You don’t need scientific proof of social media harms to know you should keep your children off of it
Timothy P. Carney
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There’s stuff we know and stuff we can prove scientifically. About 99% of the stuff we know, it turns out, is stuff we can’t quite prove without making at least some assumptions and some leaps of faith.
NYU statistician Aaron Brown argues, with lots of analysis and lots of numbers, that social science has yet to prove social media is harming the mental and emotional health of young people. Fine. But that doesn’t change the fact that social media is harming the mental and emotional health of young people.
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If you know any significant number of teenagers, you know that this is true. If you spend any time on social media, you can see roughly why and how social media use would be both addictive and harmful.
If you peruse the news media, you’ve seen many studies claiming to “prove” the harm of social media. This is where skepticism is due, because studies and science don’t prove things in the way the news media typically suggests they do. This is where professor Brown provides a good and useful corrective.
Social scientist Jonathan Haidt claims that the research overwhelmingly shows that social media harms young people. Brown looks at the relevant research and concludes, “the evidence not only doesn’t support his claim about teen health and mental health; it undermines it.”
(He also flatly asserts that “social media use isn’t a toxin.” If Brown means that simply literally, fine, but while we are talking about mental health, that flat claim is question-begging.)
If you read the entire magazine piece by Brown, you will come away more skeptical than you likely started by broad claims that “social media is proven to harm children.”
But again, parents, school principals, and counselors all know that social media can really cause emotional and mental harm, especially in children.
Brown’s skeptical argument, if it convinces you, shouldn’t change your parenting. You should still not give your child a smartphone or allow your teenager to get on TikTok or peruse Discord servers. You also should push your children’s school to ban smartphones, discourage parents from providing them, and discourage all parents from letting their children on social media.
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What Brown’s argument and analysis should do is make you call for more and better research into the harms of social media. What sort of social media harms children? What sort of children are most harmed by social media? What specific harms are we talking about? What remedies or safeguards are likely to work?
The lack of proof of harm is a good reason to demand more research. It’s not a good reason to give your child unfettered access to social media.