and it's because of what social media has done to universities and so many other institutions in the last seven years or so that i hate social media now in fact i have come to believe uh that a free and open society cannot continue much longer if social media continues to damage three things that i really care about and those are young people universities and liberal democracy um i'm in my remaining time i'm going to make the case that social media has caused devastation in these three areas since 2012. and then i'll say what i think government should and should not do so i'll make three main points the first is the fragilization of gen z so in august 2017 jean twangy wrote an article in the atlantic with the provocative title i have smartphones destroyed a generation and when i read it i thought wow jean is taking a risk here because she showed these graphs with these hockey stick curves but it was just two or three years of data because in 2017 all we had was data up through about 2015 and so we had two or three years showing up turns in all these things and i thought if that turns down she's gonna look foolish but it didn't turn down it kept going up and up and up now when that article came out there were a lot of critics a lot of people said oh she's exaggerating she's cherry-picking oh the trend isn't real you know gen z they're just comfortable talking about it that's why the numbers are going up a little because it's a good thing they're willing to admit that they're depressed so there are a lot of skeptics right after the article came out and robbie and his chapter on this on this uh uh uh area quotes a number of those skeptics but those are all from 2017 at least most of the citations were from 2017 that was a legitimate take in 2017 but in the in the years since then the numbers have gone up so far uh that the the surgeon general recently issued an advisory on on teen mental health um because those numbers have uh gone up by 50 to 100 percent in many uh on many many measures um in fact if you're still skeptical that there's a real epidemic of mental illness if you think it's just oh you know changes in self-report on surveys let's look at behavior i've been gene and i have been collecting all the studies we can find from the u. s and the uk and canada and so here are the numbers for self-harm and this is hospital admissions this is not self-report hospital records for teenagers brought in because they harmed themselves mostly cutting themselves if you graph it out the lines are pretty stable they don't move around very much up until about 2009-2010 and then suddenly in the next five years the numbers are up 62 percent for older teen girls the rate of hospital admission per hundred thousand in the population is up 62 percent for girls aged 10 to 14 these are little girls these are prepubescent or just entering puberty girls the rate is up 189 by 2015 nearly triples by 2015 and it's up more since then same thing in the uk same thing in canada and similar story for suicide there it's up for both boys and girls and again for the youngest kids the 10 to 14 the percentage increase is more than double in a few years the suicide rate has doubled and then it stayed either level or increasing now what caused it that's the key thing now robbie and the other skeptics point to studies there are a lot of studies out there and many of them find no relationship between the amount of time young people spend on their devices and their rates of depression now there's a one particularly influential study by andrew schabilski and amy orban 2019 they reported an overall correlation of around .
03 between time on devices and various measures of depression in three large data sets and that study where they reported oh this is about as big as the correlation between mental illness and eating potatoes that finding got a lot of press all over the world and since then a lot of experts say oh well you know we looked at this and there's nothing there but here's the problem with those studies they lump all kids together that is boys and girls they lump all screen activities together including watching netflix texting with your friends facetime browsing the web oh and posting photos of yourself in a bikini for people to make comments about you just lump them all together you find a . 03 correlation but guess what if you take the same data sets and gene 20 and i did this take the same data sets use the same statistical techniques but you zoom in on girls and social media the correlation isn't 0. 03 it's 0.
2 which is a very large correlation in public health matters the correlation between exposure to lead in childhood and adult iq is 0. 09 public health is all about effects around 0. 05 to 0.
15. 2 at the most this is a as big as anything else we worry about now of course correlation is not causation robbie points out but we've collected we found about 15 experiments in the great majority of them also using random assignment find effects on mental health um you want more evidence ask the girls that's what facebook did in that study that was leaked last september and what do the girls say they say it loud and clear it's social media and especially instagram as one girl in the uk said the reason why our generation is so messed up and has higher anxiety and depression than our parents is because we have to deal with social media everyone feels like they have to be perfect point number two from curiosity to fear in universities so a crucial part of my story is that social media was not toxic in its original formulation you put up links to your friends your favorite bands in 2004 2005 it was not toxic everything changed beginning in 2009 when facebook ads the like button and twitter copies it twitter adds the retweet button facebook copies at the share button and then other platforms copy them and now you have so much engagement data that you can use algorithms to feed stuff to people based on what will engage them which means emotions which means especially anger so everything changes between 2009 and 2012 we get much more this is when facebook perfects that business model based on advertising and gluing people to the screen by having viral emotional content that's when everything changes 2009 to 2012. one of the engineers at twitter who worked on the retweet button was quoted a couple years ago as saying he regretted what he did because twitter became a nastier place immediately he said when he watched those first twitter mobs form he said we just gave a loaded gun to a four-year-old and that's where we are that's why call out culture and uh and victimhood culture but call it culture in particular emerges in the early 2010s that's what greg lukianov began to see on campus in 2014 when gen z arrives on campus around 2013 2014 kids born in 1996 or seven or later greg begins to see this weird pattern this vindictiveness this fragility this attack mode it wasn't there in 2012 but by 2014 2015 it was intense and it was scary and it changed our behavior we've done a lot of research at heterodox academy on attitudes what we find is that students are afraid to speak on campus because they're afraid of not their professors other students and professors feel they're walking on eggshells not because of other professors because of students and it's not most students most students are lovely they want to learn uh they want to be challenged but there are enough around that make it so that we all have to walk on eggshells as deb masik said i'm sorry is that five minutes left to in my okay okay um as deb masik said uh uh former executive director of hedorax academy one of our students said my motto is silence is safer what a sad motto for a college student the third point very briefly is the achilles heel of democracy plato said that democracy is the second worst form of government because rule by the deimos the masses or the mob inevitably decays into tyranny so the founding fathers of this country gave us all kinds of mechanisms to slow down mob dynamics well needless to say it didn't work very well after 2009 so i'll skip ahead and we can talk about this later but basically democracy has a known achilles heel a known spot like on the death star where you know if you get hit that spot it's going to blow apart and it is our the ease with which we are divided into factions that hate each other so much we don't care what happens to the country social media especially twitter but also facebook and others have really targeted that spot now what can we do the resolution here is not congress shall regulate i really enjoyed rob's book i recommend it to you he's such a clear writer he goes through every possible issue that people talk about and you find out there's a lot of misunderstanding of what's going on he also points out just how terrible congress is at regulating and some of the ideas proposed you know by holly and others you know they're specifying micro specifying and you know after 30 minutes they should be kicked off i mean these are stupid stupid bills um so if i was defending the motion congress shall regulate i would just say well it's hopeless and and i'm gonna go jump in a lake um but what what we're talking about here is do we have a national emergency do we have a gigantic problem facing our young people our democracy and our institutions and if so a lot of it is commons dilemmas like prisoner's dilemmas things that are hard to resolve if you're one person for example many of you are parents many of you have kids raise your hand if you want your your children to be on instagram raise your hand if you think that's a good thing for them okay raise your hand if your kids are on instagram okay not many parents here maybe not among libertarians but okay okay i can't see with the lights in my eyes take it from me all of us parents who who let our kids on instagram it's only because they say but everybody else is on and i'll be excluded if i'm not on it so we're caught in a trap and we need central leadership to break it in particular what kids most need is delay entry the copper bill that set the age of internet adulthood it was originally going to be 16 was the original bill from ed markey lobbyist got it down to 13 and back in 1996 that's at that age you're like an adult that was a terrible idea and now we know the age must be raised i think it should be 16 or 18.
