The BBC apparently thinks there is little research on social media and the impacts it has on teens. The reality is that there is research out there.
One of the central themes regarding age verification – especially age verification and social media bans – is the impact social media has on teenagers and mental health. For a lot of mainstream media outlets, they push the narrative that the negative impacts on social media are just obvious and a foregone conclusion. They claim that social media is inherently harmful and bad to mental health and the only mystery is why government has not acted.
Nothing about that perspective is accurate, of course. The only evidence that seems to be used to support the claims is just random people making that claim or that “people believe” that it is harmful. In other words, there is no evidence.
Recently, the BBC published a piece arguing that social media is new and that there is little to no evidence on the affects social media has on teenagers. Here’s an excerpt from their “Science Focus” piece:
Keeping in touch with friends outside the classroom often involves devoting hours to chatting on social media. It’s a habit that some have called an addiction – The Anxious Generation, a 2024 book by American social psychologist Prof Jonathan Haidt, helped galvanise a movement to suggest something should be done to protect kids from spending so much time on social media.
Whether the book’s findings stand up to scrutiny is hotly debated among experts, but the idea has caught the attention of the general public and politicians.
Social media is a relatively new thing. The first major mainstream social network, MySpace, was founded in 2003. Facebook, which unlike MySpace is still used by many, arrived a year later – though younger users only joined several years after its creation.
That means there’s precious little data to examine what impact using these platforms at an early age has on our sense of self and wellbeing. And in the 20-plus years since Facebook’s arrival, a range of other social platforms have cropped up that critics say are even more addictive.
Many researchers looking at child safety suggest that there may be something to fears that social media is negatively affecting children. But it’s too early to tell definitively – partly because of the relative lack of time we’ve had it, but also because the ubiquity social media has achieved makes it difficult to discern any impact it might have had.
“It’s quite hard to draw conclusions from the existing evidence base about the uniform impacts of social media on mental health,” says Prof Amanda Third, co-director of the Young and Resilient Research Centre at Western Sydney University.
Anyone with any knowledge on this area is likely to do a collective facepalm at that excerpt. First of all, the Jonathan Haidt book is not a book that hotly debated by experts. It was universally panned by academics for being complete garbage. 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 only way you could possibly frame the reaction from this book as “hotly debated” is if you say that science is on one side and people who know little about the subject pushing a moral panic on the other side. Even then, that alone should tell you everything you need to know about the age verification movement in general.
For another, trying to paint 2003 as making social media a relatively new thing for teenagers is pretty presumptuous to put it lightly. Basic math would suggest that 2003 was 22 going on to 23 years ago. That’s long enough for at least two generations of teenagers to go through the world of social media. Arguably, that would be long enough for 3 or 4 generations.
Further, the idea of suggesting that social media is too new to have any real scientific study is just being presumptuous. In this case, the assumption is quite wrong. There is, in fact, scientific research in this area. There’s not one, not two, not three, but at least four studies exploring these very topics.
The overwhelming conclusion from the scientific literature? There’s no evidence to suggest that social media is inherently harmful to teenagers. In fact, the more recent study concludes that the moral panic being pushed by the mainstream media is becoming quite harmful to people in general as they figure out what their relationship is with social media. What’s more, the idea of social media “addiction” is generally very overblown.
The problem here is that mainstream media has spent years pushing moral panic about social media. This isn’t because they genuinely believe that social media is actually a social ill, but rather, they view social media as a competitor for views and they are pushing a disingenuous campaign for business reasons.
The science has long drawn conclusions and all its doing these days is continue to re-confirm previous findings to further strengthen the science. For the most part, mainstream media has conveniently tried to ignore all of that. Anything that suggests that social media is not inherently harmful is quickly ignored and swept under the rug. Anything that treats social media as a massive social ill, no matter how flimsy the science is, is generally treated as gospel to be paraded around for all to see. An excellent example of this was what happened with the UNESCO report back in 2024. That report took a single random claim about harms to teenagers and published that those claims are concerning in multiple places. The mainstream media spent months parading that steaming turd as undisputed proof that social media is harmful and pushed various governments to crack down on social media in general.
Ultimately, the problem here isn’t that the science isn’t conclusive, but rather, mainstream media is paid to ignore the science on this subject and push even the most wild of bad faith claims as fact. That really is where the problem lies these days.
Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.
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