The author of “The Anxious Generation” shares his latest research about the harms social media is doing to children.

By Kevin Roose, Casey Newton and Whitney Jones, nyt
Jan. 16, 2026

Jonathan Haidt Brings New Evidence to the Battle Against Social Media

The author of “The Anxious Generation” shares his latest research about the harms social media is doing to children.

Jonathan Haidt did not expect to become the face of a global movement against social media. When Haidt published his book “The Anxious Generation” in March 2024, he thought he would do a bit of press and then move on to his next project. But the book, which lays out a framework for protecting children from the worst harms of social media, became an international best seller. It caught the attention of regulators and world leaders and fueled momentum for phone bans and laws governing children’s use of social media around the world.

As Haidt’s influence has grown, so, too, have objections from critics. At issue is his central claim that smartphones and social media are causing a mental health epidemic in young people. Some academics and members of the tech industry have argued that there is no way to prove causation.

But in research released this week, Haidt and his co-author, Zachary Rausch, claim to demonstrate causal links between social media platforms and the harms they say they are doing to children. Not just harms like anxiety and depression, but also frequent sexual harassment and cyberbullying.

This week, we invited Haidt on to talk about that research, what’s changed since his book came out and how his work might inform future child-safety fights around the potential harms of A.I. companions.

Below is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity and length.

Kevin Roose: You’ve been a busy man. You joined us originally right as your “Anxious Generation” book was going out into the world. The book has now spent 88 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. That’s a lot of weeks. It led to discussions all around the world as well as follow-on projects. And now you are back with a new paper about this issue of social media and mental health. What is the most important new finding in your research since your book came out?

Jonathan Haidt: When my book came out, I thought that the main problem was mental health. And there’s a big debate in the academic world: “Well, OK, people who use social media more are more depressed, but is that correlation or is it causation?” And that has kind of defined the scope of the debate, and that’s gone on for a couple of years now. And it’s what Mark Zuckerberg says to defend himself: “Oh, there’s no evidence of causation.”

Well, guess what? There’s tons and tons of evidence of causation, and Meta did some of the best studies to show it. There are so many different kinds of evidence, including what the kids themselves say, what the parents say, what the teachers say — everybody sees it. That’s evidence. And then there are experiments with random assignment that show that when you get off social media for at least a week, depression gets less.

So I was collecting all that evidence for this big review paper. And while we were working on that, there were additional dumps of studies from Meta that came out in the attorneys’ general lawsuits against them. They posted them online and there’s all kinds of information in the briefs. So we cataloged them on a new website we put up called Meta’s Internal Research. And that includes a couple of true experiments. So the evidence for causality is now overwhelming. People have to stop saying, “Oh, it’s just correlational.”

Casey Newton: When you say the evidence for causality is overwhelming, break that down for us a little bit. What is your understanding of the mechanisms by which social media is harmful to children?

Haidt: So, Arturo Béjar, a whistle-blower, brought out this survey that Meta did, the Bad Experiences and Encounters Framework. And Meta itself — they’ve done tons of research. They collected, you know, what are kids saying? What’s happening to them? And what they found is that kids get very high rates of sexual harassment, around 15 percent each week. Each week they have some person approaching you sexually. They get bullying. They see violence. They see hard-core porn.

The biggest, clearest one, I think, is sextortion. That’s the one that just stands out like a sore thumb. Kids, if they’re on social media, they can get sextorted. If they’re not, they can’t, really. And the kids who get sextorted are deeply shamed. They shared a picture of themselves — teenage boys usually — and then their lives are ruined, and some of them commit suicide.

So I’m just saying that there are so many different mechanisms by which kids are getting harmed. Depression and anxiety are just two of the pathways.

Newton: So you’re saying that it’s not any one thing. You’re saying that the overall environment is so dangerous that it is difficult, maybe impossible, to use a social network like Instagram over an extended period of time and not have one, or most likely, multiple of these harms hit you in some way.

That answer somewhat surprises me, because I feel like what we usually hear is: “Well, it’s negative social comparison, right? It seems as if my friends are living a more exciting life than I am, and now I am upset.” Or: “The algorithm has driven me into a rabbit hole, and I started out a little curious about losing weight, and now I have an eating disorder.” How has your understanding of the mechanisms of harm changed — if it has at all — since you wrote your book?

Haidt: When I started the book, I thought that the story was going to be: Girls using social media get depressed in part by social comparison. That’s what everyone was talking about five years ago. And that’s definitely one of the mechanisms. I didn’t know what the story was for boys when I started.

And by the end of the book — and especially since the book came out — what I realized is: It’s the whole environment. It’s all the fish hooks dangled in front of boys. You want porn, gambling, vaping, sports betting — even crypto investing is gamified.

Roose: In this paper, you’ve tried to decouple two questions. One of them is what you call the historical population question — basically, the restatement of the thesis of “The Anxious Generation,” which is that an entire generation raised on social media is showing all these mental health effects from this technology.

And the other is just the product safety question: Are these products, as currently constituted, safe for children and teens? What are you trying to do by decoupling these questions? I read that as like: “Oh, Haidt is getting a little wobbly on one of the two prongs of his argument there. He’s basically saying, ‘We may or may not be able to solve this historical population question, but when it comes to the question of product safety, we can answer that one now.’” So am I reading that correctly?

Haidt: Well, yes, you are, except I wouldn’t use the word wobbly. So let me explain that. My interest in separating the two questions came about because there was this report issued by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine in late 2023. And it has a chapter showing all these harms, all these ways that this technology is harming kids.

But in the summary of the report, there was this sentence that said their review of the literature “did not support the conclusion that social media causes changes in adolescent health at the population level.” So I read this, and I’m like, “What the hell guys? You have a whole chapter showing how it’s hurting kids. What does it mean, ‘at the population level?’”

And what I realized by reading further was that they meant they were not confident that this was what caused those big increases after 2012. And OK, that’s right. Because how do you prove something happened in history? It’s very hard. You can’t run experiments. So I will grant that we can’t be 100 percent certain that what I said in “The Anxious Generation” was right. Can’t be 100 percent certain. I’d love to hear another hypothesis, but the historical question is very hard to settle.

But that’s not what people want to know. What parents want to know and what legislators want to know is: Is this consumer product, which all kids are consuming massive quantities of, is this consumer product hurting kids? And guess what? We have seven different lines of evidence saying, “Yes, it’s hurting kids.” The kids say it, the teachers say it, the experiments say it. And Meta — I mean, my God, the data they have on harm is astonishing.

So that’s why I think it’s important to separate the two questions. In science and social science, we have to be certain about causality before we say X caused Y. So I can’t say I am certain that social media caused the big increase in 2012, but I can say I am 99.9 percent confident at this point that social media is hurting kids by the millions.

Newton: You’re understandably, and I think appropriately, very critical of the tech executives here. But I’d also note that parents gave kids these phones, and schools allowed them, and regulators did nothing for a decade. So if we’re assigning blame for this situation, how much falls on everyone else involved?

Haidt: I would say close to zero, for this reason: The whole key to solving this problem, and the reason we didn’t solve it for so long, is that it’s a series of collective-action traps. I’m a social psychologist. What we do for a living is we look at the ways that we influence each other. And there are certain situations where people say, “Yeah, I don’t want to give my 10-year-old a phone, but, you know, everyone else has one and she’s being left out, so … ”

The phones and social media, all these things — they put us in a trap, so we feel we have to give in. And since that’s the situation, I can’t blame the people. My rule as a social psychologist is: If one person does something really bad, that might be a bad person; if everybody in a situation is doing something bad, that’s guaranteed to be a bad situation.

So no, I don’t blame — I mean, of course parents should stand up and parent. But so many of us are trying, and it’s really, really hard. Everybody’s fighting all the time with their kids over this tech. We didn’t ask for these fights. So I don’t blame the parents, I don’t blame the teachers. I blame the companies.

Roose: Jon, your life has changed quite a bit since we last talked to you. Your career has shifted from being more of a pure research and public intellectual to really being an activist on this issue. And I’m curious what that’s been like for you, and what you’ve learned about advocacy in this new role of yours? What actually seems to change people’s minds?

Haidt: It’s true, my life has changed a lot. I’ve been a scholar and a researcher for a very long time, and I’ve started multiple organizations that try to translate findings from behavioral sciences to help important institutions work better. That’s kind of my mission statement as an academic. And when The Anxious Generation came out in March of 2024, I thought I was going to promote it for a few months, take the summer off, recover and then get back to work on this big book I’m supposed to write on democracy.

But mothers around the world stood up and started saying, “Where do we sign up? Let’s go. Let’s change. We got to save our kids.” Many people were coming to me saying: “How can I help? What can we do?” Legislators were calling me, governors were calling me. Because here’s the thing: If you’re a parent, you’ve seen it. Everybody has seen the problem, and nobody really knew what to do about it, because it’s a collective-action trap.

The book proposed four norms to get out of the trap: no smartphone before high school; no social media before 16; phone-free schools; more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world. I proposed these four norms and people are adopting them all around, in countries that I haven’t even been to.

So I realized: I’m 62. God knows how many years I have left with a brain that’s still functioning; I can’t count on more than 10. So how am I going to spend those remaining good years? I could write another book on democracy, which would be out of date by the time it came out, because, my God, things are changing fast. Or I could devote myself to pushing for phone-free schools and raising the age.

Roose: Yeah, I’m curious. I know you probably can’t tell us about all of the private meetings you’re having with lawmakers and heads of state and tech executives, but give us the flavor of just one meeting with someone influential as you’ve been schlepping all over, hawking your book and talking about this message.

Haidt: Yeah, sure. So, you know, the surprise for me has been how easy this has been. That everywhere I go, I’m pushing on open doors, because everyone who is a parent has seen this. It’s very popular among voters.

So the best example, to answer your question, is this: I did a quick trip to Paris, Amsterdam and London back in April of last year. And I worked with More in Common, a wonderful group that does all kinds of pro-democracy stuff. And they set up a dinner party for me to talk to members of French society and psychiatrists. It was really interesting. And one of the people there was in the French parliament, and he said, “Oh, you should talk to Macron.”

I said: “Oh, you know, I’d love to, but you know I’m leaving in two days.”

He said, “I’ll call him.”

And the next day, I get a call from President Macron’s office: “Can you come in tomorrow?”

So I had a half-hour meeting with Macron in which I showed him the data. Because I was told in advance: “He loves data. You can show him evidence.” So I went through it with him. I said: “Look, here’s what’s happening. Here’s what we know.” And he thought about it, and as he was saying goodbye to me, he said, “We will act.” And he sure did. He’s really been pushing. What he said to me then was: “I’m going to push it. This should be an E.U. thing. And if we can’t get it through the E.U., then I’ll do it in France.”

So that was the most spectacular one. I was really surprised by that. But that’s what I’m getting at: that everyone sees it, everyone cares about this.

Roose: There’s now this group of plaintiffs’ lawyers and law firms — I’m sure you know many of them and have worked with them before — who go around the country looking for evidence of social media harms, especially against children. They bring these big lawsuits, they sue the tech companies, they try to get these huge settlements out of them.

I’m curious what your thoughts on that system are. It’s largely grown up since you published your book, and a lot of them cite your work as evidence that these companies should be held liable through the courts. Are you comfortable with that as a makeshift solution until regulators get their act together? Does that feel like an optimal way of addressing these harms?

Haidt: Well, I think it seems to be the only way that we have. Let’s imagine that there was a new consumer product introduced. Some new toy or a new kind of candy bar with some new ingredient. And if we knew from internal reports from the companies that they deliberately designed it to be addictive — they put something addictive in it — and then a couple of years later, 90 percent of kids are eating 10 candy bars a day, and diabetes is going up, they’re not eating healthy food and we see rates rising around the world? At some point there might be someone who says: “Maybe this is not a safe consumer product. Maybe this company should be held liable for the harm it’s inflicting on literally hundreds of millions of kids.” Literally hundreds of millions. Because social media is used by almost all kids. I mean, there are some countries where it’s not, but in the medium- to high-income countries, it’s almost universal.

We all know someone who has a kid who has been hospitalized, has an eating disorder, has died by suicide. We all know people. It is everywhere. And these companies have never faced a jury. Ever. No one has succeeded in holding them responsible for what they did to their kids. So this is an outrage. And so these lawyers who are taking these cases? Yeah, they’re heroes.

Newton: There’s this other dimension to it, too, Jonathan, which is that your book understandably focuses on the crisis with children, but adults are very much living their own version of this, right? I was having coffee with some friends at the New Year. Two of them are product managers in tech, and I asked them, “Hey, what do you want your 2026 to be about?” And they said, “I need to change my relationship with my phone.” And they have implemented so many different tricks. They’re putting it in black and white. They’re setting screen time limits. They’re leaving it in another room an hour before they go to bed. The systems that people are having to devise just to try to reclaim their own time and attention are getting ever more sophisticated. And this is among the people who are building the things on the phones.

So I’m curious how you think about bringing some of these same arguments out of childhood and into adulthood, because it seems to me as if this goes well beyond what is happening to kids under 18.

Haidt: You’re absolutely right. And I think that’s why we’re winning. That’s why it’s so easy to get laws to protect kids all over the world, because we all see it. We adults, we’re all overwhelmed. I’m overwhelmed. I can’t read a book anymore. There’s too much other stuff coming in. I haven’t focused on adults because I don’t want to legislate for adults. I don’t want to tell adults what to do. But [expletive], I don’t want the companies sucking my children into toxic spaces without my knowledge or permission.

Newton: To speak a little bit about Australia, this week Meta shut down about 550,000 accounts belonging to teens under this new Australian law that just went into effect banning social media for kids under 16. I’m so curious if you have a prediction about what is about to happen there, because it seems as if we have this great natural experiment now. What are you looking for? And how confident are you that if you simply remove phones and social media from schools, that kids’ mental health will improve?

Haidt: Well, on phone-free schools, the data is pouring in. I’ve never heard of a school that was unhappy about it or that reversed it. So I’m sure we’re going to see that learning improves, friendship improves, fun in school improves, which means that truancy will go down. And I think that will have a measurable impact on mental health.

That’s in the schools. What Australia did is even bolder. They said: “We’re going to put it on the companies. We’re going to say that you have to be 16 to open an account where you sign a contract to give away your data, your rights, without your parents’ knowledge or permission. You can’t do that till you’re 16. At 16, you can do whatever you want. But before 16, you can’t do that.”

And so here’s the question: What percentage of Australia’s kids will actually be off social media? And we don’t know. If the Australia bill is effective at getting social media use down below, say, 20 percent, then I think we will see over time — and kids have to remember how to do things other than scroll — I think we will see benefits. Especially if the Australians do the full program, which is: “Hey, go out and play.” That is what the Prime Minister keeps saying. “Go out on the footy field,” he says. So if we can succeed in restoring a play-based childhood, then we’re going to see, I think, big benefits to mental health.

Roose: And how long should we let that natural experiment run? If five years from now, there’s been no significant improvement in mental health among young people in Australia, would you conclude that this was a wrong hypothesis of yours? That we just didn’t let it run for long enough? When should we judge the success or failure of this intervention?

Haidt: First of all, tell me when we get to, say, 60 percent or 70 percent of kids actually being off — and the effectiveness matters; this is a cat-and-mouse game, so the companies are going to have to up their game — but once we get to, say, 70 percent of kids actually being off, now we’ve broken the collective-action trap. Now kids can be off. Now parents can say “no” more easily. And once we get there, I think within a year we’ll start seeing lots of reports of different behavior.

Will that show up in the national statistics? Not for a couple of years. It takes a couple of years before it’ll show up in these big, national surveys we have. But if we don’t see anything budge in five years, I would then have to conclude that I was wrong in thinking that reducing social media use would improve mental health.

But here’s the thing: This whole debate has been framed around mental health. And if it doesn’t improve mental health, does that mean we should undo it? I would say no. I would say: Tell me how many kids have been sextorted. Tell me how many kids have died from drug overdose deaths. Let’s look at all the other ancillary harms, and then we can decide whether it was a good policy.

Newton: You know, Jonathan, I have to say that over time I have become more sympathetic to your point of view. I started very much coming from the viewpoint of free expression, wanting to let kids communicate online, wanting them to be able to explore their interests, connect with people like them. But over time, I have just become more persuaded by the product safety argument. I have read the internal documents. I have talked to the people who work at these companies. I do not believe that they care or are investing in protecting kids the way they should be. And, to me, that argument is just starting to carry the day.

But I was having a conversation with my sister-in-law about this stuff over Thanksgiving. And she let me know that she kind of took issue with a comment I’d made on a previous episode where I’d said, “You know, the one argument that you never hear anybody making is that Instagram is really good for kids.” Which I still basically believe.

Haidt: Yeah, I haven’t heard that. I haven’t heard that argument.

Newton: We’ve heard it from some. But my sister-in-law made a version of this argument to me, which is that, for my nephew, he has an Instagram account. He’s 13, and he is able to explore his interests, which include gymnastics and cooking. And when she looks at his use of Instagram, she says, “This basically seems OK to me.” My question is: What avenues do you hope that children use to explore their interests in a world where we just yank that away from them?

Haidt: So I think last time I was on the show, we talked about a related topic, and I said, “You’ve got to separate the internet from social media.” Social media is a part of the internet. It’s one of the worst parts. It’s the one that’s hurting kids the most.

But look, we’re old enough to remember the ’90s when we first got a look at the internet. It was amazing. And you know, if you’re gay in a rural area, suddenly you can find information, you can find people. I mean, it was amazing the way it brought people together. So I would never take that away. I would never say kids shouldn’t be on the internet.

Do they also need platforms that use algorithms to force-feed them whatever content was most up-voted by people based on the extremity of its emotions or expressions? Does your nephew benefit from having Instagram pick what he sees as opposed to having him type in what he’s looking for? If you take away social media from kids, I don’t see any loss.

Roose: I’m curious, because, like Casey, I am also pretty Haidt-pilled at this moment in time; I am pretty convinced of the arguments you’re making. But I would say one criticism I might have is that it feels to me a little bit like you are fighting the last war. Because when I go to high schools now and meet high school students, they tell me, “We are talking with A.I. companions now. That is the thing that we are doing.” And I have this fear in the back of my mind that you will succeed at getting social media banned for under 16s all over the world, and then there will be this new threat that we weren’t even paying attention to. And we will pine for the days when teens were using social media since at least they were communicating with other people and not A.I. companions. So do you worry at all that you have not kept pace with the state of the technology?

Haidt: No, this is a strategic move, for this reason: A.I. is so new, and it’s morphing so fast. And in the research community, it takes us five, 10, 20 years to figure anything out. So we’ve been arguing about social media for a long time. I think we’ve got it. I think I’m going to win on this issue. Now, it’s a normal academic debate; there are researchers who look at the data and they see something different.

But here’s the way I’m thinking about it: If we can’t win on social media — if we can’t get consensus that this is bad and that governments should do something — if we can’t win on that, then just give up on A.I. Just say it’s game over, our kids are gone, we’re never going to see them again, the boys are going to have sexy chatbots their whole lives, they’re never going to reproduce. So if we can’t win on social media, then we definitely can’t win on A.I.

But we are winning on social media, and governments around the world are waking up to the fact that they have an obligation to protect kids — and a lot of them have never done anything. Our federal government especially has never done a single thing — never, ever — to protect kids on the internet. So governments are waking up. And so the faster we can win on social media — delaying phones and more play and phone-free schools — then we have a chance. A chance. At least, we can try to make the case: Just get it out of elementary school. Just don’t let kids be talking with chatbots when they’re little.

At least minors can still be undressed by grok and posted on X.

https://www.wired.com/story/meta-child- ... h-harvard/

"AS META HEADS to trial in the state of New Mexico for allegedly failing to protect minors from sexual exploitation, the company is making an aggressive push to have certain information excluded from the court proceedings.

The company has petitioned the judge to exclude certain research studies and articles around social media and youth mental health; any mention of a recent high-profile case involving teen suicide and social media content; and any references to Meta’s financial resources, the personal activities of employees, and Mark Zuckerberg’s time as a student at Harvard University."

"These motions are part of a landmark case brought by New Mexico attorney general Raúl Torrez in late 2023. The state is alleging that Meta failed to protect minors from online solicitation, human trafficking, and sexual abuse on its platforms. It claims the company proactively served pornographic content to minors on its apps and failed to enact certain child safety measures.

The state complaint details how its investigators were easily able to set up fake Facebook and Instagram accounts posing as underage girls, and how these accounts were soon sent explicit messages and shown algorithmically amplified pornographic content. In another test case cited in the complaint, investigators created a fake account as a mother looking to traffic her young daughter. According to the complaint, Meta did not flag suggestive remarks that other users commented on her posts, nor did it shut down some of the accounts that were reported to be in violation of Meta’s policies.

Meta spokesperson Aaron Simpson told WIRED via email that the company has, for over a decade, listened to parents, experts, and law enforcement, and has conducted in-depth research, to “understand the issues that matter the most,” and to “use these insights to make meaningful changes—like introducing Teen Accounts with built-in protections and providing parents with tools to manage their teens’ experiences.”

“While New Mexico makes sensationalist, irrelevant and distracting arguments, we're focused on demonstrating our longstanding commitment to supporting young people,” Simpson said. “We’re proud of the progress we’ve made, and we’re always working to do better.”

In its motions ahead of the New Mexico trial, Meta asked that the court exclude any references to a public advisory published by Vivek Murthy, the former US surgeon general, about social media and youth mental health. It also asked the court to exclude an op-ed article by Murthy and Murthy’s calls for social media to come with a warning label. Meta argues that the former surgeon general’s statements treat social media companies as a monolith and are “irrelevant, inadmissible hearsay, and unduly prejudicial.”"

These guys are just the Union Carbide of the 21st century.

In addition to all of the other "issues" surrounding social media, there's another, more basic problem with it . . .

It's trained whole generations to care way too much--AT ALL??--about what strangers think of them. These strangers are generally not going to be involved in your life or positive endeavors in any meaningful way; they won't likely support you in any tangible sense. They could even be hacks or complete mooks. And yet, you--"you" being a lot of very online people--seem to care what they think of you, as if it's of great consequence.

Seems curious. And rather needy. But I suppose we've all been there before.

my teenager has an innate distrust of AI, yet she can't seem to understand that social media has the potential to rot her brain even faster.

i say how are you going to avoid understanding AI in 10 years?

"oh i'll just move to an island and live off the grid!"

sounds great. no iphone, no vaccines, no instagram. let me know how that goes.