The Links x Techno Sapiens guide to teens & screens
A very special guest stops by to guide us through The Discourse™
Some fields of human knowledge are so messy, so fractious, that I dare not wade in without a licensed guide. “Pregnancy” has topped that list, historically. But I’m thinking teens and screens might have it tied.
Are phones and social media rotting the brains of our proverbial next generation? Are today’s teens more anxious, more depressed, more lonely — or just more willing to articulate those feelings in public?
These questions aren’t new, by any stretch, but they’ve grown a bit more baffling since the March publication of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. (You’ve undoubtedly encountered this book or its author, who have spent the past two months rocketing around the TV interview/book-excerpt/Substack-bestseller circuit.) Haidt and his allies hold the kids are not alright, and their phones are almost certainly and overwhelmingly to blame. But just when he’s convinced you to ship your kid off to the Amish … some journal review alleges his fears are overplayed.
Don’t despair just yet, though. For this *extremely* special midweek edition, I’m delighted to be partnering with one of my personal favorite Substackers,
, to bring you a comprehensive reading guide on social media and the teen mental health crisis.Jackie, who writes the invaluable
, is truly my dream partner for this project. In addition to writing a whole-ass newsletter, she is a clinical psychologist, Brown University professor and widely quoted expert on kids, phones and mental health. She’s testified before Congress on this stuff; she helped write the American Psychological Association’s adolescent social media advisory. In Techno Sapiens, she unpacks new research, debunks and/or complicates viral claims and tackles topics from depression memes to “phone snubbing.”Jackie herself became interested in kids and tech as a Harvard undergrad, when she led outdoor adventure trips that, among other things, parted high school students from their beloved phones. (I doubt that even the *most* intrepid adventure guide would undertake such a dare now.)
“I'm glad that this is an ongoing conversation — I obviously think it's super important to understand what's happening,” she said. “But I also worry that with so much focus on smartphones and social media, we might forget to pay attention to all the other, basic things that are really important for kids' mental health.”
This is, FYI, the second in a series of monthly round-ups where I dig into the archives and partner with experts to bring you the best reading around a given theme or topic. In my usual weekend emails, I scour hundreds of newsletters and RSS feeds for the best new stories — this applies that same (unhealthily obsessive?) rigor to the back catalog of the internet.
Our criteria for this were, as always, subjective — so please write and tell us what we missed. And if you have not already … be sure to check out Techno Sapiens!!
The Links x Techno Sapiens Guide to Teens & Screens
“Being 13,” by Jessica Bennett for The New York Times (September 2023). A warning to the grown women in the audience: Jessica Bennett’s immersive account of being 13 years old is almost triggering in its ability to retransmit the anxiety and drama of being a teen girl (... now with the added complications of social media!). Three girls participated in the story for a year, keeping diaries and recording voice memos they later shared with the paper. But the image that ultimately emerges is not so much of a generation destroyed by their phones — but a generation contending with a lot of stressors (intense schoolwork, the pandemic, group message dynamics) that might be foreign to their Gen X and millennial parents.
Why Jackie recommends it: When we talk about teens and social media, there tends to be one key voice missing from the conversation — and that is teens themselves. Sometimes, we adults need to put down our megaphones and do a little listening.
For some added perspective: The Washington Post wrote a similar story on “the social media habits of 13-year-olds” in 2016. Some of the questions it asked remain relevant — what’s it like to never remember a life before smartphones? What happens when the social validation teens crave is reduced to a “like”? — but much of it already feels wildly quaint.
“Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show,” by Georgia Wells, Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman for The Wall Street Journal (September 2021). Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked a huge tranche of company documents to the Journal in 2021, yielding a series of 17 bombshell stories and inciting a global backlash against Big Tech. Of all the revelations in the Facebook Files, however, this scoop — re: the company’s own internal research on teens, depression and body image — arguably drew the most shock and condemnation.
Jackie’s take: The internal company presentation heard ‘round the world! In my opinion, much of the reporting on these documents overstated the evidence they actually contain. Nonetheless, it’s hard to argue with the effect they’ve had on this debate.
Do the research: The Journal later published six of the leaked Facebook documents, including a 41-slide presentation on teen girls and body image that got lots of Congressional attention. But in other surveys and focus groups, Facebook researchers found that most teens felt Instagram had a positive impact on their mental health.
“TikTok’s Algorithm Keeps Pushing Suicide to Vulnerable Kids,” by Olivia Carville for Businessweek (April 2023). Among the many interesting anecdotes in this deeply troubling piece: TikTok employees purportedly read the Facebook Files — and immediately worried their app posed greater risks to kids and teens. The TikTok algorithm (in)famously latches into users’ brains and routes them down the rabbit holes that will keep them most engaged. For some young users, that’s dance challenges and getting-ready videos; for others, it’s content that glorifies suicide and hopelessness.
Why Jackie recommends it: You do not need a PhD in clinical psychology to know that this is very, very bad. Social media platforms should not be feeding harmful suicide content to kids. The question is: how do we fix it…and what’s taking so long?
Down the rabbithole: Other investigations have found the TikTok algorithm promotes videos about eating disorders, sex and drugs and deadly stunts to minors.
“Beauty Filters Are Changing the Way Young Girls See Themselves,” by Tate Ryan-Mosley for MIT Technology Review (April 2021). AR and VR beauty filters are now so ubiquitous that you can never really know if anyone’s face is as young, thin or poreless as Instagram says it is. Way back in 2021, however — when such filters were still novelties — some researchers warned that they could distort some users’ impressions of their own faces (... to say nothing of their wider views on youth and beauty).
Why Caitlin recommends it: I have learned from Jackie’s example not to draw anecdotal connections between these types of things … but it certainly feels like this piece predicted Gen Z’s obsession with skincare, fillers and plastic surgery. It also feels bad! Like — to me, personally. My teens may have ended well before the beauty filter, but I’m getting second-hand dysmorphia from all this milk-aging.
Skin deep: Jia Tolentino published the canonical essay on social media and beauty standards — “The Age of Instagram Face” — in 2019.
“The Twitching Generation,” by Helen Lewis for The Atlantic (February 2022). In 2019, Tourette’s researchers the world over began reporting a sharp and sudden uptick in patients — often presenting with severe symptoms and at atypical ages. These “functional tics,” as they’re called, tend to present differently than chronic tic disorders like Tourette Syndrome — they’re more common among girls, start suddenly and involve more complex movements. But researchers have linked the surge to the popularity of TikTok influencers with Tourette’s, describing it as a particularly online flavor of mass psychogenic illness.
Why Caitlin recommends it: There are few things on earth more interesting than mass psychogenic illness. Full stop. (Have you HEARD of the dancing plague or the LeRoy cheerleaders??)
Jackie’s take: We don’t have great research confirming the true nature or prevalence of tic symptoms spreading through TikTok, but it certainly seems plausible to me. And just because these functional tics don’t have a known biological cause doesn’t mean they’re “made up” or “all in a teen’s head” — they require expert diagnosis, treatment and, in most cases, a careful reconsideration of one’s TikTok feed.
“No One Knows What Social Media Is Doing to Teens,” by Kaitlyn Tiffany for The Atlantic (June 2023). Okay, so — we both quibble with this ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ headline, which the story immediately contradicts. We know a lot about what social media does to teens — but those effects are complicated and nuanced, and depend on the specific teen in question. This story pulls together the research in a way laypeople can understand.
Why Jackie recommends it: I have a lot of empathy for the journalists who try to take on this issue. The research is messy and hard to summarize, and debates quickly veer into territory (e.g., statistical effect sizes, differences-in-differences approach) that even seasoned researchers have trouble wrapping their heads around. Kaitlyn Tiffany is up to the task, though.
If you also feel up to the task: This collaborative, open-source, 356-page literature review has the dual distinction of being the longest Google Doc we’ve ever encountered and a useful roundup of studies on the topic of social media and mental health. Says Jackie: “As a researcher in this area, it’s a nice resource for keeping up-to-date on new studies, but for someone who doesn’t spend nearly every waking hour combing through this literature, I see how it might be…a lot. It’s almost become a microcosm of this issue: tons of studies, endless debate, and seemingly no closer to a solution.”
“Anxiety and Depression is Spiking Among Young People. No One Knows Why,” by Daniel Payne for Politico (April 2024). Politico interviewed nearly 30 policymakers and surveyed 1,400 clinicians to produce this wide-ranging overview of the teen mental health crisis. Some of the statistics are flat-out horrifying: One in five kids has considered suicide, according to the CDC. But the solutions that schools, lawmakers and other observers have offered aren’t terribly promising.
Why Caitlin recommends it: The whole social media/teen mental health debate sometimes seems to assume that kids and their phones exist alone, in hermetically sealed vacuums, with no other stressors or traumas or complicating factors. But there are lots of reasons for kids (and frankly, adults!) to be anxious and depressed right now — I appreciate that this story widens that view out.
Jackie’s take: In the accompanying survey of mental health providers, the highest number (28%) reported believing that social media is “the biggest driver of mental health issues in kids,” beating out causes like external events (school shootings, climate change, war, political instability: 14%) and social isolation (13%). This actually worries me. Mental health issues in kids are complex and rarely the result of a single cause. I worry about the experience of a child in therapy, being told (explicitly or implicitly) that their struggles are entirely due to the phone in their pocket. Not exactly a recipe for a validating therapeutic relationship.
It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, by danah boyd (February 2014). danah boyd (stylized in lower case) has been studying and writing about teens and tech before it was cool. Her 2014 book It’s Complicated argued that perhaps the story was more complex than “Phones = Bad.” Should you not have room for a 300-page, semi-academic tome on your proverbial dance card, boyd — now a researcher at Microsoft Research and the founder of Data & Society Research Institute — also blogs regularly on Medium, where she’s argued that “teens are addicted to socializing, not screens” and that technology has largely made “the struggles young people are facing visible.”
Why we recommend it: boyd is a firehose in the Haidt firestorm. She’s equally passionate about these issues, but in service of quelling, rather than igniting, the growing “moral panic” she sees around kids and screens. Though boyd at times glosses over some of the real risks, her work is required reading for any adult tempted to blame all of society’s ills on ~the phones.~
Quotable: “Please please please center young people rather than tech. They need our help. Technology mirrors and magnifies the good, bad, and ugly. It’s what makes the struggles young people are facing visible. But it is not the media effects causal force that people are pretending it is.”
“TikTok Has Become the Soul of the LGBTQ Internet,” by A.O. Ohlheiser for The Washington Post (January 2020). You wouldn’t know it from the preceding links or the discourse writ large, but teens say their online experiences are … overwhelmingly positive!! That’s especially true for LGBTQ+ youth, who have created sprawling, supportive communities on platforms including YouTube and TikTok. Is it negativity bias or some other flavor of generational panic that prompts us to focus on all the bad stuff?
Why we recommend it: It’s astoundingly difficult to locate positive stories about social media and teen mental health. Go ahead, take us up on this challenge! That’s despite the fact that — as Jackie put it last year — “girls say social media has important upsides, like connecting with friends, discovering new things, and accessing resources and support.”
The pandemic effect: Online spaces for LGBTQ teens expanded during Covid-19 lockdowns, when many were cut off from their in-person support networks.
“The Techno Sapiens Ultimate Guide to Teens, Phones and Mental Health,” by Jacqueline Nesi for Techno Sapiens (April 2024). If you just want the TL;DR on all this, then this actionable, one-stop guide is for you. Think Expecting Better, but about teens and phones. (Also, conveniently … much shorter!)
To sum it all up: “I think there is a very good chance … that social media has contributed to the teen mental health crisis. At the same time, I think large-scale mental health crises are complex phenomena, that there are likely multiple causes, and that we need to make sure we’re approaching the data with the scrutiny it deserves. It’s this nuance that, I think, has been missing from the conversation.”
But when is Jackie buying her kids their first phones?!: “Ha! I get this question a lot — I have an almost-three-year-old and an eight-month-old, so we've got a long way to go. I honestly think that the technology and norms around it will be totally different by the time we're considering it. But if I HAD to choose at this exact moment, I'd probably try to wait on smartphones until after 8th grade.” Sounds reasonable!
Weekend preview
I’m in D.C. this week for the grand finale of the Poynter-Koch fellowship, which has been a huge and beautiful part of my life since the start of Covid. 🥲 But before/after/around that, I’m also reading about the return of Creed, the lives of OnlyFans chatters and the drama at the Miss USA pageant. (Today’s edition is late due to travel — thanks for your patience!)
Until the weekend! Warmest virtual regards,
Caitlin
Thanks for having me!
This looks like a fascinating roundup. Thanks for sharing.