Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Kids Aren't Addicted to Phones — Here's the Data (The Top Academic Studying Social Media & Children Breaks Things Down)

Episode Date: July 10, 2026

Is social media actually destroying a generation, or are we in the middle of a massive political moral panic?For this week's Free Speech Friday I sat down with one of the world's leading researchers studying young people, technology, and mental health to answer one question: Did social media really create a generation-wide mental health crisis?SUPPORT MY WORK: Buy a paid subscription to my newsletter at usermag.co           Support my work on Patreon: http://patreon.com/taylorlorenz  For years we've been told that smartphones and social media are fueling anxiety, depression, loneliness, and suicide among teenagers. Politicians, bestselling authors, and news outlets have treated that idea as settled science.But what does the actual research say?Developmental psychologist Candice Odgers has spent decades studying how young people use technology. In this interview, we break down what the evidence actually shows, why many experts disagree with the popular narrative, and how the social media panic is influencing online safety laws, censorship, surveillance, age verification, and internet policy around the world. We discuss:The real relationship between social media and teen mental healthWhy correlation is often mistaken for causationWhat studies actually find about screen timeThe debate around The Anxious GenerationWhy many scientists reject claims that phones are driving a mental health epidemicOnline safety laws and age verificationPrivacy, surveillance, and internet censorshipWhat parents should actually focus onThe future of social media regulation

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now we're going to go kick them out of the spaces where they've gone to congregate and gather and build community virtually, right? And that doesn't make sense either when they're just trying to be together and have their own space. In recent years, concerns about a growing mental health crisis among young people has fueled widespread debate about the impact of social media and smartphones on kids. One of the most influential people shaping this discussion is Heritage Foundation collaborator Jonathan Haidt, an academic with no experience in this field who wrote the bestselling book, the anxious generation. The anxious generation argues that the rise of social media and smartphones has led to unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, and social isolation among young people. This feels true to so many people, and it's a big part of why this idea has caught on.

But the reality is that every single top scientists and researcher who actually studies this issue has come out time and time again and said that these claims are completely false. Candice Odgers is arguably the top academic expert in the entire country, and she's been studying the effects of internet and technology use on young people for decades. So today she's joining me to break down what the science really says about social media and mental health, and talk about how this moral panic about kids' mental health and online safety is being used to justify incredibly dangerous policies that will harm not just children, but all of us adults as well. Candace, welcome to Free Speech Friday. Great to be here. Thanks for having me on. So to start off, can you tell me a little bit about your work studying kids and technology use and specifically social media? Because you have a pretty rich background in this area. Yeah, so I'm a developmental psychologist. I've been doing this a long time, probably 25 plus years studying adolescent mental health. And since around 2008, we started working with young people directly from their phones, trying to understand their mental health symptoms day to day a little bit better. And that was right when young people were starting to use a lot of technology or a lot more technology.

So we started to ask and measure what they were doing on their phone, what kind of influence it had on their sleep and their emotions and all types of things in their lives. And so it's been a really interesting and at times wild ride to have a front row seat to this uptick in technology and concern. Yeah. I feel like if you mentioned to a lot of people that you started to study kids, mental health and phones, you know, around the time of 2008 now, they would say, well, I already know what you found, right? You found. that it's destroying everyone's mind, it's making everyone anxious, it's leading to all these issues. Tell me what you have actually found, because I think it's a little counterintuitive for a lot of people in terms of what the research actually shows. Yeah, it's been pretty incredible to pick up the newspaper or to pick up my own phone and read these headlines,

which basically tell us that young people are doomed, their brains are destroyed, that phones have been the end of them and their mental health. And then, on the other hand, to spend every day streaming through data with them on their phones and watching this this unfold. And I think the most meaningful thing for me across this whole time period has been this massive gap between the story that we're told repeatedly every day about young people and what we actually see in the data and what young people tell us.

And when I say massive gap, there is so much distance between what we all believe to be true. And I'm a parent of teenagers. I get the anxiety. And what we actually see when we take the time to look at what young people are actually doing online and we look at the data to see what kind of effects it has on mental health, for example. Yeah.

Well, let's talk about this a little bit because, you know, there's these people that claim that we started to see rises in anxiety or mental health issues, all sort of parallel to the rise of smartphones among young people. And of course, I've always been quick to point out there is no causal relationship there, but how do you explain that? Because I think the story is very compelling to a lot of parents who have witnessed their own kids struggling with mental health challenges. Yeah, it is very compelling. And the phone, it looks like an, you know, an easy thing to blame for this. And in fact, when people first started

to point this out, I was hopeful that it was something to do with the phone because that would be an easy target, right? As a parent, as someone who's worked to prevent mental health problems, we could shut it off and we could solve a lot of really complex problems. So that would have been the easy answer at the time. But of course, it's mental health and it's not that simple. Everything is a little bit more complicated, which I know is a very sciencey way to address these. But what's shocked to me is the thing that we're not talking about. And the elephant in the room for me is that at 2008, when youth suicide started to uptick, we experienced the Great Recession, so a huge economic shock. We also know that we were in the middle of an opioid crisis and parental mental health. So

adult suicide risk had actually been increasing since 1999. So a full decade prime. And we know from decades and decades of research that caregiver mental health is the, by far, the most important predictor of child mental health. So the fact that when we're having these conversations about this uptick, we're not talking about what's been going on with adults. So we can have lots of conversation at whether or not this youth mental health crisis is royal or not. But there is no doubt that adults and caregivers are in the midst of one.

Yeah. And it also seems like adults are struggling increasingly financially. You mentioned 2008. I talked to so many kids that became hyper online. And a lot of them got involved in like crypto and gambling and stuff. So I'm talking to them for these stories. And a lot of them mentioned the 2008 financial crisis as really affecting them because they watch their parents struggle financially.

Their lifestyle changed. A lot of them, this is their first major memory of like a big news event because they were forced to leave their house. Their mom and dad got laid off. It was really their lifestyle changed. And I feel like, I don't know. I'm curious if you looked at sort of like these economic factors as well because it also seems like kids are being forced to compete in this like really intense economy these days with more

and more economic pressure. They're being forced to participate in the economy at younger and younger ages. And it seems like that could have maybe had a role as well. I'm curious what you found. Yeah. So we had the economic shock in 2008, but we also had a shock around the global pandemic. Right. It affected people differently. So those in the lower SES households, they both didn't recover as much from the 2008 shock. And they were hit again with the pandemic being in jobs where you couldn't just stay at home or you didn't maybe have, you know, the kind of resources to protect yourself and your family. So the distribution of risks and hits and shocks were very uneven and we saw kind of different outcomes because of that. Family resources is the most important

predictor also of youth mental health. It's one of the big ones. It's what transmits a lot of risk and it's also the thing that structures how kids use online materials. So when we follow the young people in our studies, we get them from across the entire distribution of income. So kids that are growing up in poverty or low-income households and also young people who are growing up in the most affluent and rich households. And one of the most striking things is how the media use differs across those groups, right? And it's basically not a function of what kids want to do. It's a function of how their day is structured. So kids who are growing up in really high-income affluent neighborhoods, they're over-scheduled. They only have.

about one or two hours of free time per day outside of their extracurricular drama and sports and tutoring and all the rest of it. Whereas the teenagers who are in lower SDS households have a lot more unstructured time. So time where they're kind of on their own where both parents might be working and they could be in a single parent household. And their use is less supervised, is less scaffolded. So there's less people around them that are taking the time to set up kind of protections. online or restrictions or safe device use, kind of scaffolding behavior. So there's big, big differences that you see between those two groups in terms of how much they use technology and then there's also differences in their mental health.

And people will look at the differences in technology use and say, oh, this group of kids uses tech five hours a day and this group uses one and these group has great mental health and this group is suffering and they're completely ignoring the thing that created that in the first place, which is how many resources the family has. has. So that's just one example of how, you know, income and resources in the family matter a lot. It's such a complicated picture, right? I mean, I think of this also with schools and opportunity. And like you said, like, do they have access to playing sports after school? Can they go run around outside at all? Or are they in an unsafe neighborhood where their parents want them to be at home

on the phone? I speak to a lot of parents who are really nervous, especially parents of color, you know, they don't want their kid running around unsupervised outside. It's a dangerous world. The kid can be arrested. They can be arrested. Something bad can happen. And so they want their children safe at home on the phone. And it feels like that's been a shift to, you know, over the past couple decades. That's exactly right.

So tragically in America, guns are the number one killer of our children, right? We should probably be banning guns. And so that will get a lot of reaction, I'm sure, from your viewers. But, you know, that's just data. That's just math. Number one killer of our children. We've also kicked kids out of public spaces. So people don't want to see teenagers hanging around in public space.

or at the mall or at the beach, right? They want them kind of out of sight. And that's meant that young people are, don't have the places to congregate. And the ironic thing here is we've kicked them out of these public spaces, now we're gonna go kick them out of the spaces where they've gone to congregate and gather and build community virtually, right?

And that doesn't make sense either when they're just trying to be together and have their own space. Well, let's talk about how kids are using their phones, because I think this is another misconception. And I'm curious what you've found. So many times you see people make these arguments online all day where they're like, well, the kids are just sitting there scrolling brain rot. It's destroying their brains.

It's melting their minds. It's causing psychological problems, et cetera, et cetera. I loved when actually Adam Masari came out a few years ago and said, according to Instagram data, the number one way that kids are using Instagram was actually direct messaging, which is usually what they use Snapchat for as well. But I thought that sort of broke a little bit of, you know, people's preconceived notions. But what are young people doing on here? you know, are they just scrolling harmful, addictive feeds all day? What is the actual sort of use case being had? It's funny because adults make a lot of assumptions about what young people are doing on their phones

and they make these assumptions based on how they engage with their phones, which is often what you're describing and not that helpful, right? So do them scrolling various, various things. But, you know, we stream data from young teenagers' phones every day. And we scrape it in terms of what they're viewing, what they're, we've installed keyboards and we can see what they're typing. and this sounds a little bit creepy, but we do with their consent. They work with us to make sure that we understand what they're doing.

And it's really been eye-opening for me, and it's actually reduced my anxiety as a parent. Because the vast majority of things that young people do online are very normative, appropriate, driven to connect with peers. And social media is really changing. So it's becoming parasycial, right? More recently, where, meaning that young people are not creating as much of the content themselves and sharing on the big platforms, they're off in their own chat groups, right? So that is where all the peer-to-peer action is happening, whether that's on Discord or whether

that's, you know, on just a regular kind of chat group. And they're pulling in content from social media to share and to talk about, but the main interactions aren't happening on the social media platforms themselves. That's become more like this, you know, this generation's version of television or just content consumption. So, you know, even if we're worried about bullying, et cetera, that's going to be happening in these separate channels. Yeah, I think, you know, the fact that kids are spending so much time in these messaging apps and platforms like Discord, like you mentioned, that are more peer to peer, it kind of scares me because now when these lawmakers are talking about, you know,

restricting social media use, because the reality of it is most young people are using social media to direct message, you see them increasingly roping in messaging platforms, seeking to sensor and restrict access to discord, to basic messaging apps, you know, to signal, to telegram, et cetera. And I'm not arguing that people aren't, you know, having harmful conversations on these places. But fundamentally, these are communication platforms. They're not even just media platforms.

And so that seems kind of concerning as well. When you speak to parents, they'll still tell you, but my child is addicted. They're addicted. And, you know, this is an addiction. And I covered the social media trial in L.A., which was all. all claim, you know, making these claims. Addiction specialists have come out many times and said you cannot become addicted to media and communication. Where do you sort of see this? And why do you think parents feel this way? Like, you know, is social media really addicting? And if it is

addicting, how is it not harmful? Yeah. So the term addiction gets turned around a lot and it's usually the headline and it's, it's terrifying for for parents. But if you know, if you think of addiction in a cloque wheel sense, then, you know, people say it all the time, I'm addicted to my phone, but do they really mean I'm, addiction means in a clinical sense that the behavior that you're engaging in is impairing, right? It's interfering with other activities in your daily life, right? It's something that's compulsive and you can't stop. So there are probably features of that that overlap, but to think about it as an addiction is really the wrong kind of medical frame in the same way that they're trying to compare it to big tobacco. So technology is infused

into all of our lives, right? It's not a carcinogen or something that is inherently harmful. It is just there and how we use it or how, you know, it is used by various people was what makes it helpful or harmful. So that's kind of where I stand, you know, on that piece of it and, you know, agree that using the term addiction really isn't helpful to anyone at this point. If you're watching this video and you like my work, please support me on Patreon via the link below or buy a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter at usermag.co. That's usermag.com. I don't have any long-term brand partnerships and a lot of my content is effectively demonetized. I've lost major brand deals for speaking out on certain issues and for challenging power. As you can imagine, advertisers are not exactly eager to work with somebody who covers a lot of the topics that I cover

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I think it's helpful to the people that want to regulate speech and access to communication like illicit substances. And when you compare a speech and communication to illicit substances, like you do sort of presuppose that, I guess, regulatory framework, which is terrifying. I'm wondering if you can kind of just like dive a little bit deeper into what you've found, you know, about this correlation between youth mental health issues and phone use. Because to so many people, when you tell them this or when you, you know, they've read certain books or listen to other people, they say, well, it's obvious. It's obvious. Like this is something that we innately feel is so true. So what do you think is sort of the most compelling case you can make for why social media is not, you know, leading to all of these issues? So I try and separate two things.

The first one is this normative value-based judgment that like parents and adults, they don't want their children to have a digital childhood or a digital childhood only, right? They react to that. There's large consensus that they want something different, right? And that's kind of one piece of it. The part that I look at it is does the time online engaging in social media on your phone is it actually, causing mental health problems or making mental health problems worse for people who are already struggling. So I'm in that piece of it and I'll kind of put the what parents want for their kids, which is legitimate. And I'm not here to tell anybody what they should want for their kids of the type of childhood.

But what I can tell you is when people are telling you that social media is to blame for serious mental health problems like depression, anxiety and suicide, that the evidence is just not there on the population level. and let me tell you what that means. So if you look at the correlation between screen time or social media, it usually is quite small. And when it's there, when we do see it, it's often there. Sometimes more often for girls in social media. So then we say, okay, what might be happening there?

And when I say small, I mean the correlation between screen time and well-being explains less than 1% of the variation in well-being outcome. So 99% is explained by something else. So that's small. And then people make a list of the most important contributors to youth mental health problems just based on kind of objective data Social media often doesn't make the list and some studies claim that it's one of the least influential factors Right and that's a big difference. That's why I talked about there's like this big gap But I'm very interested in adolescent mental health and so when we do see this signal that there's an association between

time spent on social media and depression. I'm like hmm, what is that about and if you dig a little bit deeper what you find is that young people who are struggling already with depression and anxiety tend to go on social media a bit more in the future. It predicts future use and there can be going there for help, they could be going there because they're socially isolated, but they do spend more time going forward. We don't find the opposite, right? So where social media use does not predict robustly future mental health problems. So that's the first thing is I think we're drawing the arrow in the wrong direction of what causes what. So when there is a linkage, we know that people who are more vulnerable are spending more time online. Now, whether that time online is good or

bad, like, it can be a lot of different, different things. But that's just the obvious part of it. The other thing is many of these things, they're small associations, and there's not a lot of way to sort of cause and effect. So people make up all kinds of stories about a very tiny correlation. So we're like, why can't we have an experimental study? Like, let's just experimentally reduce it and figure out what happens. And it turns out people have done that, right? So people are starting to do that. And this was like exciting for me because this is like one of the best ways that we can understand like, is this actually a cause? And when you do that, it's even more shocking. And let me tell you why when I reviewed all these studies and there's been a few, a couple of like big

reviews of the first meta-analysis that came out said when you go across all these studies, the average effect when you randomize people to give up social media and then you follow them up and see how they did was indistinguishable from zero. Right. And that was surprising because we're doing this in a context where we actually tell people. hey social media is bad for you giving up is good and then we asked them how they felt when they give up social media and then the next thing i discovered when we reviewed this list was there wasn't a single study that included adolescence like the group were all talking about and banning so these are all among adults there wasn't even a single study with an average age of 18 and we're talking about under 16 so no study has actually tested what happens when you have young people restrict their social media use so that's pretty remarkable that we're moving forward with all this confidence when we're when the experimental data with adults shows us, there's really no association between the two, or no association with no effect of giving it up.

And we haven't even included young people in these studies. Here we go. Someone's already claiming this is our year. Someone else said that last year, too. A round of Jamest and Ginger and Lime arrives at the table. Smooth enough for kickoff, smooth enough for extra time. New friends pulling up a stool. Debates about whether that was a handball.

Cheers rising like a roar around the room. Because match days are about the shared moments. How did Jameson to your match day lineup? Jameson, it's what you bring. Please enjoy our products responsibly. Yeah, I mean, I think this is so remarkable. And also just, I think a lot of times we don't even, you know, when they do these studies, we don't even talk about sort of like what is social media.

Everybody uses social media. Everybody uses the internet differently. One child's social media use can be enormously productive. One child's social media use can be not productive. You know, there is no universal using social media. Like, it's so bizarre and dependent on the child. And that's what I tell parents, too, is like this fight over like screen time. It's like, well, what is your child doing online?

Are they learning video editing? Are they having fun? Are they engaging in educational material, talking to friends, connecting directly? Or are they in that zone out mindset, right? Where they're just watching TikTok brain rot for five hours or whatever, which I guess we did on television before, you know, and it is what it is. But there is something that it's tapping into that feels true. And I'm wondering if you've unpacked or have any visibility into, yeah, what's driving that?

I think it does feel true because it's so pervasive. And so it is true that young people are like early, enthusiastic adopters and new technology. Like they gravitate towards it. And we're seeing it with artificial intelligence also. So they are there. They're experimenting. They're engaging there. They're taking ownership over some of these platforms.

The second part of this, and I'm not going to say it's all a moral panic, but, you know, it's felt right to people in the past. So, you know, I'm older than you when I was young. It was Pac-Man. And the U.S. Surgeon General issued a warning. They proposed age bans. There was something called Pac-Man addiction. And looking back, it seems absurd, right? It just seems absurd that they were convening. They were blaming burglaries of quarters in people's homes on these children who were addicted to Pac-Man. It was supposed to destroy their executive function, right? It turns up that executive function has remained, you know, entirely the same across generation. So things can feel really true and they're just not. And we're going to, when we look back on it, it could

look a little silly. But I will say that this has been like a very rapid transformation and big changes. And so we're right to be worried. And so some people have taken a safety first approach. And I think the Surgeon General did this in one of his reports or tried to try to before the media storm took off, which is, you know, we're not sure we don't know. And so, we're going to hold back or restrict use or be really cautious about root use. And as a parent, I get that. The problem is when we weaponize the story or the scientific story or we use a group like young girls to try and use them as a political instrument to move forward on policies

and selling it with great certainty, I think that's where we get in trouble. So if we were saying a safety first perspective makes sense, I can get behind that. But what we're saying right now, we're telling people a story that is very scary. scary that is about serious things that really threaten our children's lives. And we're saying that science supports it and it does not. Well, that's the thing I feel like it that's been frustrating. And even to hear from the search general, who's fundamentally, I would say, also a political actor in the sense that like, you know, they're pushing policy. Like you constantly hear this in the media and elsewhere. And parents really do believe that this is what science

says or that, well, actually like science is so sort of convoluted and we really don't know anything. And so we really have to believe the people that are the most alarmist because we don't really know anything. And actually, as you've shown, we know a decent amount. You know, we've been studying this for a while. Social media yet, it came quickly, but it's been a 30 year change here. Like it's not, you know, two years ago. I would say AI is a lot more rapid, right? And so in there, I think we're learning. But it seems like people continue to say that the science is settled. People like you and actual scientists studying this, I would say, are not represented in the media. It's hard to find people like you out there. I think a lot of people.

they look to these major national figures because those are the ones they see promoted on CBS News. Those are the ones that they see like pushed out. So I'm curious if you could speak to your experience as a scientist and an actual expert in this area in terms of like, why don't you think you've been able to get the message out more? Like what is holding it back? Why hasn't that science broken through? Yeah. So I think that the argument is so compelling because it feels true to many people, right? And it's a it's a simple solution. And if we can shut it off, we can save our kids and it solves a lot of kind of political issues. I think, you know, scientists like me are not hard to find.

It's hard to find people that will say this out loud right now, right? And this is, you know, the people who are pushing this message will say there's a couple of skeptics that don't agree with us, but really it's a scientific consensus that the science is really unsettled. So the National Academy of Sciences, you know, convened an expert panel. I wasn't on it, but I gave testimony. And they came to this same conclusion that there's this massive gap between what science has actually shown and the story that's being told and sold and pushed to parents and to people

and to policymakers. And that gap we're seeing it in all kinds of areas with, I would say, misinformation about our kids. And, you know, people, the interesting thing for me from a policy perspective has been, I've been approached by a number of people who will say, okay, Candace, you know, just who cares if it's not causal? Who cares if it's not the main thing? Like, this is going to cause tech companies to change their regulations, to be. safer, it's going to lead to improvements, right? Like, just get on board. And so my response to that has been, you know, depression is one of the leading causes of

disability in the world, right? And if something else that threatened our children, like childhood cancer, for example, someone was going around and saying, drinking, you know, purple Gatorade is the main cause of childhood leukemia. Like I would want a pediatric oncologist to stand up and say, actually that's not the thing, right? And I'm not saying there's no harms online. I'm not saying there have not been tragic cases. but the vast majority of harms to children happen offline in places where adults are.

And any place where adults are, harm will happen to children. So churches, schools, homes, homes is the big one. And so, you know, this kind of pushback, like, why wouldn't I just get behind this messaging if it's going to cause this, you know, outcome of tech companies suffering or paying a price? And the price would be that I'd have to lie to my own kids and tell them the behavior that they're engaging and it's really normal, right? That's sometimes fun for us and our family that, you know, is going to be part of their future and they have to learn how to do it,

is addictive, it's shameful, it's rotting their brains. And I spend enough time around young people that I know that they are actually amazing. They are better than us. It is one of the best times, like adolescence is like a superpower. And, you know, many of us are just sorry that we don't have those same strengths right now. We're that long run of life ahead of us. And so we complain about them every generation. And so I can't get behind this messaging that this is the worst thing that could happen to our kids because it's not.

I spoke to another researcher Ian Anderson who did a bunch of research on habits and stuff, and he put out a study showing actually it's just telling young people that the behavior that they're engaging in is addictive and dangerous and bad actually makes them stigmatize their own use and makes them stigmatize and feel shame about social connection. And so they feel shame. And so then they isolate themselves because they're. They believe that that's morally better and that actually makes them more sad. And so I think there's actually a lot of harms with going along with it. And think of all the parents that are we live our lives in a constant state of guilt. And now you're shaming us, you know, for these behaviors.

So it's, it's scary. I think of it a little bit. I mean, it's not exactly the same. But I grew up like as a young person in the 2000s when it was like the video game moral panic. And like we weren't allowed to even play the game boy Tetris because my mom was like that will you will become a school shooter, you know, if you're playing. video games and you know and how little that played out but also how like gaming was actually a really communal activity and like not being able to participate in that like sometimes made you feel more lonely you know and so you do see these shades of moral panic I mean I didn't even

know that about Pac-Man but like it's it feels like a tale as old as time of course we've seen it with comic books whatever I think with each one people argue but this is different like this is just different to get back to what you're saying about the tech companies there's been all of this child safety regulation and I actually just had a piece out in The Guardian on this topic of like, we're holding big tech accountable and we're punishing them and they're going to have to make their platforms safer. But when you look at what these laws do, they mostly expand mass surveillance and censorship, top-down government censorship removal of LGBTQ content, punishing young girls, you know,

by removing young girls' profiles under these sort of like anti-sexual content guidelines, reproductive justice information is obliterated. And now you have to scan your face to use the internet. Can you talk a little bit more about what you think we could do or what parents could do to ensure their kids do have a safe online experience. Because I do think like it is hard out there for parents and the internet is not all good, right? Yeah. So I think bands actually don't punish tech companies.

They let them off the hook and they actually give them so much more information about us and our children. And so it is absurd to think that this is actually a punishment for companies, right? It is a free pass in so many ways. And it is, it is kind of bad for all of us to have to give up our rights to privacy. And to tell our kids, essentially, who we've been teaching for years, do not turn over personal information online. And now scan your face, scan, you know, my information to make sure you're my kid. And it's just, it's one of those things in the policy field.

I was a professor at a policy school for years. And often you'd have to go, you know, two, four, six steps beyond the policy to figure out how bad things were going to happen because of the policy or unexpected negative consequences. And here it's like at step one, right? Like the first day of the ban. So, you know, Australia is a good example. So they rushed this through after reading, you know, The Anxious Generation, someone's wife, read it, they all got, you know, marching towards it. They pushed it through at break net speed.

And then they realized they didn't know what social media was, to your point. Like, they couldn't define it. And so they had to kind of work through that. And on the first day of the band, they kicked something like 2 million kids off of YouTube, but they didn't kick them off of YouTube. They kicked them off of their accounts, which had parental controls. and content filters and all other types of safety things that had been built into the platform, now they could just go in the open frame of the platform.

So that made it worse on day one. And it was like two months earlier that I think Sesame Street had moved over to YouTube also. So very conflicting information about this. But I think in terms of making it safe, I do, you know, it does have to be a platform level change because parents, this cannot all fall on parents to keep young people safe online. And by Safe Online, I mean your data and your privacy. I don't just mean, you know, content moderation. I think those are the points that we're missing too as we, you know, focus just on this

mental health and tech issue. The one thing that I do, this is a thing that I learned from the young people on our study and it's changed my own parenting is the conversation that I have with my own kids is that if you see something negative online or you see something being done, like, that's harmful to you or your friends or you viewed content. that's upsetting, I need you to come and talk to me about it and I will never take your device or your tech away because of it. So you're never going to lose your privileges or your access because you've come to me for help on this because one of the biggest things that the teens

in our study do is they hide information that's happening online from their parents because they're worried that they're going to take it away, right? And they will find a way to get there and be there. So that's kind of the number one rule in terms of trying to keep those lines of communication, you know, open. And the other thing, and this gets back to your video game example, we had a rule in our house when our kids were young. No first shooter games, right? Like, you can play all the other games, but none of them. And my son came home and he was upset because at lunchtime, everyone was doing the Fortnite skins and dances and he was excluded, right? Like, he was excluded offline because he wasn't part of this culture. And so I spent the weekend playing

Fortnite with him and realized it wasn't going to like turn him into a mass shooter. And so he started playing and it was right before COVID and then COVID hit and I had a younger daughter at the time who was ultra social like this kid like thrives on social relationships and COVID hit and she was isolated. My son was on Discord playing with all of his friends and so I actually let her join them. They went in creative mode. They all taught her how to play the game. They had some laughs. And so it wasn't about the game. It was about the kids and being together and learning and laughing. right? And so if you can see the platforms in that way and create spaces for kids to do the things they need to do as kids, then it's just a different conversation in frame. Yeah, I think having that

open conversation and saying, I'm not going to ban it, but I want you to talk to me and just making kids able to like speak to you and feel comfortable is so important because I've written about so many of these cases where ultimately the kid does suffer enormous harm. And so often, especially when I've interviewed the victims. They say, like, I didn't want to, like, lose my Instagram. And so I ended up, you know, and then, you know, another thing I should mention in this, too, is that a lot of times the harm comes from people they know. So, you know, you have meta saying, oh, well, we're just restricting, you know,

DMs to contacts or whatever. And it's like, okay, but that child is likely being groomed, you know, statistically by somebody that they know. Actually, it's their coach that's DMing them after hours, asking them for inappropriate pictures. They need to be able to speak to their parents about that and not feel like they're going to lose everything and lose access to their social life online. So I think just having those sort of modes of communication open is so key. It's so important when you talk about with the victimization.

So everyone's talking about online harm and victimization. We know that the vast majority of harm still happens offline, but there's this huge overlap. So we followed a group of 2,000 young people in the United Kingdom. They're followed from age of 5 to the age of 24. and we were able to assess them in person and online, and we got an entire record of their victimization they'd experienced both offline and then cyber victimization, and we found one in five had experienced cyber victimization,

which you hear that, and you're like, oh, my God. But only two of them had been victimized online only, and most of that overlap was within the home victimization or people that knew them very well, and that was what predicted future mental health problems, the offline harm, right? And so when we just start to focus only on the cyber victimization or the phone, we miss the entire story, the things that we already know, which is the majority of young people that are harmed are harmed by people that they know in places where

they should be safe. Yeah. And, you know, especially when we talk about young girls and harm and making young girls the center of this, like, I would definitely call it a moral panic about like online safety, all this stuff. It's like young girls are the least likely. to be believed and they are the least like in terms of enforcement it's really we should fix the fact that these young girls are so often disregarded when they seek to take action against people calling you know harming them in various ways yeah i actually i started my career working on child sexual abuse in vancouver with kids who had been displaced many from aboriginal communities and many who had been sexually exploited and so you know i've thought about and cared about

this issue for a very long time and if we were really concerned about protecting young girls, we would do something more than just require tech companies to report if there was an incident of harassment or attempted exploitation, right? Like all that does is protect them from legal liability and make it the staffs just fly through the roof. If we really wanted to protect them, we would invest in resources that track down the perpetrators of online and offline harms. I mean, that's just what we would do, but that is not what we're doing, right? And it's, you know, I've said it a number of times, but, you know, there's nothing that scares a society more than little girls, becoming women. And whenever policymakers or the political elite or old men rush in to protect the

little girls, it catches my attention because it often doesn't work out well for the little girls. And I think we're seeing that right now. Yeah, especially when you consider the policymakers behind these proposals and the political organizations leading these proposals, it's the Heritage Foundation. It's a lot of far-right political groups that at the same time they're pushing these online safety laws are seeking to strip women of right to bodily autonomy and have deeply misogynistic, I would say, worldviews. And that's what I've also been pushing for when we've gone to evaluating these bans. So people that are looking to evaluate what is the effect of reducing social media use or banning people or groups of people from social media. It's, you know, essentially you want

to ask, okay, does it influence their mental health? Fine. But does it influence their ability to receive reliable news or information on reproductive health or connect for support? So we have to assess when you take these things away, what are the impacts it's having on all kinds of domains of life and health, right? We can't just be focusing and looking at, okay, do people report that they feel happier because of it? Yeah, I feel like when we ignore the positives of technology or we ignore like the positive use of social media and communication technology especially, we can't ensure that that's equally distributed either. We can't ensure that people have access to it and we're causing an enormous amount of harm, I think, by just not even

acknowledging that there is this positive use case for so many of these tools. And there are ways to crack down on big tech and regulate any big powerful corporation that we're not, that we've never even explored. And so I think it's frustrating that we're just sort of jumping immediately to these mass surveillance and censorship laws without ever pursuing actual, I guess, like, I don't know, regulating meta's anti-competitive behavior that they're constantly engaging in. I think also, like when we look at this younger generation, I feel so hard and definitely like when I talk to even my younger cousins that are in high school and college. It seems like they actually have access to a lot of opportunities that, you know, we never

had. They have really robust social networks around like specialized interests that certainly when I was young, like, didn't even exist or like I couldn't have found those people because I was so limited by my geography. What are you seeing in terms of just like the overall, like, how is this generation doing? Like, are they truly the most depressed, anxious, miserable, like, doomed generation that we've seen in our lifetime or not? Yeah. So I've been studying adolescent mental health since the 90s.

And so I've seen a lot of changes in trends. And I can tell you that, again, here, the story that we're told about this generation being worse off than ever just does not hold up in the data. So if you compare them to previous generations, they are more intelligence, they are more empathetic. They are less violent. They're less likely to be arrested for crimes. They're less likely to drink alcohol, to have a teenage pregnancy. This is the most educated generation that we've ever seen. They are excelling on so many metrics that matter.

and on virtually every metric that you look at, we can go back to prior generations and say, well, they're doing as well or better. Now, they are reporting more anxiety about the world that they live in, right? So they are reporting fears about climate change and about safety at school. So we've seen an updick in the Center for Disease Control data on young people feeling less safe to be at school and concerns about the world they live in. And I can understand that, right? I mean, they're anxious about the world that adults have grown up with. And then we have seen this uptick since about 2008 and suicide risk among young people. But again, we saw that increase happen among adults look long before.

So a full decade before. So it's not surprising in that sense. So I think the story of adolescent mental health is not the simple one that we're hearing, that on most metrics that matter, they are excelling. And I would argue that given the suffering of the. the adults around them, that they're a resilient generation, right? They're doing better than would be expected, given some of the stressors that society is under, the poly crisis that some people have talked about, and the suffering of the adults that are there and that should be supporting

and caring for them. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. It's sad and it's sad that their reaction to this broken world is often to get involved in activism and engage in online activism and that is then stigmatized. They've talked and reported a bunch on the anti-ice group chats and social media accounts run by teenagers that the government

has targeted and sought to restrict. And I think that there's often some of the first content banned under these safety, online safety policies under the Online Safety Act. Some of the first content restricted was police violence videos, you know, young people speaking out about different social justice problems. So it's scary. I mean, I think the take-home message for me is that young people have to be at the table for these conversations because adults are just missing the point.

But which young people? Because there is a one group specifically that viewers know I have huge problems with, like, because there are these young people that just build their entire brand by pushing reactionary stuff. It's like the same type of young people that were burning their comic books saying, you know, this is destroying our generation. But when we look at like cross, you know, there's discord servers of thousands of young people that are mobilizing against these laws. They are never interviewed by the New York Times.

They are never centered in any of these stories. but the five political science majors that went to the nicest school as possible that have connections to certain senators' offices, they not only have gotten a New York Times profile, but they are quoted left, right, and center. Yeah, so a genuine voice and participation is what's required, not a cherry picking of young people that will support a specific side. So that's what I mean in terms of broad participation in kind of the design, the build and the targeting of policies that will impact them. I view that as another example of kind of weaponizing, you know, young people and young people's voice for a political gain. And that can be done by both sides, both sides, right? And that's why we need to have a system of integrating young people's opinion and voice and participation in a way that is not dependent on somebody plucking them out or elevating a profile, but is really representative of their experiences, which is what adults miss all the time.

They don't understand what young people are actually doing online. And, you know, it's not all ill intent. There's so many people that have the best of intentions that believe this, which is the part that's concerning to me and are putting all of their energy and action into a set of, you know, policies and responses that are just in the end not going to help young people. Well, Candace, thank you so much for joining me and breaking all of this down. Your work is so important. And I really want people to continue to follow it.

So where can people continue to follow what you're doing and get updates? about, you know, all of this amazing research and work that you're doing. Yeah, so I try to post on my website, so Candaceodgers.com. I have a TED Talk that is out, so check it out there as well. And then I've also written for The Atlantic on this issue. And I'm happy to, if you reach out to share any of those resources with your audience. And we'll have all those links below as well. Your piece for The Atlantic was fantastic and I'm so thrilled that you're able to do a TED

talk on all this. I really hope that people go watch that. And yeah, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to chat today. Thanks, Taylor. It was a pleasure. All right, that's it for this week's episode of Free Speech Friday. If you like my work, please, please, please buy a paid subscription to my substack at Usermag.co. That's Usermag.com or support me on Patreon via the link below. On my Patreon, I do Q&A live streams, monthly bonus content and more. My work is entirely funded by supporters like you, so truly every single dollar makes such a difference. I'll be back

next week with a brand new episode of Free Speech Friday. See you then.