Technology

1. Nobody gives a shit about kids, this has nothing to do with kids.

2. It is a distraction to point to infinite scrolling, and it makes people dumber when they nod their heads and say "yeah that is the problem!" because the oxygen goes out of the room to have a serious conversation about collective ownership of digital platforms, the violence inherent to rightwing ideology and the extreme damage wealth inequality and the globally collapsing social safety net does to us all.

3. These laws WILL be used by wealthy corporations to shut out smaller competition/social networks.

4. Infinite scroll? Really? We are gonna compare swiping over and over again to physically giving someone drugs? I am not debating the reality of addiction, I am saying that there really isn't any actually solid evidence we are making rational scientific decisions here. Whenever we talk about addiction people turn their brain off and everything becomes a slippery slope, it is a logic that only ever works when applied in a monomanical way that excludes the obvious fallacies that comes from expanding the logic outside of the moral panic zone... but a moral panic demands you be shamed if you aren't hyperfocusing on it and thus it can propagate even though the broader implications of its logic are destructive and regressive.

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/01/21/two-major-studies-125000-kids-the-social-media-panic-doesnt-hold-up/

https://www.platformer.news/social-media-screen-time-manchester-study-haidt/

https://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2018/aug/09/three-problems-with-the-debate-around-screen-time

https://news.ucsb.edu/2025/022293/brain-science-social-media-and-modern-moral-panic

https://www.usermag.co/p/can-you-sue-for-social-media-addiction

https://petergray.substack.com/p/63-more-on-moral-panics-and-thoughts

Will restricting social media or other uses of technology reverse the current mental health crisis among kids?

I am convinced that the answer is no. I have written about this before. The mental health crisis preceded smartphones and social media. It even preceded public access to the Internet. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide among teens increased continuously and dramatically between 1950 and 1990. In previous writings (e.g. here and here) I have described some of the societal changes that gradually restricted children’s freedom to play and explore independently and thereby deprived them of their greatest sources of joy and the kinds of activities that provide the opportunity to acquire a sense of agency and build the skills that underlie emotional resilience (see here).

Then, from 1990 to about 2010, the mental health of kids in the US improved. Rates of anxiety, depression and suicide declined about a third of the way back toward 1950s levels. Why? We don’t know for sure, but I have presented—with evidence (e.g. here)—the hypothesis that computers, computer games, and the Internet itself became a saving grace. Already by 1990 we had taken away most of kids’ opportunities to play, explore, and communicate with one another independently of adult control in the real world, but now they could do those things in the virtual world. They regained some of the sense of autonomy, competence, and relatedness to peers that psychologists have long known are essential for mental wellbeing.

Beginning around 2011 rates of anxiety, depression and suicide among teens began to increase again, reaching by 2019 a peak about the same as that in 1990 before leveling off again after 2019. What happened? Jonathan Haidt, in The Anxious Generation, wants us to believe that the crucial social change was availability of smartphones and social media platforms, but most social scientists who have long been immersed in testing that theory disagree. Again, see my critique of Haidt’s book here and the previous posts I link to in that critique. I elaborated (here) on another theory about what changed around 2011 to increase kids’ anxiety, depression, and suicide, which is far better supported by evidence than the smartphone/social media theory, but relatively few people are willing to consider it. It’s easier to blame media companies than to blame what was viewed as “reform” of our public school system.