In The Anxious Generation, we told the story of the “great rewiring of childhood” and situated it in the historical context of the last 50 years. But just as we were turning in the manuscript, in late 2023, I (Jon) read an extraordinary book that traced the story back much farther — another 10,000 years.

The book was The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business, by historian David Courtwright, at the University of North Florida. Courtwright begins with humanity’s eternal quest for pleasure from the plants and animals found in nature. It used to take a lot of work and bee stings to obtain a few servings of honey. But the agricultural revolution, and later the invention of money, and later the industrial revolution, brought Western civilization to the point where vast quantities of quick-dopamine products (candy, cigarettes, crack cocaine) could be obtained easily and cheaply, even by the poor, who were often the main targets of these industries.

Courtwright tells the story of “limbic capitalism,” a term he coined to describe an economic system where industries take advantage of the brain’s limbic system — which regulates emotions, motivations, and memory — to drive overconsumption of brain-rewarding products. It is a quintessentially modern enterprise, one that takes something humans have always done — seeking out new pleasures — and supercharges it in the name of profit. It also makes the brain-rewarding substance cheaper and more potent over time, so that vast quantities can be consumed. He shows how, for example, the trans-Atlantic trade in sugar, liquor, and tobacco created vast fortunes from the labor of enslaved people, while spreading mass addiction around the world.

Most of Courtwright’s story is about addictions to substances, from junk food to hard drugs. But in Chapter 7, reprinted below, Courtwright gives us a gripping account of how tech companies followed the same logic to fill our lives with “digital addictions,” starting with computerized slot machines and then on to internet addictions and the smartphone as a variable-ratio reward center.

We think that Courtwright’s long historical perspective is essential for understanding how digital addictions rose so quickly and caused such widespread damage in such a short time. He helps us look ahead too: we know for certain that limbic capitalism will be supercharged by AI and the competition among companies to recoup the mind-boggling amounts of money that they must generate to repay their investors.

We recently had a wonderful discussion with Courtwright himself, and we asked him for permission to reprint Chapter 7 of his book here on After Babel. We thank him and Harvard University Press for allowing us to share it with you. We hope you’ll enjoy the chapter, and consider buying the book.

– Jon & Zach

Digital Addictions

Chapter Seven of The Age of Addiction by David Courtwright

Though critics disputed Volkow’s claim that food addiction is a brain disease, all but doctrinaire libertarians agreed with her on one point: Overeating has an element of conscious commercial design. Volkow’s worries about hyperstimulating environments were widely shared, and not just by those concerned with compulsive overeating. Students of the casino industry, including the journalist Marc Cooper and the cultural anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll, found an uncanny resemblance between engineered gambling and engineered food. The similarities were most obvious in Las Vegas, a place where, as Cooper put it, the market ethic had been laid completely bare. So had the impulse to fine-tune and then standardize the exploitation of consumer weaknesses, a trend critics called “McGambling.”

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Machine Gambling

For all the diversification into glitzy entertainment, casino operators never gave up on gambling. But they preferred the automated variety, installing as many slot and video poker machines as they could cram onto their casino floors. The machines took no coffee breaks, demanded no maternity leaves, required no skill to play, and ensnared customers with maximum efficiency. “There’s no decision—it’s all done for you,” explained one slots manager. “You just stand there and get excited.” Or very excited. “For some people, something like the Fourth of July is going off in their brains as they gamble,” the sociologist Bo Bernhard told Cooper. “It’s trendy to say gambling is sweeping America. But mostly it’s machine gambling that’s sweeping America. And these machines are a convergence of so many factors: the logic of capitalism, technology, and increasing comfort with machines.”¹

Compulsive gamblers are mostly escape gamblers, as distinguished from action gamblers who favor the craps and blackjack tables. James Bond did not play slots. But women do, and not all are retirees in tennis shoes. “Today the problem gambler is likely to be a thirty-four-year-old woman with two kids and two years of college,” said Robert Hunter, a Las Vegas addiction therapist. “And a video game addiction. We’re not seeing many of the dinosaur action gamblers who play to feel a rush. We’re seeing people who say they want to feel numb, want to blank out, want to lose track.” The point was to disappear, said one of his patients, a woman in her late thirties who moved to Las Vegas after she married. The disappearing act cost her $200,000 over three years.²

If her losses were unusual, her status as a Las Vegas resident was not. Between 1960 and 2015 the resident population of Clark County, home to Las Vegas, grew by two million. The gambling industry cashed in. By 1991 gambling ranked as the locals’ fourth most popular commercial recreation, trailing only eating out, movies, and shopping. By 1999 some 6 percent of the county’s residents were compulsive gamblers, a rate over four times the national average. Exposure mattered, as did novelty and social class. Most prone to frequent gambling were recent arrivals and those with a poor education, many of whom toiled in the resorts. When they went off duty they patronized neighborhood casinos or McGambled at one of the ubiquitous machines in restaurants, bars, and grocery stores. Some “locals’ casinos” sweetened the pot, awarding frequent play with credits that could be swapped for cigarettes and liquor.³

Schüll wanted to know why machine gambling was so addictive and why so many addicts were women. The answer was an updated digital version of the hunter–prey story of commercial vice. Using Las Vegas as their proving ground, the hunters perfected computerized gambling machines that doubled as marketing and tracking devices. The machines’ television themes and resemblance to consumer gadgets gave them an aura of entertainment innocence and attracted a new generation of prey. Many of the younger players were anxious, depressed women seeking respite from burdensome lives in a high-pressure society whose expectations they could not meet. They played less for a big win that would let them escape than to escape, period. The goal, said one, was “to stay in that machine zone where nothing else matters.”⁴

Casino architects obligingly created machine-lined labyrinths in which gamblers lost themselves, satisfying their desire to escape until their stamina or money ran out. Solitary, continuous, and rapid wagering created a trancelike state that rendered players oblivious to anxiety, depression, and boredom. Digitized machine gambling was as reliable as Valium and faster acting. Regular players of video gambling devices became addicted three to four times more quickly than those who gambled in other ways. They also played more rapidly, whipping through a new video poker hand every three to four seconds. Their fingers flew over the controls. The most compulsive players became transfixed, unable to leave their machines despite growling stomachs and bursting bladders. One retired firefighter, who played fourteen hours at a stretch, said the place could burn down and he would stay put as long as he had gambling credits. “Forget it—I’m not leaving unless I can take the machine with me, I’ll die of smoke inhalation first.”⁵

Game designers, who knew the risks of addiction and the odds against winning, avoided playing. Asked if he indulged, an artist at Reno’s International Game Technology replied, incredulously, “Slots are for losers.” The director of a department called Responsible Gambling at the company said that her designers did not think about addiction. They thought about beating the competition. “They’re creative folks who want machines to create the most revenue.” Others were more candid about the price of victory. “I don’t feel great preying on psychological weaknesses of little old ladies,” a game developer told Schüll. “I can’t sit here and say, I only put the screws in the bomb, I only assemble the warhead, because I’m sure that products I’ve made have destroyed people’s lives somewhere.”⁶

The slot machine had indeed been weaponized. The weapon’s power first became apparent in 1984, when Las Vegas’s Four Queens Casino installed “virtual reel” slots armed with microprocessors. Each machine could produce ten times more reel stops than standard electromechanical models, hence larger potential jackpots. When casino staff compared the performance of the old and new devices, they found that digitized slots doubled revenues. Trade magazines spread the good news.⁷

Over the next two decades digitized gambling swept the casino industry. With 10 percent of the gamblers providing 80 to 90 percent of the take, anything that speeded up and extended play among regulars was bound to grow revenues. Labor costs shrank, too. Player identification cards and barcoded cash tickets replaced antediluvian change attendants pushing coin carts and tellers selling rolls of quarters from cages. Even cocktail waitresses’ jobs were not wholly safe. By 2008 Harrah’s Entertainment was experimenting with automated bars in casino lounges. Patrons could play touch-screen games, watch YouTube, and design and order their own customized drinks with a click.⁸

As with resort architecture, what happened in Vegas did not stay in Vegas. Digitized machine gambling expanded rapidly in revenue-hungry nations from Scandinavia to South Africa. Designers adapted to local conditions and traditions. Pachinko parlors, Japan’s de facto casinos, got a digital makeover. But everywhere the strategy was the same—to establish and reinforce player habits. The result has been a familiar spectrum of heightened risk tailing off into compulsion and ruin. By 2012, Hungary, a nation of ten million that allowed digitized gambling in pubs and bars as well as casinos, was home to an estimated one hundred thousand gambling addicts and another half million regulars in danger of losing control over their play. In Britain, betting shops proliferated along the main streets. The big draw was FOBTs, fixed-odds betting terminals that offered virtual games from roulette to slots. Punters could burn through £500 in a minute. Counting only those sessions in which gamblers lost £1,000 or more, FOBTs brought in £2.3 billion per year. May as well put heroin on a cheese trolley, a professional poker player wrote disapprovingly, and leave it twixt the chemist and the bus stop.⁹

It was in Australia, however, that digital gambling became a national obsession. By the late 1990s the country had one “pokie” for every eighty adults. Local clubs and pubs installed the machines, as well as hotels and casinos. Eight in ten Australians gambled, four in ten regularly. Casinos encouraged them with loyalty cards offering bonuses and discounts and easy-to-use debit cards that silently tracked their habits and acquired marketing leads about the addicted minority who provided most of the revenue. In one Australian casino, just 2.3 percent of the loyalty card holders accounted for 76 percent of the slot take. The gambling lobby protected and widened the take. In 2015 the government of New South Wales, the country’s most populous state, raised the maximum amount that casino gamblers could store on their smartcards from $1,000 AUD to $5,000 AUD. The move, which stunned hardened industry observers, was clearly designed to keep problem gamblers glued to their custom-designed seats.¹⁰

For confirmed machine-gambling addicts, there was no leaving the perch anyway, regardless of the credit line. It had become part of their mental furniture, their blues ejection seat. “It starts while I’m on my way to the casino,” an addicted gambler told Schüll:

“I’m in the car driving, but in my mind I’m already inside, walking around to find my machine. In the parking lot, the feeling gets even stronger.

By the time I get inside, I’m halfway into that zone. It has everything to do with the sounds, the lights, the atmosphere, walking through the aisles. Then when I’m finally sitting in front of the machine playing, it’s like I’m not even really there anymore—everything fades away.¹¹

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Caught in the Web

The machine-gambling language of preoccupation, anticipation, cue- arousal, and oblivion- seeking is strikingly similar to that of drug and food addicts. The principal difference is that food addicts have to eat. Drug and gambling addicts at least have a shot at a clean break. But their digital cousins, internet addicts, are more like food addicts. Online temptation is well nigh inescapable, internet access having become an assumed feature of life in developed societies. Addiction therapists know the score. They aim for “abstinence from problematic applications and a controlled and balanced internet usage,” just as food addiction recovery groups promote measured and balanced eating.¹²

The similarities do not end there. Both food and internet addicts become obsessed, lose control, display tolerance (bigger gulps, more time online), manifest associated disorders like anxiety and impulsivity, and experience depression during withdrawal. They often relapse and persist despite family badgering and social opprobrium. And their numbers have been growing. Surveys undertaken in the United States and Europe between 2000 and 2009 (before widespread smartphone use aggravated the situation) reported internet addiction prevalence rates between 1.5 and 8.2 percent. Chinese studies found values ranging from 2.4 to 6.4 percent, though some subgroups, such as Taiwanese university freshmen, approached an 18 percent addiction rate. In developed nations, internet addiction has become at least as common as food addiction. Among adolescents it is much more so.¹³

Addiction to the internet and other electronic pastimes reveals itself most clearly in the harsh light of abstinence. In 2010 an international team of researchers asked one thousand college students from ten countries to go without electronic media for twenty-four hours and to record how they felt. The typical response involved a combination of surprise, restlessness, boredom, isolation, anxiety, and depression, often prefaced with a frank admission of excessive use and addiction that cut across cultures:

CHINA: “As matter of fact, I’m quite addicted to the computer and the Internet. In the wake of this experiment, I realized that media is spread like a web that binds me.”

UGANDA: “t will not do any good if I do not begin on the note of acknowledging that I am actually very tied to the media.”

ARGENTINA: “I realized that, out of every 24 hours, I’m connected to a machine 15 hours a day.”

MEXICO: “It was quite late and the only thing going through my mind was (voice of a psychopath): ‘I want Facebook.’ ‘I want Twitter.’ ‘I want YouTube.’ ‘I want TV.’”

UNITED KINGDOM: “As soon as my 24 hours were up, I grabbed my beloved Blackberry and turned on my laptop. I felt almost like a drug addict getting a fix after a long stint of going cold turkey.”¹⁴

As with alcohol, drugs, processed food, and gambling, electronic media consumption is subject to the principle of hormesis. Consumption runs along a spectrum from occasional, beneficial use to relieve boredom and boost morale—the digital equivalent of a coffee break—to heavy, escapist use that harms self and others. Clinicians differ over whether to call the latter condition internet addiction, internet addiction disorder, internet use disorder, pathological internet use disorder, or something else entirely. They do, however, discern a common denominator. The heaviest users are those who have come to strongly prefer recreational life online as a way of tuning out IRL (in real life) hassles. They behave much like machine gamblers slipping into the zone, save that most of their activities, such as massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), have a social aspect that reinforces the virtual seduction. No self-respecting World of Warcraft DPS (a character who inflicts a large amount of damage per second) would want to miss their guild’s next big raid. IRL types take a dim view of such pursuits. Teachers issue failing grades, parents threats, employers pink slips, spouses papers for divorce, and judges treatment orders for internet boot camps.¹⁵

Libertarians and medicalization skeptics think forced treatment is absurd. The arguments over food addiction—Is it really an addiction like drugs? Is it an acquired brain disease to which some individuals are more susceptible than others?—have cropped up again over internet addiction. Only this time the debate has been messier, because internet addiction includes a much wider range of activities than compulsive eating. Among them are addiction to digital pornography, online gambling, video and role-playing games, adult-fantasy chatrooms, shopping on sites like eBay, social media platforms, and websurfing. Different groups of people display different types of addiction. Boys and men are more inclined to online video games and pornography, girls and women to visually oriented social media and compulsive buying. Some psychiatrists class the latter as an addiction, others as a type of obsessive compulsive disorder. If comparing food and drug addiction is like comparing apples and oranges, comparing food, drug, and internet addiction is like comparing apples, oranges, and several varieties of grapes.¹⁶

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The Worse Angels of Our Nature

Another thing that makes internet addiction difficult to assess is its relative novelty, especially habitual social media use via camera-equipped, internet-accessible mobile devices. History wants perspective. Little is available here. In countries like India, cheap voice-activated devices with intuitive video-oriented apps have only just begun to bring the social media revolution to poorer and less literate consumers. Yet some account is necessary, as there is no denying digital technology’s accelerating role in the history of pleasure, vice, and addiction. Briefly, three developments stand out.¹⁷

First, digital connectivity and mobility have spawned genuinely new patterns of addictive behavior. Putting aside academic disputes over categories and causes, the behaviors themselves have become social facts. When I told people that I was writing an updated history of addiction, the near-universal response was that I should include kids glued to their smartphones. What had once been a peripheral nuisance has become a real worry, given the rising toll of accidents caused by distracted drivers, not to say reports of increased bullying, anxiety, and academic failure. Compulsively studying social media posts leaves less time for studying everything else.

Second, the development of the internet created new, global opportunities for the dissemination of old vices and addictions, including gambling, psychoactive drugs, prostitution, and pornography. Indeed, porn has accounted for a significant portion of internet traffic from the time of its commercial inception. Swearing, the last of the bad habits that John Burnham profiled in his book, also gained a new outlet. Swearing never had much of a commercial aspect, which is why I have said little of it. Yet traditional vice it is. An emotionally charged form of speech processed through the limbic system, rather than the cortical language regions, swearing is a taboo, aggressive act of a cue-triggered nature. Like the other masculine and lower- class vices with which it is associated, swearing offends and demeans others. It flourished among soldiers during the world wars and then became increasingly common public behavior. From the vantage of 1993, when Bad Habits was published, normalized swearing struck Burnham as another defeat for American opponents of vice. In the ensuing quarter century that defeat has turned into a global rout. Online libertinism and anonymity encourage profanity, flaming, and other forms of verbal aggression such as trolling, succinctly defined in the online Urban Dictionary as “being a prick on the internet because you can.”¹⁸

Third, both developments, new bad habits and new outlets for old ones, have been engineered to maximize revenue, data on consumers, and time spent on the device or app. No less than for gambling machines, attention is the key corporate asset and behavioral science the means to claim it. For every individual attempting to exercise self-control over computer use, pointed out the ethicist Tristan Harris, there are a thousand experts on the other side of the screen whose job it is to break it down. Game makers study young players and analyze their mouse clicks to devise reinforcement schedules that prolong play and stimulate purchase of products tied to the game. Some are limited-time offers: You had better keep playing or you will miss out. Others are virtual gold pieces “farmed” by Chinese proles playing MMORPGs in twelve-hour factory shifts to supply impatient gamers in South Korea and other affluent countries with the virtual assets necessary to advance quickly in rank. One Fuzhou gold farmer earned $250 a month—good pay, he said, in comparison to other jobs. Most of his wages, and the middlemen’s profits, came from free-spending “whales” whom the computer-game industry had cultivated and caught.¹⁹

All three aspects of digital vice and addiction—new, old, designed—figured in journalist Nancy Jo Sales’s American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers (2016). Sales interviewed more than two hundred smartphone–equipped girls aged thirteen to nineteen, asking how social media had affected their lives. The gist was that they had displaced reality into a digital realm of celebrity idolatry, genital exhibitionism, drunken hookups, pornographic sex, constant distraction, collective insomnia, malicious gossip, cyberbullying, desensitization, and anxiety about appearance and popularity. The chief beneficiaries were makeup manufacturers and Silicon Valley honchos who equated teen time with advertising revenue. They were, Sales wrote, as prone to objectify women as the schoolboys who sexted female classmates and expected nude photographs in return.

Sales’s subjects volunteered that they were addicted to or obsessed with their phones, internet videos, and social media, to which the heaviest users devoted from nine to eleven hours a day. As with other addictions, reinforcement had a positive and negative dimension. Every like on a post or photo, every retweeted message, was a small psychic jackpot that could arrive at any moment. The continual flow of information, especially information about where one stood in the hotness pecking order, was a potent form of reward. Not having access to that information was a source of gnawing anxiety. Like much else online, it acquired its own name, FOMO. Fear of Missing Out.

Missing the big weekend party was fear one for the older, sexually active girls. “People get drunk, hook up,” explained Madison, a Boca Raton high school student whom Sales interviewed together with three of her friends, Billie, Sally, and Michelle. “Seniors are like, Let’s live it up. We’re all going off to different colleges, I’m never going to see you again, so let’s just, you know, do it.” Sales asked if porn had anything to do with the sexual carousel:

They all said, “Yes.”

“Boys look at porn all day,” said Billie. “They watch it during class,” said Madison. “Whenever you text a guy and ask, What are you doing?, they say they’re watching porn,” said Sally. “Some guys in my class were actually watching it while someone was doing a presentation. This girl Jennifer was giving a presentation and these guys put their phones like that”—she held her phone up to show the screen. “They were like, Oh, Jennifer, I have a question, and they raised their phones and it was a porn video. She couldn’t even concentrate. It was so sad. I felt so bad for her.”

Their teacher, sitting in the back of the classroom, saw nothing. Why didn’t they tell her? Sales asked. The girls looked around at one another. “If you tell on them, they’ll never let you forget it.” When Sales asked another group of girls, in Los Angeles, why they didn’t just walk away from social media if it was making their lives miserable, the answer was “because then we would have no life.” It is the classic addict answer, with a twist. Anxiety and dysphoria have acquired a new partner in the list of withdrawal symptoms—fear of social death.²⁰

Wired kids in other cultures have found themselves similarly entangled with smartphones, the stickiest of the world’s sticky things. They say they cannot imagine life without them. Phones are their lives. They would freak out if they lost them. They need apps for confidence. They long for perfect selfies. Everything revolves around social media. They cannot abandon online friends and late-night chat sessions for fear of ostracism. No less than their American peers, they have fallen into the ultimate luxury trap.²¹

The trap became more insidious after 2007, when smartphones and tablets conquered the consumer electronics market and social media went mobile. By 2015, 92 percent of American teenage girls were online daily, 24 percent “almost constantly.” It is easy to see why. A smartphone in a personalized case seems like the ultimate in teenage liberation, a portable vending machine full of mood-brightening apps. But in this instance, as in so many others, the sheepskin of consumer autonomy conceals the wolf of emotional manipulation from a distance.²²

The most obnoxious manipulators are boys who badger girls for nude photos and hookups and who harass and slander them should they fail to deliver. Yet boys too pay a price for easy, uncensored internet access. They become ensnared in a loutish bro culture and a world of pornographic fantasy that can result in sexual dysfunction. The reason college men are having trouble getting erections, a male Ivy League student told Sales, is excessive porn use. Masturbating to online pornography is like drinking ten cups of coffee a day. The prospect of “random non-intimate sex” with a real person rather than a porn star sculpted to trigger arousal cues is like drinking just two cups of coffee, “not that stimulating in comparison.” Biological Calvinism applies to online pornography as well as to alcohol and drugs. A reckoning there has been, manifest in hookups turned into letdowns or outright failures to launch.²³

It is as if, in the span of a century, there have been three revolutions of technology and sex. The first, artificial contraception, separated sex from procreation. The second, digital pornography, separated sex from physical contact between persons. And the third, online remoteness and impersonality, separated sex from courtship and its customary object, marriage. When sex is cheap, quick, and always available, why bother with corsages, dinner dates, and engagement rings?

More than tradition is at stake. Since the pioneering work of Norbert Elias, historians and social scientists have come to appreciate that acquiring and displaying good manners has greatly strengthened the faculty of impulse control on which social order depends. Sales’s informants did not need a dead German sociologist to know that something had gone wrong. If these guys said to our faces what they say to us online, one of them told her, we would probably kick them in the balls.²⁴

Critics accused Sales of pushing a feminist agenda and ignoring the other uses of social media, such as sharing family news or networking with activists. No smartphones, no Arab Spring. No social media, no Black Lives Matter. New consumer technologies have their liberating side. In his magnum opus on the historical decline of violence and intolerance, The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), the psychologist Steven Pinker proposed that the acceleration of human and animal rights revolutions since the 1960s was a byproduct of the consumer electronics revolutions. The annual doubling of transistors on integrated circuits put the Enlightenment’s Republic of Letters on steroids. It connected a literate mass audience and broadcast the methods and ideals of the scientific and humanitarian revolutions. Against Wikipedia, pernicious beliefs stand less chance of survival. Prejudices about the innate criminality of certain races, or women’s enjoyment of rape, or the necessity of beating children, or the moral irrelevance of animal suffering stand a mouse click from debunking. The internet is bad news for those who, paraphrasing Voltaire, would have us commit atrocities because they can make us believe absurdities.²⁵

This is a plausible theory, though not a watertight one. The Republic of Flamers and its legions of bots have proven equally adept at filling cyberspace with absurdities and invective, as comment chains and Twitter feeds attest. Nor has the Republic of Tempters been idle. In the mid-1990s the internet Jekyll, which began life as an academic email and file-sharing network, assumed a second, Hyde-like character as a global libertarian commons of untaxed commerce, seductive pastimes, and vice. As late as the 1960s, observed the psychologist Adam Alter, people swam in waters in which there were relatively few addictive hooks. Chief among them were cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs. The last were expensive, risky, and often hard to obtain. But by the 2010s consumer waters had become filled with hooks. They had names like Facebook, Instagram, porn, email, and online shopping. Fishing had become phishing.²⁶

Alter neglected to mention food addiction, a real-life phenomenon with online triggers like mukbang and fast-food-delivery apps. But adding compulsive overeating and its digital prompts only strengthens the point. In the early twenty-first century—the same period that Pinker identified as a golden age of statistically declining physical violence and expanding rights—people face more, and more cunningly fashioned, inducements to harmful habits than at any point in history.

Though the harms vary from country to country, the global pattern is clear. The average adult living in the world of 2014 was thirty times less likely to die from war or homicide than from a condition linked to bad health habits. These include familiar killers like smoking, drinking, drug use, and unprotected extramarital sex as well as relative newcomers like overeating, salt- and sugar-rich diets, techno-sloth, and distracted driving. It is as if the worst angels of our nature emerged at the same moment as our best. Even if Pinker is right about the pacifying and humanitarian implications of electronic communication, the same underlying technological revolution has brought grave risk as well as great opportunity in its wake.²⁷

As they multiplied, the digital hooks became sharper. In September 2006 Facebook was just another “fun” site, a novelty open to anyone who was thirteen years old and in possession of a valid email address. Ten years later it was an obsession, with more than a billion daily active users, a claim on the attention of nearly 40 percent of the global online population, and the foundation of the world’s fifth most valuable corporation. None of this was accidental. Like food engineers, designers of social media platforms and video games rely on pleasure’s traditional art of combination. The difference is that, instead of sugar, salt, and fat, they select from a menu of psychological ingredients. The big six are compelling goals just beyond the user’s immediate reach; unpredictable but stimulating feedback; a sense of incremental progress and hard-won mastery; tasks or levels that gradually become more challenging; tensions that demand resolution; and social connections to like-minded users. Insiders call the social aspect the “rewards of the tribe.” Tribes punish, too. “You’ve got to keep up with the virtual Joneses,” explained Ryan Van Cleave, an English professor who lost his job at Clemson because he was playing World of Warcraft sixty hours a week. When he finally quit, to avoid losing his family, he suffered drenching sweats, nausea, and headaches.²⁸

A product does not have to be a game to have game-like effects. Instagram, a photo-sharing app that ballooned from 1 million users in 2010 to 700 million in 2017, offers a textbook example of variable reinforcement. Some posts bomb. Others get lots of likes. Users chase likes by continuously posting photos and constantly returning to the site to support their friends. Instagram is simple, quick, and universal, being visual, linked to platforms like Twitter and Facebook, and requiring no language fluency. And it is, like, addictive. “I wake up in the morning and my heart is racing out of my chest,” said one user. “How many new followers did I get? How many people did I lose? What am I going to post today?”²⁹

Nir Eyal, an applied psychologist and former video game designer, has called Instagram a meticulously designed, habituating product unleashed—his word—on consumers who make it part of their daily routine. They do so because Instagram and similar apps exploit small stressors like boredom, frustration, or FOMO by turning them into internal triggers, prompting “an almost instantaneous and often mindless action to quell the negative sensation.” Successful product designers know how to combine psychology and technology to scratch these itches, forming bonds of positive association and strong habits good for their bottom line.³⁰

Just how good became apparent in 2012, when Facebook paid $1 billion to acquire Instagram, yet to reach its second birthday. The investment proved a bargain. Most of Facebook’s activity involves looking at other people’s photos, and Instagram is ideally suited for targeting ads. Foodies snapped three-star meals, quilters quilting bees, skiers their favorite resorts. “This data is WORTH S***LOADS!” tech enthusiast Robert Scoble told Forbes, referring to information about user preferences. It became worth even more when Instagram added video capacity in 2013. Facebook had a window into its shutterbugs’ souls—and into their vices, when they broke the rules by sharing illicit drug ads and pornographic video clips using hardto-detect Arabic hashtags.³¹

Whether it was forbidden content that drew users to the internet and social media platforms, or mini-hits of stress-relieving information, or both, critics began to detect ill effects of heavy use. With the exception of trauma caused by distracted driving and walking, few of these effects are acute and none toxic in the manner of alcohol or drugs. Internet addicts are not overdose candidates. Their heavy use is instead a slow poison, one whose cumulative toll is cognitive and moral.

The primary danger, particularly with smartphones, is constant distraction from personal conversation, sleep, driving, study, reflection, practice, and work, which translates into difficulty achieving or maintaining intimacy, health, safety, knowledge, creativity, expertise, and socially constructive flow states. Like gambling machines, social media and other digital diversions offer alternative flow states through virtual shortcuts that exact their price in money, time, and diminished real-life accomplishments, satisfactions, and tolerance for electronically unvarnished life itself. “It was an unpleasant surprise,” wrote a Mexican student who participated in the abstinence experiment, “to realize that I am in a state of constant distraction, as if my real life and my virtual life were coexisting in different planes, but in equal time.”³²

Or unequal time, given that there are only so many hours in a day. “Facebook remains the greatest distraction from work I’ve ever had,” the writer Zadie Smith confessed, “and I loved it for that.” With a literary career at stake, she broke off the affair after two months. She was wise to do so. The novelist Jonathan Franzen, who wrote portions of The Corrections wearing a blindfold and earplugs, doubted whether anyone working with an internet connection was capable of writing good fiction. Professors doubted whether students so equipped could sustain original arguments, fears borne out by research showing social media use inversely correlated with grades. Psychologists showed that mere proximity to a silenced smartphone diminishes cognitive ability, particularly in habitual users. Lit up or vibrating, the devices are guaranteed to divert attention, as is any form of regular online access.³³

The condition acquired a name, “time suck,” defined in the Urban Dictionary as something “engrossing and addictive, but that keeps you from doing things that are actually important, like earning a living, or eating meals, or caring for your children.” Like other forms of addictive behavior, time suck is self-perpetuating. If dereliction from real-life duties creates stress, or immersion in the virtual world creates loneliness, anxiety, and depression, then escapism is just the thing. A remark George Koob made about the spiraling distress of alcoholism— “People often drink because they don’t feel good, but drinking makes them feel worse, so they drink more”— applies equally to digital addictions.³⁴

To the extent that they undermine self-control, the internet and linked mobile devices have become part of what Pinker, in another context, called the decivilizing process. It is a label that can be applied to all forms of limbic capitalism, though not to capitalism per se. The production and exchange of unexceptionable goods and services has generally acted as a progressive force. Market competition benefited ordinary people, few of whom cared to live in a town with one store run by a state mono poly. Mercantile and future orientation, industrial capitalism fostered traits of self-discipline, future orientation, and efficient time management. And capitalism produced the wealth that funded institutions of public health, safety, and education that let people lead more salubrious, secure, and rational lives. These conditions Pinker associated with the long-term decline in violence and brutality. And yet these same characteristics and circumstances would also seem to be antithetical to vice and addiction.³⁵

So we have a mystery. Why did violence and cruelty decline while commercial vices and novel addictions proliferated? One answer is that technologies of violence— weapons—and technologies of addiction— weaponized pleasures—are psychologically distinctive. The pulses of missile-launch officers going on watch remain steady as they seat themselves at their computer consoles. The pulses of video poker addicts race as they seat themselves at their beeping machines. “Human behavior is goal-directed, not stimulus-driven,” Pinker wrote, “and what matters most to the incidence of violence is whether one person wants another dead.” Actually, behavior is both goal-directed and stimulus-driven. Yet his point stands. Technology made weapons much more lethal, but the lethality failed to translate into higher sustained rates of violent deaths because other historical developments made people less inclined to kill one another. Those developments amount to a checklist of modernity, starting with personal security under the rule of law and the expansion of mutually beneficial trade. Pinker called trade “gentle commerce”; his ally Robert Wright, a non-zero-sum game. “If you ask me why I am not in favor of bombing Japan,” Wright observed, “I’m only half- joking when I say that they built my car. . . . To the extent that you think someone’s welfare is positively correlated with yours, you’re more likely to cut them a break.”³⁶

But what if, instead of cars, the trading partner made junk food or addictive drugs and apps? Limbic capitalism is capitalism’s evil twin. It is stimulus-based, ungentle, and zero sum. It produces large and sustained profits (and with them the means of stymying opposition) through commerce in exceptionable products like pornography and cigarettes or, in the case of food and phones, quotidian products made exceptionable by addictive engineering. The good twin and the evil twin are joined, not at the hip, but at the historically contingent point where science and technology made it possible to turn a commodity into a vice. Sometimes the process was inadvertent. Hypodermic medication was a medical breakthrough that carried, unexpectedly, a greater risk of addiction to narcotic drugs. But from the late nineteenth century on, vice-product invention, refinement, and marketing became deliberate processes. These processes undercut the Enlightenment hope that gentle commerce would lift all boats. What actually happened was that conjoined-twin capitalism raised some boats and sank others. That is why mainstream anti-vice activists and their public health descendants preferred regulation and selective prohibitions to outright socialism. Reform was about killing the evil twin.

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Doublespeak

The moral justification for elimination of vice is straightforward: Destroy predacious products before they destroy us and our communities. To which the predators reply, it is not about the products. It is about individuals. No matter how tempting our lures, people can still resist them. They have made some variant of this argument for every addictive product and pastime, digital or other wise. All that is necessary is facility in doublespeak. Nir Eyal gave a textbook demonstration in two lectures before the Habit Summit behavioral design conference, the annual gathering (for up to $1,700 a seat) of limbic capitalism’s digital clan.

Eyal devoted his first talk, in 2014, to the four cardinal virtues of habituating product designs. They increase “customer lifetime value,” the total sum of money that can be extracted from a user. They allow greater leeway to increase prices, because of less flexible demand. They supercharge growth with “short viral-cycle time,” meaning that engaged users will quickly recruit others. Finally, they increase consumer “defensibility” against rivals. Up went a slide of a bomber bristling with machine guns. The message was unmistakable. We have you, and we will keep running you through our wringer.³⁷

Three years later, in 2017, Eyal again addressed the Habit Summit. He began with a walk-back of the head-fake variety. Yes, there had been abuses. Distraction was a problem. But it could be dealt with by gentle social pressure. Try saying “Is everything OK?” to the smartphone boors at your restaurant table. Encourage the consumer to download attention-retention apps that block online triggers and limit time spent on the device. Why, he used the apps himself. The social-media-as-drug crowd had it wrong. “We’re not freebasing Facebook and injecting Instagram here,” Eyal said. “We can’t believe we’re powerless. We’re only powerless if we think we are.” All but thumbing his nose at Volkow, he put up a slide of bakery shelves groaning with carbs. “Just as we wouldn’t blame the baker for making such delicious treats, we can’t blame tech makers for making their products so good we want to use them,” he said. “Of course that’s what tech companies will do. And, frankly, do we want it any other way?”³⁸

The managers of Shenzhen-based Tencent, a leading Chinese internet services provider, shared the sentiment. In 2016, a year in which the company reported a 38 percent increase in operating profit, the annual report identified online gaming as an important growth engine. The gains had come through data mining, used to tweak the performance of existing games and gain “deeper insights” into players’ behavior, meaning what kept them online and spending to improve their characters. The big winner was Honor of Kings, a fantasy role-playing game that (this detail omitted from the report) the state- run People’s Daily denounced as a “poison” and a “drug.” Rather than dispute the analogy, Tencent’s managers spun it, telling investors that their strategy for promoting smartphone games was to “engage a large pool of casual gamers and gradually advance them to mid-core and hard-core categories.” Already hard-core players of games like League of Legends could be placated with “attractive new content” prepared with the help of “insights gained from data mining.”³⁹

Some insiders lost their stomach for euphemism and equivocation. In 2017 Loren Brichter, who created the pull-to-refresh mechanism by which users of Twitter and other apps could update their feeds by swiping down on the touchscreen, said he regretted his invention. He called it addictive, a lever on a slot machine. Justin Rosenstein, who coded the like-button prototype, wished he had not bestowed “bright dings of pseudo-pleasure” on a distracted world. Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook’s former vice president for user growth, hated that “the short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse. No cooperation. Misinformation. Mistruth.” It was not, he emphasized, an American problem. It was a global problem, and stubborn in the bargain. Capturing and monetizing eyeballs had become an irresistible game.⁴⁰

Repentant or not, Silicon Valley elites watched out for the eyeballs of their own families. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home,” Apple’s Steve Jobs told an incredulous reporter, who had imagined his dining table tiled with iPads. “Not even close,” Jobs said. He wanted his children to discuss books and history at family meals. The five children of Chris Anderson, former editor of Wired, complained of their parents’ tech-denying rules. “That’s because we have seen the dangers of technology firsthand,” Anderson told the same reporter. “I’ve seen it in myself, I don’t want to see that happen to my kids.” Palihapitiya was more explicit. He didn’t use “this shit” and wouldn’t let his kids, either. Other tech executives and engineers dealt with the problem by imposing time limits, refusing phones to their children before their mid-teens, and never, ever allowing screens in their bedrooms. Extending the low- tech writ beyond their homes, they enrolled their children in prep schools where iPhones, iPads, and even standard laptops were forbidden.⁴¹

No one doubts that, functionally and aesthetically, iPhones and iPads are remarkable technological achievements. But so were the clipper ships that carried opium to China. Creativity and parasitism, splendor and hypocrisy run through the history of limbic capitalism like bright, intertwined threads. Those who count the money understand this reality. They deal with the unseemly conflict as most of us do, by compartmentalization.

The champion in this regard was Martin Stern, the architect who conceived the high-rise casino megaresort. One day in 1969 Stern was driving toward the International Hotel, his Las Vegas prototype. Approaching an intersection, he gazed up at his creation, oblivious to the red light he was about to run. He was transfixed. “This is a goddamned good-looking building,” he told his startled teenage son. “This is a really goddamned beautiful building.” It was, too, and it would be copied all over the world. But what Stern did not admire was his building’s principal attraction, gambling. He thought the table games and slot machines he had cunningly laid out were “stupid” pastimes for tourists and losers. He was neither.⁴²

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The Post-Spatial Underworld

Though Stern’s glittering mousetrap had three physical dimensions, it also operated in the fourth dimension of time—more precisely, in the nighttime. Historians and sociologists think of the nighttime as a temporal frontier whose colonization was made possible by artificial lighting, electrification, and motor vehicles. Victorian pub crawlers and prostitutes were early nighttime pioneers, in that they used gas and electric lights to expand their scope of operations. In postwar Japan gamblers and bar and cabaret workers extended the night with the help of amphetamine “awakening drugs.” Stern took the next logical step, creating a self-contained, air-conditioned, parking-equipped, nonstop pleasure palace. Inside it day and night were as irrelevant as wall clocks, omitted to keep gamblers lost in play.⁴³

The mice still had to reach Stern’s cheese. That is why transportation speed and price mattered so much to Las Vegas and other pleasure meccas. In the 1950s Chicago to Las Vegas by car was two days, six meals, and a motel bill. A $75 tourist ticket on a TWA Constellation reduced the trip to five hours, with plenty of time left for an evening of play. Over the next three decades large, fuel-efficient jets and deregulated fares dramatically increased tourist volume. In 1958 about 60 commercial flights landed daily at Las Vegas. By 1988 well over 500 did so.⁴⁴

It follows that, before the internet, the history of pleasure, vice, and addiction was largely a history of spatial and temporal expansion. There were places, at first isolated places, where people discovered, cultivated, processed, blended, and traded food-drugs, until eventually psychoactive commodity chains spanned the world. There were urban districts, like Harbin’s Garden of Grand Vision, where people sought or tolerated commercial vices and where addiction-centered subcultures took root. And there were late-night hours, after the streetlights flickered on, when rouged streetwalkers emerged from the shadows to troll for customers.

Anti-vice activists made it their mission to shrink these domains to a minimum. They won some victories. Yet, despite their sustained campaign against illicit drug use and cigarettes, they lost the larger war to contain and marginalize commercial vice. By the 1990s, one had only to switch on cable television, stroll the aisles of the local video store, or glance at the magazine rack to understand that, in the Protestant nations that had been its cradle, anti-vice activism was on the ropes.⁴⁵

The internet delivered the knockout blow, launching anti-vice activism out of the ring and landing it somewhere in the third row of seats. A restrictive strategy predicated on physical supply chokepoints (open your trunk), human checkpoints (show me your ID), and regulation of space and time (no ads near schools, no selling after hours) had scant chance against a technology operating in the virtual fifth dimension of a globally connected, post-spatial environment. Anti- vice activism did not compute. Digital commerce did, and in ways that transformed the availability, affordability, anonymity, and advertising of vice.

The obvious example is sex. Before the internet children received informal instruction on sex from peers and media, formal instruction from teachers and parents. After the internet children had only to enter a string in a search engine. An analysis of the top thousand “how to” searches in the United States in late 2007 revealed that 17.3 percent involved sex, including four of the top ten. The wording of these four—how to have sex, how to kiss, how to get pregnant, how to make out—suggested that young fingers were doing the typing. Porn videos offered advanced erotic instruction, or what passed for it in the objectifying world of internet sex. Those seeking guidance for illegal activities accounted for another 9.5 percent of the top how-to searches. Growing marijuana led the pack. Though readily accessible, do-it-yourself vice was not entirely anonymous or free. Tracking cookies, viruses, and malware exacted their toll, and pornographic websites often charged for regular access. But it was easier than dealing with strangers in dicey neighborhoods, or running the risk of being seen there. Silicon Valley executives knew what they were doing when they forbade computer screens in their children’s bedrooms.⁴⁶

Constructive knowledge is also on offer. How to write a résumé came in at number five in the 2007 study, how to write a book at sixty-two. A few keystrokes allow internet users to immerse themselves in the works of Caravaggio or Callas. The question, though, is relative traffic In 2018, a search for “how to grow marijuana” yielded fifteen times as many hits as “Callas arias.” The headline lesson of the content surveys is that the internet provides a mostly frictionless entry into what used to be called “the life.” The life was the underworld, an exciting but precarious place where outlaw players hustled, pimped, gambled, got high, and did anything to scrounge a buck. The life was a term of class, subculture, and place, more often heard in poor neighborhoods than in rich ones. But with the advent of the internet and social media, every one was virtually in the life, no matter where they lived.⁴⁷

Alcohol marketers, who knew that up to 20 percent of sales went to underage users, quickly spotted the internet’s potential. By 1995 liquor companies had begun sponsoring sites offering giveaways, promotions, and information about how to play drinking games. When social media arrived, alcohol multinationals tied their brands to pop-culture “influencers.” Most of the ads are accessible to underage viewers, who upload their favorites to YouTube. Tweeters sing alcohol’s praises. Facebook and Myspace users post photos and videos of themselves and other kids getting drunk or high. Just as American Indians had learned to drink from the worst possible tutors, fur trappers and backwoods traders prone to riotous binges, wired teenagers learn to drink from peers who swill booze, hug toilets, and pass out on the floor. Pathological learning is social as well as chemical and commercial.⁴⁸

The cybervice portal operates in closed societies as well as in open ones. As early as 1995, Chinese communist officials denounced the threat of “pornographic and reactionary” internet material. Over the next two decades, China’s business deeds often spoke louder than its official words. Chinese manufacturers supplied most of the sex toys sold (and demonstrated) on the internet. Chinese software companies like Tencent prospered by designing addictive online games. And Chinese firms supplied precursor chemicals, advertised on the internet and exported in bulk, used to make deadly synthetic drugs. Money had no ideological color.⁴⁹

The Chinese were consistent in one regard. Their main worry was young people, a concern echoed in every national survey of internet vice exposure. Studies of pornography consistently find that neophytes enter the digital underworld at an early age. In 2003 Australian researchers learned that 84 percent of boys and 60 percent of girls aged sixteen and seventeen had accidentally or deliberately viewed internet pornography, including “images of virtually any sexual practice imaginable.” These figures, likely underestimates, were compiled at a time when only one Australian home in three was connected to the internet. Kids found a way. In Iceland they tapped in with game consoles. In Kenya students used internet cafes and university dorm rooms, where they downloaded pornography and staged blue- movie nights. One undergraduate was turned on by a friend who sent him a porn link. “Since then I have craved for more sites like that,” he said. “It is very addictive.”⁵⁰

The internet provides a means of accessing commercial sex, as well as experiencing it virtually. By the late 1990s New York City prostitutes were advertising escort services online. Booking dates by computer was easier and safer than dodging police and street predators. Classified advertising websites like Craigslist and Backpage (which was shut down in 2018) ran ads for prostitutes and pimps, including those who trafficked in minors. Backpage, a Minnesota prosecutor charged in 2016, was “the platform by which children are bought and sold.” Another prosecutor called it a “dystopian hell.” But hell has its defenders, including internet trade associations and tech companies that resist crackdowns and censorship for fear of adverse precedents. Vice wants to be, if not free, at least readily available.⁵¹

Vice also wants to be mobile. “I can say to my phone, ‘Siri, where are the hookers?’ ” observed Robert Weiss, a therapist who specializes in sex addictions. “And it will geo-locate escort services within a half-mile, a mile, two miles, three miles, with phone numbers and maps and reviews of the different prostitutes.” In India, where prostitution was traditionally confined to red- light districts, prostitutes abandoned brothels, bought cheap mobile phones, took an assumed name, and visited clients who called or texted. Hello, I’m Neelan, and my terms are cash before disrobing. The business being flexible and anonymous, part-timers ventured into the market. Men liked the convenience of mobile sex. AIDS workers took a dimmer view. Safe-sex counseling worked better when prostitution was physically concentrated than when it was digitally dispersed.⁵²

Websites, dark or otherwise, began to traffic in drugs and drug paraphernalia. Online shoppers bought everything from powdered caffeine, more dangerous than it sounded, to fentanyl, every bit as lethal as its reputation. By 2014 an estimated forty to sixty thousand websites offered drugs without a prescription. Those with names like buyoxycontinonline.com left no doubt as to their intention. Other sites provided information on how to con doctors for narcotics. Faking fibromyalgia was a good bet. Just be sure to pick a doctor on the wrong side of the tracks and pay cash for your appointment.⁵³

Rights to choice drug URLs command top dollar. In 2011 pot entrepreneur Justin Hartfield paid $4.2 million for marijuana.com. When governments dispensed with the pretense of prescription cannabis, he reasoned, he could cut out the local pot shop and sell directly. Marijuana.com would be the new wine.com. Meanwhile help was at hand for male customers worried about drug screening tests. They could order a Screeny Weeny, a fake penis connected to a bag of synthetic urine that could be strapped on and squeezed to emit a stream of clean urine. The manufacturer offered circumcised and uncircumcised versions in a variety of skin tones. Headshops provided refills. They took orders online.⁵⁴

Just as important is information about drugs: what dose to take, how to inject, how to produce your own. Digital know-how helped transform European and North American cannabis markets. With the help of information, seeds, and specialized equipment acquired through the internet, domestic cultivators began growing potent strains of marijuana such as sinsemilla and nederwiet. High-THC domestic pot competed well with, and often replaced, traditional smokes like Moroccan hashish or commercial-grade Mexican marijuana. Legitimate nurseries and hardware stores got in on the action, selling growing media, cloning trays, high-intensity lighting, generators, fans, and dehumidifiers for indoor cultivation. The largest and most sophisticated operations added computers and other automated equipment that relieved growers of monitoring chores and cut labor costs. Growing pot became as rationalized, and as digitized, as anything else.⁵⁵

Automated pot farming can also be read as a dystopian augury. Futurologists (and one historian- turned- futurologist, Yuval Noah Harari) have argued that the big story of the recent past is the uncoupling of consciousness from intelligence. Kludgy human brains have failed to keep up with digital algorithms. The gap keeps widening as information-processing power keeps doubling. Homo sapiens is bound for the evolutionary scrap heap. People will be replaced by smart machines that—or who—dispense with most or all of their economically useless forerunners. We face extinction by design.⁵⁶

That prospect should prompt skepticism. Library shelves and video bins are littered with dystopias that failed to materialize. Yet the brief history of digital addictions suggests that there are other ways that digital devices can parasitize their creators. They not only excel at data processing, they excel at recognizing, predicting, and manipulating human feelings. “Hey, Siri, where are the hookers?” teaches the iPhone something, not just the iPhone’s owner. If information and the ability to process it are what really count, who is the owner and who the owned in such circumstances? With machine intelligence divorced from conscience as well as consciousness, and with algorithms deployed in the service of habituation as well as profit, who is to say that the singularity will not be an addictive one, with a fading species’ penultimate act seeking succor in digital opiates? Of course, the skepticism rule applies to this scenario, too. With one footnote.

Some of us are already there.

David Courtwright

David Courtwright earned a doctorate in history from Rice University and took up the study of addictive behaviors (Dark Paradise, Addicts Who Survived, Forces of Habit, and The Age of Addiction); the social worlds of frontier environments (Violent Land and Sky as Frontier); and the late-twentieth-century culture war (No Right Turn: Conservative Politics in a Liberal America). He pursued these interests with the support of the American Historical Association, NASA, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the University of Richmond, and the University of North Florida, where he is presidential professor emeritus. He lives in Jacksonville, Florida, and is writing a history of the U.S. opioid crisis — this time on his own nickel.

You can find this post’s footnotes here.

In April I gave my third — and most urgent — TED Talk. It’s about stopping the takeover of childhood by technologies that were not designed with children’s welfare in mind. To change course in democratic nations will require a major change in public opinion as a signal to political leaders that the current course is not acceptable. To that end, I advocate that anyone who cares about children should take a techno-skeptical perspective, and I offer three general principles that would reduce the harm to children from current and future technologies:

1. Protect brain development through puberty.

2. Prioritize people and books in education, not screens.

3. Beware of artificial relationships for minors.

The challenge is enormous, and the first half of the talk sounds dark. But as readers of After Babel know, this is also a time of hope. The two years since the release of The Anxious Generation have shown us that when we work together, we can put some genies back into their bottles; we can reclaim childhood and create a future where our children can grow into flourishing, connected adults.

The team at TED just published the recording, and I’m pleased to share it (along with the transcript if you’d prefer to read) with the After Babel community.

– Jon

Why You Should Be a Techno-Skeptic

Transcript

To begin, I invite you to remember a time in your life — a period in your life — when you felt fully integrated into a group. Maybe you were on a sports team, maybe you played in a band, or maybe you just had a great group of friends that loved to hang out together. Or maybe it was at work. Maybe you were part of a team trying to do something big and difficult under time pressure, but you all pulled together.

Whatever it was, my question to you is: Does that memory glow? Do you look back on that as something special and magical, that time in your life?

The great biologist E.O. Wilson says that humans aren’t just social like dogs and chimpanzees, we are ultrasocial, like bees and ants. We have a massive division of labor. And we love to do things that put us in a mindset of “one for all and all for one.”

Yet our hives aren’t made out of wax. They are made out of shared culture and shared experiences.

My talk today isn’t really about bees and ants, it’s actually about technology and childhood. But let’s see what we can see about technology and childhood if we start with this premise that human beings are ultrasocial creatures with deep needs for community and communion.

As a social psychologist who studies the effects of digital tech on young people, what I see from this perspective is very concerning. I think it justifies a general sense of wariness, or skepticism, about the technologies that are pushing their way into childhood today.

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So let’s start with social media. In the early 2010s, teens traded in their flip phones for smartphones, and the phone-based childhood began. Their social lives moved on to social media.

At first we thought this would be fine, maybe even better. But quantity pushes out quality and they started spending a lot less time with each other in person.

And that’s a problem for our ultrasocial species because a lot of our evolved bonding mechanisms involve our bodies. So we connect with people — we bond with people — when we eat with them, when we share food with them. When we share laughter. When we move together in synchrony, even if it’s just walking next to each other. And we bond together when we touch.

But when everything moved online, teens across the developed world lost most of those bonding experiences. Levels of loneliness and anxiety began to rise almost immediately, in many countries simultaneously. And this wasn’t just an historical correlation. There are now multiple lines of evidence showing that social media is causing harm at an industrial scale. One line is the dozens of experiments showing that when you randomly assign people (these are usually with young adults) when you randomly assign people to greatly reduce their social media use for at least a week, their levels of anxiety and depression go down. And one of those studies was done by Meta.

But what I’ve learned in the last two years is that I grossly underestimated the damage in The Anxious Generation — because I focused on the mental health outcomes. That’s where we have the best data, that’s where we’re doing the most work.

But I now believe that even larger damage is the diminishment of the human capacity to pay sustained attention.

One third of all American teens say that they are on a social media platform “almost constantly,” throughout the day. And the main thing they’re doing on those social media platforms is watching very short videos. Young people call it “brain rot,” which is a funny term but it might really be true. Because the adolescent brain is always a brain that’s being remodeled. The neural network of a child has to convert itself, has to rewire itself, to become the neural network of an adult. And that rewiring process — the neurons finding each other — that’s shaped by whatever you’re doing every day. And it’s shaped by whatever everyone else says is prestigious.

Which means that puberty is therefore the worst possible time for a human being to be on social media. For our ultrasocial species, that rewiring should be guided by huge amounts of social interaction, in the real world, not by TikTok’s algorithm.

So here’s the first principle of what we might call techno-skepticism: Protect brain development through puberty. That’s why it’s so important for countries to follow Australia’s example: let’s just raise the age for opening social media accounts to 16 as Australia did.

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Now let’s look at EdTech.

Of course there are good uses of technology in education. My kids have learned a lot from Khan Academy. But I’m very concerned about what happened when we started putting computers and tablets on kids’ desks — this is the so-called “one-to-one” device policies.

Computers and tablets are multifunction entertainment systems. If kids can get to the internet, they will play video games, and watch short videos, watch YouTube Shorts, and even porn. As soon as we brought in one-to-one devices in the 2010s, national test scores began dropping in the USA. And they dropped in many other countries — especially in the countries that most firmly embraced EdTech.

Now I can’t prove that these declines were caused by the screens and apps that we put on their desks. But consider this: Sweden led the world in digitizing education, in the 2010s. They got rid of textbooks, they put a device on every desk, they even mandated that nursery schools had to use tablets. But after years of experience and years of declining test scores, Sweden reversed course. In 2023, they announced that they’re going back to textbooks, they’re pulling out a lot of the devices, they’re going back to books and handwriting, especially in the earlier grades. Their top research institute, the Karolinska Institute, issued a report backing the government’s position, saying: “There is clear scientific evidence that digital tools impair, rather than enhance, student learning.”

And consider this: many of us professors are banishing computers — laptops — from our classrooms. Many of my students say they learn better when people aren’t on devices — when they don’t have a computer and the multitasking staring them in the face. But if college students can’t learn that well when there is a computer in front of them, how do we expect eight-year-olds to do it?

School is an intrinsically social experience. Students are not learning machines. They’re ultrasocial human beings who need to connect with their teachers and their fellow students. They don’t need to connect with more screens.

So here is the second principle of techno-skepticism: Prioritize people and books in education, not screens. We should never have let laptops and tablets spread throughout K–12 education without extensive testing and evidence of safety and efficacy. But we’re about to make the exact same mistake with AI.

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Do you see the pattern here? We let social media companies take over our kids’ social lives, and they’ve harmed our kids’ social lives, and their mental health. We let EdTech companies take over our kids’ schools, and they appear to be doing more harm than good.

Now AI companies are coming for their relationships. To be their friends, their therapists, and even their sexual partners. What could go wrong?

We’re already seeing massive cognitive offloading and learning loss. When students have access to AI, they pass the critical thinking over to AI. We’re already seeing young people becoming dependent on ChatGPT to make their personal decisions and draft their texts and their emails.

And we’re seeing a booming AI toy market. Chatbots are being put into dolls and teddy bears. These chatbots are super responsive to the child — they’re always there to offer comfort, to be there for the child. And of course the parents are often busy. But if the chatbot is super responsive while the parents aren’t as responsive, the child’s attachment system — which is looking for “who in my environment is the person who responds to me?” — may well imprint or focus on the chatbot, which is going to compromise the relationship with their own parents.

So here’s the third principle of techno-skepticism: Beware of artificial relationships for minors. Give them nothing that conveys that it understands the child, or that it cares. Because it doesn’t.

There could be a role for AI therapists someday, but how about we require years of testing before we let anyone push it out into childhood?

Now, I’ve just told you that we need to greatly reduce the role of these technologies in our kids’ lives. Some of you may be thinking: “Now hold on a second. I want my child to be successful in the digital future, the digital workplace, so why not give them a head start?”

Two reasons. The first is that these technologies are extremely easy to use. Your kid doesn’t need a 10-year head start to master social media and AI.

Second, because now we know that being a digital native does not confer an advantage. For many kids, it’s a curse because it messes with the kid’s attention systems and their motivational systems. It teaches them that there’s always a little bit of reward — always a little bit of dopamine — available just one swipe away. And that undermines the ability to do difficult or sustained cognitive work, like reading a book.

I teach a course at New York University called “Flourishing,” and two years ago we were talking about attention fragmentation, and one of my students — who’s a very heavy TikTok user — said, “I take out a book, I read a sentence, I get bored, I go to TikTok.”

So if we want our children to be successful in the digital future, we need to protect them from the damage being done in the digital present.

So let’s return to the hive. What do we see when we look at technology and childhood through this lens? When we start from the premise that humans are ultrasocial.

What we see is that these technologies are being built by people who don’t understand that premise. They think of people as consumers with social needs that can be satisfied by machines. They think that it’s good to free people from dependence on other people.

Let’s suppose, just for the sake of argument, that they really can give us excellent friends and excellent romantic partners. (In fact just yesterday at lunch, Esther Perel told me she just did her first couples therapy with a mixed couple: a human male and an AI female.) So is this liberation? Do we no longer have to depend on other people to meet our social needs? Would that make us happy — if we no longer have to depend on others?

Absolutely not. Because that would mean that nobody depends on us. Nobody is relying on us. We are not important to anyone.

So is this our fate? Is there any way to stop this lonely digital future?

Yes, there is.

When The Anxious Generation came out two years ago, one of the main objections I got was that I was too late. “The technology is here to stay,” people said. “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”

But in the last few years, humanity has mobilized, and we are putting the genie back in the bottle. Mothers were the first to organize and take action. They were quickly joined by fathers, and by a lot of Gen Z activist organizations. And also by many governors and many heads of state.

Together, we’re getting phones out of schools around the world. Teachers are so thrilled to get their students back. And one of the things that they tell us — it’s the most common thing we hear: “We hear laughter in the hallways again.”

We’re getting the age raised for social media to 16. More than a dozen countries have already committed to following Australia’s bold example.

We’re seeing parents letting go and trusting their children to ride bicycles with their friends and to do errands so that they can feel useful. I’ll give you one example: a mom in Utah gave her seven-year-old son the “Let Grow Challenge” — that’s where you say to the kid, “What’s something that you think you can do on your own?” — and her son said, “I think I can go into a Chick-fil-A restaurant and get us lunch.” So she said OK. And in the video you see the mother sitting in the car and you see the kid coming out of the store, and he’s got the bags and this huge smile and he says, “That was so fun!” And then the mom says, “Were you nervous?” And he says, “Yeah, my legs are still shivering, but I want to do it again!”

These are the stories that most move and most thrill me, because this movement is not primarily about technology. It’s about reclaiming childhood in the real world, with real people.

So what on earth do we do about the robot teachers and all the other future waves of technology that are going to push their way into childhood without adequate safety testing?

It sometimes seems overwhelming. So let me repeat the three rules of techno-skepticism:

I think techno-skepticism is the right attitude for people today — especially for parents and legislators. Because when it comes to children, these companies have earned our distrust.

Techno-skepticism means that from now on, we put the burden of proof on them. Let them prove that their products are safe. We treat them like any other maker of potentially dangerous consumer products: we make them prove that their products are safe before they push them out into the world. And we hold them responsible for their safety lapses.

In conclusion, human beings are ultrasocial creatures who need to matter to one another in order to flourish. We are so brilliant that we’ve invented technologies that can replace us, that can take us out of each other’s lives.

But human connection is not optional. It’s who we are. So we’re going to have to fight for a future in which our children can grow into flourishing, connected adults.

As a social psychologist, I’m used to speaking to academic audiences, making arguments from evidence. This was different. I spoke to the graduates — members of Gen Z — to offer advice about how to flourish in a world of technologies that raise many obstacles to human flourishing. I drew on the class I teach at NYU Stern, called “Flourishing,” which is my favorite class to teach, ever. Over the 12 years of teaching the course, my students and I have found techniques to make us all smarter, emotionally stronger, and more sociable. These are the key changes to increase one’s odds of success in love and in work. And success in love and work is the best validated formula for flourishing.

I wanted to share a few of those discoveries with the entire graduating class. And now I want to share those techniques and ideas with the After Babel community. I hope it will “earn” your attention. (You can find the syllabus for the course, and the reading list, here.)

– Jon

NYU began holding commencement ceremonies here in Yankee Stadium in 2009. Since then, graduates have heard from prime ministers, presidents, Supreme Court justices, movie stars, civil-rights crusaders, and Taylor Swift. So I know what you’re all thinking: Finally, they brought in a social psychologist!

Perhaps that’s why over the past few weeks, as I’ve thought about what I might say to all of you, I’ve felt grateful. I’ve felt excited. But most of all, I’ve felt a strong sense of responsibility. Because I am part of NYU. I love this university, and I love the students that I have the privilege to teach. That’s why I feel a strong responsibility to do my small part to make this the great and memorable day that all of you, and your families, deserve.

Graduates, I see how hard you have worked. And I love how you also throw yourselves into the life of New York City. Because all of us made the same deal when we chose NYU: We traded in the campus quad for Washington Square, and the football stadium for the city that never sleeps.

Here’s something else I know: Most families have stories of struggle and perseverance, many of which began on distant continents. But all our family stories converge here, today, in Yankee Stadium, with a loved one graduating from New York University. So to all of the parents, grandparents, and other relatives and friends in the audience, and to all the teachers or anyone else who helped you reach this day, let us all thank you and applaud you.

As I sat down to write this address, I thought back to my own commencement, in May of 1985. I remember the mix of emotions I felt as I sat with my fellow graduates in our caps and gowns. On the one hand: pride, excitement, gratitude, and love for my friends. On the other, the sadness of knowing that an amazing chapter of my life was ending, and the fear of not knowing what would come next.

Our commencement speaker that day was a former Massachusetts congressman who said that in 20 years we would not remember anything from his speech. He was wrong: I still remember that he said we would not remember anything from his speech.

His words ring as a reminder to approach my role here with humility. So, while I will share several lessons that I’ve learned in my life and my research, if there’s just one thing from my address that you remember tomorrow, next week, and 20 years from now, make it this: Treasure your attention.

In 2014, when she was nearly 80 years old, the poet Mary Oliver wrote a short poem titled “Instructions for Living a Life.” It goes like this:

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

It sounds simple. But paying attention is in fact one of the most challenging and meaningful things you can do. Because what you pay attention to shapes what you care about. And what you care about shapes who you become.

Taking control of your own attention has never been easy — which is why it’s one of the many things this university has tried to prepare you to do. In 2005, the writer David Foster Wallace gave one of this century’s best-known commencement addresses, at Kenyon College. He said, “the really significant education-in-thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.” He was right, and he seemed to anticipate that, two decades later, there would be so many powerful people and big companies trying to take that choice away from you.

They compete with each other to capture your attention. Think about that phrase. It acknowledges that your attention is valuable. But it also reveals that some of the biggest corporations in human history aren’t trying to earn your attention, or deserve your attention. They’re trying to take it from you.

Consider just one example. Meta is valued at well over a trillion dollars, even though few of us have given it any money. How is that possible? Because it invented a business model that extracts attention from nearly half of all human beings and sells it to advertisers. Other industries followed: video games, dating, gambling — even investing has been gamified and optimized to keep us all staring and swiping. We’ve all had the experience of picking up our phone, maybe for a good reason, only to find ourselves, an hour later, mindlessly scrolling. That’s not an accident. That’s our phones and apps, doing what they were designed to do.

Let me tell you what I have learned, from my research and my teaching, about how to resist, how to reclaim your attention. I’ve taught a course at NYU’s Stern School of Business, now for 12 years, called “Flourishing.” On day one of that course, I ask students to do something simple: Turn off nearly all the notifications on their phones. Do you get an alert every time an email comes in? Many young people do, so, turn it off. Alerts for breaking news? Turn those off, too.

A week later, I ask them, “Did you miss anything really important?” The answer is almost always no. Then I ask: “Did you gain anything important?” Yes. Students are amazed at how much better life feels when they remove a hundred interruptions from their day. When they check things when they choose to, rather than giving a company the right to interrupt them as it pleases.

In the third week of my “Flourishing” course, I ask my students to take part in an exercise that they think is going to be a lot harder: I ask them to delete social-media apps from their phones, just for a week. I don’t ask them to stop using social media entirely. Many of them continue to use it through a web browser. But adding that little bit of friction for one week, by having to log in on a web browser rather than just pulling out a phone without thinking, puts us back in charge of deciding where our attention goes.

By the end of the week, most students are surprised by how easy it was. More than that, they’re surprised by how much freer they feel. They got back precious hours each day, and a feeling of agency over how to spend that time.

So treasure your attention more than the people who want to take it from you. Never forget what it’s worth. For Meta, it’s a trillion dollars. For you and your life, it is priceless.

Once you’re in control of your attention, you can start to ask yourself one of life’s most exciting questions: “What do I want to do?”

Of course, the answer to this question is going to be different for each of you. But looked at in another way, I think the answer may be the same for all of you. What should you do? You should do hard things.

This is among the most universal pieces of advice from our ancestors. In the words of two great philosophers — Friedrich Nietzsche and Kelly Clarkson — what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. The psychological foundation of this great truth is that humans, and especially young people, are not fragile. They are antifragile, to use a term coined by NYU professor Nassim Taleb. Fragile things break when they get knocked over or challenged, so we need to protect them vigilantly. Antifragile things grow stronger, so we need to expose them to challenges, diligently.

So how should you live these next postgraduate years, these years of transition? By repeatedly turning your attention toward doing hard things. Throw yourself into your next job, or academic program, or whatever your next adventure is. Take chances. Say yes to anything that will expand your capabilities.

And I’m not just talking about your career. Devote your precious attention to taking chances in relationships, too. You’ve heard it said that “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” That line becomes even more resonant once you understand that your heart is antifragile, too.

Which brings me to my final point. Because along with the question “What should I turn my attention towards?” comes a related question: “Whom should I spend my attention on?”

Once again, the answer is going to be different for each of you. And once again, the answer may also be the same for all of you: You should spend a lot of your attention on real people in the real world.

During your time at NYU, in-person connection was built into the architecture of your lives. You ran into friends constantly. Or maybe someone texted “pizza?”— and 10 minutes later, you were getting pizza. Shared experiences are easily launched in college. That’s part of what makes this place so special.

But today one of the most common experiences of adulthood — especially in ambitious cities, among high-achieving people — is a strange kind of loneliness. You can be messaging people all day. You can see everyone’s lives unfold in real time. And yet, despite all this so-called connection, you may find yourself feeling increasingly alone. Friendship now requires much more intentionality than it once did. So my advice, as you think about what does and doesn’t deserve your attention, is to reach out to others, even when it feels awkward.

Call someone you love just to say hi. Invite someone to dinner. Say yes when someone invites you. Be the one who makes things happen in the real world, and others will be grateful to you.

Think about your most memorable moments from your time at NYU. I’m willing to bet that almost none of them happened on a screen. Most of them probably happened while spending time with people who made you laugh or helped you grow. Keep making those moments happen.

So, NYU Class of 2026, I want to end where I started, with Mary Oliver’s instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

I cannot predict what your future will hold. But I can tell you this: At your age, at this point in your life, with a degree from NYU, you have opportunities that few people in history could have dreamed of. You have the opportunity to become the best, fullest, and truest version of yourself.

Here’s something else I can tell you: The world needs you to seize that opportunity with everything you’ve got. It won’t be easy. You’ll face the universal challenges encountered by all the generations who came before you, and you’ll face the unique ones that have arisen for your generation.

But if you treasure your attention, and then use it to do hard things, with other people, in real life, then — and trust me on this, as a social psychologist — your life is going to be amazing. And the world is going to be a far better place because you’re in it.

Congratulations, NYU Class of 2026. May you all flourish.

Editor’s Note: You can watch the recording of Jon’s NYU Commencement Address here.

Are norms around childhood and technology actually changing? Looking at policy both abroad and in the U.S., the answer is a clear yes. On the individual and community level, we hear encouraging stories regularly. But is parenting culture changing widely already?

A new report from the Institute for Family Studies tackles this question. They surveyed parents across the United States and analyzed how they are approaching technology and independence for their kids. If you want to better understand the reality of childhood in the U.S. right now — how much has changed, and how much hasn’t — this is a good place to start.

– Zach

This report was originally published by The Institute for Family Studies. In partnership with the authors, we adapted the introduction for After Babel and made a few minor corrections. You can view the original report here. Thank you to IFS for allowing us to share it directly with our readers.

The State of Childhood in the U.S.

Over recent years, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and others have increasingly underscored the developmental value of children spending less time on their devices and more time playing outside, unsupervised, with their friends. The Institute for Family Studies set out to examine how much these insights have penetrated mainstream parental practices in the U.S. thus far. In our recent survey of nearly 24,000 U.S. parents — caring for 40,000 children — we found that American kids continue to spend enormous amounts of time online with very few restrictions, while experiencing very strict limits on their activities in the real world. In other words, the key phenomenon Haidt observed in The Anxious Generation — “overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world” — remains widely true for most children and teens.

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Key Findings

• American kids spend a lot of time online. Even parents who would describe their parenting style as low tech and who encourage free-range play allow their three-year-old children, on average, 3.5 hours per week of time on internet-enabled devices. Three-year-old children of parents who encourage tech average 6 hours per week using such devices.

• American kids get their devices young with few serious restrictions. By the age of 11, smartphones become the primary medium for internet access among American kids, with over 60% having a smartphone. These phones generally have few parental restrictions placed on them. Meanwhile, nearly 50% of three-year-olds use a Tablet, iPad, or Kindle; and many of these children have few or no restrictions.

• American kids are generally not free to move around unsupervised. In fact, even by 17 years old, about 60% of American kids are still not allowed to leave their neighborhood unsupervised.

• Social class shapes parenting in big ways. Parents with a graduate degree are more likely to establish screen time limits or phone drop-off rules for children over age 10 than less-educated parents; and parents with a graduate degree are also less likely to support the idea that 8 to 12-year-old kids should have more supervision.

Before presenting our analysis, we think it’s important to note: as with any large survey, some figures may vary slightly due to sampling limitations or differences in how respondents interpreted the questions.

Tech and Family Life

In general, similar to previous research by the Institute for Family Studies, we find that American children overall are online at very early ages, screens are prevalent, and few devices are subject to serious parental controls, especially as they become teenagers.

On average, American parents allow their three-year-old children 4.5 weekly hours of internet-connected device use. From there, the average weekly hours steadily increase with age. By the time their children are 17 years old, American parents allow them almost 20 weekly hours of internet-connected device use. It should be noted that parents could have double-counted some device usage time: if a child was scrolling on their phone while streaming a show on a computer, we would count both the computer and the phone usage. However, we do not regard this as an error, since using multiple devices simultaneously would indeed be a more intense exposure to screens and online content.

Though the numbers remain high overall, we do find some substantial differences in weekly device use between parents who prioritize outdoor play and claim to be low-tech, and those who say they encourage the technology use of their kids. As the figure below shows, by the age of three, kids who grow up in a high-play/low-tech household are on internet-connected devices an average of 2.5 weekly hours less than their peers who are in high-tech households. That might not seem like much, but over the course of a year, that amounts to nearly 130 fewer hours online for three-year-olds. And while both groups steadily rise, the gap in hours used begins to further widen around age 13, and the widest gap is at 15, when kids in low-tech/high-play households are, on average, online eight fewer hours a week, which over the course of a year amounts to a difference of approximately 400 hours. In other words, in any given week, the differences are modest. But over time, they compound, becoming extremely meaningful.

Still, the numbers for both groups are remarkably high. In fact, 17-year-old kids in the low-tech/high-play group are online a weekly average of 15.7 hours, which amounts to more than 800 hours a year. Based on these numbers, they are online approximately five weeks a year; and kids in high-tech households, at the age of 17, are online an average of 6.5 weeks a year.

A large share of American kids at three years old are given internet-connected devices by their parents. Just shy of half of American three-year-olds in our sample (46%) have access to a tablet, iPad, or Kindle. More than 15% have access to a smartphone. Tablet access reaches a peak at age 6, when 60% of kids in our nationwide sample are using them, with gaming console and smartphone access rising steadily. At the age of 11, the hierarchy changes, with smartphones surpassing tablets in use and, a few years later, at the age of 13, gaming consoles become the second most dominant device used, followed by computers and laptops, which become the third most dominant device. By age 17, 90% of the children in our sample have a smartphone, 60% have a gaming console, and 50% have a laptop or computer.

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Parental Controls

But what about parental controls? American children might have access to devices at young ages, but are parents closely monitoring and guarding their activity, such as by disabling internet access on a child’s device, or utilizing content filters? Not as much as one might hope.

Overall, we find that the peak of internet-disabled smartphone usage is at four years old, and it steadily declines from there, with less than 10% of five-year-old kids using internet-disabled smartphones. Throughout the course of childhood and adolescence, a greater share of parents require passwords to make purchases on their child’s smartphone than implement content filters to increase the safety.

This may be unfortunate, but it is also not surprising. Child safety experts, like Chris McKenna of Protect Young Eyes, have analyzed how Big Tech companies like Apple and Google have made it needlessly challenging to implement parental controls. No doubt this problem is exacerbated by other factors, some as straightforward as parents who simply don’t believe their children need guardrails or don’t have the time to make the changes. Whatever the case, only a minority of parents in our sample across all child ages require content filters on their children’s smartphones. By age 17, fewer than 20% of teenagers who use smartphones have parental content filters on their phone.

Because tablets have such a high prevalence among very young children, we also assessed what safety controls parents apply to those devices. We find that, even for very young children, controls and restrictions are surprisingly lax. About 2-in-5 preschool-age children with tablets can make purchases on their tablet without a parental code, a majority of preschoolers with tablets do not need a parental code to access their tablet, and only about half of preschool-age children have content filters on their tablets. Most preschoolers with tablets do not even have specific time limits on their devices. While tablets do have generally stricter controls than smartphones, overall, many preschoolers appear to have broad internet access on tablets, which are only lightly supervised.

We also find some interesting demographic differences in the percentage of parents who responded to a question about household technology rules saying they implement screen time limits or device drop off rules at home for their children over the age of 10. About half of the parents in our sample say that they impose such limits. Conservative and liberal parents have relatively similar practices around screen time. The main differences we find involve the religious practices and educational attainment of parents. Kids who grow up in highly religious households are much more likely to have their tech use limited by screen time than those who never attend a religious service (56% to 40%, respectively). Education is also a significant factor, with screen time limits for kids being more common in households where parents have a graduate degree (59%), whereas fewer than 40% of parents with just a high school diploma established such limits.

Similarly, in our analysis of the percentage of children, ages 9 to 14, who had a smartphone by parental demographics, we found similar advantages to growing up in a household with a parent with a graduate degree. Among this age range, kids whose parents have a graduate degree are the least likely to have a smartphone (55%), and parents with either a high school degree (69%) or associate’s or technical degree (69%) are the most likely to allow their children to have a smartphone.

These numbers fundamentally challenge the longstanding view that there is a digital divide in which kids that come from less privileged households are being left behind with little access to screens and social networks. According to our findings, the situation is exactly reversed. It is those that come from the more privileged backgrounds that are most likely to be raised in technologically cautious homes.

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Mobility and Play

There may be situations in which a parent’s caution to allow children to play outside unsupervised is warranted, such as in communities that are unsafe. Our survey did not ask about neighborhood crime, or busy urban environments where strangers will be significant in number. The safety of communities certainly influences household norms around childhood mobility and unsupervised play. On the other hand, due to the size of our sample, covering 24,000 parents and 40,000 profiles of children, the overall patterns we see cannot be explained by such factors alone. Indeed, as we show, at least one kind of neighborhood factor that we checked — walkability — has no impact on what children are allowed to do and where they are allowed to go. We find that there is a broad culture of low autonomy and low unsupervised play that pervades the United States.

As we can see in the figure below, American kids are not allowed to go very many places without being accompanied by an adult. By age 14, a majority of American kids are not allowed to travel beyond their own street. Even at age 17, more than 60% cannot go beyond their own neighborhoods. While we hasten to note that the exact prevalences shown here could reflect various kinds of sampling errors or idiosyncratic respondent behaviors (as well as some share of parents who may have children with disabilities), the overall conclusion is hard to escape: a very large share of American teenagers are not allowed much autonomy at all.

The flipside of the tendency for American kids to be permitted to spend many hours online from early childhood is that they also are kept from spending many weekly hours of unsupervised play outdoors. At the age of 5, kids in the sample average about a half an hour outside without parental supervision per week, and that number plateaus at 2.4 hours by the age of 17. This is, to put it lightly, a very small number of hours. American kids will spend substantially more time on internet-enabled devices than playing outside without their parents.

But, as the below figure shows, there are advantages throughout childhood for kids who grow up with parents who believe children should be supervised less. At the age of 12, kids who are raised in such homes are unsupervised outside an average of one additional hour per week more than their peers. The advantage narrows modestly by the age of 17, but even then — when kids are on the cusp of adulthood — the advantage remains.

It is worth noting, however, that despite the documented developmental benefits of play, independence, and mobility for children, we find that most American parents believe that children today are under-supervised. In fact, 62% of all parents in our sample said that 8 to 12-year-old children should receive more supervision than they currently do. We find no meaningful differences on this issue between religious and secular — nor between conservative and liberal — parents. All of these groups want more childhood supervision.

This is also true for parents of different levels of educational attainment. We find a majority of groups, from those without a high school diploma to those with a graduate degree, who also believe that kids are under-supervised.

But here, there are some interesting differences. American parents with a graduate degree are about 10 percentage points less likely to think that children are under-supervised. This provides strong evidence that highly-educated Americans are the most supportive of the idea that kids should have more freedom.

For about half of our respondents, we were able to match them to a valid latitude and longitude coordinate in the United States. Using that data, we then matched individuals to walkability traits for their neighborhood using EPA-calculated walk scores. We also matched them to neighborhood traits such as land coverage by parks, land coverage by woods, and other undeveloped territory, building structure density, and population density. The conclusions from all these approaches were identical: the physical form of a neighborhood has no correlation at all with how much autonomy kids have to go places or how much time they play outside. The figure below shows walkability scores versus the distance kids are allowed to walk.

Autonomous mobility matters for kids. For example, while kids tend to spend more time hanging out with friends unsupervised by adults as they grow up, we find that the entire effect of age is mediated by autonomy in mobility. In other words, parents who do not allow their kids to have expanded mobility as they grow up inadvertently trap their children in foreshortened social lives more typical of much younger children.

As can be seen in the next figure, 14- to 17-year-olds who are not allowed to leave their family’s home or yard have barely more unsupervised social time with friends than 5- to 9-year-olds who cannot do so. The difference is only about two to three hours. Meanwhile, kids who can go anywhere in their neighborhood or beyond have about four to five hours of unsupervised social time with friends, with little variance by age. The key factor that determines whether or not children have rich social lives with their friends is simply how much freedom parents allow them to have

Conclusion

Much more needs to be done to establish societal norms that can guide parents toward healthier parenting practices for their children. Furthermore, it is quite clear that the old paradigm of the digital divide — i.e., that disadvantaged kids are being left behind by insufficient technology access — is no longer relevant or meaningful. In fact, a clear sign of privilege today is the ability of parents to both establish boundaries around their children that limit their access to screens, and encourage them to freely play.

Acknowledgement: The Survey of American Parenting Culture was made possible through a collaboration between The Anxious Generation Movement and the Institute for Family Studies.

Longtime After Babel readers will recognize today’s guest author, Seth Kaplan, lecturer at Johns Hopkins and author of Fragile Neighborhoods. In previous essays, he has argued that loss of community is an upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis, and that restoring the play-based childhood requires rebuilding strong local communities. Today, he highlights a once-vital institution of childhood — community-based groups like Scouts, Little League, 4-H, and youth ministries — and makes the case that local, youth-led community groups are among the most powerful tools we have for restoring the rich, place-based social lives that children need to flourish.

– Jon & Zach

We Took Away the Phones — Now What?

The movement Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues helped catalyze has already achieved something remarkable, shifting norms around children’s technology use that once felt immovable. But the school phone bans, social media age restrictions, and platform regulations are only part of what we need in order to restore the play-based childhood. We need to pair those gains with an equally ambitious effort to renew the social ecosystem that once made kids’ off-screen lives robust and intensely local.

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Phones did not simply replace something good, as I previously argued on After Babel; they filled a void created by the earlier loss of community and the decline of the play-based childhood. If that diagnosis is correct, then reducing screen time — while essential — addresses only part of the problem. If we remove phones without rebuilding the social architecture that once gave childhood meaning, agency, and joy, we risk leaving kids with less stimulation but not more formation.

One element of that ecosystem stands out for its proven ability to cultivate independence, belonging, leadership, and joy: place-based, in-person youth community groups. I don’t mean highly structured enrichment activities, competitive travel teams, or online communities. In the past, groups such as Scouts, neighborhood and settlement-house clubs, after-school and park-based leagues, Boys & Girls Clubs, church youth fellowships, 4-H chapters, and informal block-based play groups provided millions of American children with daily opportunities to be together without screens, without hovering parents, and without performance pressure.

If we are serious about restoring the play-based childhood, we must do more than limit what children consume — we must rebuild the social architecture that makes off-screen life rich and compelling. That begins with placing far greater value on youth community groups and treating them not as optional enrichment, but as essential infrastructure for growing up.

What We Lost

In the heyday of youth community groups, kids’ social lives were embodied, local, and immediate. Children spent hours each week with peers, building forts, organizing games, planning events, or simply hanging around. They were building independence, responsibility, and connection, and had little incentive to retreat into solitary entertainment. These groups anchored childhood in real places, making neighborhoods feel alive and meaningful. Streets, parks, basements, and community halls became stages for shared memory rather than empty transit zones between scheduled activities.

Many of the most successful groups, including Scouts and 4-H, combined deep local roots with affiliations to larger regional or national networks. Local chapters were run by volunteers and embedded in neighborhoods, but drew strength, legitimacy, and meaning from being part of something larger than any single town or block. When either side of this equation weakens, the model becomes fragile.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what occurred. Many of the largest youth organizations that once anchored childhood have seen substantial declines in participation over the past several decades. The Boy Scouts of America, for example, counted more than four million youth members in the early 1970s but has fallen to roughly one million today. Girl Scouts membership peaked at over 3.7 million in the early 2000s and has since declined to around 1.7 million. Similar patterns are visible across civic and community life more broadly: participation in voluntary associations, including youth-serving organizations, began declining in the latter half of the twentieth century, as documented by Robert Putnam and others. These trends predate smartphones by decades, suggesting that the erosion of youth group life was already well underway before digital technology accelerated it.

At the same time, a substantial body of research underscores the developmental value of sustained participation in these kinds of groups. Longitudinal studies of Scouting, for example, have found that kids who participate for multiple years show measurable gains in character attributes such as trustworthiness, helpfulness, and future orientation compared to non-participants. After two-and-a-half years of participation, Scouts themselves report “significant increases in cheerfulness, helpfulness, kindness, obedience, trustworthiness and hopeful future expectations.” Teenagers more broadly describe group involvement as enhancing self-development, emotion regulation, and interpersonal skills.

Adolescents involved in community-based activities demonstrate higher levels of civic engagement, lower rates of risky behavior, and stronger social and emotional skills, according to research on structured extracurricular participation. Even participation in local sports leagues — when embedded in community settings rather than elite travel systems — has been linked to improved teamwork, persistence, and mental well-being. Across contexts, the pattern is consistent: regular involvement in peer-based, adult-supported group activities contributes to healthier developmental trajectories.

Why is participation in these peer- and community-focused groups so positive for kids’ development? To start, they give children meaningful roles (not just symbolic ones): organizing younger kids, managing equipment, resolving conflicts, planning activities, running meetings, and so on. Responsibility and competence are learned by doing, and kids quickly learn that they matter to the functioning of the group.

Research also consistently shows that play across ages is one of the most powerful drivers of social learning and emotional regulation. When kids interact and play in mixed age groups, older kids learn patience and leadership, while younger kids learn courage and imitation.

Hyper-local community-based groups also create thick relational ecosystems where conflicts must be worked through, not escaped, in contrast to digital “communities.” Local and persistent groups provide relationships that overlap with school, family, religious life, and neighborhood routines. Reputation matters. Trust accumulates.

But in their absence, two forces filled the gap: screens, which offer constant, low-friction entertainment, and highly structured activities, which organize children’s time but rarely replicate the social density of peer-led group life. Both have their place, but neither replaces what was lost. As we begin to roll back the phone-based childhood, we have an opportunity not just to remove a substitute, but to restore the institutions that once made childhood socially rich in the first place.

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Where Youth Groups Still Flourish, and Why

My interest in youth groups stems from my own kids’ experience. One of their favorite activities from the time they were small has been the weekly synagogue groups. These start very young and are always led by older kids.

In some societies, these groups remain central to childhood. During a stay in Israel, my family experienced firsthand how central youth groups — tnuot noar — are to kids’ lives, consuming hours of time weekly and running throughout almost the entire year. These groups were easily the best ways for my kids to meet their peers in the neighborhood, create meaningful relationships, find a sense of belonging, and maintain (for my oldest) a steady social life they could manage completely on their own.

In Israel, roughly 30% of students participate in youth organizations or movements — far above levels seen in many Western contexts — and these groups are explicitly recognized by the Ministry of Education for strengthening identity, belonging, and civic integration. Organizations such as the HaTzofim (Hebrew Scouts) are among the most durable and widespread institutions in Israeli civil society, enrolling hundreds of thousands of children across ideological, religious, and socioeconomic lines. Activities emphasize play, hiking, service, and group projects over instruction or performance. Participation often begins in early elementary school and continues through adolescence, with teenagers doing most of the work locally.

What distinguishes these groups is not just scale, but structure. They are deeply place-based, organized around neighborhoods and towns rather than regions. Meetings are frequent, often multiple times per week. Older teens lead younger cohorts, with adults playing supporting rather than directive roles.

Crucially, these groups are socially normative. Participation is not an exotic enrichment option; it is simply “what kids do.” Parents expect it. Schools accommodate it. Neighborhoods are designed around it. Municipalities offer public spaces for meetings. Schools and camps make space in their schedules for complementary activities.

The payoff is visible. Research on Jewish youth programming suggests that long-term participation in youth movements has more durable effects on identity and social outcomes than short-term educational experiences. In this context, youth groups function not only as sites of frequent peer interaction and independence, but also as training grounds for cooperation, leadership, and resilience long before formal adulthood begins.

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How Can We Revive Youth Community Groups in the United States?

American communities already have the people and resources to renew an ecosystem that anchors children and youth. Several large, nationally affiliated organizations still reach millions of American children each year. They possess something difficult to recreate from scratch: recognizable identities, intergenerational leadership pipelines, training capacity, and a presence in thousands of communities.

Large networks such as 4-H, Boys & Girls Clubs, Scouts, the YMCA, and park-based leagues continue to offer young people opportunities across thousands of localities, and participation shows early signs of stabilization and even modest growth. Scouting America (formerly the Boy Scouts of America), for example, reported a small uptick in youth membership following its early-2025 rebrand, even as long-term numbers remain far below their mid-20th-century peak.

These trends suggest renewed activity — but within a landscape that remains fragmented and uneven. What many lack is not infrastructure, but local energy and permission to simplify — to shift away from risk minimization and résumé-building and back toward regular, neighborhood-centered group life in which young people take real responsibility for one another.

So, what would it take for these groups to become central to childhood again?

1. Offer Proximity and Diversity

Youth groups work best when they draw from a small geographic area. While it is not always possible, walkability offers a huge boost — not only for logistics, but for trust. Groups should be rooted in neighborhoods, not optimized for efficiency or branded for a wide reach.

A healthy ecosystem includes many kinds of groups — outdoors-oriented, arts-based, service-focused, faith-based, secular. A diversity of offerings in close proximity to one another increases participation and resilience. Libraries, schools, houses of worship, community centers, and even local businesses can host and sponsor groups.

Frequency matters too: weekly is the minimum. Multiple touchpoints per week are ideal. Irregular gatherings cannot compete with the gravitational pull of screens.

Waiting until adolescence is too late. Groups that begin in early elementary years create continuity, shared norms, and cross-age relationships that compound over time.

2. Give Youth Real Authority

Older kids should lead. Adults should resist the urge to professionalize or sanitize. Responsibility — not constant supervision — is what builds competence. Leadership is not symbolic. Teenagers should be genuinely responsible for running meetings, mentoring younger kids, and organizing events. This creates a powerful developmental pipeline in which responsibility, competence, and belonging grow together. High schools can give credit and time for students to serve in these leadership roles.

3. Prioritize Experiences Over Instruction

Unstructured play, shared challenges, service projects, and collective rituals matter more than curricula. In a successful youth group, formation happens primarily through doing, not instruction.

4. Normalize Participation

Participation should feel ordinary and easy, not elite. This requires cultural reinforcement from parents, schools, and local leaders. The goal is to make participation socially expected rather than individually chosen — something children assume they will do because their friends do, their schools accommodate it, and their neighborhoods are organized around it.

Families can play a critical role here, as they do in my neighborhood in Maryland. Individuals can organize regular activities around their own passions — art, music, or food, for instance. Parents can work together to establish sports leagues or learning groups. Neighbors can agree to jointly monitor streets so that kids can organize their own fun. And in each case, older kids can play a formal or informal role leading groups, helping others, or simply keeping an eye on younger kids.

Institutions can support these efforts too. Schools and camps can make space in their schedules for complementary activities. High schools can give credit and time for students to serve in leadership roles. Employers can organize service days and offer flexible scheduling so employees can facilitate community-based activities. Municipalities can offer public spaces for meetings.

We don't need to create parallel systems; we need to reactivate dormant civic infrastructure. Any serious effort to revive youth community groups today should learn from earlier successes — strengthening hyperlocal groups while reconnecting them to broader networks that can support replication, legitimacy, and long-term durability.

Beyond Phones: Restoring the Social Architecture of Childhood

An overwhelming majority of kids would rather be together in the real world than on screens, as Jonathan Haidt and The Harris Poll found. The problem, then, isn't kids’ desire; it's the absence of in-person, community-based alternatives. If we want children to flourish off of screens, we must rebuild the social architecture that makes off-screen life rich. It’s a project we can all take up, and even the “grown-ups” will find unexpected sources of belonging when we do.

A year and a half ago, we teamed up with Lennon Torres, senior campaign manager at The Heat Initiative and LGBTQ+ advocate, to write an article for The Atlantic, “Social-Media Companies’ Worst Argument” (reposted here with no paywall). Together, we refuted the social media companies’ claims that using these platforms is net-positive for teens in historically disadvantaged communities and that regulation would do more harm than good for adolescents in these groups.

Since then, however, these claims have continued to surface as an argument against regulation. In the below piece, originally published by The Hill, Lennon draws on her own experience as a trans woman who grew up sharing her life on social media. She argues that the social media companies use LGBTQ+ kids as an excuse to avoid accountability and reminds the public that despite what the companies claim, “queer people are the ones these platforms fail first and protect last.”

Thank you to Lennon and The Hill for allowing us to share this piece directly with After Babel’s readers. We hope you’ll read it and share it widely.

– Jon & Zach

Don’t Let Big Tech Hide Behind a Rainbow Flag

With Big Tech companies recently losing two key lawsuits over the harm they do to youth — both in rulings they have promised to appeal — a false narrative has begun to re-circulate. The claim is that requirements making digital communities safer for young people will somehow undermine queer expression.

Here is my message, coming from a transgender woman who grew up with and was badly harmed by exploitative social media: Do not let Big Tech hide itself behind a rainbow flag. The truth is, queer people are the ones these platforms fail first and protect last.

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Many gay, transgender and queer kids lack supportive families and affirming schools. To them, digital spaces may seem like a lifeline — a place where they can be themselves. Unfortunately, those digital spaces are often built on the same logic that once targeted kids with cigarettes: Maximize use, minimize accountability and monetize vulnerability. These platforms were designed not to empower us but to get and keep us hooked.

In the social media addiction trial that recently wrapped up in Los Angeles, plaintiff attorney Mark Lanier asked Meta whistleblower Arturo Béjar how Facebook’s leadership dealt with the issue of “addiction.” Béjar replied: “They changed the name of it” — specifically, they stopped calling it “addiction” and called it “problematic use” instead. He added, “You couldn’t talk about it.”

I joined social media at age 13, just as the iPhone became the center of adolescent life. I was attending a performing arts school after five years at a public school where I was teased for being too feminine. I turned to Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and YouTube — platforms that gave me access to a community I had never had. But this came with life‑threatening side effects I couldn’t yet see clearly.

Online, I found attention — first from classmates, then from strangers. When I started working professionally as a dancer, hundreds of thousands of followers watched my every move. What felt at first like affirmation quickly became the only place I thought I had value. I got so consumed with how I was being perceived that authenticity didn’t stand a chance.

At some point, it stopped mattering whether the comments were praise or cruelty — what mattered was the hit. I began refreshing comments in bathroom stalls between classes and rehearsals, scrolling before bed and learning how to curate myself for algorithms I didn’t understand. The behavior was compulsive. I didn’t know to call it “addictive design” — I just knew I couldn’t stop scrolling.

Chasing the algorithm for validation wasn’t the only risk. The real danger often arrived in my private messages. Adults I didn’t know approached me with explicit messages and nude images. I was only 13, and I did not yet understand what grooming was. I did not have the language for it — I only knew that the attention I could not find offline seemed to appear online.

I know now that the platforms and their algorithms were delivering me up to these predatory strangers, serving them my profile as engagement bait.

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The Los Angeles lawsuit pointed to Internal Meta documents showing that Instagram’s “Accounts You May Follow” feature1 actively connects predatory adults to minors: “In 2023, this tool recommended to adult groomers ‘nearly 2 million minors in the last 3 months’ — and ‘22 percent of those recommendations resulted in a follow request.’”

Employees warned leadership. Leadership rejected fixing the system, maintaining a 17-strike policy for predators — including sex-traffickers — before suspending the offenders’ accounts.

The architecture of these platforms placed me in the path of adults who saw opportunity in a lonely queer kid. Because queer kids come to online spaces for identity and survival, we are the ideal product: highly engaged, highly vulnerable and highly profitable.

Big Tech claims to defend queer kids’ rights by opposing regulations like requiring age-appropriate design and limits on addictive features. In reality, they are using us as a shield to avoid accountability. They weaponize our dependence on online connection to argue that any safety guardrail is “anti‑LGBTQ.” They warn lawmakers that protecting kids will erase queer expression. This is a lie, and a strategic one.

In reality, features that harm young people — endless scroll, autoplay, compulsive engagement loops, recommendation pipelines driven by surveillance data, settings that expose kids to ill-intentioned adult strangers — do not create queer communities. They create dependency. They bury our identity in algorithms optimized for outrage, objectification and profit.

Queer kids do not need online platforms that claim to celebrate us in Pride campaigns while exploiting and exposing us to harassment at disproportionate rates. We need them to prioritize our safety and mental health.

I know this because I lived it. Only after a decade of anxiety, addictive patterns, algorithmic harm, grooming, and harassment could I finally withdraw from exploitative social media. Even then, the choice felt impossible. Most of my childhood had unfolded online. The most intimate parts of my life — my gender transition, top surgery, and coming out — became content opportunities to me. That is the cruelty of these platforms: They teach you to equate visibility with safety, engagement with belonging, and exploitation with connection.

Regulation is not a threat to queer expression but a prerequisite for queer safety. It won’t solve every problem, but it will do the first and most important thing: force the companies profiting from our attention to finally take responsibility for the harm they have caused.

Reprinted with permission from The Hill.

Two weeks ago, on March 25, a jury in Los Angeles found Meta and Google liable in a landmark case. The jurors determined that the parent companies of Instagram and YouTube had acted with “malice, oppression, or fraud,” addicting and harming the young plaintiff, known as KGM.

Just one day prior, a jury in New Mexico found Meta liable for “misleading consumers about the safety of its platforms and endangering children.”

Many kinds of evidence were presented to the juries, from internal documents and research done by the companies themselves to testimony from experts and former employees. The evidence revealed that the companies had intentionally designed their products in ways they knew would harm children.

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The companies used a two-pronged defense strategy. First, they blamed others: It was KGM’s fault for opening accounts before she was 13. It was her parents’ fault that she got addicted and depressed. Whatever harm happened, we’re just a neutral platform! The jury did not respond well to this strategy.

Second, they claimed that there is no scientific evidence that their platforms cause harm to adolescent mental health. Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly asserted that the academic evidence is merely correlational. He grants that heavy users are more depressed, but notes that correlational evidence cannot prove that social media caused their depression.

There are thousands of similar cases coming, and we can be confident that the companies will lean hard into this strategy: denying any scientific evidence of causation. When making such claims, defenders of social media usually refer to an essay in Nature that made similar assertions. But as we showed in The Anxious Generation, and in our academic articles and many posts here on After Babel, there is abundant scientific evidence of causation. We are writing this post to make it easier for everyone to learn about that evidence.

The editors of The World Happiness Report (WHR) recently asked us to put all of the evidence together. The annual report shows how countries vary on measures of well-being. Each year there is a special topic or focus, and for the 2026 report, the focus was on social media’s effects on well-being. We wrote the target essay laying out the case for harm, and other authors brought a variety of perspectives.

Knowing that thousands of jury trials were on the horizon, we laid out our argument like a hypothetical civil trial, asking our imagined jury this question: Are social media platforms dangerous consumer products whose design has led to a variety of harms to young people? We call this the Product Safety Question. We present seven lines of converging evidence showing that these platforms are causing harm.

At the end of our chapter, we show that the levels of harm uncovered while answering the Product Safety Question are so high that we can also answer a different but related question: Are social media platforms causing harm to entire populations? We call this the Population Harm Question, and it’s at the center of some states’ and school districts’ cases.

Taking the Companies to Trial

In our hypothetical case against the companies — particularly Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat — we begin with the apparent victims, the people who allege harm: Gen Z, the cohort born roughly between 1996 and 2011. They were the first generation to go through puberty with social media in their pockets, accessible at all times through smartphones beginning in the early 2010s. They have the clearest view of what happened to them and their peers.

We then turn to those who spend the most time with young people — parents, educators, and clinicians. They also witnessed the effects of social media across many young people, over many years.

If we could call all of these groups to the stand, what would they say? We offer a brief synopsis of each line of evidence below. You will find far more detail in our WHR chapter.

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Line 1: What the Victims Say

Across surveys in multiple countries, many young people report that social media has harmed them directly and indirectly. They describe widespread experiences of cyberbullying, sexual exploitation, sleep disruption, lower confidence, and worse mental health. They also express strikingly high levels of regret toward the major platforms they have used for years. In a Harris Poll survey of members of Gen Z, nearly half reported that they wish that TikTok, X (Twitter), and Snapchat were never invented — despite using those platforms for several hours a day.

Internal surveys conducted by Meta found similar results. In their own research, they found that “teens blame Instagram for increases in the rates of anxiety and depression among teens.” One in three teen girls said Instagram made their body-image issues worse (20% said it made it better); and 13% of adolescents reported unwanted sexual advances on Instagram in the previous seven days.

In a courtroom, it is powerful when a victim points to the defendant and says “he did it.” In survey after survey, and in open-ended interviews, Gen Z points to social media platforms as the culprit.

Of course, the victims in a court case could be mistaken or could be lying, so direct positive identification is strengthened when corroborated by eyewitness testimony. The same logic applies here, so let’s move to our second line of evidence and call a variety of witnesses to the stand.

Line 2: What the Eyewitnesses Say

We next turn to the adults who spend the most time with young people. Parents describe changes in their children’s mood, sleep, self-esteem, and friendships; teachers report worsening distraction, attention, and academic performance; and clinicians say social media is exacerbating anxiety, depression, and addiction-like behavior in their young clients.

A 2025 Pew survey of U.S. teens and their parents found that 44% of parents identified social media as the single most negative influence on teen mental health, ahead of “technology generally.” Similarly, the 2025 UK survey by More in Common asked parents to identify what most negatively affects their own children’s mental health. The top response was “social media use/excessive screen time,” followed by concerns closely linked to digital technology, including exposure to harmful online content, bullying, low self-esteem, and lack of sleep.

In our own Harris Poll survey, majorities of parents said that, when thinking about their own children, they wished the major social media platforms had never been invented. And according to findings disclosed in litigation, Meta’s own research found that large majorities of clinicians believed social media worsens anxiety and depression in adolescents.

Line 3. What Company Insiders Say

The attorney for the plaintiff might then call the defendant to the stand and turn to the direct evidence. Suppose, for example, that the attorney had obtained, through pre-trial discovery, a series of text messages from the defendant describing what he was planning on doing, and then, afterward, talking about what he had done.

In our case against the social media companies, we have the equivalent of hundreds of such text messages in the form of internal company emails, messages, memos, documents, presentations, and more.

Here are just a few of the quotations from internal documents revealing what company insiders — employees as well as external consultants hired to offer advice — believed.

These quotes barely scratch the surface of what the internal documents reveal, and we cover more from this line of evidence in our WHR chapter. You can also find a large selection of disturbing quotations at TechOversight.org, and you can find our compilation of 35 studies carried out by Meta at MetasInternalResearch.org.

The evidence is clear: The companies and their leaders knew from their own research that they were harming millions of children and adolescents. As former Facebook president Sean Parker said, they knew what they were doing, and they did it anyway.

These three lines of evidence taken together, we believe, answer the Product Safety Question and demonstrate that these products are not safe for minors. Few parents who knew about the above evidence would want their children to continue using these products. That may be why many tech executives do not let their children use their own products: they know. But there’s no need to stop here; the forensic evidence further strengthens our case.

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The Forensic Evidence

In Lines 4 through 7 of the evidence, we focus on the heart of the academic debate over social media’s effects: whether heavy social media use (~5 or more hours per day) is causing internalizing disorders (such as anxiety and depression) among adolescents (especially girls).1 There is wide agreement among academic researchers that heavy users of social media are more likely to be depressed and anxious than light users, but does that mean that social media causes those outcomes, or is it merely correlated with them? The claim that it is mere correlation is at the heart of the social media companies’ legal defense strategy.

To address that question, we examine the four major bodies of academic research in turn: cross-sectional studies, longitudinal studies, randomized controlled trials of social media time reduction, and natural experiments.

At this point in our case, we are calling on the forensic experts to give their scientific analysis and opinions of the evidence, which can help connect the defendant to the alleged harm. In a criminal trial, this might be a ballistics or DNA expert; in our case, we’re calling the academic researchers to the stand. They’ve studied social media and internalizing disorders in teens for more than a decade, and though their access to data is more limited than that of the companies, their expert analysis consistently links the defendants to the alleged harm.

Line 4. Cross-sectional Studies

The largest body of academic evidence is cross-sectional, which means that data is collected at a single time (as with a survey), with no experimental manipulation. While these studies cannot establish causation on their own, they are an important starting point: they ask whether heavy users of social media are in worse mental health than light users or non-users. Across hundreds of studies, the answer is generally yes. The main point of contention, however, is not whether an association exists, but how seriously to take it.

In one of the most informative studies, Kelly et al. (2019) analyzed data from 10,904 14-year-olds in the UK Millennium Cohort Study and found that adolescents who spent five or more hours a day on social media were about twice as likely to meet criteria for depression as those who used it for less than one hour a day. Among girls, the relative risk was even higher at 2.65 — comparable to sleep deprivation and online harassment, and larger than the risk elevation associated with poverty.

Additional studies reinforce this conclusion. These elevated risk findings were central to the U.S. Surgeon General’s warnings in 2023 and 2024.

Even the studies that our critics cite as finding “no association” between social media use and internalizing disorders in teens look much more concerning when the data is analyzed more carefully, as we show in Exhibit J of our WHR essay. In many cases, researchers blend together variables — for example, different technologies (e.g., email and social media), different outcomes (e.g., general feelings of wellbeing and anxiety), or different populations (e.g., adults 18+ and teen girls) — in ways that dilute the relationship at the center of the debate: heavy social media use associated with internalizing disorders, especially among adolescent girls. Analyses that unblend these categories almost always reveal that heavy teen social media users — and especially girls — are at substantially elevated risk for depression and anxiety. (See Haidt & Rausch, preprint for a deeper examination of blending).

Cross-sectional studies consistently show that heavy adolescent social media users are at substantially elevated risk for depression and anxiety. Next, we turn to the longitudinal studies, which help address the question of temporal order.

Line 5. Longitudinal Studies

The longitudinal literature on social media and mental health allows researchers to follow individuals over time and can help clarify whether social media use predicts subsequent changes in mental health, whether poor mental health predicts subsequent social media use, or some combination of the two. The available longitudinal studies present clear and consistent evidence that social media use predicts later depression.

The strongest evidence comes from recent large-scale studies. An analysis of a sample of 6,595 U.S. adolescents, ages 12–15, found that heavy social media use predicted later increases in internalizing symptoms. Another study, using the longitudinal Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) dataset, showed that increases in social media use predicted subsequent increases in depression. Meanwhile, other researchers using the ABCD dataset showed that earlier internalizing disorders failed to predict subsequent social media use.

Some studies also find bidirectional relationships (i.e., higher social media use today predicts worse mental health a year from now, and worse mental health today predicts higher social media use a year from now), and within those studies, the forward relationship from social media use to later depression remains robust.2

In other words, this second line of forensic evidence shows that not only are heavy users of social media doing worse, at any given time (that’s the cross-sectional finding); it’s also the case that those who use more social media at one point in time are generally found to be worse off at later times.

Line 6. Randomized Control Trials of Time Reduction

The most powerful tool for measuring causation directly is an experiment that randomly assigns participants to either an intervention or to a control condition and then compares the outcomes. While researchers do not, for ethical reasons, ask one group of kids to start using social media at age 10 and another to stay off it until age 16, there are numerous experiments where young adult participants have been asked to either reduce their social media use (intervention) or continue their use as usual (control condition).

A recent meta-analysis by Burnell et al. (2025) of 32 such experiments has shown that reductions of social media use caused substantial declines in symptoms of internalizing disorders like depression and anxiety — even though most of these studies lasted only a week or two.3

The experimental results are all the more remarkable given that these studies are not designed to measure impacts that could be produced by entire communities reducing their use of social media. For example, if all students in a given school district ceased to use social media, that would leave more overall time for in-person interactions with peers and therefore the beneficial impacts on mental health could be even stronger, including for students with low levels of social media use. Furthermore, kids who do not use social media would cease to be penalized for their inability to socialize with their peers on these platforms, which in turn might help improve their mental health.

Even Meta’s own internal research confirmed evidence of benefits caused by social media reductions. In a 2020 Facebook deactivation experiment, code-named Project Mercury, Meta found that users who stopped using Facebook or Instagram for just one week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and social comparison. One internal researcher warned that keeping such findings secret would resemble the refusal by tobacco companies to admit that their own research revealed severe harms of cigarette consumption.

This sixth line of evidence is arguably the most damning: experiments using random assignment provide consistent causal evidence that when users reduce the amount of time they spend on social media, their mental health improves. The defendants themselves found this in their own internal experiments, and they tried to bury it.

Line 7. Natural Experiments

Our final line of evidence comes from natural experiments. Because high-speed internet made social media much more appealing (photos and videos would load faster), if some regions of a country got broadband connections a year or two before other areas, researchers can compare: did the mental health of young people in those early adopter regions change before those of the later regions? These studies are especially valuable because they offer population-level evidence that is not available from short-term laboratory experiments.

Across the major natural experiments we reviewed — in Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United States — the evidence indicates that the spread of high-speed internet worsened mental health, with the harms falling most heavily on young people, especially women and adolescent girls. Documented effects include declines in self-reported mental health, increases in hospital-diagnosed mental disorders, and rising suicide rates. Additional natural experiments point in the same direction.4

This final line of forensic evidence may be the most policy-relevant of all, because it allows us to examine what happened as these technologies actually spread through entire populations. It comes closest to the ideal experiment of having one group of adolescents gain access to always-available social media while another does not. And the results are again clear: as high-speed internet spread — and with it, ever-present social media — mental health outcomes worsened, especially for young people and especially for girls.'

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Harm to Millions is Harm at the Population Level

Our seven lines of evidence make it clear: the answer to the Product Safety Question is No, social media platforms are not safe for young people. These consumer products were designed — intentionally — to maximize the number of children and adolescents who would be drawn to them and the amount of time that each would spend on them. The leaders and researchers at these companies know that heavy users of social media suffer many indirect harms (mental health problems, body image issues, addiction), and that even light users are often exposed to dangerous direct harms (such as sextortion, or death from purchasing fentanyl-laced drugs, or performing a dangerous challenge).

The Population Harm Question is a different one. It is quite possible for a consumer product to be extremely dangerous and yet have no effect on the aggregate statistics of a nation. That would be the case for any product that is used by only a tiny portion of the population. But social media platforms are arguably the most widely used products among young people in the developed world, used regularly by a large majority of adolescents in the United States. In fact, a third of American adolescents say that they are on one of the major platforms “almost constantly.” So if several of the product safety concerns we have documented are affecting more than 20% of all users (as with self reports of sleep deprivation and mental health damage), that quickly adds up to a population-level effect.

When the documented direct and indirect harms are scaled to the number of young people actually using these products, the number of adolescents harmed each year likely reaches into the millions in the U.S. alone. Arturo Béjar’s internal Instagram research found that 13% of users ages 13–15 reported receiving unwanted sexual advances in the previous week — which, if the U.S. is similar to the global average, would imply that about 5.7 million adolescents experience this in any given week. This same research also found that 10.8% of Instagram users ages 13–15 reported being cyber-bullied in the previous week. The number of adolescents experiencing direct harms from social media likely exceeds 10 million each year in the United States alone. (See the subsections in our WHR chapter “Direct harm to millions” and “Indirect harm to millions” for more extensive examples and estimates).5

In other words: the answer to the Population Harm Question is very likely to be “yes.”

The evidence we have presented does not prove that any particular plaintiff is correct, and it does not mean that evidence does not exist on the other side. We have been engaged in a debate with other researchers for seven years now, and you should read their arguments to hear the other side. Scientific debates are never closed; there is always the possibility of new evidence, or of discovering new complications and interactions.

But the next time you hear Mark Zuckerberg or anyone else say that there is “no evidence” of harm, or that the evidence is merely “correlational,” send them a link to this essay, or to our full WHR chapter. There is now a great deal of evidence, from many sources (including Meta’s internal research), using many methods.

Social media companies have been harming millions of children and adolescents for many years now. Until very recently, they faced no liability for these harms, and they never faced a jury. But now the courtroom doors are finally open and the evidence is being seen — by juries and the world. As the punitive damages increase, there will be design changes to the platforms. And there will be justice.

After two watershed verdicts in the social media trials in New Mexico and LA this week, we’ve entered a new era in the fight to protect children from online harms. Momentum is growing internationally, and we’re excited to see Indonesia’s groundbreaking new regulation take effect this weekend. The country has mandated a minimum age of 16 for account creation on any online platform that uses features that expose children to documented categories of risk — meaning the regulation applies not only to social media platforms, but also to AI chatbots, gaming apps, and beyond. By addressing harmful features like autoplay, engagement-based algorithms, and ephemeral content, Indonesia’s approach protects kids while preserving their ability to access information, and holds the platforms accountable while incentivizing safer tech design. The regulation will solve the collective action trap for Indonesian families and serve as a model that other nations can build upon.

In this post, Anindito Aditomo, senior researcher for Indonesia’s Center for Education and Policy Studies — a key advisor in the design of the regulation — and his co-authors offer an inside look at how the regulation was built and what makes it unlike anything attempted before.

Bravo, Indonesia!

–Jon and Ravi

Indonesia is home to more than 80 million children, and roughly 8 in 10 of them are already online. That’s 64 million young people (a population larger than Italy) navigating an online world with very few guardrails. According to survey data from UNICEF, 48% of Indonesian children ages 8–18 have experienced cyberbullying, more than 50% have been exposed to sexually explicit content online, and 2% have been threatened with or experienced sexual violence. So, in early 2025, Indonesia joined a pioneering group of countries regulating digital platforms that pose risks of harm to children. Championed by the Minister of Communication and Digital Affairs, Meutya Hafid, Indonesia’s new regulation will restrict access to high-risk online platforms for users under 16.

Though much of the initial media coverage has called this a “social media ban,” Indonesia’s approach applies to all digital platforms that children access, including AI chatbots, social media, and online games. Instead of imposing a blanket ban on platform categories, its design-based risk assessment approach treats each platform differently based on the level of risk its features pose to children. This design-focused regulation is the first of its kind internationally — differing from Australia’s law, which designates an minimum age for account creation on specific social media platforms. When it goes into effect on March 28, it will both shield kids from harm and create real incentives for the tech industry to build their products more responsibly.

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What the Regulation Requires

The digital design features that lead to harm are well established. These include engagement-based algorithms, which can lead to compulsive use and exposure to unwanted or harmful content, the autoplay, which removes opportunities to reconsider how long one is using a platform, and the quantification of engagement (e.g., displaying how many likes a post or photo has), which can result in negative social comparison.

Indonesia’s new regulation requires digital platforms used by under-16s to conduct a self-assessment that evaluates whether the platform’s features expose kids to various categories of risk, including interaction with strangers; exposure to harmful or inappropriate content; misuse or exploitation of personal data; exploitative consumer practices; risks of addiction; and other mental and physical harm.

Digital platforms must submit the results of their self-assessment to the Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs — the body tasked with implementing the law — along with supporting evidence. The Ministry will then evaluate the submission and determine the platform’s risk level. Platforms certified as sufficiently low-risk can continue to provide services to children, while platforms deemed high-risk must implement risk mitigation measures to continue serving under-16s. Required mitigation measures may include disabling features linked to addiction risk (e.g., infinite scrolling, “like” counts, and content recommendations based on user data); protecting minors’ accounts from discovery by strangers, including via search engines; and preventing underage users from being exposed to violent and sexually explicit materials.

If the platform’s mitigation measures are insufficient, the Ministry will require the company to implement age verification, revoke accounts for current users under the age of 16, and prevent under-16s from creating new accounts. A specialized Ministry team will audit the high-risk platforms to ensure compliance.

Because this regulation is fundamentally an age minimum for account creation, it protects children from the most harmful design features without infringing on their right to information, as Jonathan Haidt and Ravi Iyer explain:

[I]f they do not have an account and have not signed a contract with the company, then they cannot compare the popularity of pictures of themselves, receive tailored late night notifications, be served more and more extreme content, or be contacted by strangers via messaging. Without this inappropriate business relationship and access to the extensive data they currently collect from kids, companies will find it much harder to train algorithms and use design features to manipulate and exploit kids.

The law also imposes other accountability metrics that platforms need to fulfill, including the allocation of resources for public education (e.g., parental guidance workshops at schools), and regular reporting and analysis that supports continuous improvements.

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The Advantages of a Design-Based Risk Approach

Indonesia’s unique, design-based risk approach to protecting kids online recognizes that platforms within the same broad category can pose very different levels of risk. Not all online games or chat applications are equally risky, just as not all apps marketed as “educational” are necessarily safe for children. A risk-based approach allows children to continue using platforms where the benefits plausibly outweigh the risks, while restricting access to platforms where the risks are unacceptably high.

The focus on design over platform type also incentivizes the innovation of safer tech. Companies will have a clear opportunity: create safer technology for kids and attract the users displaced from high-risk platforms. New platforms can build safer spaces that meet the regulation’s design standards without fear of being out-competed by companies that are willing to compromise children’s safety for growth. Families will also benefit from the transparent risk framework the regulation establishes, which will allow them to compare platforms more easily and choose the right ones for their kids.

In addition, honing in on risks rather than specific technologies helps future-proof the regulation by anticipating categories of technology that do not exist yet. New platforms, formats, or business models can be assessed within the same framework without the need to constantly rewrite the law. Our evolving understanding of harmful design can also be incorporated into the regulation’s risk assessments, just as improved knowledge of fire or earthquake safety continues to inform new building codes.

Much like the platform-based age-minimum approach used by Australia, Indonesia’s regulation places responsibility on the platform providers, reflecting a shift in the nation’s regulatory thinking from “policing bad outcomes” to “preventing predictable risks.” The burden is on the platforms to understand and mitigate the risks their products create; the tech companies themselves will be held accountable for violations (not the parents or children). The framework also creates a shared language that is conducive to better dialogue between regulators and platforms.

The design-based risk framework will also support productive public discussion about online safety in Indonesia. The risk-assessment criteria will broaden and enrich public understanding of digital harms, which is often narrowly focused on ill-intentioned users who post harmful content or who attempt to contact children, rather than the platform designs that enable and incentivize such behavior. This approach also draws attention to less visible but equally serious risks, such as data exploitation, exploitative monetization practices, addiction, and longer-term mental and physical health effects.

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Determining Risk Levels

At the heart of implementation is a deceptively simple question: What makes a platform risky for children? A rigorous, evidence-based assessment that answers this question is essential to the regulation’s success. The Indonesian government has taken this task seriously, using empirical data and scientific expertise to inform the assessment design.

To gather critical information about the types and degree of online harms that Indonesian children experience — and therefore what the assessment should evaluate — the Ministry examined user data from the major platforms1 as well as simulations of children’s digital platform usage. From the data as well as advice from experts, they identified seven categories of risk that the assessment would evaluate: content, contact, consumer (i.e., extracting payment from underage users via targeted ads or gambling-like features), data privacy, addiction, mental health, and physical health. They then leveraged existing research, including the companies’ own randomized control trials, studies, and experiments,2 as well as academic studies on features like autoplay,3 to identify key risk indicators and determine the best way to measure risk. Across categories, they devised a scoring method and determined at what threshold a platform qualifies as high-risk.

After building the risk assessment instrument, the Ministry convened a panel of experts for a Delphi study that examined the proposed risk indicators and evaluated the validity of the assessment. To ensure consistency and reliability, they also asked dozens of raters to independently apply the assessment on a set of platforms and compared the resulting scores. These third-party raters consistently identified platforms known to cause harm, suggesting that the assessment is both credible and rigorous.

Potential Implementation Challenges

1. The Self-Assessment

The decision to have companies complete a self-assessment as an initial step makes the regulation scalable across a large number of platforms, including future services that don’t yet exist. Testing from third-party raters indicates that the assessment’s specificity regarding design requirements should produce objective, consistent results, even when applied by the companies themselves. This is in contrast to general risk-assessment frameworks, which are broader and have not meaningfully addressed platform design because they allow companies to focus on content risks instead of design choices (e.g., in the EU).

Still, the self-assessment creates the very real possibility that providers will take a liberal interpretation of the risk indicators to claim that their platforms pose little risk to users.

Independent review of the companies’ self-assessments is therefore critical. The Ministry will need to equip itself with the resources and technical capabilities necessary to identify and refute unfounded claims. Fortunately, this challenge is not unique to Indonesia, and the Ministry has already taken steps to coordinate such capabilities with like-minded regulators.

2. Age Verification and Enforcement

Another key technical challenge revolves around age verification. The regulation will require high-risk platforms to both prevent under-16s from creating accounts and delete existing under-16 accounts. As part of enforcement, the Ministry will need to monitor whether high-risk platforms have implemented accurate age verification and barred underage users from creating accounts. This will require the Ministry to rapidly build technical expertise and gather additional resources.

Some tech industry stakeholders have pushed back against age verification, citing technical limitations; others have raised privacy concerns. These are valid, but given worldwide momentum toward protecting children, providers are already improving age verification technology and addressing the need for user privacy. The latest version of iOS, for example, allows users in select jurisdictions to validate their age without sharing any identity information with the third-party applications. As more countries demand it, such innovations will only get better.

Another common refrain is that teens will find ways to circumvent age verification measures (e.g., through VPNs). While this may be true for some, even partial success will protect a great number of children. Compare this thinking to other regulations that protect kids: The fact that some drivers still speed does not eliminate the utility of speed limits, and we don’t encounter underage drinking and decide to get rid of the minimum drinking age.

3. Balancing Safety with Children’s Rights

Some critics of the regulation have also raised concerns about its effect on children’s rights to information and freedom of expression. While there is some validity here, we believe the concerns are overstated. Indonesia’s age minimum applies specifically to account creation on high-risk platforms; it doesn’t prevent children from accessing the vast majority of information available online. YouTube content, for example, is fully accessible without an account (and other platforms could follow suit if they choose). Still, this is an area the Ministry will continue to monitor and address

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Empowering Collective Action

If implemented well, Indonesia’s age minimum for high-risk platforms has the potential to solve a persistent collective-action problem. As parents and educators, we are locked in a losing battle against online addiction, forced to act as individual “digital police” for our kids. Because the large majority of adolescents are currently on these platforms, keeping your child off of them can feel like a sentence of social isolation. This regulation fundamentally changes that calculus. By addressing addiction at the architectural level of the platform, Indonesia’s approach empowers parents to stop being enforcers and start being mentors.

For educators, this is equally transformative. Schools have long struggled to manage the behavioral and cognitive effects on kids who spend too much time online (the majority), from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation. Because this regulation focuses on limiting the most predatory, “sticky” features of digital platforms, children will be more able to disengage. With the collective-action problem solved and kids freed from mechanisms designed to addict them, schools and communities will have the chance to reclaim the “unmediated” spaces — playgrounds, sports fields, and face-to-face social circles — where crucial social-emotional skills are forged.

With this groundbreaking regulation, Indonesia is stepping up to protect its 80 million children and is showing the world that this is no longer a private uphill battle for parents to wage against the platforms; it’s a public concern that demands a bold government response. Ultimately, the true measure of Indonesia’s risk-based approach will be found not only in the absence of digital harm, but also in the presence of a flourishing analog life.

The first evidence we had for the impact of smartphones and social media was for teens’ lives outside of school. Teens were spending less time hanging out with their friends, less time sleeping, and more time on screens, often holed up alone in their bedrooms. That’s not a good formula for mental health, and sure enough, teen depression doubled as smartphones and social media took over after 2012.

But what about during school, where teens spend more than 30 hours a week? Those hours, too, are filled with technology. Sometimes that’s for truly educational purposes — they’re working on an essay for English class, reading a science textbook in an online library, or taking notes in class.

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But not always. Even school-issued laptops often allow access to YouTube and streaming (like Netflix, Disney+, and Peacock), allowing students to sit in the back of class and watch endless hours of entertainment. Others play games. Personal smartphones are also a huge distraction: A recent analysis found that American teens spend more than an hour using their phones during the school day, and almost none of that time is spent on educational activities. Instead, teens scroll through social media, watch videos, and play games. Some take videos of their peers without permission, or sneak off to the bathroom to watch TikToks.

Thus, teens are spending about 20% of their time at school not focusing on schoolwork or talking to their peers. That may be one reason why standardized test scores in math, reading, and science have declined since 2012 and why students have increasingly reported feeling lonely at school. Electronic devices are both distracting in the classroom and isolating in the lunchroom. What impact does that have on teens’ learning and on their mental health?

In a recent paper, my students and I looked into these issues in the PISA dataset of 15- and 16-year-olds around the world. In 36 countries, students consistently took standardized tests in math, reading, and science between 2006 and 2022. In 2022, they were asked how much time they spent using electronic devices (like phones, tablets, and laptops) for leisure purposes (like social media or entertainment) during the school day. This varied quite a bit across countries, with students in some countries spending hardly any time on devices for leisure during the school day, and others spending an average of more than two hours.

In countries where students spent a lot of time using devices for leisure during the school day, test scores plummeted between 2012 and 2022. In countries where they spent less time, test scores merely slid. Thus there was a significantly larger decline in scores in the countries where students spent more time using devices for fun during school hours (see Figure 1).

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The consequences of device use aren’t just academic; they are also social and emotional because device use has displaced students talking to each other during lunch and breaks. In countries where students spend more time using devices for leisure during the school day, the percentage of students who agreed “I often feel lonely at school” rose steeply, with the increase much less pronounced in countries with less leisure device use during school (see Figure 2).

These results show the twin impacts of the leisure use of devices during the school day: declines in test scores and increases in feelings of loneliness at school. They are another piece of evidence suggesting that schools should restrict students’ use of smartphones from bell to bell — not just during class, but also during lunch, breaks, and passing periods. A school where students are talking to each other is less lonely. I recently visited a Milwaukee school with a bell-to-bell no phones policy, and students are now talking, playing cards, and “bedazzling” (had to look that up!) with each other instead of being endlessly absorbed in their phones.

Of course, phones are only part of the problem. The next step is to lock down laptops and tablets so they, too, aren’t being used for social media and entertainment during the school day. Or, especially for younger students, it may be time to go back to paper and pencil — old-school, yes, but with the bonus of no binge-watching YouTube videos during chemistry class. Some states are considering bills outlawing or restricting the use of devices for elementary school students — a welcome step.

Sticking with the status quo means lower test scores and more lonely students — not the outcome any of us want.

P.S. I worked with some truly wonderful undergraduates on the PISA project, which at times seemed endless due to the complexity of the tables (data collected over 22 years across 36 countries). My heartfelt thanks to Spencer Deines, Ellah Fessenden, Lauren Gramse, Julia Lima, Elisa Ruiz, Siri Sommer, and M’Lise Venable.

– Jon and Zach

It’s 10:17 p.m and the house is finally still.

One partner is already in bed, body angled in that small, wordless way that signals come here. It isn’t necessarily sexual; it’s the end-of-the-day bid for contact after you’ve been “adulting” all day for everyone else.

The other partner slides in beside them and, without a second thought… phone out, face lit, thumb moving. A last email check. A news scan. A “real quick” look at Instagram that turns into ten minutes because the feed is designed to feel like it might deliver something important if you keep going.

Nothing dramatic happens; no yelling, slamming doors, or single, cinematic rejection that would justify a fight. But the body registers it anyway.

The partner who “turned toward” feels something so small and familiar, it’s almost embarrassing to name. A faint drop in the chest, a tightening behind the ribs. A private recalibration: I guess we’re not doing that tonight.

They might not say anything because it will sound petty and they’re exhausted. I don’t have the energy to start an argument this late, they might think. And what does it say about me that I “need attention” at 10:17 p.m. when everyone is fried, and life is relentless, and, honestly, it’s just a phone? So they swallow it, start their own numbing scroll, roll over, or ask a logistical question so the emotional request stays hidden inside something respectable.

The partner on the phone doesn’t think they are abandoning anyone. They experience themselves as decompressing; just checking one last thing, turning their brain off, and finding relief after a day of meetings, parenting, vigilance.

Two understandable experiences. One tiny injury.

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Now imagine you meet a couple, and they tell you, casually, that every night a third person joins them in bed. Someone who interrupts eye contact, pulls attention away when you’re in the middle of talking, rewards withdrawal with novelty, and trains you to leave whenever intimacy starts to feel demanding. Would we call that “decompression”?

There’s no affair or secret texting. The third is social media, Slack, sports alerts, group chats, online outrage. Other people’s lives, bodies, jokes, takes — an infinite social room you can enter without the friction of an actual relationship.

As a couples practitioner, I see what smartphones are doing to relationships in my practice every day. A relationship rarely dies from one catastrophic betrayal, and most of the couples I see aren’t destroyed by a single event. They erode through tiny departures that are too frequent to ignore, in which one partner’s attention leaves the room while their body is still there. The phone is unusually good at producing this kind of erosion. It hides inside the banal, outwardly mimicking togetherness while, in reality, creating distance. In an intimate relationship, this subtle, reflexive pattern of divided attention creates thousands of small injuries that accumulate over time, eroding trust and collapsing erotic potential and emotional safety.

Attention has become a scarce resource. Where it goes, how reliably it returns, and whether your partner can find you in the fleeting yet important micro-moments that add up to connection can determine whether your relationship thrives long term.

Attention Begets (and Betrays) Intimacy

As Jonathan Haidt, Johann Hari, and Kaitlyn Regehr have argued, smartphones are reshaping our attention. This shows up in the most intimate places of ordinary life, affecting our closest relationships with our partners, kids, friends, and family members.

Intimacy researchers have agreed since the late 1980s that the core of closeness is perceived partner responsiveness; the feeling that your partner sees and understands you, and cares about what you’re going through. This intimacy is built during the mundane, forgettable moments around the house, in the car, and between meals. Decades of subsequent research have confirmed that perceived responsiveness reliably predicts relationship satisfaction, emotional intimacy, and even physical affection.

In a longitudinal study published by relationship psychologist John Gottman, couples who stayed together over the six years of the study responded to each other’s “bids for connection” (small, everyday attempts to engage) about 86% of the time. Couples who divorced responded only about 33% of the time. The researchers concluded that “The mundane and often fleeting moments that a couple experiences in their everyday lives may contribute to the health or deterioration of a relationship by serving as a foundation to major couple events such as conflict discussions and caring days.” In other words, couples’ daily investment of attention in the ordinary moments can make the difference between lasting love and its collapse.

But modern life has made sustained attention difficult to produce. The cognitive load on adults — particularly partnered adults with children — is historically unusual. Dual-income households, information saturation, decision fatigue, and the ambient hum of perpetual availability create a chronic mental overload on a scale that previous generations didn’t face. On top of the cognitive weight, there’s the emotional labor of managing children’s feelings, maintaining competence at work, navigating extended family dynamics, and tracking the logistics of a shared life. By the time both partners land in bed at 10 p.m., their attentional budget is depleted.

Then there’s proximity. Many of us carry our phones into the places where intimacy used to live — the first minutes after waking, the walk from the car to the front door, the last stretch before sleep. A 2025 YouGov survey found that most Americans keep their phone on the bed or directly beside it at night, with younger adults more likely to sleep with the device on the mattress itself. The phone co-opts the space between partners, at the precise moments when connection used to have the best chance of happening.

All of this adds up to what we might call “phone-based adulthood,” a structural problem where cognitive saturation meets the most frictionless, ever-present relief valve ever engineered. Most people aren’t ignoring their partners out of cruelty or indifference; they’re doing it inadvertently, almost subconsciously. The phone offers stimulation, relief, and the feeling of being somewhere else. For an exhausted adult, that’s a compelling proposition. But it slowly and quietly eats away at their relationship.

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The Phone-Based Adulthood

Recently, a friend of mine was sitting with his eight-year-old son, Ari, and Ari’s step-mom. She was talking to Ari, and he was half paying attention, half reading a book. My friend said, “Ari, pay attention when she’s talking.” Ari put the book down. Then my friend asked, “Was that kind?” Ari said, “No.” My friend invited him to apologize, and he did.

Something about the interaction sat wrong with my friend — it left him feeling hypocritical. The next day, he apologized to his son too, because he knows his attention is in more than one place sometimes. Then he asked Ari, “Do you ever feel like I’m distracted when we’re hanging out?” Ari nonchalantly said, “Yeah, you’re always on your phone, and it makes me feel like you don’t want to talk to me.”

My friend recoiled at the truth of this. His kid just named his hurt in a single sentence, and did it without resentment.

Adults rarely speak like this. The person who feels their partner’s attention drift to the phone doesn’t usually say, It makes me feel like you don’t want to talk to me. They often say nothing, start a fight about something else, or pick up their own phone and match the distance, but the pain is the same. The phone has trained and normalized attention-splitting, and the people closest to us — children and partners alike — are left vying for the attention of someone who is right there and somehow not.

Availability is not a grand romantic stance, but a repeated micro-behavior. It’s bringing your eyes up when your partner starts talking; the split-second pause before you reach for your phone; the choice to stay in the room after an awkward interaction instead of going away (literally or figuratively). But the phone-based adulthood makes this harder in two key ways:

First, it normalizes chronic partial presence. Many people now live in an “open tab” state of continuous partial attention, a term coined by sociologist Linda Stone. With a smartphone always in reach, one’s attention is constantly split between the room they’re in and the world inside the device.

Second, it creates an always-available exit from normal interpersonal friction. In relationships, friction is a necessary ingredient that allows you the opportunity to either deepen your connection or detach. Smartphones make detachment easy and instant, undercutting one of the main growth mechanisms for the relationship.

These two habitual patterns are behind more relationship strain than most couples recognize. A partner who is physically beside you but mentally gone, over and over, in the moments that used to be yours together — those small departures accumulate and create distance.

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What I See Clinically

In my private practice, relationship problems that stem from phone-based adulthood show up in a few specific, recognizable ways, couple after couple.

Attention is the New Fidelity

Traditional infidelity is obvious. Someone invests secrecy, time, erotic energy, and emotional intimacy outside the partnership.

Attention infidelity is harder to identify because it’s socially sanctioned and functionally invisible. It doesn’t look like “choosing someone else”; it’s “checking something,” “unwinding,” “being informed,” “responding quickly for work.” It looks like “I’m listening, keep talking.” But what many partners experience is I cannot access you, or you don’t care.

Studies consistently link partner phone use during interactions, or “phubbing” (phone + snubbing), with lower relationship satisfaction, in part through feeling excluded and less responded to.

What intimate relationships actually need (and healthy relationships have) is not constant togetherness, but reliable access. Couples can weather enormous stress, distance, and conflict, as long as both people trust that the other is fundamentally reachable. The phone disrupts precisely this.

In a healthy relationship, the hard parts of the day get processed together, not side-by-side in silence. When the phone becomes the regulator for both nervous systems, the relationship becomes the place you rest from, not the place you recover in.

Micro-Withdrawal Replaces Overt Withdrawal

What keeps couples connected through the normal friction of life is their confidence that their bids for connection will be received. When one partner consistently withdraws by, for instance, leaving the room and refusing to engage, it undermines this essential faith.

Phone withdrawal is micro-withdrawal. Because it’s socially acceptable, some people might not even see it as impolite. It’s the downward glance your partner makes in the middle of your sentence, the half ”mmhmm” while reading, or the reflexive reach for the phone after a question that’s just a little too vulnerable.

Because it’s ambiguous (as opposed to, say, leaving a room and slamming the door), partners second-guess themselves. Am I overly sensitive? Am I controlling? Should I let them decompress? It’s been a hard day; they should be able to decompress. So they don’t bring it up.

Over time, micro-withdrawal trains both partners: The one who turns toward the other learns to stop turning, and the one who turns away learns that withdrawal is painless, unchallenged, and easy. Then couples show up in therapy saying, “We’re just not as close as we used to be.” They didn’t consciously choose distance, but it accumulated through tiny, seemingly inconsequential moments of half-presence that became a regular state.

Conflict Avoidance, Optimized

Sometimes after a tense exchange, one partner picks up their phone to “calm down.” The other experiences abandonment and escalates. The scroller feels criticized and doubles down on the frictionless exit. This is called the pursuer-distancer cycle — one of the most common dynamics in couples therapy. (Phones don’t create this cycle, but they accelerate it.)

In my office, it often looks like this:

A couple had a tiny argument about coming home late, say. One partner says, “Can we talk about what just happened?” The other says, “I can’t do this right now,” and reaches for the phone out of instinct. One thumb flick: a news headline, a reel, an endless feed.

The partner who wanted to talk starts to put two and two together. You have energy for strangers and scrolling, but you don’t have energy for me.

“Are you seriously doing this?” comes out sharper than intended. Now the scroller feels attacked, and within minutes, they’re arguing about the phone itself but the real pain happened when one person made a bid (“can we talk about this”) and the other shut down.

In relationships that handle conflict well, tension happens, people misunderstand each other, and by grappling with nervous system regulation, wounds, and internal dramas together, the couple finds their way through. The repair doesn’t have to be graceful; it just has to happen.

The phone short-circuits that repair rhythm by giving the distancer on-demand relief and the pursuer fuel to monitor and escalate. Because the device is always within arm’s reach, conflict doesn’t get the natural cooldown it used to when there was less stimulus available.

Erotic Friction

The mechanics of desire depend on presence. Erotic connection requires attention bandwidth and the sense that your partner is there with their attention turned toward you.

When one or both partners are habitually half absent, scrolling before bed or checking notifications when something could start to build between you, initiation can feel riskier than the ordinary vulnerability of wanting someone. So you hesitate or try, and it may not land because your partner isn’t present enough to register the bid. Over time, rejection becomes more likely, and rejection in long-term love rarely stays confined to sex — it spills into identity. Am I wanted? Am I chosen? Am I still compelling to you?

Then couples do what people always do when a topic carries shame: they stop talking about it and avoid initiating. They protect themselves. The bedroom becomes less a place for intimacy and more a reminder of the distance: two people side-by-side, absorbed in their screens while the physical closeness makes the emotional gap feel worse.

What Actually Helps: Attention Agreements

When couples try to solve the phone/attention problem with declarations (e.g. we should be more present), it often doesn’t work. Without clear agreements, “being present” becomes a vague standard that either partner can hold over the other. Moral pressure activates defensiveness, and defensiveness kills intimacy.

Instead, it helps to treat attention as a shared resource with rules, boundaries, and repair mechanisms, similar to how couples often treat money. Households have a better chance at functioning well when partners have clear agreements around how they make, save, and spend money. Attention requires the same intentional approach.

Here are three simple things you and your partner can do to create containment with phone usage and preserve (or restore) your connection to each other.1

1) Build Predictable Availability (Instead of Chasing “Device-Free” Purity)

You don’t have to ban phones; you just need to focus attention during key windows.

Sit down with your partner and pick a few zones/periods of concerted, distraction-free time and make them reliable. For most couples, the highest-leverage ones are the first stretch after reunions (e.g., waking up and coming home from work) and the last stretch before sleep. If your relationship currently includes “parallel scrolling in bed,” start there. Talk to your partner about which area would make the biggest difference, and start with one. For instance, “After we come home from work, let’s take 30 minutes to do our own thing and decompress, and then spend the next hour together with our phones in another room.”

2) Tell Your Partner When You’re Leaving and When You’ll be Back

Sometimes people get overloaded and someone will check out — either intentionally or unintentionally — by picking up their phone. That’s expected and normal. Relationships survive better if withdrawal has a predictable return.

When you’re each regulated, and before you’re in the heat of the moment, make an agreement that when one of you needs to check out, you’ll name it and put a time limit on it. That’s it. The simple ritual of telling your partner you’re going and when you’ll be back makes all the difference, instead of leaving them wondering where you went while you scroll.

A return practice can be short: “I’m going to look at my phone for ten minutes to reset. Then I’m back, and I’d love to connect with you.” Then keep your commitment and actually come back within the time you identified.

3) Treat the Phone as a Symptom Before You Treat it as the Villain

If your partner is scrolling compulsively at night, the instinct is to make the phone the problem. Couples who only fight about the phone miss the pain underneath. Couples who address the pain often see the phone use drop because they’re able to solve the actual issue.

This can sound like, “I’ve noticed that when we’re both on our phones at night, I feel more alone than I want to. Can we talk about that?” Lead with your own experience, not your theory about theirs.

If you don’t decide where your attention goes, Meta, Apple, and OpenAI will decide for you. The attention economy doesn’t need your relationship to fail; it just needs your partner to be unavailable, a hundred times a day, forever.

If your relationship feels harder than it should, if you feel lonely next to someone you love, or if you keep having the same fight about attention that starts from almost nothing, the explanation might be more structural than personal. Your relationship has a third.

Rather than panic, the solution is for you and your partner to acknowledge what we’re all up against, and to establish some attention agreements. In my practice, couples who do this are often surprised at how quickly things shift. You can defend access to each other and reclaim the little moments of connection. It’s just about being intentional when it comes to your relationship’s most precious resource — your attention.

Powerful generative AI tools are suddenly everywhere, embedded in many of the learning platforms students use daily. For students, they offer an irresistible shortcut: why write the essay, solve the complex math problem, or read the chapter when a chatbot can do it for you in seconds? Schools across the U.S. are scrambling to adapt. Blue books are back. So too are in-class exams and No. 2 pencils. Running student work through anti-AI checkers is standard practice. These are all pragmatic strategies by harried educators who, along with families, are on the front lines, mediating the next tidal wave of technological innovation for their students.

But these practical solutions miss a major underlying issue. The majority of American students are disengaged at school — a trend that began long before generative AI arrived. According to the U.S. census, only one in three students are highly engaged in school, a number that has been stubbornly consistent over the last decade. And while 65% of parents believe their 10th graders love school, only 26% of students actually say they do.

AI didn’t create this crisis, but it raises the stakes considerably. AI chatbots promise to reduce the “friction” of learning by teaming up with the student 24/7. But this friction isn’t a flaw that needs to be engineered away, it’s the whole point. The effort of working something out, of sitting with a challenge and finding a way through, is an essential part of the learning process. It’s what keeps students engaged, and engagement is both a prerequisite for real learning and a predictor of outcomes that reach far beyond the classroom, including higher graduation rates and life aspirations, and lower rates of depression and substance use disorder. In a world saturated with AI, the capacity to learn — to cultivate genuine curiosity, push through difficulty, and develop independent thinking — is the essential human skill. And it’s one we can still help students build.

The good news is that student engagement isn’t a mystery, and parents and teachers have more influence over it than they realize. When students have the agency and freedom to follow their own curiosity, engagement follows naturally. The key is knowing how to help kids get there.

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The Four Modes of Student Engagement

Academics agree that a combination of several elements shape student engagement:

• What students do (e.g., showing up, turning in homework)

• What students think (e.g., making connections between classroom learning and experiences out of school)

• What students feel (e.g., showing interest in what they are learning and enjoying school)

• Whether students take initiative (e.g., proactively finding ways to make learning more interesting, such as asking to write a paper on a topic they love versus the one that is assigned. This, in particular, is an essential skill in an AI-infused world.)

Because much of this is internal, it can be hard to see. So teachers and parents often rely on external behavior and outcomes as their gauges. But grades and attendance only tell part of the story — and they lead well-meaning parents to encourage compliance rather than real engagement.

That’s where a clearer framework helps. In our research for our recent book, The Disengaged Teen, we identified four distinct modes of student engagement and disengagement in school: Passenger, Achiever, Resister, and Explorer. These modes give teachers and parents language and a deeper understanding of where their students get stuck, and offer practical tools to help reignite their motivation.

• In Passenger mode, students are coasting — doing the bare minimum. Parents of kids in Passenger mode often get a one-word response from their kids when they ask about school: “boring.” Students in Passenger mode may rush through homework and barely study for exams, yet some still get straight As. For these students, school can feel too easy, offering little challenge or excitement. Their coping strategy is to check out and focus on friends, gaming, sports — anything more interesting. For students stuck here, AI is an easy shortcut to finish homework faster and get back to hanging out.

• Students in Achiever mode are trying to get a gold star on everything — academics, extracurriculars, service, you name it. They are driven and impressive but often exhausted. Fear of failure haunts these students, and many wilt when their performance dips even slightly. A common frustration among students in Achiever mode is, “My teacher didn’t tell me exactly what to do to get an A.” A B+ can trigger alarm, extra studying, late nights, and lost sleep. Achievers are focused on the end goal — the grade — not the learning process, and for many, cheating was already common before AI came along. Now, chatbots make it even easier to power through their pile of work.

• Students in Resister mode use whatever influence they have to signal — to both teachers and families — that school isn’t working for them. Some actively avoid learning. Others disrupt their learning by derailing lessons and acting out, becoming the “problem child.” But they have something going for them that students in Passenger mode do not: agency. They aren’t taking their lot lying down, they are influencing the flow of instruction, though in a negative way. If given the chance, we found that those in Resister mode can move to Explorer mode — the final and most engaged mode — more quickly than students stuck in Passenger or Achiever mode.

• The peak of the engagement mountain is Explorer mode, where students develop the willingness and desire to learn new things. Here students’ agency meets their drive. Their involvement runs deep and they find meaning in the effort required to learn. Explorer mode includes the active curiosity Jonathan Haidt calls “Discover Mode.” Students in Explorer mode feel confident enough to take creative risks, generate their own ideas, and solve problems in the classroom. When a student in Explorer mode is asked “How was school?,” their answer is not a monosyllabic “fine” but an excited breakdown of how tornados work or how they calculated Taylor Swift’s net worth using newly acquired math skills.

A key way to build engagement is to give students some autonomy in the classroom. Across 35 randomized controlled trials in the U.S. and 17 other countries over three decades, when teachers give students opportunities to engage by having a small say in the flow of instruction — such as choosing among homework options, providing feedback at the end of a lesson, or asking questions about their curiosities — learning, achievement, positive self-concept, prosocial behavior, and numerous other benefits increase. To develop initiative, which builds agency, kids need to practice it. For that they need to get into Explorer Mode.

In academic terms, this is agentic engagement — the ability and desire to initiate learning, express preferences, investigate interests, solve problems, and persist in the face of challenges. It is the foundation of a meaningful life and the life skills required to navigate an AI-saturated world.

The modes of engagement are dynamic: students move around them all the time based on their environments, their “efficacy” — i.e., how successful they think they can be — and their emotions. When students are given the freedom to explore, they often take it, and with it they can develop agency. Parents and educators also play a massive role influencing what mode kids show up in, often without knowing it.

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The Case of Kia

Kia, one of the students we interviewed for our book, is a classic example of how agency can pull a student back from the disengagement brink. In elementary school, she was vibrant, reading incessantly and debating Percy Jackson plot points with her dad. But by middle school, she was bored, stifled, and completely checked out — stuck squarely in Passenger mode.

Worried about her profound disengagement, a creative teacher tried an unusual strategy: he invited her to join a learner advisory panel to tell the school board what it really felt like to sit at a desk all day. As Kia put it, her brain flipped from “This is useless, and I hate everything,” to “Hold on, maybe I have a say.”

At home, her father — who had gone straight to work after high school — refused to let her intellect become dormant. He treated her questions as worthy, whether she was asking why water towers are round or for a definition of “pedagogy.” He treated her like a thinker even when school made her feel like a failure.

When her school eventually introduced “studios,” where students design their own projects, Kia leaned into her love of storytelling, creating a podcast on mythology and an escape room about presidential assassinations. That agency rewired her, allowing her to fully enter Explorer mode. Even when she later landed in dry, lecture-heavy college classes, she still thrived. “I learned that you can learn anything. You just have to know how you work and how to teach yourself.”

This shift from compliance to choice, from helplessness to agency, supported by her dad and her teachers, took Kia from Passenger mode to Explorer mode and helped her rediscover the curiosity and drive she had in elementary school.

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The Exploration Gap

Our Brookings–Transcend study found that fewer than 4% of students in middle and high school regularly had in-school experiences that supported Explorer mode.

The shift in student engagement during the transition from 5th to 6th grade — when most students in the U.S. enter middle school — is striking. More coasting, less achieving, more resisting, and less exploring all characterize the move from elementary to middle school.

Why does this happen? One key factor is lack of agency and a school system that, for most learners, undermines Explorer mode. At a moment of peak brain development, when young people seek meaning about themselves and the world, many are shuffled through classes like factory workers, pounded with content that feels standardized and irrelevant, and pressured to win a race they don’t want to run. Despite all the energy they expend, they increasingly feel like they have little say in how they spend their days.

Some have proposed that generative AI could unlock students’ motivations and interests. But recent global Brookings Institution research examining the benefits and risks of AI on student learning found that current use — especially open-ended discussion with AI chatbots and AI “friends”— undermines students’ cognitive development, motivation to learn, and, ultimately, engagement with the material.

The solution is not a better algorithm. It’s centering human connection, creativity, and student agency, which parents and teachers are uniquely positioned to do.

Six Actions to Get Kids into Explorer Mode

When kids are in Explorer mode they are motivated to learn, and motivation is crucial. “Biology doesn’t waste energy,” says Mary Helen Immordino Yang, a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Southern California. “We don’t think about things that don’t matter.” Students are motivated by having authentic opportunities to contribute and learn meaningful things.

Families and schools can work together here. When adults at home and educators in school work collaboratively, kids’ outcomes routinely improve. Schools are ten times more likely to improve when this strong collaboration exists. Today, there are six actions families and schools can take to help our children have more Explorer moments.

1. Model the thrill of learning.

“Curiosity is contagious,” writes author Ian Leslie. “So is incuriosity.” It may sound simple, but one of the most powerful ways parents at home can support student engagement is by letting their kids see them having Explorer moments of their own.

John Hattie, a professor from the University of Melbourne, calls this being your child’s “first learner,” namely modeling the thrill of learning in everyday activities. This, much more than parents’ well-intentioned hovering around homework completion, helps students engage and do well in school. When Hattie examined the effects of parental involvement on student achievement across almost two thousand studies covering over two million students around the globe, he found “[w]hen parents see their role as surveillance, such as commanding that homework be completed, the effect size is negative.” In other words, parental nagging and controlling makes things worse, not better.

2. Know your child, know their mode.

Parents and educators will have more success getting their kids and students into Explorer mode if they truly know the child they have in front of them, and tailor their support accordingly. The modes are dynamic, and kids move between them, but when kids get stuck in one mode it can become an identity. The kid in Passenger-mode becomes the “lazy kid,” the kid in Achiever-mode the “smart kid,” the kid in Resister-mode the “problem kid.”

Kids don’t need a label, they each need a slightly different nudge to help move them into Explorer mode. The Engagement Toolkit in our book provides a host of practical strategies unique to each mode. For example, the kid who frequently procrastinates because they’re stuck in Passenger mode may need help developing study and planning skills. The student deep in Achiever mode may need help learning that failure is not the end of the world, something they can develop by taking small risks. Kids in Resister mode often need help developing a pathway out of the rut they are in — what Daphna Oyserman calls a vision of a “future possible self” — as well as a plan to get there.

3. Support ways for young people to make authentic contributions.

Adolescence is a period of profound opportunity as well as vulnerability. Teens ask important questions like “Who am I in the world? What matters to me? Do I matter? What kind of future can I build?” They need actual experiences to get data on the answers and build the muscles of being a respected contributor to a community. Cultural anthropologists call the process of gaining that status “earned prestige.” Too often young people default to social media to seek this status. Families and schools can both counteract that by giving kids opportunities for real-life contributions. When families rely on students to help get dinner made, bedrooms cleaned, the dog walked, or a meal delivered to an elderly neighbor, it helps young people know they matter for more than their latest test grade.

At school, when kids engage in experiential projects like “What happened in that abandoned factory?” or “Who lies beneath a headstone marked with only a single letter?” — as they did in Amenia, New York — they do work that matters in their communities. Connecting learning experiences to real life, from asking questions about how their local economy works to their community’s cultural norms, gives students opportunities to make meaning of their assignments while learning about themselves and their place in the world.

4. Never take away extracurriculars because of poor academic performance.

Too often, schools make participation in extracurricular activities contingent on good grades. A nationally representative survey found that nearly 60 percent of students earning all As participate in arts-related extracurriculars, compared to just over 30 percent of students with Cs and Ds. A similar divide exists in sports. The logic may seem sound — a child struggling with algebra doesn’t need more time on the basketball court. But this approach is misguided.

Struggling students need something to be excited about: a place to explore, connect, and shine. When students discover their “spark,” as the late youth advocate Peter Benson called it, that passion can sustain them through life’s ups and downs and boost engagement in school. If that spark is athletics or theater or music and that gets taken away because of academic performance, most kids in Passenger or Resister mode will not suddenly shift to Explorer mode so they can participate again — they’ll become even more disengaged. To foster more Explorer moments, schools should make extracurricular participation contingent on attendance and positive behavior — not grades.

5. Help students manage technology.

Another key is helping students escape the seductive power of tech distractions. Parents can set limits for children’s technology use at home, which can help ensure they are well rested enough to tap into their curiosity and creativity. They can advocate that their students’ school and community limit cell phone and social media use, as Jonathan Haidt recommends in The Anxious Generation. Parents can also check their own tech use at home. Children learn from what we do, more than what we say.

6. Hold a workshop or book group on the four modes of engagement.

You can’t fix what you can’t see. Only a third of 10th graders report having opportunities to develop their own ideas, compared to 69% of parents who think they do. A key aim of our book is to make the invisible — learning and engagement — visible, so we can develop strategies to improve it.

According to our research, teachers and parents want language and tools to talk about learning without creating friction. The four modes can unlock the conversations we need to have with our children and students. Parents can suggest this as a topic for a parents’ evening, a school discussion with educators, or a topic for back-to-school night. So, whether it’s a book club (we have a free study guide) or a webinar, workshop, keynote, or focus group, sparking dialogue about student engagement is a great first step to boosting it.

Conclusion

Despite its powerful role in learning, student engagement is rarely at the center of education discussions. Instead, grades and attendance dominate the conversation. Our hyper-focus on outcomes over inputs is a mistake. Instead of fixating on the leaves of the tree — test scores and grades — we need to tend to the roots, the invisible network of curiosity and motivation that will keep the tree growing.

In an increasingly AI-saturated world, Passenger mode is a seductive trap — a path where thinking is outsourced and agency atrophies. More than ever, we must prioritize student engagement and treat Explorer mode not as a nice-to-have, but as an essential life skill. That means giving kids the agency to follow their genuine curiosity, take creative risks, and find meaning in their own learning. Every student is capable of Explorer mode, we just have to help them get there.

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg — founder and CEO of Meta — took the stand under oath for the first time in a criminal trial.

At one point, Zuckerberg was questioned about Meta’s use of beauty filters: digital effects that make users, including children, appear younger, fitter, and more conventionally attractive in photos and videos.

The prosecution referenced Meta’s own internal review, Project MYST. According to reports, 18 out of 18 wellbeing experts who evaluated the psychological impact of these filters raised serious concerns about potential harm to young users’ mental health.

Despite those warnings, the filters remained available.

Zuckerberg’s defense rested on a familiar line of reasoning: there was no peer-reviewed, causal evidence demonstrating this specific product directly harmed children. Absent validated proof of causation, harm could not be established.

“There is no evidence of harm.”

This is the same argument now being deployed by EdTech lobbyists at statehouses across the country as lawmakers attempt to regulate classroom technology.

No Evidence of Causative Harm

This year, more than a dozen bills aimed at regulating EdTech have been introduced across at least nine states. Utah’s SAFE and BALANCE acts led the way, followed closely by Vermont’s effort to formalize parental opt-out rights and Tennessee’s proposal to remove digital devices from primary classrooms.

These efforts are informed by decades of research showing that, on average, classroom technologies do not outperform – and often underperform - well-implemented analog instruction.

Despite strong bipartisan support in most states, pro-tech lobbyists are pushing back with a familiar refrain: “There is no evidence of harm for emerging EdTech products.”

Strictly speaking, that statement is often true.

Educational technology evolves so rapidly that by the time researchers evaluate one platform, it has already been patched, rebranded, or replaced. Product-specific causal evidence is perpetually just out of reach.

But this is not a scientific defense. It is a misleading procedural maneuver.

When Causation Becomes Dangerous

Demanding product-specific, long-term, high-risk causative trials in children sets an unrealistic and ethically impossible standard.

Returning to beauty filters, no ethics board would approve a study deliberately exposing children to a tool that 18 experts consider risky simply to “prove” harm. That is why no randomized control trial has tested whether these filters damage young users’ mental health — the likely harms of such a study outweigh any possible benefits.

Luckily, we don’t live in a vacuum.

A substantial body of correlational research links image manipulation and filter use to body dissatisfaction, self-objectification, weight concerns, and reduced wellbeing. The experts reviewing Meta’s policies were not guessing — they were applying decades of psychological research to a new technological wrapper.

Software changes. Human biology does not.

The same logic governs learning.

Returning to Utah

Utah’s digital inflection year occurred in 2014, corresponding with the statewide launch of SAGE — a fully computerized adaptive assessment system. Before this, digital tools were largely peripheral in Utah classrooms. After this, they became structurally embedded.

Before widespread digital adoption, Utah NAEP scores rose consistently from 1992 through 2013. Pooled by subject and indexed to 2013:

• Math scores increased +0.76 points per year

• Reading scores increased +0.14 points per year.

After 2014, the slopes reversed:

• Math scores declined -0.39 points per year

• Reading scores declined -0.88 points per year.

This represents a structural swing of -1.15 points per year in math, and -1.02 points per year in reading. Importantly, excluding 2022 — the year most impacted by COVID-related closures — leaves these swings essentially unchanged: -1.05 points per year in math and -1.07 points per year in reading. In other words, this pattern is not a lockdown artifact — it’s a structural break beginning in 2015.

These are correlational patterns, but so were the early signals about smoking, lead exposure, and beauty filters.

When consistent patterns appear across nearly all 50 states’ NAEP data and across dozens of countries’ PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS results — and when those patterns align with established cognitive mechanisms — we are no longer looking at coincidence. We are looking at converging evidence.

And what we cannot ethically do (just as with beauty filters) is deliberately expose children to systems we have strong reason to believe may undermine learning simply to satisfy an unrealistic evidentiary demand.

Demanding perfect causation before action doesn’t protect children; it protects developers.

A Generous Interpretation

Even if we assume the decline argument is overstated — that Utah’s NAEP data has merely “plateaued” since 2014 — the harm does not disappear.

Between 2015 and 2025, Utah invested roughly $500 million in K-12 educational technology. If half a billion dollars produces stagnation, that’s not neutral.

Every dollar committed to devices and platforms is a dollar not spent on interventions we know improve learning: teacher development, structured literacy programs, small-group instruction, targeted support for struggling students.

Even under the most generous interpretation of the data, the opportunity cost alone is staggering.

So Now Then…

Demanding definitive causative proof of harm before acting to protect children sets an unrealistic and dangerous standard. If we wait for perfect causation, we will always act too late.

Our society does not demand product-specific randomized trials before regulating food additives, vehicle safety standards, or consumer protections. We act when converging evidence suggests that risk outweighs benefit.

Education should be no different.

When billions of dollars and millions of children are involved, the burden of proof should rest on demonstrating clear, durable, replicable benefit — not on proving harm after the fact.

Caution is not fear, and restraint is not regression. They are marks of a society that prioritizes children over products.

For more on EdTech, check out Jared’s previous After Babel piece, The EdTech Revolution Has Failed.

While it is well documented that social media poses significant risks to youth mental health, the long-term cultural trends that inflated its influence have received much less attention. I argue that a decades-long shift to permissive parenting created a governance vacuum — an absence of necessary rules and expectations — that left Gen Z uniquely vulnerable, providing the ideal environment for a screen-based childhood to take hold and compound the prevailing mental health challenges of adolescents.

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As Gallup’s Principal Economist, I regularly field and analyze surveys on well-being and mental health. As a parent of four, I became particularly alarmed by the troubling signs of adolescent discontent documented by Jonathan Haidt and many others. Having worked in clinical psychology as a young man — at residential care facilities and other settings, I have long known that family context matters greatly for youth mental health, providing either resilience or vulnerability depending on the strength of parent-child relationships.

With this in mind, in 2023 and 2025, my colleagues and I fielded representative surveys of U.S. parents and their adolescent children (ages 13–19) exploring mental health, parenting practices, and how adolescents are spending their time with screens and other activities.

I wanted to know how best-practice parenting relates to adolescent mental health. Psychologists hold many perspectives on parenting, but a widely accepted view is that the most effective parents both respond to the needs of the child (e.g., provide warmth, affection, sympathy, and security) and demand appropriate behavior.

This model can be illustrated as a two-dimension classification scheme, based on a diagram adapted from psychologists Eleanor Maccoby and John Martin in their influential overview of the literature.1

At the bottom left of the model are parents who are neither responsive nor demanding. According to the theory, they ask little of their children and provide little in attention or affection, a pattern thought to be harmful to development. The upper-left and bottom-right patterns are also associated with relatively poor outcomes because they are strong in only one dimension. Parents who are demanding but not responsive tend to score lower on measures of parent-child relationship quality and risk undermining the legitimacy of parental authority. Meanwhile, parents who are responsive but not demanding may fail to foster the self-efficacy and moral character of their child.

Parents who combine both elements were described as authoritative by parenting theorist Diana Baumrind. This combination is important to youth mental health because a large body of research finds that authoritative parenting has meaningfully large and beneficial associations with youth mental health. My own work reaches similar conclusions: parents who are both responsive and demanding tend to have children with the best mental health and highest quality relationships with their parents.

If authoritative parenting is most strongly associated with positive youth outcomes, an important question is whether parenting practices have shifted toward or away from this model over time.

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What We Know About How Parenting Has Changed

Measuring parenting is difficult, and tracking changes in parenting over time is even more challenging. Parents do many things for and with their children and adapt their priorities based on what they believe their child needs. With these limitations in mind, there are a few things we know.

As the 20th century unfolded, parents increasingly came to value autonomy over obedience in their children. This shift appears across several decades of surveys asking parents to rate the importance of various qualities that they think children should learn. Data from the General Social Survey show that the percentage of U.S. parents selecting “to obey” as one of the two most important things for children to learn fell from 40% in 1986 to 18% in 2024.

Similar trends have been observed globally, according to data collected on the World Values Survey. Among countries with data going back to 2000 or earlier, most saw a decrease in the share of parental valuation of obedience, with large decreases in countries such as the United Kingdom, Chile, Taiwan, Canada, and Spain. Parents continued to value authority at high rates in countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Turkey, and Estonia. In general, parents tend to give less importance to obedience if living in a high-income country.

Other evidence is consistent with this pattern. Parental strictness declined and tolerance of children expressing anger toward parents increased between the mid-20th and early 21st centuries. Parents also seem less inclined to have their children undertake paid work. For example, summer employment rates among U.S. teenagers fell from 57% in 1976 to 38% in 2024, according to data from the Current Population Survey. In short, parents appear to have become less demanding and more permissive (as has also been argued by Dr. Leonard Sax in his book, The Collapse of Parenting).

Although the term “obedience” can carry negative connotations in modern discourse, most people would likely agree that obedience to laws and to basic social norms of decency and mutual respect remain important. Parents generally want children to listen to instructions and follow rules.2

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New Evidence on Parenting Changes by Generation

To further understand how parenting practices may have changed over time, my colleagues and I at Gallup fielded a survey of parenting in July 2024. We asked a representative sample of U.S. adults to answer questions about how they were parented as children, using 12 years of age as a reference point. By comparing the answers given by various birth cohorts, we can observe (imperfectly, to be sure) whether retrospective perceptions of parents have changed over time. Respondents reported separately about their mother (or maternal figure) and father (or paternal figure), depending on whom they lived with at the time.

We found little to no difference in parents’ warmth, affection, or responsiveness. For example, 44% of adults born between 1930 and 1949 agreed with the statement their father “was very warm and affectionate toward you.” For those born between 1995 and 2006, 41% agreed.

There were, however, much larger differences in the demanding aspects of parenting. The two items showing the largest changes were:

• “You knew he would punish you or take away a privilege if you did something that was wrong” and

• “He set reasonable rules for your behavior and always enforced them fairly”

Similar items asking about the mother also showed large changes. In both cases, respondents from more recent birth cohorts were significantly less likely than those from older birth cohorts to agree, consistent with the decline in demandingness described in the literature.

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Regulating Smartphones at Home

The measured fall in demanding parenting comes at a time when adolescents are confronted with new technological temptations that require parental guidance. Thus, the partial relinquishing of parental governance increases vulnerability to the harms of social media, video games, and other habit-forming products.

As has been widely discussed on this Substack, adolescents spend alarming amounts of time using social media. In a 2023 Gallup survey, we found that the average U.S. teenager reports spending nearly five hours per day on social media. Research on young adults suggests that a meaningful portion of this use exceeds what users themselves say they would prefer. Many parents likewise report wishing their children spent more time on schoolwork, hobbies, or offline activities.

Yet, as part of the same survey, less than half of parents of children ages three and older agreed with the statement, “I restrict screen time (such as TV, tablet or phone) to certain times of the day.” Limitations were even less common among parents of adolescent children, with only 30% agreeing they restrict screen time.

Consistent with the broader argument, parents who do restrict screen time tend to have children who report less time using social media. On average, teens whose parents set limits report about 1.4 fewer hours per day on social media. They also report less time spent on video games, less time alone, and more time devoted to homework, chores, hobbies, and practicing sports or arts — patterns that are generally associated with better mental health outcomes.

Not surprisingly, parents who score high on demandingness are more likely to restrict screen time. For example, 36% of parents of adolescents who strongly disagreed with the statement “I have a hard time saying no to my child” reported restricting screen time, compared with 13% of those who strongly agreed. Parents who identify with a religious tradition are also more likely to restrict screens than parents who identify as atheist or agnostic.

Overall, these data show a strong association between adolescent mental health and being raised by a demanding parent who also restricts screens. Among parents who were high in demandingness and restricted screens, 14% reported that their child had been at least sometimes depressed in the past year, and only 20% reported that their teen spent five or more hours per day on social media. By contrast, among parents who were permissive and did not restrict screens, 38% reported that their child had been at least sometimes depressed, and 50% reported five or more hours of daily social-media use. Results were similar when using a broader index combining multiple emotional and well-being measures.

My Advice: Respect Your Authority

My interpretation of these data and decades of related research leads me to believe that children need guidance and structure in order to thrive. They benefit from clear rules and boundaries that are appropriately enforced. The evidence suggests that the mental health challenges facing today’s youth are unlikely to stem from a decline in parental warmth or affection. By most accounts, contemporary parents are at least as responsive as those of earlier generations. The more notable shift appears to be a reduction in the demands that parents place on their children.

I believe this perspective is relevant to parents, grandparents, step-parents, or anyone else who has responsibility for the welfare of a child. It’s perfectly appropriate to set boundaries and enforce rules generally and with respect to screens. A “no social media” policy strikes me as the best default. Whether your child can otherwise handle a smartphone responsibly will likely depend on the child, but it seems to me that there are plenty of less distracting options available, such as smartwatches. Calling and texting friends and family is unlikely to be harmful. Risks from social media often stem from viewing content posted by and interacting with strangers.

None of this is to say that restricting screens is easy. Digital platforms are deliberately designed to capture attention, and some children will be more resistant than others to parental limits. Parents may need to adjust their approach over time, including monitoring usage or setting graduated rules. Strong and consistent boundaries are helpful, but each family must determine what works within its own circumstances.

The challenge is compounded by the pace of technological change, which often leaves adults themselves uncertain about what constitutes responsible use of social media and AI. Many digital tools offer genuine benefits. In my own family, educational apps have reinforced early reading and math skills, online instructional videos have supported exercise and skill-building, and games have helped pass time during travel or bad weather. AI tools have also helped me identify age-appropriate books and family-friendly films.

Parents therefore face a balancing act: how to preserve these benefits while minimizing exposure to documented risks. Companies could help parents by increasing their efforts to restrict access to potentially harmful content. Ultimately, even without the cooperation of tech companies, decisions about whether and how a child uses digital technology belong to parents. Pleasing children in the short term is not as important as ensuring their long-term well-being.

I just returned from 12 days in Davos, London, and Brussels, where my goal was to encourage political leaders to raise the minimum age to 16 for opening or having social media accounts in their countries. This is the second of my four norms for a healthier childhood, laid out in my book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. I met with leaders from Indonesia, France, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. Some have already acted decisively (Indonesia and France); the others are likely to do so. And just as I arrived home, Spain and the Netherlands announced that they would raise the age, too.

All of this happened less than two months after Australia enacted the world’s first nationwide age limit, which requires users to be 16 for opening or maintaining social-media accounts, and which puts the responsibility for enforcing the age limit on the platforms themselves.

The tide is turning, but I have been shocked by how quickly it is happening. Social media has been dominating kids’ attention for decades. Now, in the span of just a few weeks, the landscape has been transformed. What happened?

The cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker can help explain it. His most recent book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life, explores the massive social change that can occur when widespread private knowledge suddenly becomes public knowledge. For example: Many people may privately know that a dictator is brutal, or that an ideology is bankrupt, yet nothing changes for many years until something happens that lets everyone know that everyone else knows it too, and that everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows. Once that threshold is crossed, new forms of coordination become possible. Social movements ignite. Regimes and walls fall. Norms can change almost overnight.

Hans Christian Andersen captured the same dynamic in his famous story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”: The emperor was naked and everyone could see it, but no one knew if others saw it, too—because the swindlers had spread the idea that only the wise could see the cloth. It took a child’s cry—“The emperor has no clothes!”—to convert private knowledge into public knowledge. What the child said was “whispered from one to another,” until the crowd finally cried out together.

This is what happened among leaders around the world in the month after Australia’s age limit went into effect.

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When The Anxious Generation was published in 2024, many legislators saw a need for action to protect children, but there was a general reluctance to get too far ahead of the public. Restricting something widely used—and thought to be widely loved—seemed politically dangerous. Furthermore, critics declared that a social media age limit of 16 was impossible to implement and was sure to ultimately harm children.

But in Australia, leaders said damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. The first was Peter Malinauskas (premier of South Australia), who commissioned a report on how such a law could be drafted. He was soon joined by Chris Minns (premier of New South Wales), and then by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. All three were from the Labor Party, yet the law was passed with strong support from the right-leaning Liberal–National Coalition. The federal law was signed in November 2024 and it took effect December 10, 2025.

Just two days later, journalist Casey Newton offered his tech predictions for 2026 on the New York Times podcast Hard Fork. His highest-confidence prediction was that at least five democracies would follow Australia’s lead by the end of 2026. He recognized that we were about to see a rapid transformation of private knowledge into public knowledge.

Over the weeks that followed, the world learned two important lessons.

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First, action is possible. Phase one of Australia’s rollout went smoothly. The companies complied. They closed down 4.7 million accounts that were held by 2.5 million Australian children between the ages of 8 and 15, and few adults were incorrectly shut out of their accounts. The sky did not fall. Of course, some kids will find ways around the law in the first year, but the burden is on the companies to enforce the age limit, and they will get better at doing so as technology companies develop ever more effective and privacy-preserving methods, and as norms change in Australian society.

Second, action is popular. As coverage of Australia’s law spread globally, it was met with an extraordinary amount of public support—from parents, journalists, and politicians on the left, the right, and the center. Other countries asked: Why can’t we do that, too? Many teens supported Australia’s law as well. As research shows, young people see the harms of social media. They feel trapped by it, and nearly half wish it had never been invented.

The whispering turned into a chorus.

In January, a few weeks after the Australian law went into effect, people discovered that they could use Elon Musk’s Grok to strip any woman or girl down to a pornified string bikini. To give just one disturbing example: Someone used Grok to show Renee Good in a bikini within hours of her being shot in the head by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis. The savagery of offering frictionless, free, nonconsensual deepfake porn triggered a global wave of revulsion in early January. These widespread expressions of disgust were further evidence that humanity now had common knowledge about the dangers of social media.

By the middle of January, everyone knew that everyone knew that governments can and should set minimum age rules for social media, and that doing so was an electoral winner.

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So, when I arrived in Davos, Switzerland, last month, political leaders around the world had already realized that enacting an age-limit law would not put them out ahead of public opinion. In fact, public opinion was now far ahead of legislation. Polling confirmed what leaders already sensed intuitively: Parents around the world are begging for help. They feel overwhelmed by the digital tide. For years, they’ve watched social media hurt children. Many felt powerless to protect their own kids.

There is no magical age when comparing how many likes your photos get, or scrolling an endless stream of short videos when you should be sleeping, becomes good for you. Like any addictive consumer product that routinely exposes users to graphic sex, extreme violence, and anonymous sexual predators, social media in its current form causes a variety of harms to people of all ages. But we allow adults (often defined as age 18) to make decisions that are bad for them.

In The Anxious Generation, I proposed 16 as a pragmatic compromise—one aimed at shifting global norms quickly. I knew that advocating for 18 would likely take many years and risk total failure. Sixteen is also roughly the age by which a majority of adolescents have completed puberty: a sensitive period of neural reorganization during which it is extremely important to protect the brain.

France will impose its age limit at 15, and in my two conversations with President Emmanuel Macron, I came to understand why 15 is a culturally salient age in France. I support his decision to act decisively this year. Still, I urge countries that can enact 16 to do so. Each year of delay is a year of additional maturity and protection.

I cannot support any law that includes a “parental consent” exception—it defeats the central purpose of the law by dropping parents and children straight back into the same collective-action trap: “Please, Mom! All of my friends’ parents said yes!” I would rather see countries pass no law this year than a weak one with parental consent exemptions.

But I am confident that leaders understand this, and that they will move much more quickly and confidently in 2026 to pass minimum-age laws and other policies to protect children online.

So, bravo, Australia, France, Indonesia, Spain, and the Netherlands. And bravo to leaders in both major parties in the UK, and to leaders across the EU, who are likely to follow their lead.

The successes of the past few weeks are testaments to rapidly changing public knowledge and public sentiment. By this time next year this sentiment will be even stronger, and laws offering additional protections will be common. After all, now everyone knows that everyone knows that we can do this—and that we must.

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Note: If you’re an educator, school administrator, or a policymaker interested in phone-free school policies, this post is for you! If you’re a parent or other stakeholder who is interested in helping your school implement and/or measure a new phone policy, we invite you to share this post and the Toolkit for Assessing Phones in Schools website with your school’s leaders.

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Over the past few years, momentum to restrict smartphone use in schools has grown rapidly. Notably, 40 U.S. states and around one quarter of countries in the world have now adopted or proposed policies aimed at reducing phone use during the school day. With growing public and institutional interest in phone policies, schools, school districts, and governments need an easy, research-validated way to help assess their effectiveness and impact.

That’s why, last fall, we launched the Toolkit for Assessing Phones in Schools (TAPS), a free, ready-to-use, research-informed toolkit that helps stakeholders measure the effects of a new or modified school phone policy. The TAPS includes four core surveys for students, teachers, administrators, and parents that are available in two user-friendly formats (Google Forms and printable PDF files), accompanying methodologies, and a detailed User Guide. The TAPS empowers you, as an educator, administrator, or school leader, to assess how your school’s phone policy affects your students directly.

And now, we added some new resources to the TAPS that make it even easier to measure changes in your school’s phone policy, including:

• A new manual scoring guide that walks you step-by-step through how to analyze the responses for each survey based on question type, as well as how to create easy-to-understand visuals of the data.

• An add-to-cart survey design experience that allows you to choose “a la carte” from our library of measures, for researchers who want to customize their own surveys.

• Coming Soon: A new Data Dashboard, an automated scoring app that does the analysis work for you, immediately transforming Google Form results into graphs, averages, and other useful statistics. (Sign up on our website to get updates on the Dashboard release.)

We’re also offering an exciting opportunity for schools or legislators to partner with the Stanford Social Media Lab on your survey implementation and measurement. If you choose to partner with the Stanford Lab, the team will help you design your policy study, implement your pre- and post-policy surveys via the Qualtrics platform, and conduct a comprehensive statistical analysis. If you’re interested in partnering, please fill out our contact form.

Even if you don’t partner directly with the Stanford Lab, you can share your findings with us after implementing the TAPS. In either case, you will be contributing to a large body of research on the efficacy of phone policies.

Together, these TAPS enhancements are designed to lower barriers to evaluation and produce consistent, policy-relevant evidence on what happens when schools go phone-free. As more and more schools adopt the TAPS, we will be able to draw stronger, evidence-backed conclusions about phone policies, ultimately helping leaders and educators make decisions that prioritize student well-being, attention, and learning.

You can learn more about the new features below, jump right into the TAPS website, or fill out our contact form if you’re interested in partnering with us!

Contact TAPS

Our latest release of the TAPS introduces new tools designed to support two primary use cases.

The first: states, research organizations, and large districts seeking to conduct rigorous, multi-school evaluations — with the option of collaborating with the Stanford Social Media Lab. These efforts typically involve tracking outcomes across many schools and, in some cases, over multiple years.

The second: individual schools that want to better understand the efficacy of their phone policies internally, without launching a full-scale research study.

Deep Dive on the New TAPS Features

1. Qualtrics-Ready Surveys

Best for: Organizations interested in partnering with the Stanford Social Media lab to design and execute robust studies, evaluate phone policies across multiple schools, and conduct advanced statistical analyses will benefit from these expanded components of the TAPS.

The Student, Teacher, Administrator, and Parent surveys are now available in Qualtrics format. Qualtrics is a secure, widely used survey platform that supports advanced data collection, branching logic, and statistical analysis. The Qualtrics versions are better suited for large-scale studies and longitudinal data collection (versus the more basic Google Forms versions).

Image 1. Online and mobile versions of the Teacher Survey using the Qualtrics interface

2. Expanded Research Collaboration Opportunities

Best for: Organizations interested in partnering with the Stanford Social Media lab to design and execute robust studies, evaluate phone policies across multiple schools, and conduct advanced statistical analyses will benefit from these expanded components of the TAPS.

Organizations that partner with the Stanford Social Media Lab can design more comprehensive evaluation strategies, including longitudinal tracking, careful measurement of confounding variables, and tailored survey configurations. Additionally, researchers interested in executing their own study can request access to the Qualtrics survey. These collaborations make it possible to move beyond descriptive reporting toward stronger causal inference about the effects of school phone policies.

If your school district or organization is interested in collaborating with the Stanford Lab, please fill out our contact form on the TAPS website and indicate “Research Collaboration” in the “Subject” field.

3. Clear Scoring and Interpretation Guidance

Best for: Individual schools, school leaders, and school districts that want to conduct their own analysis.

To support practical decision-making, TAPS now includes a manual scoring guide that helps schools interpret results without advanced statistical training. In addition, we have developed an automated Data Dashboard that will make this process even easier (coming out soon).

• The manual scoring guide provides clear instructions for individuals who want to conduct the data analysis themselves.

• The TAPS Data Dashboard (coming soon) is a tool that automatically generates statistics, plots, and a compilation of feedback from respondent data. To use it, simply download a CSV file of data collected through the TAPS Google Forms surveys and upload the data to the Dashboard. The Dashboard can support both an analysis of data from a single timepoint and a longitudinal analysis of data from two timepoints (e.g., before and after a new phone policy was implemented).

These guides are designed to answer common, applied questions: Are students reporting fewer distractions? Do teachers perceive changes in classroom management? Are there differences across grade levels?

4. Customizable Shopping Cart Survey Builder

Best for: Individual schools, school districts, states, and research organizations who want to fully customize their phone policy surveys.

The Custom Shopping Cart survey option gives researchers the flexibility to individualize the TAPS surveys to their own interests, and work with schools to develop a relevant and sound study of their phone policies. Within the Measures Library, users can explore over 80 validated measures covering a large diversity of school outcomes, some of which are included in the six core TAPS surveys and some which are not. Then users can bookmark the measures most relevant to their goals and automatically generate a PDF file of all selected measures and questions. This document can then be used to adapt the existing TAPS surveys or create a new survey altogether.

Cautions and Caveats

While TAPS is a valuable tool for assessing and tracking changes in school environments, it is not designed to definitively establish causality with high confidence. Like most observational tools, the TAPS cannot fully control for all confounding variables without a randomized control trial.

That said, the TAPS makes it easy for individual schools to track changes within their school, and for larger entities such multi-school districts or states, as well as research teams, to conduct studies in which they can compare the change scores, over time, between schools that changed their phone policy and schools that did not. Such studies can offer meaningful evidence to help schools decide whether to continue, adjust, or discontinue a policy based on observed outcomes and stakeholder feedback.

For guidance on interpreting results and understanding the limits of causal claims, see the TAPS: User Guide.

Try It Out

We care about phones in schools because we care about the education of our students. We developed these additions and features in direct response to your feedback after our initial launch of the TAPS. If you’re introducing a new phone policy in your school, district, or state — or if you want to evaluate an already established policy — the TAPS will make it easy for you to measure the changes. Take a look!

If you’re interested in collaborating with the Stanford Lab, please fill out our contact form.

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If I’m honest I’ve been feeling hopeless lately. Sometimes I feel like giving up. What’s the point of writing when AI will soon automate the book I just spent years on, and generate my blog posts faster than I ever could? What’s the point of improving at anything? There is nothing impressive left to do or to learn. This is all there is, staring down the barrel of a life spent inputting and prompting. It feels like the worst time to try.

Then I started thinking about the next generation, and how bad that feeling must be. Why learn to drive when self-driving cars are coming. Why bother to code or start a company. Why learn to draw, why practice guitar, why study photography, why struggle through academic research. But as I thought about this happening in every direction, all at once, it began to look like an opportunity. When so few seem interested in being a person, isn’t that the best time to be one? Maybe this is a moment for optimism. You just have to be human.

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You have to speak like a human, for a start. When everyone else is grinding out birthday messages and apologies and love letters with AI, use your voice. Stumble over your words, get them jumbled. Write a wedding speech or a birthday toast that rambles and goes off track and makes people laugh and frown and remember. Put words together that don’t fit or perfectly flow, get your metaphors tangled and grammar confused. As everyone generates the same college essays and job applications, say something real, put something on the line. In an automated world where everything is so bland and boring, your messages and vows and condolences and eulogies will glimmer, will glow with their humanity. There’s never been a better time to touch the hearts of people, you just have to be human.

Think like a human, too. Have your own opinions, convictions, beliefs you are brave enough to defend. Because along with this robotic voice, it feels as if everyone has this agreeableness now too, this neutered way of seeing the world. Nobody wants to be distinctive, nobody wants to risk disapproval. So when everyone is getting these fawning, flattering responses from AI bots, be sincere. Be skeptical, critical, have preferences and judgements. Stand up for good art and good ideas and good choices. I am so bored of hearing that’s valid! and you do you! not just from AI bots but from people, human beings, those who have blunted themselves and their beliefs. It’s so dull, this refusal to say anything; I’m desperate for human judgement, starving for taste and conviction. Develop your own opinions, especially if you’re young; don’t outsource your thinking before you’ve even lived, don’t try to win approval at the expense of being human. You won’t be liked by everyone but that’s the point, no human ever has been. Not everyone will get you, you won’t be for everyone, but you will be someone.

Act like a human too! To have your own voice you need to venture out into the world. You need to take risks and try things, you need experiences and adventures. AI has to churn out the observations and opinions of other people, of a world it has never touched or experienced. You don’t have to do the same. So go outside, say yes to things, be scared and excited and uncomfortable. Feel your hands shake before you speak, your legs ache after a long day, your face flush when asking her out. Experience it all, the real world with all your senses, the fear of getting lost, the relief of finding your way, the hands of another person. Look people in the eye and learn about the world from living in it.

This is very important for the next generation, because mine was taught to do the opposite. We became automated ourselves. We learned to speak like robots, think like robots, act like robots. We hid our opinions, for fear of upsetting anyone. We affected the agreeable robot voice, to accommodate everyone. We stayed inside more than any generation before us, to avoid risking anything. We were warned that strong convictions were dangerous, that anything we said or did could be held against us. We grew up in a culture that was both validating and vicious: sycophantic and yet willing to slice us apart in a second for having the wrong opinion or making a mistake, to never let us forget. So we played it safe, convinced we could not step out of line, could not have our own thoughts, could not feel too much.

We became less human. We became anxious and insecure, afraid to say or do the wrong thing, unable to live. Constantly monitoring and managing ourselves, protecting our personal brands, making sure we were never too contradictory or confusing. And we never realized there was something more at stake, more than the risk of offending, more than the risk of getting things wrong, a danger of becoming like bots, automated and standardized. Now here we are, many of us functioning like autocomplete, capable of thinking and saying only the most acceptable and predictable things.

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Now it feels unfair—now that we are rapidly approaching times when it is necessary to know how to be human. Times when the most ordinary human things will seem extraordinary. After years of being trained out of our humanity, these are times when it will be the most valuable thing about us again, the rarest and most prized possession, if you managed to maintain it. And now we need to be human if we want to compete. Nobody is remembered for being robotic and predictable, for thinking and sounding the same as everyone else. Sure you can prompt and generate your words and beliefs but you will do nothing lasting, build nothing of consequence. And I refuse to believe that relying on AI is an advantage; they keep saying we will be left behind if we stay human, but maybe I want to be left behind from a life spent delegating my thoughts and feelings and decisions to machines.

So write, think, live. Get hurt and rejected and feel it in your gut and sort of like that horrible feeling because at least you’re alive, you’re here. I realize now that I want to be real. I don’t want to be harmless, I want to be human, I want to say things that bother people and move people and confuse people; I want to start sentences that can’t be autocompleted because even I don’t know where they’re going. I want to learn and offend and regret and grow. I want to be interesting, irritating, irreplaceable. I want to get things wrong and apologize and sometimes I want my opinions to be contradictory and incomplete because I am feeling my way through this world and I am not a machine with all the answers. I want to try and be seen trying, to be a person you can’t perfectly map out and make sense of, what good am I otherwise, what am I otherwise.

So to the next generation: This is your opportunity. The best defense you have is being human. Write in a way AI can’t imitate. Come up with ideas it couldn’t generate. Believe in something when bots can’t believe in anything. Speak from the heart because you have one and AI doesn’t. Don’t live on screens because it’s the one thing AI has to do that you don’t. Venture into the real world, as much as you possibly can, because it’s your advantage, a place you have actually felt and touched. Do things that make your heart pound. Feel and love and risk. The future belongs to those who can.

Who knows what’s going to happen to writing, to my craft. But what I do know, what we all know, is how to be a person. You can try, you can create, you can impress, you can achieve. You only have to be human.

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The Anxious Generation is best understood as a three-act tragedy. Act I begins in the mid-20th century, when new social and entertainment technologies (e.g., air conditioning and television) set in motion a long, gradual collapse of local community. Act II begins in the 1980s, as the loss of local community weakened social trust and helped erode the play-based childhood. Act III begins in the early 2010s, with the arrival of the phone-based childhood that filled the vacuum left behind.

This post, written by Andrew Trousdale and Erik Larson, goes deep into Act I. Andrew is a psychology researcher and human-computer interaction designer who is co-running a project on the psychological tradeoffs of progress. Erik is the author of The Myth of Artificial Intelligence, writes the Substack Colligo, and is completing the MIT Press book Augmented Human Intelligence: Being Human in an Age of AI, due in 2026. Together, they show how the isolation we experience today did not begin with smartphones but began decades earlier, as Americans, often for good and understandable reasons, traded connection for convenience, and place-based relationships for privacy and control.

Tracing these trade-offs across the twentieth century, Andrew and Erik help explain the problem of loneliness we face today, and offer some guidance for how we can turn it around and reconnect with our neighbors. Robert Putnam, who read a recent draft, described it as “easily the best, most comprehensive, and most persuasive piece on the contemporary social capital conundrum I’ve yet read.”

— Zach

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Scrolling Alone

By Andrew Trousdale and Erik Larson

Americans today accumulate hundreds, even thousands, of Facebook “friends” and Instagram followers. Yet 35% report having less than three close friends and 17% report having none. A quarter of Americans lack social and emotional support. We’re supposedly more connected than ever, but according to the Surgeon General we are facing an epidemic of loneliness and isolation.

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It’s tempting to believe that smartphones and social media were introduced to an ideal society and ruined everything. But the social problems we face today — while linked to contemporary digital technologies — are deeper and more nuanced than that. They originated from 20th century technological and cultural forces that also brought extraordinary benefits. It is only by looking back at these benefits that we can see today’s social problems clearly: as the result of trade-offs we have, for decades, been willing to make.

The post-war period in America was a time of enormous economic progress. Between 1947 and 1970, median family income doubled and home ownership soared. This expansion of the middle class brought with it a growing orientation toward mass comfort and convenience as the measure of everyday progress. The dream of labor-saving technology wasn’t new, but the postwar boom made it newly attainable for millions. Innovations like dishwashers, TVs, air conditioning, and remote controls flooded American homes. The Jetsons — with its push-button meals and moving sidewalks — captured an emerging vision for how technology would make life better.

These technologies did free up time, save money, reduce drudgery, and give us more control over our environments. But, as Robert Putnam first posited in his groundbreaking book Bowling Alone, they also disentangled us from one another — eliminating norms and shared experiences that, however effortful, also provided connection. As we grew accustomed to privacy, efficiency, and ease, maintaining our social lives and communities increasingly became a hassle. Independence replaced interdependence. After more than 70 years of making this trade-off, this is the culture we inherited and participate in daily.

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The Convenience vs Connection Trade-off

In 1997, John Lambert received a kidney from Andy Boschma, a fellow bowler from his Tuesday night league in Kalamazoo, Michigan. They weren’t relatives. They weren’t even close friends. They just bowled together once a week and that was enough. Putnam opens Bowling Alone with this story because it captures what we’ve been losing: the kind of trust where casual friends would give you a kidney.

Stories like Lambert and Boschma’s emerged from a world of regular, low-stakes, in-person interaction. In 1964, 55% of Americans believed “most people can be trusted.” As Putnam recounts, the average adult belonged to about two organizations. Family dinners were nightly rituals for half of Americans. Dropping by a neighbor’s house unannounced was normal. This was, by Putnam’s measures, the high-water mark of American civic life.

By 2000, when Putnam published Bowling Alone, that world was already disappearing. Trust had fallen to around 30%. Organizational membership fell sharply. He shows that by the 1990s, Americans were joining organizations at just one-quarter the rate they had in the 1960s, and community meeting attendance had dropped by a third. Hosting friends at home fell by 35%.

Four Decades of Dwindling Trust, 1960-1999

What happened? Starting in the 1950s, America underwent a wave of changes that looked like unalloyed progress. The 1956 Federal Highway Act funded 41,000 miles of interstate, opening up a suburban frontier where families could afford their own homes with yards, driveways, and privacy. Women entered the workforce en masse, expanding freedom and equality and adding to household incomes. The television — which provided cheap, effortless entertainment — was adopted faster than any technology in history, from 10% of homes in 1950 to 90% by 1959, according to Putnam. Air conditioning made homes comfortable year-round. Shopping migrated from Main Street to climate-controlled malls with better prices and wider selection.

These changes were widely embraced because they made life better for millions of people in countless ways. But as Putnam documents, they quietly eroded community, shifting American life toward comfort, privacy, and control, and away from the places and habits that had held communities together.

Suburbs scattered neighbors across cul-de-sacs designed for privacy over casual interaction. The front porch — where you might wave to a neighbor and end up talking for an hour — gave way to the private backyard deck and the two-car garage. Television privatized entertainment, moving what once happened in theaters, dance halls, and community centers into living rooms where, by the 1990s, the average American adult was watching almost four hours a day, and, Putnam tells us, half of adults usually watched alone. Dual incomes often meant neither parent had time for the PTA meeting or volunteer shift. Local shops on main street closed because they couldn’t compete with the mall.

Generation by generation, the habits of connection weakened while the scope of everyday comfort, privacy, and control grew. Then came the digital revolution — with the internet and smartphones — and these isolating forces accelerated.

Digital technology extends the logic of suburban sprawl: it allows us to live not just physically apart, but entirely in parallel. In the past decade, e-commerce jumped from 7% to 16% of retail while physical stores shuttered. Online grocery sales are growing 28% year over year. Home exercise has surged in popularity. Twenty-eight percent of Americans work from home, up from just 8% in 2019. Across every sphere — shopping, working, exercising, socializing — we’re choosing staying in over going out because we enjoy the privacy and convenience.

Meanwhile productivity technologies are dissolving the boundaries between work and personal life. While work used to have clear boundaries, today, for knowledge workers in particular, a laptop and Wi-Fi mean the office never closes. Work bleeds into every hour, every room. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index reports that “the average employee now sends or receives more than 50 messages outside of core business hours, and by 10 p.m., nearly a third (29%) of active workers dive back into their inboxes.” More than a third of U.S. workers now do gig work, which offers the freedom to work whenever you want. But when you can always be earning, social commitments become harder to justify. Giurge, Whillans, and West argue that “time poverty” — the chronic feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it — is increasing and hits affluent knowledge workers hardest. They use time-saving tools not to free up social or leisure time, but to take on more work commitments. These innovations in how we work make us more productive and create earning opportunities. But they also place a round-the-clock demand on our time. And when we optimize for individual productivity, we sacrifice the shared time — after-hours and weekends — that enables community life.

Workplace innovations are consuming social time and bandwidth, and so are the televisions in our pocket. Putnam found that most of the leisure gains since 1965 have gone to screen-based activities rather than face-to-face social ones. He called television “the only leisure activity that seems to inhibit participation outside the home.” And he argued TV didn’t just consume time, it also rewired leisure from shared experience toward solitary consumption.

Whereas television stays in one room, smartphones are with us everywhere — at bus stops, in waiting rooms, at restaurants, and while “watching” our kids at the playground. Americans still watch 3.5 hours of TV daily in addition to 4.7 hours on smartphones. The internet and smartphones didn’t replace television; they stacked on top, crowding out a mix of other activities. Scott Wallsten found that “a cost of online activity is less time spent with other people.”And when Hunt Allcott randomly deactivated people’s Facebook accounts, they got back an average of 60 minutes per day and spent more of it with people in person. As Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings put it, “we compete with sleep.”

When we spoke with Putnam recently, he said "things are way worse than I thought." Today, only 30% of Americans socialize on any given day. As of 2023, young people spend 45% more time alone than 15 years earlier. Two-thirds of Americans under 30 believe most people can't be trusted. According to Sherry Turkle, even time together with others is compromised by our connected devices, which make us less present to those around us.

There’s a reason these tools have saturated our lives. They save us time, make us more productive, free us from drudgery, engage us when we’re bored, connect us when we’re otherwise alone. But for all that technology can do, it is rarely an adequate substitute for physical presence, shared vulnerability, or the willingness to be inconvenienced for the sake of others.

For better and for worse, we built a world where you can work, shop, eat, exercise, learn, and socialize without ever leaving your home, where work and leisure are increasingly things we do alone in front of screens. In other words, we’ve allowed social interaction to become more optional than ever.

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The Path Forward

When we asked Robert Putnam what gives him hope, he pointed to history. In The Upswing, he reminds us that Americans faced a similar crisis before. The Gilded Age brought economic inequality, industrialization, and the rise of anonymous urban life. Small-town bonds gave way to tenements and factory floors. Trust collapsed. By the 1890s, social capital had reached historic lows — roughly where it stands today.

The Progressive reformers found this new world unacceptable, but they didn’t try to turn back the clock. Cities and factories were here to stay. Instead, they adapted, creating new forms of connection suited to their changed reality, from settlement houses for anonymous neighborhoods to women’s clubs that built networks of mutual aid. They didn’t reject modernity; they metabolized it, showing up day after day to create new institutions and communities suited to the industrialized world.

Decades ago Neil Postman observed in Amusing Ourselves to Death that we haven’t been conquered by technology — we’ve surrendered to it because we like the stimulation and cheap amusement. More recently, Nicholas Carr concludes in Superbloom that we’re complicit in our loneliness because we embrace these superficial, mediated forms of connection. Like Postman and Carr, the Progressive Era reformers understood where they had agency when technology upended their world. It isn’t in demanding that others fix systems we willingly participate in, nor is it in outright rejecting technologies that deliver real benefits — it’s in changing how we ourselves live with and make use of the tools that surround us.

There are already signs that people are willing to do this. In a small, three-day survey, Talker Research found that 63% of Gen Z now intentionally unplug — the highest rate of any generation — and that half of Americans are spending less time on screens for their well-being, and their top alternative activity is time with friends and family. And they found that two-thirds of Americans are embracing “slow living,” with 84% adopting analog lifestyle choices like wristwatches and paper notebooks that help them unplug. Meanwhile in Eventbrite’s “Reset to Real” survey, 74% of young adults say in-person experiences matter more than digital ones. New devices like the Light Phone, Brick, Meadow, and Daylight Computer signal a growing demand for utility without distraction.

Unplugging isn’t enough on its own. The time and energy we reclaim has to go toward building social connections: hosting the dinner party despite the hassle, staying for coffee after church when you’d rather go home, sitting through the awkward silence, offering or asking for help.

Ultimately, we can’t expect deep social connection in a culture that prioritizes individual ease and convenience. Nor is community something technology can deliver for us. What’s required is a change of culture, grounded in a basic fact of human nature: that authentic connection requires action and effort, and that this action and effort is part of what makes connection fulfilling in the first place.

We can form new rituals and institutions that allow us to adapt to technology, ultimately changing it to our liking. But it starts with the tools we use and the choices we make each day. If we all prioritize the individual comforts and conveniences we’ve grown accustomed to, no one else will restore the community we say we miss. No one else can. If we want deeper relationships and better communities than we have, we’re going to have to put more of our time, effort, and attention into the people around us.

History shows that we can adapt, building communities suited to changing times. The question is: Will we stay in and scroll? Or will we go out and choose one another?

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In March 1770, as Boston boiled with outrage over the killing of five colonists by British soldiers, John Adams did something few could comprehend: he volunteered to defend the enemy. Adams believed that the very idea of liberty depended on ensuring that even the reviled had counsel; that a free country could not exist without an independent and impartial bar willing to defend the despised.

But Adams did not believe that his charge in defending his client was to win at all costs. “Every lawyer,” he reflected in his autobiography, “must hold himself responsible not only to his Country, but to the highest and most infallible of all Tribunals for the part he should act.” The moral map Adams established in this case became a foundation for the practice of law in America. Indeed, today’s legal ethics codes still speak of lawyers’ threefold duty: to the client, to the court, and to the country.

Imagine if Adams had decided that defending his clients meant winning at all costs. Can you imagine Bostonians’ outrage if Adams had, say, withheld evidence that the British soldiers did have murderous intent? What would Adams’s legal legacy be if he’d tried not to discover the truth of what happened outside the Custom House, but to sow doubt and uncertainty among the people of Boston? How different would our legal system be if the British soldiers were acquitted not because they were innocent, but because they had a lawyer who was willing to hide the truth?

Such a hypothetical has become our reality two and a half centuries later, only the victims are children, and its ethical corruption and harm operate at an industrial scale. What has emerged from inside Meta over recent months reveals how vacuous the characterization of the lawyer’s ethical obligations have become: Meta lawyers ordering evidence of child exploitation destroyed and research findings buried, while they hid behind attorney-client privilege. Meta’s lawyers do not follow Adams’ precedent, but, rather, the example set by Big Tobacco lawyers in the 1970s and ’80s. These lawyers collapsed Adams’ threefold duty into one — serve the client alone, whatever the cost to the courts and the country.

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Tobacco Road to Menlo Park

The story of this ethical erosion begins not in Menlo Park but in the tobacco boardrooms of two generations ago, when Big Tobacco attorney Ernest Pepples outlined what he called the “honesty option”: admitting that smoking killed people. He conceded this would expose tobacco companies to catastrophic liability, and the companies ultimately rejected honesty in favor of profit. In the decades that followed, tobacco lawyers counseled document destruction, abused attorney-client privilege to suppress research, and intimidated scientists whose findings threatened litigation defenses. Big Tobacco’s attorneys perfected hiding the truth from the American people, abandoning their duties to the court and to the country. The cost of that abandonment can be measured in millions of lives and billions of dollars. The cost to the public trust is incalculable.

Fast forward 30 years to Meta headquarters where the multi-trillion dollar company’s attorneys are following Big Tobacco’s playbook, aiding and abetting the company’s disregard for public welfare and children’s safety. Meta’s leadership and legal team have hidden “mountains of evidence,” as Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch put it, of direct and indirect harms to kids and teens.

The latest revelations about Meta’s malfeasance come from newly unsealed court documents. In 2020, the company discovered through its own experimental research — an initiative known as Project Mercury — that when users reduced the amount of time they spent on Facebook, their levels of depression, anxiety, and loneliness decreased. Meta’s lawyers buried the findings.

But Project Mercury, and Meta’s suppression of its damning research on the mental health effects of Instagram, is only the beginning. Deeper revelations come from whistleblowers Jason Sattizahn and Cayce Savage and their testimony before the U.S. Senate this past September. Sattizahn and Savage had been researching child exploitation in Meta’s VR ecosystem, where they discovered coordinated pedophile rings operating inside games like Roblox. Sattizahn and Savage described an immersive experience where children regularly encounter what Sattizahn called “the transmission of the motion and the audio of sex acts” from adult users — not just sexual words or adult “content,” but the physical experience of “adults sexually gratifying themselves” while “surrounding and hounding minors,” complete with immersive audio.

Sattizahn also testified how, after his research on Meta’s VR platform uncovered children under the age of 10 in Germany being propositioned for “sex acts, nude photos, and other acts that no child should ever be exposed to,” Meta’s in-house lawyers demanded the erasure of any and all evidence of this finding. When asked by Senator Josh Hawley how often she’d witnessed an underage user being exposed to inappropriate sexual content on Meta VR, Savage replied, “every time I use the headset.” The permissiveness by the company that Savage and Sattizahn testified to is mirrored by the more recently unsealed court documents, which included that Meta maintained a 17-strike policy for sex trafficking accounts — removing predators only after they were caught attempting to traffic people 17 separate times. Meta’s own internal documents called this threshold “very, very, very high.”

According to Sattizahn, Meta’s legal department created what he called a “funnel of manipulation” in response to these identified risks to children, a comprehensive system for controlling every aspect of safety research. Legal representatives embedded in research teams demanded destruction of findings deemed too sensitive. Researchers were forbidden to use words like “illegal” or “non-compliant” even when plainly applicable. Sattizahn and Savage’s testimony is complemented by internal communications, now public, showing that Meta employees worried they were behaving like tobacco executives “doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves.”

On October 23, 2025, a judge in a separate case validated what the whistleblowers and court documents had described. Invoking the rarely used crime-fraud exception to pierce Meta’s attorney-client privilege, District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Yvonne Williams found Meta’s lawyers had coached researchers to hide, block, and sanitize studies on teen mental-health harm in order to shield the company from liability. Judge Williams determined there was probable cause that these communications were “fundamentally inconsistent with the basic premises of the adversary system.”

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Cracking Open the Cover-Up Machine

Attorney-client privilege was originally meant to protect candor in service of truth, but in Meta’s hands it has become a means of hiding the truth — a transformation that marks how far the legal profession has drifted. John Adams believed that truth was the lawyer’s surest refuge, the one place where all three duties could coexist. He wrote in his autobiography that his British client “must therefore expect from me no Art or Address, No Sophistry or Prevarication in such a Cause; nor any thing more than Fact, Evidence and Law would justify.” When lawyers abandon fact, evidence, and law, and turn their craft toward suppression instead, they corrode the foundation of public trust on which the entire legal system depends. Judge Williams’ ruling is thus more than a procedural rebuke; it is a reminder that the law’s legitimacy survives only so long as truth remains discoverable.

Yet Judge Williams’ ruling alone cannot stop Meta’s institutional misdeeds. Meta has thrived in an environment of passivity, thanks to lawyers who refuse to report ethical misconduct, bar associations that decline to investigate despite court findings of probable cause and reams of evidence in the public domain, legislators who prefer theater to legislation, and influential business leaders from other sectors who remain silent bystanders as tech lawyers remake the legal system into one that rewards grift and exploitation rather than enterprise and innovation.

Impunity is not inevitable. State bar associations should open investigations tomorrow and revoke reciprocity to Meta attorneys licensed in other jurisdictions. The evidence is public: testimony under oath, a judge’s finding of probable cause, court documents that speak for themselves. Investigations for potential disbarment should begin with senior leaders like Jennifer Newstead and Joel Kaplan, Meta’s respective heads of legal and public policy who bear responsibility under ethics rules for attorneys working under them.

Junior lawyers at the company who may have witnessed this systematic obstruction and failed to report it should also be scrutinized, as the rules of professional responsibility generally require lawyers to report professional misconduct by another lawyer “that raises a substantial question as to that lawyer’s honesty, trustworthiness or fitness.” That none reported what they witnessed demands investigation at the very least. A stint in Meta’s legal department on a lawyer’s resume should be considered disqualifying by law firms and other future employers, making that lawyer unhireable if they cannot show that they spoke up about, or were otherwise unaware of, the suppression of evidence or harm. The fear of real consequences for playing a role in perpetrating such massive harm to American children should force Meta’s attorneys to either leave the company or to begin to stand up for what’s right.

Congress and state legislatures should also examine whether legal ethics rules require reform: whether attorney-client privilege has been extended too far when it shields corporations’ most questionable activities, and whether benefits of encouraging candid consultations with clients justify costs of facilitating cover-ups. Meta is not the only bad actor here, but it did get caught in the most egregious behavior. The unsealed court filings demonstrate similar behavior by Snap and by Google. OpenAI’s lawyers “accidentally” erased evidence compiled by The New York Times’s attorneys in its copyright lawsuit against the company. Judges have caught attorneys from Google and Apple withholding or destroying documents relevant to anti-trust trials. As Stuart Taylor in The Atlantic wrote of the tobacco lawyers two decades ago, we should invite the profession’s leaders to “explain why lawyers should remain free to hide evidence of corporate wrongdoing, mislead courts, and mangle the truth.”

The machinery for accountability exists. State bars can act tomorrow to investigate and suspend Meta’s attorneys. Judges can continue piercing false privilege claims and issue sanctions against bad-faith advocates. Legislators can demand bar associations justify their continued self-regulation and reform the rules of attorney-client privilege for corporations. Law firms can fire clients that ask them to violate their broader duties to the country and its courts. Importantly, holding corrupt, unethical lawyers accountable for enabling harms to children does not mean that we sacrifice the foundational tenet of the American legal system that John Adams championed: that even those we may despise — the redcoat soldier then, the billionaire and his exploitative empires now — will remain entitled to counsel who will zealously defend them, provided they follow the rules that the rest of us do.

Meta’s attorneys have forgotten that the law’s legitimacy derives from the integrity of those who practice it. For that reason, accountability for failing to follow the rules of professional ethics cannot be left in the hands of those who would pervert the principles at the heart of their profession so casually. Instead, it’s up to the rest of us — those who still believe law should serve justice — to ensure Meta’s attorneys are reminded of their obligations through real, material, swift, individual consequences. They are the architects of a system that harms children at an industrial scale, and every Meta lawyer who participated or stood by silently shares the moral stain of what the company has perpetrated.

Holding Meta accountable includes holding its lawyers accountable; the harm the company inflicts on young people could not exist without lawyers willing to enable it. Defrocking those lawyers could be what ends the impunity for Mark Zuckerberg, his lieutenants, and his empire.

The truth will out for Meta’s lawyers — eventually — as happened with Big Tobacco’s, but the stakes reach beyond any single company’s malfeasance or any one attorney’s lack of conscience. Just as tobacco lawyers’ corruption poisoned public trust, Meta’s attorneys threaten to complete the transformation of law into a service available only to those wealthy enough to corrupt it and shameless enough to ignore the wreckage. Whether courts can function, whether Americans believe law serves justice rather than a system many believe to be rigged, depends on whether those in power repudiate this conduct decisively, or whether they continue, through their inaction, to tacitly endorse it.

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The historical trends question: Was the spread of social media in the early 2010s (as smartphones were widely adopted) a major contributing cause of the big increases in adolescent depression, anxiety, and self-harm that began in the U.S. and many other Western countries soon afterward?

The product safety question: Is social media safe today for children and adolescents? When used in the ordinary way (which is now five hours a day), does this consumer product expose young people to unreasonable levels of risk and harm?

Social scientists are actively debating the historical trends question — we raised it in Chapter 1 of The Anxious Generation — but that’s not the one that matters to parents and legislators. They face decisions today and they need an answer to the product safety question. They want to know if social media is a reasonably safe consumer product, or if they should keep their kids (or all kids) away from it until they reach a certain age (as Australia is doing).

Social scientists have been debating this question intensively since 2017. That’s when Jean Twenge suggested an answer to both questions in her provocative article in The Atlantic: “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” In it, she showed a historical correlation: adolescent behavior changed and their mental health collapsed just at the point in time when they traded in their flip phones for smartphones with always-available social media. She also showed a correlation relevant to the product safety question: The kids who spend the most time on screens (especially for social media) are the ones with the worst mental health. She concluded that “it’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen [Gen Z] as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.”

Twenge’s work was met with strong criticism from some social scientists whose main objection was that correlation does not prove causation (for both the historical correlation, and the product safety correlation). The fact that heavy users of social media are more depressed than light users doesn’t prove that social media caused the depression. Perhaps depressed people are more lonely, so they rely on Instagram more for social contact? Or perhaps there’s some third variable (such as neglectful parenting) that causes both?

Since 2017, that argument has been made by nearly all researchers who are dismissive about the harms of social media. Mark Zuckerberg used the argument himself in his 2024 testimony before the U.S. Senate. Under questioning by Senator Jon Osoff, he granted that the use of social media correlates with poor mental health but asserted that “there’s a difference between correlation and causation.”

In the last few years, however, a flood of new research has altered the landscape of the debate, in two ways. First, there is now a lot more work revealing a wide range of direct harms caused by social media that extends beyond mental health (e.g., cyberbullying, sextortion, and exposure to algorithmically amplified content promoting suicide, eating-disorders, and self-harm). These direct harms are not correlations; they are harms reported by millions of young people each year. Second, recent research — including experiments conducted by Meta itself — provides increasingly strong causal evidence linking heavy social media use to depression, anxiety, and other internalizing disorders. (We refer to these as indirect harms because they appear over time rather than right away).

Together, these findings allow us to answer the product safety question clearly: No, social media is not safe for children and adolescents. The evidence is abundant, varied, and damning. We have gathered it and organized it in two related projects which we invite you to read:

• A review paper, in press as part of the World Happiness Report 2026, in which we treat the product safety question as a mock civil-court case and organize the available research into seven lines of evidence. The first three lines reveal widespread direct harm to adolescents around the world. Lines four through seven reveal compelling evidence that social media substantially increases the risk of anxiety and depression, and that reducing social media use leads to improvements in mental health. Taken together, these lines of evidence provide a firm answer to the product safety question.

• MetasInternalResearch.org, a new website that catalogues 31 internal studies carried out by Meta Inc. The studies were leaked by whistleblowers or made public through litigation — despite Meta’s intentions to keep them hidden. The most incriminating among them: an experiment designed to establish causality, where Meta’s researchers concluded that social media causes harm to mental health.

In the rest of this post we present the Tables of Contents from these two projects, so that you can jump into the projects wherever you like and see for yourself the many kinds of research demonstrating harm to adolescents. After that, we return to the historical trends question to suggest an answer. We show that the scale of harm we found while answering the product safety question is so vast, affecting tens of millions of adolescents across many Western nations, that it suggests (though does not prove) that the global spread of social media in the early 2010s probably was a major contributor to the international decline of youth mental health in the following years. We suggested this in Chapter 1 of The Anxious Generation. The two mountains of evidence we present here make that suggestion even more plausible today.

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The Review Paper: Seven Lines of Evidence

The World Happiness Report (WHR) is a UN-backed annual ranking that has become the global reference point for national well-being research. It draws on Gallup World Poll data from more than 150 countries. We were invited to write a chapter for the upcoming WHR on the 2026 theme: the association between social media and well-being. Following their 2024 report, which documented a widespread decline of well being among young people, this year they ask whether social media’s global spread in the 2010s was a major contributor to that decline. Our chapter, “Social Media is Harming Young People at a Scale Large Enough to Cause Changes at the Population Level,” offers an answer to the product safety question — no — and to the historical trends question — yes.

The editors graciously allowed us to post our peer-reviewed chapter online before the March 19 publication date so that discussion and debate on this topic can begin immediately.

We structured the chapter as if we were filing a legal brief offering 15 exhibits organized into seven separate lines of evidence. The first three lines are the equivalent of testimony from witnesses in a trial. If the people who had the clearest view of an event say that Person A punched Person B, that would count as evidence of Person A’s guilt. The evidence is not definitive — the witnesses could be mistaken or lying — but it is legitimate and relevant evidence. Here’s the structure of that part of the chapter:

After establishing that the most knowledgeable witnesses perceive harm from social media, we move on to the four major lines of academic research. While most researchers agree that correlational studies find statistically significant associations between social media use and measures of anxiety and depression, and that social media reduction experiments find some benefits for mental health, the debate centers on whether the effects are large enough to matter.2 We show that the experimental effects and risk elevations are larger than is often implied — in fact, they are as large as many public health effects that our society takes very seriously (such as the impact of child maltreatment on the prospective risk of depression.)3

Furthermore, we take a magnifying glass to some widely cited studies that claim to show only trivial associations or effects between social media use and harm to adolescents (e.g., Hancock et al. (2022) and Ferguson (2024). We show that these studies actually reveal much larger associations when the most theoretically central relationships are examined — for example, when you focus the analysis on heavy social media use (rather than blending together all digital tech) linked specifically to depression or anxiety (rather than blending together all well-being outcomes) for adolescent girls (rather than blending in boys and adults).

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Meta’s Internal Research: Seven More Lines of Evidence

Throughout 2025, a variety of lawsuits against social media companies were progressing through the courts. In the briefs posted online by various state Attorneys General, we found references to dozens of studies that Meta had conducted. Some of this information had been available to the general public since 2021, when whistleblower Frances Haugen brought out thousands of screenshots of presentations and emails from her time working at Meta. Others were newly found by litigators in the process of discovery.4

The descriptions of these studies are scattered across multiple legal briefs, most of which are hundreds of pages long, so it has been difficult to keep track of them — until now. We have collected all publicly available information about the studies in one central repository, MetasInternalResearch.org. Indexed in this way, the scattered reports form a mountain of evidence that social media is not safe for children. The evidence was collected and hidden by Meta itself.

We found information on 31 studies related to the product safety question that Meta conducted between 2018 and 2024. Meta has long hired PhD researchers, particularly psychologists, to conduct internal research projects. (In January 2020, Jon met with members of this team and shared his concerns about what Instagram was doing to girls.) Meta’s researchers have access to vast troves of data on billions of users, including what exactly users saw and what emotions or behaviors they showed afterward. (This is known as “user-behavioral log data.”) Academic researchers never get access to rich data like this; they must devise their own surveys, which obtain a few crude proxy variables (such as “how many hours a day do you spend on social media?” and “How anxious were you yesterday?”). So we should pay attention to what Meta’s researchers found and how they interpreted their findings.

In one example, recently unsealed court documents from lawsuits brought by U.S. school districts against Meta and other platforms reveal that Meta conducted its own randomized control trial (considered to be the best way to study causal impact) in 2019 with the marketing research firm Nielsen. The project — code-named Project Mercury — asked a group of users to deactivate their Facebook and Instagram accounts for one month. According to the filings, Meta described the design of their study as being “of much higher quality” than the existing literature and that this study was “one of our first causal approaches to understand the impact that Facebook has on people’s lives… Everyone involved in the project has a PhD.” In pilot tests of the study, researchers found that “people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and social comparison.” One Meta researcher also stated that “the Nielsen study does show causal impact on social comparison.”

In other words, Meta’s own research on the effects of social media reduction confirms those from academic researchers that we report in Line 6 of our review paper. Both sets of researchers find evidence of causation, not mere correlation.

We were impressed by the great variety of methods that Meta’s researchers used. In fact, the 31 studies we located fit neatly into seven lines that are similar to the seven lines we used in our review paper. The findings from Meta researchers are highly consistent with the findings from academic researchers, which gives us even more confidence in our conclusions about the product safety question.

Here’s the Table of Contents. Once again, after the introductory material, we present three lines of testimony:

We then move on to lines 4, 5, and 6, which correspond exactly to lines 4, 5, and 6 in the review paper: correlational, longitudinal, and experimental studies, although line 7 is unique. (It involves reviews of academic literature conducted by Meta’s researchers.)

Returning to the Historical Trends Question

The product safety question is distinct from the historical trends question. A consumer product (e.g., a toy or food) can be unsafe for children without it producing an immediate or easily detectable increase in national rates of a particular illness.5

But social media is an unusual consumer product because of its vast user base and the enormous amount of time it takes from most users. It’s as if a new candy bar, intentionally designed to be addictive, was introduced in 2012 and, within a few years, 90% of the world’s children were consuming ten of these candy bars each day, which reduced their consumption of all other foods. Might there be increases in national rates of adolescent obesity and diabetes?

In our WHR review paper, we estimate the scale of direct harms (e.g., cyberbullying, sextortion, and exposure to disturbing content) and indirect harms (e.g., elevated risks of depression, anxiety, and eating disorders). We then show that these estimates are likely underestimates because they don’t account for network effects inherent to social media, nor the heightened impact of heavy use during the sensitive developmental period of puberty. All told, the number of affected children and adolescents likely reaches into the hundreds of millions, globally.

Once we consider the vast scale at which social media operates — used by the large majority of young people, for many hours each day, over many years, and across nearly all Western nations — it becomes clear that social media companies are harming young people on an industrial scale. It becomes far more plausible that this consumer product caused national levels of adolescent depression and anxiety to rise, especially for girls.

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Conclusion: What Now?

Academic debates over media effects often take decades to resolve. We expect that this one will continue for many years. But parents and policymakers cannot wait for resolution; they must make decisions now, based on the available evidence. The evidence we have collected shows clearly that social media is not safe for adolescents.

We believe that the evidence of direct and indirect harm that we have collected in these two complementary projects is now sufficient to justify the sort of action that the Australian government took in 2025 when it raised the age for opening or maintaining a social media account to 16. Just as the recent international trend of removing smartphones from schools is beginning to produce educational benefits, the research we reviewed suggests that removing social media from childhood and early adolescence is likely to produce a great variety of benefits, including lower rates of depression and many fewer victims of direct harms such as sexual harassment and sextortion.

Countries around the world ran a giant uncontrolled experiment on their own children in the 2010s by giving them smartphones and social media accounts at young ages. The evidence is in: the experiment has harmed them. It is time to call it off.

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