People should really read Jonathan Haidt's full series of posts. This one is post # 8 out of N, and they are meant to be read in series. The author's arguments build on each other, and all of the criticisms people are making in the comments are addressed in prior posts.

Full series here: https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/archive

I find the complete argument really compelling. It convincingly argues that teen use of social media has drastically reduced the time spent in person with friends, and drastically increased social comparisons. These two effects are awful for the mental health of a human who's brain is still developing. The specific issue is the combination of smartphones with cameras and social media based on images and video, which only became prevalent in ~2012. Social media is causing a public health the scale of COVID, Opiods, or smoking - a tremendous amount of unnecessary suffering, and 2-3x the rate of teen self harm and suicide.

Here's the longer version of the argument, with citations:

Teen mental health has unambiguously dropped off a cliff. Both self reports of depression, and objective measures like hospital admissions and suicides, have increased drastically since ~2012 [1].

The decrease in health does not correlate with the economy [2], or with academic pressure [3]. It does not correlate with 9/11, school shootings, or any particular American issue, because the decline started at the same time in all Anglophile countries [4].

There is no evidence of the "doomer" hypothesis: that teens are right to be more depressed because the world actually does suck, and they're just the first to notice [5]. And that thought pattern is itself specifically characteristic of depression: Depressed people view the world as worse than it actually is [6].

The decline in mental health does unambiguously correlate with social media use. And every class of study that examines causation has shown that social media causes declines in mental heatlh. The issue seems to be specifically the combination of smartphones with cameras and social media based on images and videos. These two technologies both became common ~2012, at the same time mental health started dropping [7].

Some combination of social media has radically altered the social life of teens, in ways that we know to be terrible for mental health. Time spent by teens in person with friends has decreased ~70% [8]. And I don't have a specific source for this one, but it sure seems like social media has vastly increased social comparison. Nothing else can explain the decline in time spent with friends. We know depression and anxiety are tightly linked to social support - how could time spent with friends fall by so much and not cause a crisis.

I think tech-savvy people are so used to baseless moral panics that there is a set of defense instincts kick in whenever something seems like a moral panic. But all of the evidence is that this time is different. If you don't think social media is a major contributor, at least understand the evidence that it is, or use evidence for your alternative hypothesis.

[1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness...

[2] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/i/104255435/conclusion-so...

[3] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/academic-pressure-socia...

[4] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/international-mental-il...

[5] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/mental-health-liberal-g...

The same point is made better and I think less ideologically by Matt Yglesias in the link before. Half of the piece is behind a paywall, but the first half is the most important.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/why-are-young-liberals-so-depre...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beck's_cognitive_triad

[7] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...

[8] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-new-cdc-report