The Social Media Panic Enters Its Mean Girls Phase
Increasingly, data is sidelined in a debate that's becoming about fear, personalities, and insults.
Moral panics make people behave badly. Presumably neither the panic nor the moral part exactly incentivize calm, critical thinking, and cordial behavior. That’s too bad because often the underlying question is pretty interesting…do comic books make teenagers gay (seriously, I’m not making that up…a goodie from the 1950s)…do video games make teenagers into mass killers (no, it turns out)…or does social media harm teen mental health? As easy as it is to make fun of some of these old panics (and it is1), the underlying hypotheses aren’t scientifically unreasonable, and require good data to answer.
This post is less on the data part of the social media panic and more on the reasonable part. I’ll come back to the data soon enough. But the last few weeks have seen an uptick of people behaving a bit nuts over the whole social media/smartphones debate.
In part, I think this is because the social media panic overlaps with other panics, particularly over gender (where emotions run hot on both sides) and even a bit with the race panic of 2020. Jonathan Haidt, current standard-bearer for the “harm” side of the social media debate, endured slings-and-arrows not only for allegedly being sloppy with statistics in making his case (a criticism I agree with), but also was accused of being racist and transphobic (which seems, erm…silly).
The transphobic criticism arose due to an interview Haidt gave with PBS’ Firing Line in which he stated that gender dysphoria in girls may be caused due to social contagion via social media2. As I’ve written before, Haidt is statistically out of line here…there’s absolutely no data on this, one way or another. That is to say, precisely 0 studies that I can find. But the hypothesis at least is consistent with Haidt’s wider view of social media causing mental health problems. It’s confused to argue social media would cause other mental health problems, but not gender dysphoria, although I suspect that’s more or less the position of the rest of the scaredy-cat social science research community. Of course, it’s fair to counter social media may cause none of these outcomes. But Haidt came under withering and unfair personal criticism notably from former Science associate editor Tage Rai who appeared to accuse Haidt of transphobia (to his credit, Rai has since removed these comments from Twitter).
Also, in one bizarre article in the New Yorker, although the author appears to share Haidt’s panic over smartphones and social media (and fantasy view about how conclusive the evidence base is to support such contentions), she also essentially accuses him of being a racist, stating: “He has been beset by a troubling fixation on the heritability of I.Q.—a contention widely dismissed as scientific racism—and the purported accuracy of stereotypes.” This is, of course, complete and utter balderdash. The heritability of IQ is well-established scientifically. No serious scholar believes this is some kind of dog-whistle for, say, believing black people are less intelligent than white (a view I demonstrably do not hold, for instance). But, although I make no claim to being inclined to read everything Haidt writes (I have a blood pressure to watch), I can’t remember him saying much of anything about IQ and heritability, let alone anything about racial differences in intelligence.
To be clear, criticizing Haidt’s science is entirely fair game; criticizing him as a person is ad hominem and unconvincing. I can’t claim to know Haidt well, but my impression of him is of a sincere and well-intentioned person. Particularly during such an intense debate, I believe he deserves credit for remaining a gentleman and professional even with those with whom he disagrees3. It’s important for his critics to remember that his being wrong on the data doesn’t make him a bad person, transphobic, racist, or otherwise. Likewise, it behooves his supporters to remember that his being a good person (he is) doesn’t make him right on the data (he’s not).
This is one thing that makes me nervous about this whole debate: how connected it has become to Jonathan Haidt the man. I believe Haidt does good and important work on issues related to free speech and intellectual diversity on college campuses. But this may lead many people who appreciate his work there to become defensive in the one area that he’s gotten far, far ahead of the data…on social media effects. This may particularly be true as his claims regarding social media wrap up in areas related to gender dysphoria. Many who worry about free speech are concerned (for good reason) about censorship and chilling efforts aimed at any criticism of the more ideological side of trans activism4. But this may create a kind of knee-jerk defensiveness and blindness to the possibility Haidt may be wrong on social media effects. No enemies to the left and all that.
Thus, I’ve come across a few people who are otherwise smart, critical thinkers, who I perceive as defensive and prickly when it comes to all things Haidt. These folks seem to really like Haidt, and I mean in the “great leader” sense, as if it’s outright heresy to critique anything the gentleman says (a perspective Haidt himself would likely not endorse). My observation is these folks also seem really proud of themselves for the rightthink of protecting children from smartphones even as they (correctly) critique others for enforcing rightthink on issues such as gender and race.
Perhaps the most obvious example of this was responses to the review of Haidt’s recent book Anxious Generation by Candice Odgers, a psychologist who’s done considerable research on social media effects on youth5. Published in the journal Nature, Odgers’ review critiqued Haidt’s book as largely misleading regarding the science (which it is6). Odgers’ review appeared to get under Haidt’s skin a bit, as he appeared to rebut it (civilly to his credit) several times on social media. Responding to an email question from me, Odgers reported receiving hate email from Haidt’s fans, apparently mostly men telling her to shut up7.
It's a perennial irony of moral panics (along with the inevitability someone will start making comparisons to cigarettes), that such panics tend to focus on the behavior of children yet tend to result in adults behaving abominably. With TV/video game violence, the behavior of some researchers purportedly worried about childhood aggression was, itself, so aggressive that myself and colleague Malte Elson once joked about it in a manuscript title. The irony for social media debates is the degree to which adults worry about, say, kids’ exposure to bullying on social media, but then take to social media to bully other adults out of wrongthink on the issue.
My point is that, ideally, we all should try to calm down. But I say this knowing most people won’t listen. That’s just not what happens during a moral panic. Saving children is an exhilarating, morally self-gratifying exercise. We don’t like to let things like science, data or the wellbeing of other human beings get in the way of that.
Someone today was just telling me about, how, in the early 1900s, there was a panic that giving white girls teddy bears would lead them to stop having white babies.
Pointing things out too often results in weird ”but did he really say that” arguments I tend to think get very silly very quickly. Trying to argue that how a normal person interprets words is wrong is a common element of culture war debates.
To be honest, I give Haidt sharper elbows online than he gives in return. I claim no immunity to Mean Girl moments.
To be clear, I differentiate the ideological side, the language policing (“uterus havers” and all that), unscientific claims about sex not being a binary, censoring any concerns about gender medicine for youth, etc., from activism which promotes equal rights for trans individuals, the latter of which is entirely reasonable.
I’m not a big fan of publication-counting as a means of deciding who is an expert. Video game researchers tried to do this kind of “real expert” gatekeeping and it was obnoxious and had nothing to do with the accuracy of science claims. Haidt is smart enough to read studies outside his field and comment on them…he’s wrong, of course, but not because he’s done less research in this field than Odgers.
To be fair, I don’t necessarily agree with everything Odgers says either, though my views align more with her than Haidt. I think both she and Haidt are too fixated on GenZ (e.g. “…a generation in crisis…”), ignoring that mental health issues are much worse among their parents. But that’s all part of reasonable debate.
Just a thought, but I suspect there’s an element of realizing “Uh oh, I might be wrong here…” that makes most people double down, make wilder claims and get more aggressive.