Something terrible has happened to Gen Z, the generation born after 1996. Harm to teens is occurring on a massive scale.įor several years, Jean Twenge, the author of iGen, and I have been collecting the academic research on the relationship between teen mental health and social media. If public officials want to make that case, it could go like this:ġ. The available evidence suggests that Facebook’s products have probably harmed millions of girls. The toxicity comes from the very nature of a platform that girls use to post photographs of themselves and await the public judgments of others.įrom the September 2017 issue: Have smartphones destroyed a generation? Mark Zuckerberg’s company actually made few major changes in its first years of owning the photo-sharing app, whose users have always skewed younger and more female. When it bought its emerging rival Instagram in 2012, Facebook didn’t take a healthy platform and turn it toxic. Its flagship product supplanted earlier platforms and quickly became ubiquitous in schools and American life more broadly. The preponderance of the evidence now available is disturbing enough to warrant action.įacebook has dominated the social-media world for nearly a decade and a half. If Americans do nothing until researchers can show beyond a reasonable doubt that Instagram and its owner, Facebook (which now calls itself Meta), are hurting teen girls, these platforms might never be held accountable and the harm could continue indefinitely. One major question, though, is how much proof parents, regulators, and legislators need before intervening to protect vulnerable young people. Social media-particularly Instagram, which displaces other forms of interaction among teens, puts the size of their friend group on public display, and subjects their physical appearance to the hard metrics of likes and comment counts-takes the worst parts of middle school and glossy women’s magazines and intensifies them. Much more than for boys, adolescence typically heightens girls’ self-consciousness about their changing body and amplifies insecurities about where they fit in their social network. Far easier to show is the damage to a specific class of people: adolescent girls, whose rates of depression, anxiety, and self-injury surged in the early 2010s, as social-media platforms proliferated and expanded. But proving that harms have occurred to all of society is hard. S ocial media gets blamed for many of America’s ills, including the polarization of our politics and the erosion of truth itself. He is the author of The Righteous Mind and the co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, which originated as a September 2015 Atlantic story. About the author: Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at the New York University Stern School of Business.