I Filed a Complaint With the CBC Ombudsman

In response to the reporting on the World Happiness Report, Drew Wilson formally filed a complaint to the CBC.

A few days ago, I reported on the CBC’s reporting on the World Happiness Report. What I found was that the report that the CBC was covering was research practices that were deeply flawed and, as I found out later, I was far from the only one finding errors and problems within the report. The thing is, the CBC published the findings without questioning it, implying that the report was, in fact, accurate when there are serious credibility questions and flaws in the report.

In the days since, I have been debating back and forth on whether or not I should go beyond my reporting on the CBC potentially spreading misinformation and formally file a complaint with the CBC ombudsman. Normally, this contemplation would take maybe two days, however, I spent this last weekend attending a funeral for my aunt, so it took a little while longer to get back to my computer so I could continue writing.

Ultimately, I chose to actually write a formal complaint to the CBC Ombudsman because I was sick and tired of the myth that social media is inherently harmful to people continuing to be repeated over and over again without a formal challenge being submitted. Now, I’m under no illusion that the CBC is somehow going to magically change their ways overnight in all of this, nor am I totally confident that my complaint would actually be considered. However, it makes for a much stronger argument that I formally filed a complaint about the CBC publishing inaccurate material rather than just getting annoyed and posting my complaints to my own website, however accurate my complaints may be.

So, the first question is how one goes about filing a complaint with the CBC Ombudsman. As it turns out, it’s actually not that difficult as you can go to this webpage and click on the link to file a complaint. The complaint can be sent through snail mail or e-mail. For reasons that should be obvious, I filed the complaint through e-mail, in part, because I make a number of references that is more easily accessible online. It’s easier to click a link than to painstakingly recreate the URLs from a piece of paper.

To better bolster the validity of the complaint, I also referenced the CBC mandate as that would likely be one of the big documents that would be referenced, or, at the very least, given consideration when assessing the validity of the complaint. In particular, I noted the following as part of their mandate:

The evaluation measures performance in respecting the fundamental principles of CBC journalism. All employees of CBC News, as well as the content they create, and employees of Local Services, Radio Talk information programming, or any service involved in the creation of news, current affairs and public affairs content must respect all of the principles of the Journalistic Standards and Practices, namely:

• accuracy, fairness, balance, impartiality and integrity.

In this case, all of the above apply with the complaint that I was filing. With this information in hand, I then proceeded to craft my complaint. The personal information that is required, at least at the time of this writing, are the following:

For complaints that fall within the jurisdiction of the Ombudsman, please email ombud@cbc.ca. Your email should include the following information:

• First name
• Last name
• Province/Territory
• City
• Country
• Email address
• Platform (e.g. radio, TV, website, app or social media)

So, for the purpose of easily referencing the information required, I placed this at the top of the e-mail before proceeding to the actual complaint. The complaint itself, of course, should be respectful. Naturally, being a journalist, I also took things a step further by also including sources to further bolster the validity of the complaint. As such, this is the complaint that I produced:

I’d like to submit a complaint about the reporting on the World Happiness Report.  The report in question was published online here: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/world-happiness-2026-canada-25-9.7134296

Though this was from the Associated Press, I do note that this story also aired on the TV airwaves through CBC News Network.  What’s more, publication of the article on the CBC website implies that the information has been confirmed to be accurate by the CBC even if it was not necessarily written by staff working at the CBC.

The CBC has a mandate to ensure accuracy, fairness, balance, impartiality and integrity for its reporting. The report that was broadcast and published online does not meet those standards.

The reason for this is because the reporting, at best, only portrays one side of the debate – namely whether social media leads to unhappiness or not.  The on air reporting suggests that Canada specifically can blame social media for the decline of happiness.  However, social media is a global phenomenon.  If it is available everywhere, then it would make sense that several nations would, theoretically, be negatively impacted, not just Canada specifically.
The reporting, including the online report, relies heavily on the World Happiness Report while not referencing other material.  This is problematic for two reasons:

The first reason:

The first reason is the fact that the World Happiness Report is deeply flawed in its research.  For one, it relies heavily on the work of Jonathan Haidt.  In Chapter 3 of the report, the report appears to be co-authored by Haidt.  The first work cited was his book, “The Anxious Generation” which was published in 2024.  While this book has been referenced by numerous outlets in the time since its publications, academics and researchers have examined this book and concluded that it is not reliable at all.  See this link for reference: https://www.techdirt.com/2025/09/10/experts-universally-pan-jonathan-haidts-the-anxious-generation-as-unscientific-garbage-but-politicians-keep-buying-it-anyway/

Even worse, Chapter 3 of the World Happiness Report cites Haidt’s work numerous times.  As a result, the work is very self referencing.  Even worse, a number of the works cited were unpublished manuscripts which appears to mean that academic journals, for whatever reason, has chosen not to publish his material.  Yet, the work was cited as evidence to bolster the arguments about how social media is inherently harmful.

Moreover, what works weren’t referencing Haidt’s own materials were considerably flawed.  Some works were simply self-published Substack pages, articles that bore little to no relevance to social media use, or self-reporting surveys: https://bsky.app/profile/blakestacey.myatproto.social/post/3mhf7t73ifc2n

Moreover, the World Happiness Report appears to simply blame social media for the decline of general happiness.  In the process, it ignores critical elements that can very easily affect general happiness. Whether this is the cost of housing, the general cost of living, social safety nets, the overall quality of social interactions, psychological support structures, medical support for the community, the prevalence of crime, countries impacted by war, and a host of other issues.  It makes little sense to simply focus on the one issue of social media use and declare this to be the biggest factor in happiness when happiness is, in general, a complicated thing that requires numerous elements to be in place to ensure that this broadly happens.

I recognize that these research problems within the World Happiness Report were not problems made by the CBC, however, the CBC reporting on this report in the way that it did implied that the report itself was accurate despite the many flaws contained in the report.  At the very least, this opens the door to the possibility that the CBC may have inadvertently spread misinformation or disinformation.  I trust that this is something that the CBC would be interested in avoiding.

The second reason:

There has been actual research on the subject of mental health and social media.  The conclusions that keep appearing over and over again is that social media either has a positive impact or a neutral impact on mental health. Claims that social media is inherently harmful has simply not shown up in the evidence.  For this research, I’ll refer you to the following:

The Evidence Just Doesn’t Support Any Of The Narratives About The Harms Of Social Media

Yet Another Massive Study Says There’s No Evidence That Social Media Is Inherently Harmful To Teens

Yet Another Study Shows No Link At All Between Social Media And Teen Anxiety And Depression

Two Major Studies, 125,000 Kids: The Social Media Panic Doesn’t Hold Up

New Study: No, Social Media Does Not Hurt Offline Friendships For Kids

Study: Social Media “Addiction” Overblown, Media Called Out

It is my personal opinion that the claim that social media is inherently harmful to people is on the same level of scientific fact as the claim that vaccines cause autism.  The scientific evidence simply does not support the assertion. I understand that there will be pushback to this notion.  One of the papers that multiple media outlets refers to is the UNESCO report from 2024.  This is a paper I personally examined and concluded that the findings were deeply flawed:

UNESCO Study on Social Media Suffers from Confirmation Bias

In this report I wrote, I also noted that the source of a lot of the theories about social media being inherently harmful can be traced back to a slide deck by Facebook in 2021 (something that the UNESCO report also noted).  The slide in question showed numerous metrics about the well-being of their users and, as the slide in question noted, there are numerous metrics in which people had a net positive impact on their mental health.  Facebook admitted that this research told them that they need to improve on the aspect of girls own feelings about their bodies and know they need to improve on this part of their platforms.  That is the real story behind that slide.  The problem is that this one statistic has been repeatedly cherry picked over the years to try and push the talking point that social media is inherently harmful.  This has long been an extremely misleading statistic that frequently removes the context of not only the other statistics that were featured, but also what that statistic was actually telling Facebook in order to improve their platform.  No, I am not really a fan of Facebook, but this is the actual background for that particular statistic.

As a result, the evidence that I am aware of that is frequently cited as sources to support the notion that social media is inherently harmful to people’s mental health and well-being does not withstand scrutiny.
At any rate, it is my opinion that the CBC simply did not meet the standards of accuracy when reporting that social media is inherently harmful as if this has long been the scientific consensus when it clearly is not when actually fact-checking this.  It is my opinion that the report should be retracted, however, I understand that this is not my call to make.

However, even if the CBC disagrees with what I, along with the scientific community and other experts, has found with social media and mental health and well-being (and considers this a debate, perhaps, because there are those on staff who are of the opinion that social media is inherently harmful), then a very strong case can be made that the CBC has failed to uphold the standards of fairness and balance.  This is because the scientific evidence that disagrees with the notion that social media is inherently harmful to mental health and well-being simply was not mentioned on air nor mentioned in the subsequent online report.  In other words, even if the conclusion was made that this is an area that is disputed, then the CBC would, at the very least, acknowledge that there is also the other side of the debate.  Instead, the reporting that I witnessed regarding the World Happiness Report makes no such effort, implying that the scientific consensus is that social media is inherently harmful.  If the CBC was unaware of this part of the debate, I trust that the 7 studies I have referenced in this complaint will better inform the staff that this issue isn’t so simple.

I hope that what I was able to provide is sufficient for the complaint and that the evidence provided, at the very least, is informative on this subject as well.  I’m also a journalist who specializes on the topic of digital rights and technology which is why I have so much knowledge in this area.  Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions and I look forward to follow-up correspondence.

Thank you,

At the very least in all of this, I put my money where my mouth was on this issue and actually filed the complaint. Do I expect to hear back on this one? Probably not. Still, at least I partook in the process that the CBC set out and the ball is in their court at this point in time. I’ll be happy to post a follow-up if I get anything back from them.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.