Smartphones & Social Media Apps

Since the early 2010s, smartphones and social media have triggered a sustained moral panic about their effects on children, mental health, and public discourse. Psychologist Jean Twenge argued in her 2017 Atlantic piece "Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?" that the arrival of the smartphone marked an "earthquake" in teen mental health. In 2021, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager turned whistleblower, leaked thousands of internal documents (dubbed the "Facebook Files") showing Meta's own researchers had found Instagram worsened body image and suicidal ideation among some teen girls. In May 2023, the US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy (the federal government's top doctor) issued an advisory on social media and youth mental health. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation (March 2024) became the movement's defining text, arguing that a "great rewiring" of childhood by phone-based social media had caused an international mental-health crisis.

Critics have pushed back hard. Developmental psychologist Candice Odgers (writing in Nature, April 2024), Oxford researcher Andrew Przybylski and science writer Pete Etchells note that peer-reviewed meta-analyses (studies that pool results across many other studies) find effect sizes close to zero. Odgers argued bluntly that Haidt's book is "not supported by science."

Legislation has followed the panic rather than the evidence. Australia's Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 banned under-16s from major platforms from December 2025. The US Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which would require platforms to take a "duty of care" for minors, passed the Senate in July 2024 but stalled in the House. Dozens of US states and New York City have filed lawsuits against Meta, TikTok and others. The question of what the best evidence actually says about screens and teens remains one of the sharpest open empirical disputes of the era.