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- [00:00]
A
Hello and welcome to the techdirt podcast. I'm Mike Masnick.
- [00:06]
B
The world is increasingly technological, so we had better get methodical, bringing precision to critical digital journalism with the singular vision of a modern monocle. Stopping the copyright police for pulling the wall on us, facing and taking on all the blatant pay to troll Document the ways that they aim to take control, scrutinize and do their lives and make them fold. If we don't stand up to them, someone will get huh to grab a shovel and dig up the tear. If we don't stand up to them, someone will get huh to grab a sh. To think of the cat.
- [00:34]
A
Just last week on the podcast we had Professor Alice Marwick looking at the problems of many of the laws designed to supposedly protect kids online and noting how they were unlikely to actually achieve any of those goals and could in many cases actually make things worse. I'm not going to restate everything that I said in that podcast about the, I guess mainstream discussion that is happening these days about the supposed harms of the Internet and cell phones and whatnot to teens and their mental health, but you can consider this something of a follow up to last week's podcast. I guess. This week we have Candice Odgers, who is professor of Psychological Science and Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. She's one of the preeminent developmental psychology professors who are studying the intersection of technology and the mental health of adolescents. And given how important that topic is these days, I am somewhat amazed and maybe slightly disappointed at how often I seem to find her showing up in conversations where it is basically her discussing in careful detail the piles upon piles of research and then having to debate some random dude who has little more than maybe overconfident feelings about what is causing the teen mental health crisis. So rather than forcing her to just push back on against a constant stream of loud people with strong feelings, I thought it might be nice to have her on to explore what the research actually shows and what we should think about it. So, Candace, welcome to the podcast.
- [02:19]
C
Thanks, Mike. I look forward to the conversation versus being the voice of reason in the debate.
- [02:24]
A
Well, you'll still be the voice of reason, but hopefully the whole conversation is a little more reasonable. And again, like if, if you haven't. I mean, for people who are listening, if you haven't heard, there have been many debates recently and, and Candace is always showing up as what should be the voice of reason, but is often sort of presented as like the. The outsider skeptic. And that is Personally frustrating. So can we just start with. Because I know you've been, you've been doing research in this field a lot. You've gone through, you've done sort of, you know, looking at all the other research and sort of compiling it together. What really is the sort of state of research today regarding teens and mental health and technology?
- [03:11]
C
Yeah, it's an interesting story. And the state of the research was summarized recently by a panel, an expert panel. In December 2023, the National Academies of Sciences, they released their report based on a year long inquiry and they summarized a lot of what we know today so far. And the, the story of that research is, is interesting because what the research says over here and what the public believes kind of over here, the distance between those two things is vast. And that has become kind of one of the more fascinating parts of this entire thing for me. So, you know, just to be really concrete, the research typically finds really tiny correlations, you know, positive and negative directions. Not a lot of ways in the designs to sort out cause and effect, but the narrative and the story and what the public is told and what people believe is that it is a one way causal arrow and that effect is big and we need to act. So that's the two kind of sides to this story.
- [04:15]
A
Yeah, I mean, do you have a sense of why, why that is, why does the public narrative divert so much from, you know, from the piles and piles of research as a, as I noted before.
- [04:27]
C
Yeah, I think you've, you've touched on this before. But you know, a number of people talked about, talked about a moral panic. Right. And this certainly has elements of that. There's elements of the older generation looking back and romanticizing, you know, how life was for them and demonizing how young people spend their time. And there's elements of that. It's also the case that this has been a rapidly moving kind of new field and set of, you know, constraints and opportunities have been introduced. Our young people have been early and enthusiastic adopters in that space. And so there's, there's, you know, it's perfectly legitimate to be concerned and to watch and to test and to understand what is happening. But you know, the moment we're in right now, I think, you know, I don't want to overstate it, but it does feel like we are at the peak of this tsunami of moral panic around this issue. And so having kind of the big tent discussions about this topic that have to be had to move this in a reasonable way are getting really challenging.
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A
Yeah, yeah, challenging is a diplomatic way of putting it. I find some of the discussions a little bit on the more frustrating side rather than challenging.
- [05:44]
C
You're getting my Canadian side. I'm trying to be, you know, I'm trying to be reasonable.
- [05:49]
A
Excellent, excellent. You know, I mean it is interesting, right, Because I think and well, first of all, do you agree? I mean, I think a lot of the research does suggest that there are real concerns about teens and mental health and that there are elements that, and there's some dispute here, but it does feel like there are legitimate concerns about teens and mental health today. Is that, do you agree with that?
- [06:16]
C
So, yes, but I would take a little bit of a different stance. I've been studying adolescent mental health for 20 years and it's always been the case that about one in five young people have struggled with what we term early onset and persistent mental health problems that then predict the whole range of problems going on. So I have always been in the seat of we need more attention, more support during this kind of critical phase of development and early adolescence at 10 to 15 year old window has always been critically important because that's when we see the emergence of anxiety, depression, internalizing disorders. And that's with or without phones. Right. So that is just a thing that happens around puberty and that has been true for a very long time. So you know, I do care if it's increasing dramatically, but I've always cared and think we should invest regardless. As for whether or not we're seeing in the midst of an epidemic or a surge, I mean we're definitely seeing signs of increases and there's all kinds of reasons that that might be happening and lots of things are probably true in driving that increase.
- [07:21]
A
Yeah, I think one of the things that has become clear to me and I haven't spent nearly as much time and I'm sure have not gone through nearly much of the research as you have. But the, that, you know that there are, there's, there's a whole bunch of different factors. Right. People are complicated, society is complicated. All of this is really, really complicated. And yet it's. And like this is natural. Like everybody wants to have like simple answers to complicated problems. But it feels to me that that's, that's what we're seeing. That there are things to be concerned about and it's great that there are people researching this stuff and studying and trying to figure out. Be great people could figure out ways to minimize that and minimize the harm that is coming. But this sort of search for really simple one or Two things that are. The answer is almost certainly going to come up empty.
- [08:16]
C
Yeah, it's very strange logic. And experts that work in this field, if you were to put them together and let's take adolescent depression and anxiety and say, make a list of the top 10 things that are driving adolescent mental health. Right. And you made a list of those things. So social media wouldn't be on that list. Right. And that's a different conversation. So for those of us who are interested in adolescent mental health and providing treatment and intervention and creating healthy childhoods, that's, you know, it might come into the conversation as an. In the innovative, you know, solution space of reaching people for kind of just in time crisis, those types of things. But as far as effect size and as far as what we're seeing, the, the bulk of the scientific literature and what we know about historical factors that predict and including things that are happening right now, if we look at parental death from suicide, from guns, if we look at rates of suicide among every age strata in the United States that have been going up and going up long before the smartphone. Right. And you know, those, those types of things impact kids. Right. So if we were having that conversation, you know, social media should, should be, you know, maybe in the solution space, you know, maybe for some kids that are highly vulnerable, you know, that are experiencing lots of risk in other places, you know, we say be careful in any context those kids are going into. You know, we need extra eyes and extra support. That includes a digital world. Right now, if the conversation is, is there any effect on anything in the world about digital technology, positive or negative? Like, that's a different kind of set of questions. Right. And when you go into the digital technology effects world, that's about what you find. Right. So do people feel a little bit happier or a little bit sadder if they see this type of message or this type of image? But that's a different set of questions than what causes serious mental disorder or things like suicide.
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A
Yeah.
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C
And so those two things are collapsing together in ways that are really strange right now, Right?
- [10:21]
A
Yes. Right. Yeah.
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C
And I actually have the misfortune of, you know, every time if there's a headline and it says, you know, new study finds, you know, social media destroys the world, whatever that is, I go in and I actually read the study, and often it doesn't actually say what it claims to have said. The population has nothing to do with the population. That's being generalized to. So a lot of this is really just extracting from some sort of study somewhere that Studied a set of outcomes to, and pointing it towards the problem that everybody is trying to or wants to solve. And so if you go through and really try and disentangle this, it's, it's actually pretty fascinating, you know, in this game of telephone, you know, what ends up as the public message, the public facing message.
- [11:10]
A
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, it's interesting to me, right, like you can find some studies that are like, you know, that, you know, basically give people surveys around, like, did you see this kind of content and how did it make you feel? And that is very different than is that leading to mental health issues? And yet it's easy to conflate those two things, I think.
- [11:33]
C
Yes. Around the time of the Facebook whistleblower, you know, they released some of that data there and I was being interviewed by a reporter and I tried to make this distinction. I said, listen, we don't go around and ask people what they think the efficacy of vaccines are and then conclude that's the efficacy of vaccine. But that is what we do all the time in digital technology. It's like, you know, 50% of kids say X. Well, 50% of kids say it doesn't matter either way, but you know, then the other ones on the margins and of course it matters what kids think and what people think is happening. But that's different, that's a different question than what's the actual impact of this thing, Whether it's an algorithm or whether it's Instagram or, you know, insert your favorite technology on a specific outcome.
- [12:19]
A
Yeah, yeah, it's. Yeah, it's interesting how quick people are to sort of use a bunch of these findings to sort of, you know, reinforce their priors, I think, is what often happens. Now it is interesting to me that, you know, especially in the last few years, it does feel like more research has been put into this, which I think is good. In general, though, you know, I think the sort of misinterpretations of, of what the studies show. But one of the things that, that certainly has come up is that, and you mentioned this a little bit, is that it feels as though the results, you said sort of small correlations, some positive, some negative. The thing that strikes me is that it's fairly inconsistent in terms of what you see from the different studies. Do you have any sense of why, why that is
- [13:11]
C
So a lot of it is, you know, 80 to 90% of the studies in this field are based on cross sectional studies where you ask the same person to reflect back on, hey, in the past six months how much digital technology to use in the past six months? How did you feel? So right away you have informant bias. So the same person is answering those two things. You'd expect those things to be correlated, right? How they're feeling in the moment reflects, you know, correlates. And you have absolutely no way in those study designs to sort out cause and effect. And, you know, those populations are sampled from very different distributions. The questions are asked in different ways. So in the meta analysis Jeff Hancock did, the biggest moderator of whether or not you find an association between digital technology and mental health is how you ask the question. So if you use addictive framing, right? Do you have problems with this thing? Or if you just ask people for straight use, you tend not to find an association. But, you know, as you know, you find an association, right? It's there. The next thing you do is a good research. You never leave the bivariate. Like, that's not that interesting. Then you have to control for all of the other things that might be confounding it, right? Otherwise, explain, you know, those two things in the world. And so I think a lot of the. The discrepancy comes apart and, like, how, you know, how committed people really are to falsifying that initial hypothesis, to digging in and having alternative kind of rival hypotheses. And you saw this with Bowlski and Amy Orban's work, where they went in and really tried to test kind of all the universes of possibilities of how you would put these things together. And it's why we would like people to kind of openly register their hypotheses, share their data, right? I mean, we. I care less about being right or wrong on this issue of actually figuring out what's going on. And it seems really impossible to do that. Now. The really fascinating part, and this was a moment, I don't know if you remember, you know, here I'm going to talk about Trump, but Trump's inauguration, and there's two photos, right? There's an Obama photo and a Trump photo. And they asked people to estimate the number of people in both of those photos. And then the percentages varied depending on your political affiliation. And I thought, oh, geez, if we can't even count together, we can't do a bivariate correlation, right? And that's kind of where I feel now. So there's a study called the Monitoring the Future study. This was a study where, you know, Gene Twenge, way back in the day, declared that smartphones have destroyed a generation because we had a correlation between screen time and, you know, some measure of well being. And it explained like less than 1% of the variation. Right. Another, you know, Andy Jabolski, Amy Orbin come in and do a reanalysis of that. Right. And, you know, tell us that things like wearing eyeglasses, et cetera, can have a bigger correlation. We come in, we do the reanalysis and we say, okay, well, maybe, you know, it's not the effect for the whole population is zero, but if we find kids who are already depressed, maybe that's stronger. Right. We go in, we don't find that. We find, you know, there's virtually no association on the population level. There's some for girls and it's for girls who have less risk. Right. So completely counter. And if you go over time, you know, from the early 2000s up until 2017, we had the data, the effects or the association actually decreases over time, so it becomes closer to zero. Which says to me there was like selection early on of a smaller portion of people, you know, selecting to spend more time. And as it becomes more normative, then any kind of negative signal disappears. But the reason I tell that, you know, kind of story of the statistics is that we're all looking at exactly the same data. We're all looking at exactly the same correlation. And people are, you know, interpreting that in very kind of different ways. And so, you know, if we can't look at the same bivariate correlations together, it's really difficult to go further than that with, with these types of designs. Right?
- [17:10]
A
Yeah, yeah. One of the things that you've, you've written about and spoken about is this idea that, you know, because, because everyone's always talking like correlation versus causal and, and all of this stuff. And one thing that you've suggested is that the evidence suggests if there is a sort of causal connection, it's in the opposite direction where you're, you're having, you know, teens who are dealing with, with mental health issues using social media more rather than the social media causing that. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
- [17:48]
C
Yeah. I mean, so that's the interesting thing. You know, you find this correlation, and like I said, In 90% of the studies, you can't separate which direction the arrow is going. Right. So what happens is researchers are drawing in that directional arrow and based on what they think, and they think social media causes depression. Right. But if you look at the longitudinal data, what you actually find, and Jeff Hancock reported this in his meta analysis,
- [18:13]
A
this is the National Academy of Sciences.
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C
Well, he had yeah. So it was one of the meta analyses included in that. It was a study of 226 studies. It was included in there. There's been a bunch of meta analyses basically showing the same thing over and over and over again. And, you know, what they found in the longitudinal studies that they collected was that, you know, there weren't. There wasn't a lot happening over time between depression and social media in this case. But when you do find something, it turns out that social media use does not predict later depression, but depressive symptoms early on predict how you use social media. And for people who understand anything about depression, that makes sense. Right. So there's a correlation between having, like, being depressed and spending time in bed. Right. But we don't immediately say the bed, get rid of the beds. Right. And say that it's a cause of depression. Right. There's tons of things that are correlated with being in a depressed mood when you're an adolescent. You listen to more music, you spend less time interacting with people. Right. And so I've been really interested, you know, in kids who might be struggling, why they're going online, what they're looking for online, you know, what they're seeing. And we had early hypotheses that that turned out we couldn't find evidence for them. But I went out there and publicly stated in them anyway that time online or time in kind of negative spaces would make a bad situation worse for young people who are already at risk. And I still think that could be the case. I don't think we have the perfect studies yet, but we have tried to openly test that and have not found evidence for that yet. And so that was kind of a compelling case that maybe at the population level, it's a wash for most kids, but if you have kids that are really vulnerable. But it turns out the story is much more complicated there. Right. There is much finding support and community and resources and connection as they are, you know, being exposed to kind of additional negative content which may or may not make a bad situation worse.
- [20:13]
A
Right. Are there. Are there studies that you. That. That haven't been done that you wish could be done? Is there research that. That you would love to be able to do?
- [20:25]
C
Yes. So tomorrow, the NIH review is one of my big proposed studies. So if any reviewers are listening. Yeah. So. And this is actually fascinating to the current debate. So we need experimental evidence. Right. So we need experimental evidence, and we need it on young people in really important ways, because a lot of the research out there is on adults using Facebook.
- [20:48]
B
Right.
- [20:49]
C
And then people are just extrapolating downward. So Chris Ferguson put out a meta analysis. I talked about this a little bit in Atlantic article that I just wrote. And you know, they, he identified 26 studies which were social media kind of reduction studies. And you know, interestingly, you know, across all those studies, you know, if you look at it, you know, I said let's ask a couple questions. Like, first of all, do they involve adolescents at all? Right. Like, people are going around and saying, let's shut off the phones, let's turn them down. It's going to benefit mental health in big ways. What do we know? So it turns out there's 26 studies that have tried to do this. You know, only two of them have an average age of 18. There is not one study, there was not one study that involved 10 to 14 year olds, which is the group that everyone is talking about right now. Right, right. So if we're going to set policies and we're going to make causal claims about that group, we should probably have some experimental evidence. Right. You know, so, you know, recently people who've been, you know, making these arguments have said, you know, reporters, please stop using the word correlation. We now have the causal evidence. I'm like, great, where, like, where is it? Like, tell me. And that would be interesting if we, we had that. So I think first we need actual research on adolescence. We need an experimental design. And it doesn't, you know, there are problems, right. With pure experimental designs. Quasi experimental designs would be great too, leveraging these national natural experiments. But that is, you know, sorely, sorely needed. I think the other thing we need to know is, you know, there's been a huge tendency to rely on kind of time spent on various platforms. You know, we need better ways of kind of measuring and integrating content and how people, how kids are really interpreting their experiences online. So you and I could see the same content and take away very different interpretations or messages from that. It could have very different impacts depending on our offline vulnerabilities. Right?
- [22:57]
A
Yeah, yeah. And I would imagine there would be even be big differences among, I mean, if you're just looking at time, you know, people are using different types of apps or accessing different types of content or, you know, and even how they interact with it. Is it, is it passive? You know, viewing? Watching content versus creating content is very different experience. Or all of these kind of like big and open, open questions.
- [23:25]
C
Yeah. So we use each person as their own control. So we follow kids every day on their phone. So we're not Asking the question like, does Mike different from Candace in terms of, you know, their time spent or how that impacts them? You know, we go and we say, on days where I'm using more or less of this typ of digital technology, do I see impacts on, or associations with my sleep, with my mental health, with other kinds of measures? So you use each person as their own control. And that's really what parents want to know too. You know, they get this big message about the population on average, but they have this kid that is everything in the world to them. And it's terrifying, right, to be bombarded with these messages. And so what they want to know is, you know, how is their individual child responding? And I would argue that you would want to know why they're spending more time. So we, we get an initial rating in the morning, for example, of their negative affect. And if they're having a more negative mood that morning, they're more likely to spend more time, based on our passive sensing metrics. Right. Of how much time they're online than they are when they, you know, wake up reporting a better mood. Right. So it's an interesting, complicated set of questions.
- [24:36]
A
Yeah, yeah, no, it's, I mean, again, sort of goes back to what we were saying earlier. Like, people are complex, society is complex. Like there's all different variables here and, and I don't think, I don't think it's even possible to, to narrow down like all of that. Obviously, you know, the more of a sense that we can have, like what things do help and, and what things don't are important, but the idea that there's some sort of simple universal solution just, just is, is wrong. Along, along those lines, what do you have concerns around the potential downsides of getting this wrong? Like if we, if we go through this and, and do believe that. Oh, you know, well, you know, these people say it's, you know, there should be no, no social media before 16 or no, no smartphones or whatever. Do you have any concerns about what happens if we get that wrong?
- [25:33]
C
Yeah, it's a good question. I get it a lot. So people will say, well, what's the harm? Right? There's no harm in shutting these things off. And I had a great conversation with a high ranking scientist yesterday on this very, very point. And the first response I have is that if we're talking about childhood cancer, other things that kill and, you know, harm and take away time from our children, we would never accept this level of evidence that we have currently, you know, in the world about social Media, for example, and, and mental health, right. We would have kind of rigorous standards, and if people were going around telling stories about things that cause leukemia, we would probably pause and call that out. Right. One, you know, it's. Even if there was like, what's the harm? And whatever they were, they were talking about. So that's the first thing is that we're actually talking about serious mental disorders that take our children, that have an enormous cost on the individual in society. So let's, let's be serious about the rigor that we're going to expect from those, those conversations. The second, you know, part of this is really an opportunity cost on a number of fronts, and I think we're seeing it in the scientific community now, this constant search in this, in this space here, this tiny space for negative effects, and people are going in and going in and going in until they find something. Right? Like the way statistics works is every hundred studies, you know, you'll have those five, you know, false positives, and those get on the front page of the London Times at this point now, right? So. So we're in this kind of dangerous, you know, it's highly incentivized to find these associations and to keep searching and searching. So I think there's an interesting question of kind of resources, of how are you spending our time? And then there's the real causes, right, the real causes of mental disorder among our kids and where, where those get attention or, or not in terms of, you know, policy efforts and prevention. So this is sucking a lot of the air out of the room. I mean, there are, there are great conversations to be had about big tech. I mean, and that's a whole other conversation of not being a huge fan of many of the policies and approaches. But, you know, in this case, it really could be sending us on a wild goose chase. And then I think the last thing I would say is we're telling kids, right? We're telling kids that the behavior you are engaging in, that's really pretty normative, that all their friends are doing is addictive, it is shameful, it is harmful. We're telling parents who are raising kids in this pretty complicated world today that this is something that you should be taking away, you should be shutting down. And we already know that, you know, conflict over screen time was the number one cause of conflict in families, right? So, so there's that whole message. And so I think there are real costs, and I don't, I don't buy the thing. You know, let's just let the people go around and tell the story about children and mental health when the story is pretty damaging, pretty bleak and pretty wrong.
- [28:47]
A
Yeah, well, when you put it that way.
- [28:52]
C
Well, you asked. And I guess that's why, you know, I struggle because, you know, people have come up to me and said, candace, just you're a scientist, you do really good science. Go back, just let the moral panic die. Die. Right. Let it die.
- [29:04]
A
Yeah.
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C
And I do, for the most part, I, I do have not been, I'm talking to you. I don't take any media requests. I have not been fighting about social media. On social media. I turned down, you know, try to turn down to do the review in various ways. So. But yeah, here we are.
- [29:23]
A
Yeah. Yeah. Well, look, I, I appreciate, well, certainly I appreciate your willingness to come on this podcast. But, but I do think that it has been helpful. Even as I said, like, I do get frustrated that, that, you know, the only time I see your name popping up in the media is when it's to, to, to respond to some sort of nonsense. But I do appreciate the fact that you, you have taken the time and doing that. I mean, obviously in particular, we haven't even mentioned him. But like, Jonathan Haidt is like the, the, the. And his book has gotten a lot of the attention in this and you wrote a piece in Nature that has been very useful and sort of pushing back against that you've written in the Atlantic, sort of pushing back against the narrative a little bit. I think those are really useful to have out there just because otherwise the narrative just, you know, it, it, you know, it piles on itself and it runs away. And, and so having, you know, good, credible, you know, research and your voice, which is very clear and very useful out there, I think is, is really useful. So as, as much as I understand why you would avoid doing it as much as you can, I, I do appreciate the few times you've been willing to do it and certainly willing to do it here. You know, one of the questions that does come up and, and I get this a lot because I, you know, I, to try, try and push back on some of the misleading narratives that I think come up. And in some ways this is maybe a variation on the question I already asked, but it is slightly different. I think it is important to respond to which is that people still come to me and they say, but something has to be done. And so all of this, like, this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong. That doesn't help enough because we still feel that we need some sort of response to you Know, children in crisis, which is, again, a sort of understandable thing. But what's. How do you respond to those. Those kinds of questions?
- [31:29]
C
So I think, again, there's two. There's two separate and sometimes related things. There's the. Something has to be done about adolescent mental health, and that is a great conversation that we should be having. And I would love to have that conversation in a big way that doesn't just involve talking about a, like, button or a smartphone. Right? So that is absolutely the conversation that I would love us to be having in this country in a serious way. Then there's a question about how to regulate big tech and how to make technology a productive place for children to be. And so, you know, in December, we. We wrote a report that was essentially talking about the risks and benefits of life on online for young people, you know, pointing out all the kinds of things everyone talks about, which is, you know, these platforms were not designed with children in mind. And as soon as I say that, someone goes, aha. So you think they're bad? Well, I can think they're not. They're designed poorly, and they're not the space that we'd want children to spend all their time and also believe that it's not the cause of the adolescent mental health crisis or whatever we're. We're calling it here. So, you know, if you. You step back and think, okay, what. What are the features that we want these spaces to have? A lot of the concerns that I've talked about in the past and others have been around privacy of children's data, right around designing it in ways where content is age appro. Incentivizing companies to come into the public square and assume responsibility for these spaces where children spend so much of their time. And that the bar for us, you know, a safety bar is actually, you know, I would say too low, you know, versus having a productive space where young people come, and what are the features of that space we would want to have when young people are in them? And that includes access to resources about health and education. And, you know, and. And actually, kids don't want us in their space either. They don't want to be on the adult platforms, but they want a lot of the things that are in the adult spaces. And so I think, yes, something has to be done about both of these things, and sometimes those will intersect. Right. So there's lots of great interventions that need to be scaled that could be. Technology could be leveraged to help and do that for schools and for mental health hospitals. And I'M not saying just design an app for that. I'm saying integrate technology in a way that extends the capabilities of humans and evidence based treatment. Go to kids in place, find them in places where they are. I mean, there's these great examples here. The University of Minecraft servers that are run for young children who've lost a caregiver. Right. And they, there's content moderators that are trained in terms of grief counseling. Kids come there, you know, not all kids who've lost a parent, but kids who like to game and who want to, you know, memorialize their loved one in those spaces and share it when they're ready. So there are all kinds of creative kind of solutions and ways technology can be so much better for kids. And that's a, that's a whole important set of issues. And then there's this conversation about mental health. And when I, we started the conversation, I said, they've all just collapsed into one big amorphous thing, right? Which is, which is getting harder and harder to pull apart and have a really good conversation about mental health and have a really good conversation about what we should do to improve the spaces and improve digital technologies that are going to be here for a long time and that our kids are immersed in. Right?
- [35:04]
A
Yeah. I've had a few conversations, especially in the last six months to a year, about people sort of recognizing exactly what you said, you know, recognizing that no matter what people think or what people argue, like, kids are still going to use these technologies. And if there are concerns about what is happening there, like what are ways to use the technologies for, for good and, and sort of meet, meet the kids where they are as, as you said, and I've heard that phrase a few times now and it, it, like it feels really obvious and like, you know, once you hear it, you're like, okay, right. You know, if kids are on these platforms and they're struggling with mental health, like, maybe that's an opportunity to provide resources or tools. And I'm certainly not the expert in that in terms of what those resources and tools are, but it does feel like some people are at least exploring that now in terms of, you know, ways to actually, you know, provide useful resources in those scenarios.
- [36:04]
C
There's actually a ton of people working in the solutions space. And this is a bit of the frustrating part. Right. So it's not a simple story. It's hard work to do digital literacy and scaffolding and supports and all that thing. And there's tons of groups that are doing that. They don't get the airtime or the attention as someone telling a simple story. That's scary. Right. And that's what's captivating to people. Right. The hard work of doing digital literacy, of supporting, you know, kids. I mean, one of the biggest findings that we've had since we started looking at this is that really offline disadvantages, you know, replicate themselves in the online world. So when you just look at kids, you know, we often have these big samples of thousands of kids and we stratify them by their socioeconomic status. And what you find is that the kids in the lowest earning households, not only do they have the fewest opportunities offline, they have the fewest kind of supports, protection, scaffolding in online spaces. Right. So how are we thinking about these new technologies coming into the lives of our children in ways that can reduce that gap? We're not.
- [37:07]
A
Right.
- [37:07]
C
We're having these other conversations. We're not thinking about how can we get, you know, better supports, better training and for the entire family in each ecosystem. Right. I mean, the other part of this, and you know, I'm a parent of teenagers, I get this, we, we can't offload all this respect, responsibility onto parents. It is way too confusing to understand where your child's data is going, what kind of privacy is assured, you know, what's, what's safe and what's not. And so, you know, that that's just a space where we need to do a better job.
- [37:41]
A
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, it strikes, it's. I sort of keep thinking through this where so many of the issues that people have around technology is getting outside of the, the sort of mental health side. Again, like over to the, the concerns that people have around technology. So much, much of it comes back to questions around privacy. And, and, and you know, it's not that, not that solving questions around privacy are easy either. Like, again, there's like a ridiculous number of trade offs and variables involved in all of those discussions. And I worry about some of the approaches that are being proposed by different legislators that, you know, know, sound good in theory if you don't actually understand reality.
- [38:26]
B
Yeah.
- [38:26]
A
And, and, but like, it would be nice if we could have that serious discussion of, you know, so many of these things if we had real systems in place to protect privacy. How much of that does that solve? Some of the larger issues or larger concerns that people have around these other things? Rather than saying like, you know, all social media is bad or all screen time is bad or whatever it might be, and it would be nice if we could have those kinds of conversations, but they, they seem few and far between these days.
- [39:01]
C
I mean, I think this gets back to your, your question about, you know, what's the harm? So, yeah, it is very clear to me that children are being used at the tip of the spear right now to slay social media companies. Right. We're very close to having, you know, people throw phones in the water and, you know, see if it's safe things. And it, it, there is very much. And, you know, and I'm not a fan of social media companies. I'm not like, I, you know, I just, I'm not a strong user of social media, but I get that young people, like, this is, you know, this is their world. And the other, like, just the thing that kills me in these conversations is adults who have no idea how social media is used by young people. Right. They think Facebook and Twitter.
- [39:43]
B
Yes.
- [39:43]
C
And like, that's, that's their ecosystem. And kids are in discord using socials. We're gaming. I mean, they're, they're leveraging, you know, Snapchat, WhatsApp in all kinds of creative ways to fulfill the needs they have as kids, to belong and to connect and to explore. That is not how adults use it. And so, you know, when you have this discussion in Congress or by whoever's selling the latest book, it's stunning. If you ask a basic question about what kids are using or how. They have no idea.
- [40:12]
B
Right?
- [40:13]
C
They just have no idea.
- [40:14]
A
I mean, my favorite story on that, and this is from a few years ago now, this is maybe even out of date, but there was a story of a school that had banned social media within the school, but, like, all homework was turned in using Google Docs and the kids had basically recreated social media using Google Docs. Comments. Yeah, because that's what they're going to do. They're going to figure out ways to communicate, and that is different. Right. You don't, you don't solve that by saying, you know, Facebook. Not that any kids use Facebook anymore. Right. But like, that saying, like, oh, this is, this is bad. We have to deal with that. I, I think, I mean, I think you're, you're right. Like, the, just the, the way that kids and adults are using social media is so different. But there's this, you know, conception of, you know, I'm using Facebook and I'm seeing this bad stuff. That must be why, you know, you know, kids are struggling and yet they're using it in totally, totally different ways. And often, you know, I mean, it Right. Again, like I was going to make generalizations and I shouldn't. So like, it's, and it's, it's going to keep changing. Right? And, and one thing that we know is like whatever adults tell kids, like, you know, kids are going to do something different, kids are going to do what they want and, and sort of, you know, that's why that idea of like meeting the kids where they're at and providing them the opportunity to have resources and information hopefully makes sense. But you know, again, you know, I don't, I don't even know what, how much research has been done on that and how effective that is yet either. But it's, it's such a sort of messy space right now.
- [41:56]
C
It is a very messy space, but we're living in it, you know, we have to figure it out. So.
- [42:02]
A
Yeah. Yeah, well, with that I think I will let you go. And again, as I said earlier, I really appreciate you taking the time. I know I'm sure there are lots of demands on your time and in fact I know that because I got an email that I forwarded to you because it was originally addressed to me. Addressed to you, sent to me, but said dear Candace. And I said, huh. I think they were trying to get you. So I'm sure you're receiving lots and lots of, of requests and media requests for your time because you have been a voice of reason in this even if you're being presented as the sort of, you know, heretic pushing back against the narrative. But I really appreciate your very thoughtful and evidence based approach to all this and your way of thinking about it and discussing it. And I hope that more people begin to think about it in the same way that you do and are willing to, to, to pay attention to this stuff and, and, and look for the actual evidence and recognize that, you know, there may, there, there may well be problems here but, but understanding solutions, we shouldn't, we shouldn't just be jumping to the simple, the simple ways out if they don't, if they don't actually match what the evidence says. So thank, thanks for, for all the work that you do and, and especially for, for taking the time to, to come on the podcast and talk about.
- [43:26]
C
Thanks Mike, for the conversation, allowing the space to do something other than be. But
- [43:33]
A
yes, yes indeed, and thanks everyone for listening as well. I hope that everyone enjoyed this conversation also. And we will be back next week.
- [43:49]
B
Up the tear. If we don't stand up to them, someone will get. Huh. So grab a shovel and dig up the tet.