After Babel

Photo credit: Shutterstock Intro from Jon: When I arrived at the University of Virginia in September 1995 for my first academic job, I was assigned to teach Psych 101, a large lecture class. I loved it. I loved synthesizing broad and diverse research literatures and then formulating metaphors to help students see patterns and make connections.

When The Anxious Generation was published in March 2024, we were flooded with questions from parents, teachers, journalists, researchers, and policymakers: What are the impacts of watching hours of short-form videos every day? How much screen time is harmful for infants? Does educational technology actually improve student learning? How will AI reshape childhood?

Photo credit: Yan Krukau from Pexels via Canva.com Academic studies, testimony from hundreds of bereaved parents, and thousands of internal documents from social media companies have all combined to shape an emerging public consensus: social media causes a variety of direct and indirect harms to young people, ranging from sexual harassment and sextortion to depression and anxiety.

Introduction by Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch: While our primary focus in the past has been on social media and mental health, in the last two years, majordeclines in test scores in countries around the world have drawn increasing attention to the effects of the phone-based childhood on educational outcomes and cognitive development more broadly.

Introduction from Jonathan Haidt: In April I gave my third — and most urgent — TED Talk. It’s about stopping the takeover of childhood by technologies that were not designed with children’s welfare in mind. To change course in democratic nations will require a major change in public opinion as a signal to political leaders that the current course is not acceptable.

Introduction from Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch: Longtime After Babel readers will recognize today’s guest author, Seth Kaplan, lecturer at Johns Hopkins and author of Fragile Neighborhoods. In previousessays, he has argued that loss of community is an upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis, and that restoring the play-based childhood requires rebuilding strong local communities.

Introduction from Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch: A year and a half ago, we teamed up with Lennon Torres, senior campaign manager at The Heat Initiative and LGBTQ+ advocate, to write an article for The Atlantic, “Social-Media Companies’ Worst Argument” (reposted here with no paywall).

Credit: pixelshot via Canva.com Two weeks ago, on March 25, a jury in Los Angeles found Meta and Google liable in a landmark case. The jurors determined that the parent companies of Instagram and YouTube had acted with “malice, oppression, or fraud,” addicting and harming the young plaintiff, known as KGM.

Introduction from Jon Haidt and Ravi Iver: After two watershed verdicts in the social media trials in New Mexico and LA this week, we’ve entered a new era in the fight to protect children from online harms. Momentum is growing internationally, and we’re excited to see Indonesia’s groundbreaking new regulation take effect this weekend.

The anti-social-media brigade has missed the point. Screens are not the real problem. Social media is not the real problem. They are symptoms of a much deeper failure in how we raise and educate children. Australia’s under-16 social media law is a good example of a political class reacting before thinking, it treats the screen as the cause, when in truth the screen has rushed in to fill a vacuum we ourselves have created.