Thread: In the early 2010s, something changed in the wiring of society, and things got weird -- first on campus, then everywhere. I've been struggling to understand it, writing a series of four articles in .
1) In 2015, with :
Conversation
3) In 2021, drawing on work I've been doing with to document the rise of teen mental illness and its connections to social media usage:
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4) In 2022, this week, pulling it all together for the first time:
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My mission as a scholar is to use research in social and moral psychology to help important institutions work better. Reforms should be based in evidence. I have gathered the relevant evidence about social media's effects in 3 open source Google docs:
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A) What is happening to the mental health of Gen Z? As late as 2018, many said it was just a moral panic, based on self-report data only. But it's not, as this Google doc shows (with )
tinyurl.com/TeenMentalHeal
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B) OK, so there's an epidemic of mental illness and suffering in Gen Z, but what is the evidence that social media is a major contributor? There's a lot, both correlational and experimental (with )
tinyurl.com/SocialMediaMen
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C) OK, so social media may be damaging Gen Z, but what is the evidence that it is damaging democratic institutions and norms?
This is a new doc, just launched. Preponderance of evidence points to harm. With :
tinyurl.com/PoliticalDysfu
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D) If you want to see arguments/evidence opposed to me, you can find them in Appendix C of the Political Dysfunction collab review:
docs.google.com/document/d/1vV
and also in this essay in the New Yorker, by Gideon Lewis-Kraus:
newyorker.com/culture/annals
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E) For my most recent summary of the case, see my Senate testimony on teen mental health:
judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/
and see my interview with , where I directly respond to Zuckerberg’s claims that social media is good for teens and democracy:
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F) And here's my 5th article in . wrote a rebuttal to my Babel essay. Here I respond, bringing in new evidence that polarization IS rising globally, since 2015, and echo chambers ARE real--not for news exposure, but for social networks:
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To what extent do you think Tik Tok may be used as a Trojan horse by the Chinese Communist Party during the 2024 elections, Jon?
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Starting a masters & hopefully PhD in dev psych at Teachers College to create written & streaming content promoting mental health self-care for kids & teens, conduct research around how best to do this. Thank u for yr incredible work, watching it closely as always.
That was really good and ended on such a beautiful reading by Lex...thank you....Lex ur really talented with a most interesting way of speaking😂
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