra sleazy and irresponsible, Haidt ends with a manipulative plea which boils down to “if you don’t think my book is really important and shouldn’t be the basis for laws regulating social media, you’re going to be killing children while you keep trying to solve dumb stuff like school shootings, corrosive wealth inequality, looming college debt, or better job opportunities.”

Despite the fact that this is just so vile that the only expressions I have to describe it in a way that feels appropriate are all in utterly unprintable Russian and Ukrainian, Haidt has another wall of polysyllabic prose dated almost exactly a year prior in which he oh so carefully lets it slip that even if you took all his work at face value — remember, he did say that if you were too critical of him, children’s blood would be on your hands — and applied it to existing literature, it would only explain 15% of mental health effects.

why good science rarely makes you rich

Yes, you read that right. Only 15% of all negative mental health outcomes are related to Haidt’s grand thesis at best. This is the reason behind his cherry-picked logorrhea firing back at his critics and accusing them of playing with children’s’ lives for daring to question him and his co-author. This is why he insists to reporter after reporter that he’s only scratched the surface of the iceberg, and surely, the effect must be much, much greater. A book called The Slight Effects Of Social Media In Exacerbating Poor Mental Health In Kids isn’t going to get him on the bestseller list, or on Joe Rogan.

For all the scorn I’ve heaped on Haidt, there is truth in some of what he says. We do have data showing that a lot of time with social media is objectively bad for you. Like, chain smoking bad. We know for a fact that if you’re spending five or more hours per day on social media, you’re much more likely to be lonely and depressed. We saw the deleterious effects of excessive smartphone use on exercise and sleep habits. And we also know that how you use social media is extremely important.

Probably the last thing I want you to take away from all this is “don’t listen to some old fogey scared of technology, social media is awesome, eleventy out of ten, no notes.” It really isn’t according to a mountain of peer-reviewed data. It’s more like alcohol. Sure, you can have fun with it, what you drink can affect you differently, individual tolerance varies, and you definitely do not want to over-indulge because it eventually leads to a whole heap of trouble.

You can’t blame it for all of life’s problems, but it can make said problems a lot worse if allowed. If you already have a lot of negative things happening around you, it can lead you down rabbit holes of despair. Then again, so can leaders who tell you that you are the future in one breath, then yell at you to fuck off with your whining and toughen up when you ask them to stop your underage AI nudes being sold on the internet, or help schools not feel like a multiplayer battle royale game map.

This is the distinction Haidt forcefully rejects so he could sell more books and bring in more speaking fees, even if he admits that the real problem is maybe like 15% social media and 85% systemic fuckups thanks to the modern world ran by sociopaths who think that empathy is a weakness and objecting to them hunting the poor for sport is basically communism and should be against the law.

There’s just no money in writing books that come to this conclusion no matter if real world data supports it, Thomas Picketty being a very rare exception. Moral panics, on the other hand, are basically catnip for soft focus journalists and daytime talk shows.

In the 1980s, they were hyperventilating about Dungeons and Dragons. In the 1990s, they were warning about Satanic cannibal pedophiles everywhere after your children while trying to build a New World Order. (Hey, why does that sound so familiar?!) The 00s saw them clutching pearls about mythical Rainbow Parties and the “sex bracelet craze” literally invented for ratings or which started out as internet pranks then taken seriously by gullible or avaricious adults. Today? The “dark side of social media” is the new hotness and Haidt is here to deliver the fear no matter what.

It’s a great way to sell books and get on TV and podcasts. But it’s a really shitty way to do science and inform the public. If he is taking on the mantle of a public intellectual, we have to measure him by the standards of his profession and the science he claims to bring to the forefront, not ones we apply to carnival barkers. And that, frankly, is the best way to describe his advertising blitzes and counteroffensives against critics, as he keeps hawking his fear porn to already rightfully worried parents.