And I guess the question is, like, how can this stuff not have an effect on young people? yeah

so there are absolutely cases of offline harm and so i'll give you so a couple of things i want to say first one i'm not in any way minimizing the types of harms the responsibility of tech companies and i have been a huge proponent of the molly rose foundation of their leadership in this area and i've been especially impressed by how outspoken they have been in terms of focusing the regulation on the pieces of the tech that has, you know, kind of a possibility of having a positive impact on young people, right? So they don't want the superficial change.

They want the actual real change on the design features and I commend them.

And nobody should be fed those types of images or content, regardless of their age.

There are many vulnerable people across the age distribution, across the world.

I mean, just safety for design for everyone.

And that's first and foremost, absolutely.

okay, so in terms of that diversion of energies, okay, what do you think is that we're not looking at that we should be looking at?

How would you say we can navigate that?

You just brought up so many things there.

So the first thing, taking away Snapchat, it's not really about taking away the platform.

It's what would you say if I said I was going to take away all your friends and your ability to contact all your friends, right? And so I think the connection...

Now, the fact that they're connecting on a corporate platform, which does not have their best interests in mind, which does not protect their data in the way it should, that does not have the safety by design standards that we've all been pushing for a long time.

That's a problem.

Right.

and in communities so do you have any sort of ideas and suggestions about what we can be doing in terms of resources and how with a focus you know for parents now what could we be doing to help our kids in a much more productive way

[laughs]

But the good news is, is that the real story about teens today is far more positive and far less frightening than the stories we all read.

They have made remarkable progress on metrics that really matter, and we know a lot about how to keep them happy, safe, and well.

Okay, the bad news.

The bad news is we are in the middle of an adult mental health crisis, and caregiver mental health is the most important predictor of teen mental health by far.

So if we are concerned about teens today, we need to invest in real and meaningful ways in the adults around them.

Many of them are simply not okay.

[cheering] [applauding]

Mm

... child sexual exploitation, and I think there is, like, real work to be done in that space, and I wanna do the real hard work of it.

But let's talk a little bit about this argument that's, people are making that, you know, somehow social media or time online has led to these increases at a population level in depression, anxiety, et cetera.

So the first thing to kind of note is that when you look across all of these studies, and it's not just me, hundreds of researchers have done it, the National Academy of Sciences convened a panel, reviewed all the evidence, and what you really find is a mix of really small associations with no real way to sort out cause and effect.

We often find that kids who are experiencing mental health problems will go online more, sometimes looking for help, sometimes just 'cause they're spending more time online.

Um, and in the experimental work that we've done to date, um, you know, there's been about 40 studies that have been conducted where they've actually randomly assigned people to stop using social media, and when you average those effects out, you find that the effect sizes are close to or indistinguishable from zero, and there's not one study that's done this on kids.

So I think it's, it's a kind of a stretch to say that this is a major contributor on a population level, although we believe it's true.

What would you do if you were in New Zealand, if you wanted to act decisively to do something about this?

What does extra support look like online?

So part of the struggle I have in this field is I get sucked into talking about, you know, what is the, you know, kind of worst thing that social media, you know, does, and is social media bad for all of those things, when I wish we would spend more time thinking about, hey, all these young people are in these spaces.

Um, we have an opportunity to reach them in those spaces and deliver the kind of evidence-based treatments and supports that, that they need and they're looking for.

But sadly, when young people go online to find help, they often don't find it in, in those kinds of ways.

Um, but there are some creative examples.

I'll tell you one example that I really love, which is, um, Katie Salen, who's my colleague here at UCI.

They run connected camps, which are Minecraft servers where young people go to camp on Minecraft, and I know that might sound way out there, but they have content moderators on these platforms, and they have a special camp that's for children who've lost a caregiver, and I talked a lot about caregiver loss in my talk, and this is a s- this is a space where young people go.

And also you want to talk about why kids are scared and anxious is the fact that at school they're getting the message that it's possible, and in fact so possible they have to prepare for it, that someone will come in with a high-powered weapon and, and they'll have to hide for their lives.

So what do you think is sort of the most compelling case you can make for why social media is not, you know, leading to all of these issues?

So I try and separate two things.

The first one is this normative value-based judgment that, like, parents and adults, they don't want their children to have a digital childhood or a digital childhood only, right? They react to that.

There's large consensus that they want something different, right? And that's kind of one piece of it.

The part that I look at it is does the time online, engaging in social media or on your phone, is it actually- Causing mental health problems or making mental health problems worse for people who are already struggling, right? So I'm in that piece of it, and I'll kind of put the what parents want for their kids, which is legitimate, and I'm not here to tell anybody what they should want for their kids or the type of childhood.

But what I can tell you is when people are telling you that social media is to blame for serious mental health problems like depression, anxiety, and suicide, that the, the evidence is just not there on the population level.

And let me tell you what that, that means.

Can you talk a little bit more about what you think we could do or what parents could do to ensure their kids do have a safe online experience? Because I do think, like, it is hard out there for parents, and the internet is not all good, right?

Mm.

So we have a youth advisory board that screens our protocols and that works with us to make sure that we're asking the right questions, and we're not just another bunch of adults who are making assumptions.

I want to share with you a few science-based te- facts about kids today, and I'm gonna focus on American teens because that's where a lot of the stories that you and I are hearing come from.

So in the past twenty years, we've had some major wins.

Rates of teen violence, alcohol use, pregnancy have plummeted to historic lows.

You are looking at the most educated generation ever in terms of high school graduation.

Young people are inventors, they're activists, they're leaders, they're amazing.

There is a line drawn that you cannot have your phones out, and kids aren't subjected to FOMO," you know, that these companies know how to manipulate them to get them to want to look at their phones so bad that they can't help themselves?

that a hundred of those students are struggling and nobody can carry that caseload if we're just going on a one in five statistic yeah

yeah Yeah.

And there's so little investment right now in the digital mental health space of bringing those services to young people where they are.

We know, we see it time and time again.

When young people are depressed, they're more likely to go online and ask for help.

There's a whole conversation now, which is another podcast about conversational agents.

They are going there to ask because they're not getting supports offline, right? So what are we thinking about when we invest in this? Are we thinking about investing in bans and pretending we're kicking kids off and restriction? Or are we building things that are just better for them? And I think the other part of this is like, we also know, and David Yeager has a great new book on this, right? The Science of Motivating Adolescents is like, this is a period of time where we need to set high expectations for them, right? And they will meet them and they have all the ability in the world.

He's still not

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, I think mult- I mean, I, I think with any of these, like, complex behaviors, there's not one single thing, and I think that's where the social media smartphone thing, it's so compelling because people can point to this one thing and it's something you can turn off.

But there's been lots of changes, right? So, you know, some of it's been prevention.

Some of it has been, you know, population demographic shifts, right, that have happened in the, in the United States.

Some of it has been, like, greater investment in kind of young, young people, you know, early on.

And so I think it's a mixed causal story, but the, the main point is that the story that we're constantly told about young people doesn't match the data, right? It just doesn't.

Um, you know, there, there are these upticks in anxiety, um, and depression, and we need to pay attention to that, but we also have to understand that against the context of what they're, what they're waking up to every day.

[laughs]