Transcript

Mark, last week, the US Senate had a hearing on the dangers of social media in preparation of the legislation to improve child safety online. In this hearing, meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed that it has not been scientifically proven that social media causes mental health problems in adolescence. Mr. Zuckerberg, let me start with you. Did I hear you say in your opening statement that there's no link between mental health and social media use?

Senator, what I said is, I think it's important to look at the science. I know people widely talk about this as if that is something that's already been proven, and I think that the bulk of the scientific evidence does not support that. This offset a lot of people who think that the link is obvious, but I'm afraid Zuckerberg is right. Let's have a look. Contrary to what some headlines have claimed, we don't have a global mental health crisis. I discussed this at length in an earlier episode. By and large, mental health globally has been remarkably stable. However, the mental health of one demographic group has been suffering in the past decade, and that's adolescent girls in some countries, and to a lesser extent, also boys. This is evident in data from the USA, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and some other countries where self reports also correlate with self harm in other countries, such as Sweden, this mental health trend is primarily found in self reports from girls difficult to interpret and does not correlate with self harm statistics. Still, many put the blame on the increased use of social media, and that includes the affected young people themselves. It's a topic I care a lot about because I have two children who just got their first smartphones. The most vocal critic of social media use for children has probably been the American psychologist Jonathan Haidt. His major argument is that there isn't any other hypothesis, which is also what string theorists are about, the existence of strings and generally, not how science works. Now look, I'm not saying that Hyde is wrong. I don't know what's going on, but I do know that the studies on the topic have been inconclusive. I don't expect you to believe what I say, but Hyde has been criticized by his own colleagues for jumping to conclusions. And again, it's not that they say he's wrong. They point out that to the extent that studies have found any influence of social media on young people's mental health, it's been a small effect. For example, a study from 2019 followed about 13,000 adolescents in the UK between the ages of 10 and 15, though not all of them participated in all parts of the study.