On The Degrading Effects of Life Online

How social media makes us worse people

Part 1, from Jon Haidt:

I recently returned from a week in the United Kingdom, where I had the great fortune to meet with many of the people who are leading the movement to roll back the phone-based childhood and reclaim childhood in the real world. That included a dinner with Daisy Greenwell and Clare Reynolds (who started smartphonefreechildhood.co.uk), Hannah Oertel (Delaysmartphones.org.uk), Beeban Kidron (the force of nature behind the UK’s Age Appropriate Design Code), and Freya India (the Gen Z writer whose work I have been promoting for years, and who is now a staff writer for After Babel).¹ 

The UK is moving! I was so inspired to see parents, schools, and the government acting in complementary ways, addressing the collective action problems in which most developed nations are trapped. I think the U.S. is just a few months behind the UK in recognizing the scale of the problem and in mobilizing to solve it. As in the U.S., there is no political divide. Labour politicians seemed just as concerned about the problem as Conservatives. They all have children, and they all see the problem.

While I was in London, I did a lot of thinking about the ways that life online causes spiritual degradation––a topic I wrote about in chapter 8 of The Anxious Generation. Just before my visit, I read an essay in The Times titled “What British teenagers are really up to on their smartphones.” The profiles were all so sad, and many were full of ugliness. Here are a few quotes from Britain’s Gen Z teens:

Every social media app is toxic. There are a lot of nasty people on there — and nasty stuff. The TikTok For You page and Instagram Reels are the worst for showing really gruesome videos, like people getting seriously hurt or their arm being cut off. (Charley, age 17).

It’s hard to tell what’s real on social media, because you can so easily fake stuff now. Sometimes my friends show me stuff they’ve seen on Discord: people being hurt, injured or getting run over (George, 16).

When I was 11 or 12 years old, my friends and I would go on this weird trending thing called Omegle [a random online chat service], where you see videos of arbitrary people, and it could be a guy masturbating. We’d laugh about it, but now that I’m a bit older I look back and am like, that is not normal. You could be eight years old and go on Omegle and nobody would know (Sienna, 15).

I was talking to people online when I was ten. If I could go back in time and change anything, I would change that. (Jasmin, 15)

While I was in London, I was reminded of these quotes by an essay about the UK’s Children’s Commissioner, Rachel de Souza, whose office has found that one in ten children have viewed pornography by the age of nine.² The essay also noted that de Souza said that, in a room of 15 and 16-year-olds with whom she was conversing, three-quarters of them said that they had been sent at least one video of a beheading. (It was one such video, sent to her nine year old daughter during choir practice, that prompted Hannah Oertel to found DelaySmartphones.) 

When I was a child in the 1970s, there was a lot of concern about sex and violence on television. Is social media any worse than that? Yes, emphatically yes, for two reasons. First, the sex and violence on TV were limited and policed before being put on the air. There were rating systems, there were adults in charge, and there were companies against whom regulators or parents could take action if they messed up and showed pornography or beheadings to 9-year-olds. 

Social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and Youtube use a very different model: Anyone can post anything, from an anonymous unverified account, and then AI (supplemented by thousands of workers in developing nations) tries to take down some percentage of the most awful stuff. The heads of these companies assure us that they take down billions of pieces of harmful content each year, but that just indicates the mind-boggling size of the problem. Even if they could magically catch 99% of the stuff, our kids would still be getting sent beheading videos in choir practice. Oh, and in the U.S., thanks to section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, we parents can’t do anything about it. The companies have been granted immunity from lawsuits for what they show to our children, even underage users (under 13) because the companies have also been granted freedom from any duty to check or verify ages. 

The second enormous difference is that when I was a child, the violence was almost all fictional. There was cartoon violence, of course, which was not at all disturbing, although later on, graphic video game violence (such as in Grand Theft Auto) was far bloodier. There were scenes of murder in police dramas and in mafia movies that sometimes were disturbing (such as Moe Greene’s death in The Godfather).

But our kids today are witnessing the suffering and death of real people and animals. This is shocking, haunting, and degrading in a way that no fictional violence can be. While in London, I learned about the “cat in a blender” video that circulated widely online last year. Months later, video experts concluded that the video had been digitally edited and the kitten was probably unharmed, but millions of children saw a graphic video of one of the most depraved and disturbing things a human being can do. The fact that someone was motivated to fake such a thing to create an internet sensation only makes it worse. 

Children—as well as adults—cannot unsee such awful things. I deeply regret watching a video last year of a large teenage girl sitting on the chest of a small teenage girl, bashing the back of the girl’s skull into the pavement as though she was a rag doll. 

What is the collective effect of a media diet consisting of five hours a day of social media, including hours of short videos? Sure, the great majority of these videos are harmless and entertaining, but for many children, their feeds are randomly interspersed with videos more horrific than anything their parents had been exposed to as children. It’s not just violence and animal cruelty. It’s car accidents, suicides and suicide posts, strangers masturbating, and hardcore pornography, some of which involves children. And five hours a day is probably an underestimate of the average. Nearly half of U.S. teens say that they are online “almost constantly,” with TikTok and Instagram as the leading sites.

Children can’t unsee the things they are exposed to, but over time, as with all exposure therapy, they can habituate. They can stop feeling horror. They can come to see it as just another form of entertainment. Back when I studied moral disgust, I was drawn to a quote from the ethicist Leon Kass:  “Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.” 

And that brings me to a recent post from Freya. While I was in London, Freya posted an essay on her own wonderful Substack—GIRLS—titled What’s Become of Us. It’s about the morally degrading effects of living your life for social media. It’s about the chronic social comparison, the resentment, the pull of every opportunity to promote yourself, even if that means taking a sexy selfie in front of the gates of Auschwitz. As Freya says, social media doesn’t just make people feel worse about themselves; it makes us worse people. 

A “Sexy Selfie” in front of Auschwitz

I knew that Freya’s essay would be of interest to readers at After Babel, as well as to anyone who has read Chapter 8 of The Anxious Generation. So, I decided to repost Freya’s essay here, paired with my own short introduction about my recent thoughts on degradation. I hope you’ll find Freya’s essay as profound as I did. 

– Jon

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Part 2, from Freya India:

Most of the time when we talk about social media being bad for us we mean for our mental health. These platforms make us anxious, depressed, and insecure, and for many reasons: the constant social comparison; the superficiality and inauthenticity of it all; being ranked and rated by strangers. All this seems to make us miserable.

But I don’t just think it makes us miserable. I’ve written before about how it makes us bitchy. And self-absorbed. And over time I’m becoming convinced that our most pressing concern isn’t that social media makes us feel worse about ourselves. It’s that social media makes us worse people.

Social comparison, for example. This is one of the main problems people mention when talking about the harms of social media. Constantly comparing our beauty, our success, our lifestyle, our popularity, to infinite streams of other people makes us feel anxious and inadequate, yes. But I also think it makes us resentful. Bitter. Competitive. Quietly wishing for others to fail. We talk constantly about what like, follow and comment metrics do to our self-esteem—but don’t they also make us so shallow? We hate when people judge us by numbers on a screen, but aren’t we doing it all the time, to everyone else, even subconsciously? We talk endlessly about how editing apps and filters give girls and young women anxiety and body dysmorphia, which is important, but never about how they make us competitive, envious, vain. Sometimes it’s not my self-esteem I’m worried about. It’s who I become when I obsess over my profile and image and what everyone else is doing. Sometimes I lock my screen and don’t like who is looking back at me in its black reflection.

I think the same is true of dating apps. There’s so much discourse about how these platforms make us sad and anxious. We talk about how bad being ghosted is for our mental health, and how being swiped past destroys our self-esteem. But don’t they also just make us horrible? Funny how we never talk about who we become when we use these apps; how we behave. Honestly I feel more pity for those relentlessly swiping through and ghosting people than the ones who keep getting rejected. Isn’t that the real tragedy? It’s terrible to be treated like some disposable product but worse, I think, to watch yourself shopping for another person, to know you’re judging them on the most superficial standards that you would hate someone to judge you on, to act in this psychopathic way where you’re paying premium to access “Your Top Picks” of human beings. People always say dating apps make them feel weird and I think this is why. It’s not always mental health. Sometimes it’s a deeper sense that this is wrong; that this is inhuman.

We also complain, constantly, about how inauthentic everyone is, how people are always performing and how this fakeness makes us feel insecure and inferior. But what about being fake ourselves? It’s so easy to be dishonest now. We can so easily disguise our vanity as virtue. Here’s a post about Palestine where I’m posing! I’m standing up for conservative values—with a hot selfie of me at a protest! People on all sides pretend their platforms are about political causes and activism when really they just provide perfect opportunities to constantly talk about themselves. And to be rewarded for doing nothing! Now you can be showered with praise for that heartfelt tweet you typed about your mum on Mother’s Day when you didn’t bother to call her or write her a card. You can be applauded by strangers for that Instagram post about how much you love the daughter you don’t spend any time with and never really listen to. And even if we mean it, I think sharing these things shreds them of sincerity. Now we feel a flicker of integrity and immediately publicise and monetise it until it’s dead. We enjoy validation from the fakest displays of virtue and then at the same time revel in the downfall of others; reserve so little faith and forgiveness for anyone else.

And actually, paradoxically, I think all this is a major part of the mental health crisis. This feeling that we are all becoming worse. Our loss of empathy, our lack of regard for others, our neurotic obsession with our own image—it’s taking a toll. Maybe subconsciously. But I think deep down we know it. We know when people are using their dying relatives for Twitter likes, filming their private moments of “quiet reflection”, all the way to posing on the train tracks at Auschwitz for their Tinder profiles, that the conversation can no longer just be about how bad social media is for our mental health. It has to be how bad it is for our humanity.

Of course it isn’t just social media to blame. The trade-off in modern life seems to be comfort and freedom in return for being so horrifically trapped in our own heads. So much of modern culture now seems to exist to excuse our self-obsession. Therapy culture has escalated to the point where cheating on someone is an ADHD symptom (“Hypersexuality is not infidelity. It’s an ADHD response”!). Consumer capitalism to the point where human beings become hot new profiles for us to purchase (only $499 per month!) And I think more generally our problem is a progressive culture where we are afraid to say what is decent moral conduct, where we can’t really call out what is undignified or distasteful anymore, where we’re terrified to enforce any ethical expectations.

But then: social media. Modernity mined culture of its customs, denied the importance of families, made a mockery of generational wisdom—and then left the door wide open for companies to crawl in and decide what we value. What did we expect when we took down the traditions? When we uprooted our communities? And allowed a generation to be raised by algorithms and the role models it generates for them? And these platforms are always just there, too, reminding us constantly, daily, hourly, that it’s okay to have so little regard for other people. Of course we can all be cruel and selfish and insincere sometimes—but never before in history have we had a portable machine here to promote it. To indulge it. To reward our self-obsession and rename it personal branding, to protect our vanity as #selfexpression, to defend our basest desires “because you owe it to yourself”!

Of course some people will insist that you can use social media selectively, for good things. You just have to be smart with it. Sure! Maybe you’ve trained your algorithm to deliver you diet videos and exercise tips and positive affirmations. Hate to say it but it’s still all about you. It’s all about your self-improvement. Still a constant, even subconscious reminder to think about yourself. Even healthier algorithms and platforms all have the same problem: you are the centre. What are you thinking about? What’s on your mind? We are a generation forever being told to take ourselves more seriously.

And it’s not just subtle nudging either—apps explicitly encourage us to compare and compete, to see ourselves as the main character, to see other people like products. “Ever wonder why your friends’ selfies looks so good?” asks the editing app Facetune, encouraging us to download. “Say goodbye to superficial connections,” says a dating app called Hot Or Not. Snapchat even recently introduced a new “Solar System” feature which publicly ranks your friends in order of how close you are to them (of course your avatar is literally sitting on the centre of the world, with friends orbiting around it). Snapchat lies to children that everyone cares about their Story, Instagram pretends their faces and bodies are of paramount importance, and we wonder why Gen Z grow up to be self-absorbed and entitled and constantly think their existence is invalidated by the real world.

And yes, of course, you can argue we are accountable. We can avoid these platforms and try to treat people well. No they’re not an excuse to be a bad person. But I worry. I worry that there’s never been such constant cultural messaging. There’s never been so much nudging. There’s never been more incentives. And I worry most for the children—the 7 year-old girls now behaving like Instagram influencers, adopting their mannerisms, who think growing up is getting to buy more products and have a career where a camera is constantly on them. I worry that kind, humble, modest children are being raised by influencers whose income relies on the most shallow human impulses, who have zero incentive to teach them any morals or decency. And companies are getting closer and closer access to them, all the time ramping up the incentives to behave badly.

And actually, I’m losing hope for people taking accountability because all this has accelerated so much and so fast that we can’t seem to see what it’s doing to us, let alone make better choices. Having a camera roll full of thousands of selfies is now completely normal. So is checking how many likes your tweet has while someone is talking to you. So is swiping through human beings like you’re on Amazon. Most of us do things like this sometimes and we feel that it’s weird, we know it’s a bit bleak, but more and more people don’t seem to even see a problem. They spend five hours a week taking selfies and don’t see it as vanity. They talk about people’s follower counts like it’s a measure of worth without a thought of what’s becoming of them. They are so obsessed with their digital reputation they can’t see how they are degrading their real life one for it. They can point to all the ways social media is killing their mental health but never their humility. And so many of us delude ourselves that these platforms are harmless and light-hearted, all while we can feel them destroying us on the inside. All while we are becoming steadily more self-absorbed, in ways that play out in our real relationships and I think eat away at us and our respect for ourselves. Maybe that funny feeling we get from social media isn’t always anxiety. Maybe sometimes that feeling is shame.

Oh well! We’re having fun, right? We’re entertained! We’re all more connected, apparently. But who said I want to be connected to people like this? I don’t even feel connected to myself when I behave this way. I’m starting to think that the ability to know what a primary school friend on Facebook is doing at all times doesn’t quite make up for the fact that we are losing our empathy. That we are making a vanity of virtue. That all this places insane psychological demands on people until they degenerate into someone they are not. Or at least someone less than they could have been. I hate how these platforms convince humble, modest people that they are lacking—they should be sharing more; building a personal brand; playing the game. Take more photos! Tell us more about you! It’s all free! Just pay with your humility. Trade with the time you could be spending thinking about anyone else but yourself.

I honestly don’t know where we go from here. Distancing ourselves from these platforms, yes. Staying away from things that, no matter how normal they seem now, we feel are changing us for the worse. But I also think a good place to start is to change the way we talk about social media. Not just about our vulnerabilities but our vices. Not just about our anxiety but our arrogance. And to look at ourselves, honestly, all of us, and think, for once, not only about how all this is making us feel. But who the hell is it making us become?

1. My visit also included talks with parliamentarians, journalists, several BBC programs, Good Morning Britain, the Policy Exchange think tank, the prime minister, and the policy team at No. 10 Downing Street. 

2. The available data in the US suggests a similar rate: According to a Common Sense Media report, 15% of kids under 10 say they've watched porn.