Thread by @jeffjarvis

.@JoeNBC: I said I would share research on youth and social media. A family crisis intervened; apologies for the delay. Here are useful links. A long 🧵and 📸 /1

https://twitter.com/jeffjarvis/status/1639207503484407809

To start: Here's a good overview from London's @theipaper reviewing research and "misleading tactics" from Jon Haidt, Jean Twenge & John Burn-Murdoch. "A lot of the evidence is shaky and unclear." 2/
inews.co.uk/news/technolog…

Amy Orben, a leading researcher in the field, studied large social datasets with 355k subjects & found "the association of well-being with regularly eating potatoes was nearly as negative as the association with technology use." In other words: small. 3/

nature.com/articles/s4156…

In another study, Orben et al "found that social media use is not, in and of itself, a strong predictor of life satisfaction across the adolescent population.... Most effects are tiny--arguably trivial." 4/
pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

One more from Orben et al finding no increase in associations between adolescents' use of digital technology and mental health problems. 5/

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…

Here is an excellent article from Utah State showing how Haidt draws conclusions from incomplete data. Haidt says suicide correlates with the growth of the social media--when in fact teen suicide peaked in the 1990s, *long* before the phone & web. 6/

thecgo.org/benchmark/the-…

Taylor Barkley: "Suicide, self-harm, and depression all pre-date social media & smartphones. These are not new problems. The longer-term data...demonstrate that these issues are not unique to the social media era." 7/

Similarly, critic John Warner disagrees with Haidt's contention that youth are overparented & the phone did them in by 2012. "They had not been coddled, they'd been defeated...They were operating under years of stress & had reached a breaking point." 8/

biblioracle.substack.com/p/teen-mental-…

In The Times, Temple psychology prof Laurence Steinberg digs deeper into the Facebook study Haugen quotes often in media on 3 of 10 girls saying Instagram makes them feel worse about themselves. Read on: 9/
nytimes.com/2021/10/10/opi…

Hear from kids in Pew's 2022 survey: 80% says social media makes them more connected with friends; 71% say it lets them show their creativity; 67% said it provides them with support in tough ties;' 58% feel more accepted. 10/
pewresearch.org/internet/2022/…

WSJ's Family & Tech columnist Julie Jargon said she'll stop writing about kids & screen time because studies show the far bigger factor is family dynamics: low income, low parental education, poor maternal mental health. 11/

wsj.com/articles/why-i…

Jargon writes: "Screens aren't cigarettes-they may be addictive but they don't inherently cause harm." She bases her conclusion on this Harvard study in the British Journal of Educational Technology: 12/
bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.111…

That Harvard study notes that 97% of US kids 0-8 have access to smartphone, which can have positive effect on learning. "The sum of children's home environment characteristics play a larger role in children's language & literacy skills than" experience w/mobile digital media. 13/

A 2021 letter to the Journal of Affective Disorders concludes: "Current speculations about the direct harms of digital technology use on mental health may be unfounded & risk diverting attention from a more likely cause: pandemic-related distress." 14/
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

BTW, two studies of the "kids these days effect" find kids' social skills aren't declining & adults give them too little credit. 15/
scholarsarchive.byu.edu/facpub/4090/
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science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

See also this 🧵by Mekka Okereke pointing out that black kids are online more than white kids but see much less of an increase in depression. Could it be politics? I think so. 16/

https://twitter.com/mekkaokerekebye/status/1631641595559956481

Douthat's, uh, analysis of kids' misery is purely political, siding with Haidt, who says liberal girls are the worst off. Douthat blames kids for liberalism, secularization, social & sexual permissiveness, marijuana, oh my. 17/
thefp.com/p/why-the-ment…
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nytimes.com/2023/02/18/opi…

My problem is that so much uninformed media #MoralPanic leads to terrible, anti-free-speech legislation like Utah's, now Montana's, and insurrectionist Hawley's effort to take kids away from their friends when they need them most. 18/

.@TaylorLorenz tweet re Douthat: "People are like 'why are kids so depressed it must be their PHONES!' But never mention the fact that we're living in a late stage capitalist hellscape during an ongoing deadly pandemic, 0 social safety net...as climate change cooks the world."/19

Taylor retweeted @JessicaValenti: 20/

https://twitter.com/JessicaValenti/status/1627721284573331549?lang=en

So, @JoeNBC, I'm not defending "social media billionnaires." I'm defending our kids, their future, and our freedom of expression from media & political #MoralPanic. That's a book I'm writing, out next year. /21

In the meantime, I have a book out in June: The Gutenberg Parenthesis, about the perspective we can gain from examining our transition into the age of print as we leave it. Novels, even books caused #MoralPanic in their day. I'll send you a copy. 😎 /plug
gutenbergparenthesis.com

For anyone following along, here's Joe's tweet to me in response to the one at the start of the thread:

https://twitter.com/JoeNBC/status/1639230013672419329