Thuletide

Jonathan Haidt's book The Anxious Generation (2024) directly inspired digital ID and censorship laws across the West. It's frequently cited by politicians and anti-freedom campaigners as evidence that we need digital tyranny to Save The Children. Haidt, who supports the Kids Online Safety Act, claims that social media is rewiring adolescents' brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness. He suggests that we could resolve these problems via three "foundational reforms": - No smartphones before high school. - No social media before 16. - Phone-free schools. The issue is that Haidt's book failed to prove any causal effects of social media and smartphones on adolescent mental health, let alone that they're "rewiring" people's brains. Meta-analyses and systematic reviews have found that research on these topics is "dominated by cross-sectional work that is generally of a low quality standard... and there has been little work done to rule out potential confounders" (Orben 2020). Studies have "generated a mix of often conflicting small positive, negative and null associations" and "do not offer a way of distinguishing cause from effect" (Odgers 2020). On causality: "Social-media use did not predict depressive symptoms over time for males or females. However, greater depressive symptoms predicted more frequent social-media use only among adolescent girls" (Heffer 2019). This was confirmed by a longitudinal directional meta-analysis that found "no causal link from social media use to well-being," although it grouped boys and girls together (Hancock 2022). Studies that bother to disaggregate boys and girls typically show no demonstrable effects on boys' mental health, and negative effects on girls' mental health. Below are extracts from the conclusion of a decent 'natural experiment' study (Arenas-Arroyo 2023): "This study provides consistent evidence of a causal link between access to high-speed internet and behavioral and mental health (BMH) issues in 15- to 19-year-old adolescents, with girls being the primary drivers of this effect." "our findings suggest that access to high-speed internet increases addictive internet use while reducing time spent on sleep, homework, and socializing with family and friends, with girls driving all these effects. " "We observe an alarming effect on cases of self-harm and suicide attempts among girls in this age group (+112.3%), while no significant effect is found for boys." "We also found evidence of girls' greater reliance on the internet to alleviate feelings of sadness or being down, with apparently unsatisfactory results. We did not find evidence of increased online bullying." "Additionally, we find that fiber expansion has a negative effect on the quality of the relationship between parents and girls, but no effect is found for boys." Anybody with a functioning brain can see that social media has driven women politically insane, and evidence indicates that it causally explains at least some of their decline in mental health. Since social media has zero-to-negligible negative effects on male mental health, it would make more sense to ban females from social media, specifically, rather than restricting the freedoms of teenage boys and tyrannizing men with digital ID.