CBC Publishes Disinformation on Social Media in Happiness Report

Oops, the CBC did it again. This time, they published disinformation on social media in their report on world happiness.

If there is one topic I dislike having to revisit over and over again, it’s the topic of social media being scapegoated for all of societal ills. The problem is that mainstream media keeps publishing the exact same type of disinformation every couple of months or so in a bid to demonize technology. One of the big offenders (though far from the only one) in all of this is the CBC. Whether that is through advertisements declaring that the internet is “noise” and misinformation, blaming social media for ADHD being overdiagnosed, or even blaming social media for human smuggling… twice, the CBCs handling of stories surrounding social media has been pretty bad over the last few years.

On Friday, I noticed the CBC covering the World Happiness Report and proclaiming that Canada has declined to 25th place. This, according to the CBC, is all thanks to social media. This is not an exaggeration. You can see that in their report:

Heavy social media use has contributed to a stark decline in well-being among young people, with the effects particularly worrying in teenage girls in English-speaking countries — including Canada — and Western Europe, according to the World Happiness Report 2026 published Thursday.

The annual report, published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, also found that Finland is the happiest country in the world for the ninth year in a row, with other Nordic countries such as Iceland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway ranking among the top 10 countries.

But it highlighted how life evaluations among under 25-year-olds in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have dropped significantly over the past decade, and suggested that long hours spent scrolling through social media is a key factor in that trend.

This is an extremely big assumption that easily flies in the face of what research has actually said about social media. As we’ve covered in the past, social media “addiction” and negativity has never really materialized in any significant way in the research. The claim that social media is inherently harmful has long been debunked, yet, here we see this myth making yet another tired appearance. So, the question became this: where did this disinformation come from?

For that, I looked into the actual report to see what sources were cited to make these claims that runs against what the scientific community has been finding for years now. The answer… turned out to be less than surprising:

In North America and Western Europe, young people are much less happy than 15 years ago. Over the same period, social media use has greatly increased. Many people blame social media for this fall in happiness, but does this hypothesis stand the test of rigorous scientific analysis? What about the rest of the world, where young people’s happiness has not declined relative to adults, even though social media is equally prevalent?

There has been much research on this topic. This report does not attempt a comprehensive synthesis of the academic literature – for that, we refer you to the studies listed at the end of this chapter.[1]

Instead, we started by asking two leading critics of social media, Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch, to lay out their case (see Chapter 3).

(emphasis mine)

Yeah, that’s why these findings are so very wrong. While the CBC should’ve done their due diligence before publishing their article, having a good portion of your foundation of your report based on Jonathan Haidt is a pretty quick way to have your report dismissed. Haidt is known for pushing his book, “The Anxious Generation” – a book that is known for being the source of a large portion of the moral panic surrounding social media. Last year, experts reviewed the book to see what breakthroughs he was able to come up with on this topic and quickly found that it was unscientific (not my description). In fact, it was so universally panned, many experts wonder how this book ever got published in the first place. From TechDirt:

The verdict is in on Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation,” and it’s devastating. A new piece in TES Magazine systematically demolishes Haidt’s claims by doing something revolutionary: actually asking experts who study this stuff what they think.

The result reads like an academic execution:

“When I read the book, I found it really hard to believe it was written by a fellow academic,” admits Tamsin Ford, professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Cambridge.

“What Jon is selling is fear,” argues Andrew Przybylski, professor of human behaviour and technology at the University of Oxford. “It’s not scientific.”

And this isn’t some fringe criticism. TES is the Times Educational Supplement, which has been around since 1910 and is basically the trade magazine for educators in the UK. At a time when many educators have been swallowing Haidt’s misleading claims, seeing a respected educational trade magazine systematically shred his arguments is remarkable.

But here’s the truly damning part: this expert demolition came out the exact same day that Politico published a breathless piece claiming Haidt’s crusade represents “the only true bipartisan issue left,” gushing about how governors from both parties are embracing policy reform based on his work.

The contrast couldn’t be starker: while actual experts are calling Haidt’s work unscientific garbage, politicians are treating it like gospel.

The TES piece doesn’t just criticize—it comprehensibly destroys Haidt’s core arguments with the precision of actual scientists who know what they’re talking about.

This wasn’t a one-off, either. Here’s another article on TechDirt talking about the expert response to Haidt:

Jonathan Haidt’s incredibly well-timed decision to surf on the wave of a moral panic about kids and social media has made him a false hero for many parents and educators. In my review, I noted that his book, “The Anxious Generation,” is written in a way that makes adults struggling with the world today feel good, because it gives them something to blame for lots of really difficult things happening with kids today.

The fact that it’s wrong and the data don’t support the actual claims is of no matter. It feels like it could be right, and that’s much easier than doing the real and extremely difficult work of actually preparing kids for the modern world.

So what happens when an actual expert confronts Haidt on this?

Earlier this year, we had Dr. Candice Odgers on our podcast. Unlike Haidt, she is an actual expert in this field and has been doing research on the issue for years. The podcast was mostly to talk about what the research actually shows, rather than just “playing off Haidt’s” misleading book. However, Odgers has become the go-to responder to Haidt’s misleading moral panic. She’s great at it (though there are a ton of other experts in the field who also point out that Haidt’s claims are not supported by evidence).

Still, Odgers keeps getting called on by publications to respond to Haidt’s claims. She’s done so in Nature, where she highlighted what the research actually shows, and in The Atlantic, where she explained how Haidt’s supported proposals might actually cause real harm to kids.

Many people have been wondering if Haidt and Odgers (who were at UVA at the same, Odgers as a grad student, Haidt as a professor) would have a chance to debate directly, and that finally happened recently during a session hosted by UVA. This gave them a chance to discuss what the research says directly. I recommend watching the whole discussion, which is an hour and a half long, though most of the discussion on the research comes in the first half.

Yet, when you look at Chapter 3 in the report, you’ll find that Haidt is one of the two main authors of that whole freaking chapter. What’s more, Haidt appears numerous times throughout the citations (with a number of them even being referenced as unpublished):

Haidt, J. (2024). The Anxious Generation. Penguin Random House.

Haidt, J., & Johnson, W. (2024, September 17). Gen Z has regrets. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/17/opinion/social-media-smartphones-harm-regret.html

Haidt, J., Johnson, W., & Rausch, Z. (2025, June 18). We don’t have to give in to smartphones. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/18/opinion/parents-smartphones-tiktok-facebook.html

Haidt, J., & Rausch, Z. (2025a, January 9). TikTok is harming children at an industrial scale. After Babel. https://www.afterbabel.com/p/industrial-scale-harm-tiktok

Haidt, J., & Rausch, Z. (2025b, April 16). Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale. After Babel. https://www.afterbabel.com/p/industrial-scale-snapchat

Haidt, J., & Rausch, Z. (2025c, May 22). New study finds most experts share concerns about the effects of smartphones and social media on adolescent mental health. After Babel. https://www.afterbabel.com/p/social-media-consensus-paper

Haidt, J., Rausch, Z., & Aslam, A. (2025a). Population estimates for industrial scale harm post [Unpublished manuscript]. New York University. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1m4bBKfhbNqCeSUsLtPmqTZ_EDykVHUh0C2p27sJjpuo/edit?usp=drive_web&ouid=109151487798577830451

Haidt, J., Rausch, Z., & Aslam, A. (2025b). Population estimates for Snapchat users [Unpublished manuscript]. New York University. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dnCPs5kGeba0Jy2fLCiUvSuCaM-TNyeOpIM-NAlIDtA/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.xx90722q27p2

Haidt, J., Rausch, Z., & Aslam, A. (n.d.). Social media industrial scale harms: Statistics [Unpublished manuscript]. New York University. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wZ-sKSiVdCOkoY4yoyIj9YXUwBDWhOig3Keb3sFDO50/edit?tab=t.0

This is… really bad. Self-referencing, generally speaking, is not exactly the most encouraged thing to do when doing a serious research paper. Of course, even just looking at the table of contents in the whole report, you’ll notice the trend of just blaming social media for everything:

Chapter 1 Executive summary: happiness and social media
Chapter 2 International evidence on happiness and social media
Chapter 3 Social media is harming adolescents at a scale large enough to cause changes at the population level
Chapter 4 Translating scientific evidence into effective policies for health and technology requires care
Chapter 5 Adolescent life satisfaction and social media use: gender differences in an international dataset
Chapter 6 Social media, wasting time, and product traps
Chapter 7 Problematic social media use and adolescent wellbeing: the role of family socioeconomic status across 43 countries
Chapter 8 Internet use, social media, and wellbeing: the role of trust, social connections, and emotional bonds
Chapter 9 Social media use and wellbeing in the Middle East and North Africa

So, what’s the problem with this? Simply put, general happiness is a very complicated thing. Just browsing the chapters, you’d be forgiven for forgetting that this is a general report about happiness and wellbeing. The reality is that happiness depends on a whole bunch of factors. This might include socioeconomic factors. How about the affordability of housing? What about the affordability of food? What about crime rates in the locations in question? What is the overall status of education? Can people easily afford kids or not? What social safety nets are there? Is there a war going on in the region (ala Ukraine)? What about the effects of climate change? Are people of different backgrounds experiencing positive social acceptance? Is debt a major factor in the population in general? What about student loans? I could go on.

The bottom line is that this “report” ignores all of that and more. Instead, it focuses on one pet issue throughout the entire report and basically concludes that social media and social media alone is to blame. Forget being unscientific, this report doesn’t even pass the laugh test.

I’m sure a global happiness report of some kind would prove to be beneficial to people. If this report focused on actual factors for happiness instead of obsessing over social media, people who know this stuff might treat this report seriously. Instead, this whole thing is a colossal waste of time and resources that benefits no one. Even worse, mainstream media like the CBC is simply republishing this report as fact on top of it all (shame on the CBC for that one). If I was the CBC, I’d immediately issue a retraction on that story. The whole story clearly relies on a very faulty report. I know they won’t do that because they are more concerned about bashing social media than publishing accurate reporting in these areas. Now, we will likely see even more disinformation about social media floating around and I know it’s going to be extremely annoying to have to debunk the social media moral panic yet again.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.