Social Media Bans: Are We at a Global Turning Point? (Jonathan Haidt)

23:27It was kind of cool. And what could you do? You could call your friends and family. You could text them. And you could play a game called Snake. And that was it. That was it. It was a communication device. And the millennials' mental health was fine. And so if you are a millennial, it means you finished puberty by 2010, 2012. You were done with puberty and you went through puberty on a brick phone or a flip phone, a basic phone. Okay, what happens if you're born, say, in the year 2000, you're Gen Z? So you hit puberty right around, say, 2012. That's the year that Facebook buys Instagram. That's two years after the front-facing camera came out.

24:042012 is the pivotal year when in America we flip from mostly brick phones to mostly smartphones. So by 2015, almost all teens have a smartphone with a front-facing camera and Instagram and other apps, unlimited texting, unlimited data. And now, especially for the girls, it warps their life much more quickly. And now for the girls, it's all this. It's all being a brand manager all the time. It's all constant social comparison. And that's why we see this incredibly sharp elbow for the girls. No trend at all in rates of self-harm or depression or anxiety. No trend at all. And then all of a sudden, like a hockey stick.

24:37So why do you, and people can see the evidence that you marshal in your substacks, the particular post I'm referring to is called Mountains of Evidence. Why do you say that it goes beyond correlation to causation? Because I should say in the spirit of seriousness that Metta would say that you have these deep underlying trends. You have these deep, deep trends in depression, anxiety, which may be explained by other factors that social psychologists like Jonathan Haidt looked at in great detail over many, many years, like better understanding what depression and anxiety are. a greater willingness in society to medicalize what might be everyday problems.

25:11Why do you go beyond that to say actually that smartphones and social media is a technology which is a determinant that is driving and that is causing it? So first we need to distinguish between two very different questions. One is the historical trends question. Why do we get those elbows? Why does it happen? And if it just happened in the United States, there could be all kinds of theories, something about Obama, something about changing insurance criteria. But it was when we discovered, my team and I, we discovered that the exact same thing is happening in Canada, the UK, Australia, Scandinavia.

25:41And now we know the decline of happiness among young is global. When it's happening everywhere at the same time, no one has come up with an alternate explanation other than the technological change that we just discussed. But what parents really care about, what legislators really care about is the product safety question. Here we have the most widely used consumer product among young people. It's universally used. It's been linked, at least correlated, with all kinds of terrible things happening. And if it was any other consumer product, it would have been banned long ago. So let's look at the evidence that this widely used consumer product is causing harms.

26:17And so what Zach Rausch and I, my lead research, what we did was we gathered all the evidence and we realized it's not just experiments and correlational studies. There are seven different lines of evidence that are all evidence of causality. So let me just, I'll just very briefly run through that. No, no, no, take it through. Take us through that. Okay. So imagine that a woman is mugged. A man comes up and he punches her and he takes her wallet and he runs off. How do we prove that he did it? How do we prove that? Well, the woman goes to the police and she says, here's the guy. I know him. I know his name.

26:52I've known him for a long time. He did this to me. Okay. Is that proof? She could be lying, but that is evidence. Okay. What do we have with social media? Survey the kids. What do they say? Young adults have very negative views of social media. The surveys show they think it does more harm than good. About 20 to 30 % say it harmed their own mental health. So you've got the victim, it's himself or herself is saying, he did it. Okay. So that's line one. That's line one. Now, maybe they're wrong. What do we do? We bring in witnesses. Suppose there are a bunch of bystanders who say, I saw it. I saw him punch her.

27:28I saw it. Is that evidence of causation or is that just a correlation? That's evidence. So who are the witnesses? Who has the best view of what happened? The parents, the teachers, the psychotherapists, the psychiatrists, everybody working with kids, they're witnesses. What do they say? Surveys of all of them show they blame social media. It's very hard. You can't find a group that works with kids that has a positive view of social media. Okay. So now let's suppose it's a court case, the prosecutor called the called the victim up, called the witnesses up. And now the prosecutor says, and here I present you text messages that this guy had with his friend, where he said, I'm going to mug this girl at three o 'clock.

28:10And then later I mugged her at three o 'clock. Okay, is that a correlation or is that evidence? We have so many internal emails and reports and studies from within Meta, Snap, and TikTok. We found 28 different experiments described in the material that's come out from whistleblowers and lawsuits. A lot of it from Meta. Meta say that this has been selectively cited and that the full picture is not one of causality. But you would say go and read it for yourself is pretty abundant. Yeah, read it for yourself. And if Meta has 50 studies proving the benefits, let them publish them. If they say we cherry-picked, we took everything we could find, let them publish the evidence of benefit.

28:49I'm waiting. So that's line three of the evidence. That's the evidence, the text messages that were before and after the mugging. What about line four, five, six, seven? Okay. So now if the jury isn't convinced at this point from those first three lines of evidence, let's bring in the forensic evidence. Let's bring in the experts who analyzed data to try to confirm that this guy was there. So line four is the correlational studies. Now, there are thousands of these, and they almost all show that the kids who are using it heavily are doing worse than the kids who are using it. And that's true for video games.

29:20That's true for all these technologies. And the argument is, well, the correlations are too small to matter because the correlation coefficient is typically around 0.1 to 0.15. I don't want to get into technical details. So it's highly significant statistically, but then we debate, is it big or small? And some of my critics say, well, some studies don't show any correlation. And what we show is that if you look at the studies they cite that show no correlation, they always get it by blending. That is, if you just look at hours on social media by girls and measure anxiety or depression, you always find a substantial relationship, usually 0.15 to 0.2, which is substantially larger.

29:58And that's similar to what other public health effects are. But when you mix in, this is what often happens, it's hours spent on any screen, including TV, including watching Netflix, including doing your email, time on a screen for boys and girls, including young adults. then sometimes you get a correlation of zero or 0.03. But what we do is we go into these studies. We say, if you can zoom in on girls' social media depression, you always find it. So the correlation of studies, it doesn't prove causation, but it's not random effects. It's a very consistent effect that gets blended. It gets diluted as it gets blended.

30:35So that's line four. Line five is the experiments. There's a body of experiments where you say to young people, randomly assigned, you guys reduce your social media use for some period of time. And we're gonna measure whether you get less depressed and anxious. And what do we find? When you go for more than a week and you look at depression anxiety, you, in almost all the studies, published studies, you do find a benefit. You do find they're better off, especially those who have any sort of preexisting depression. So you do find it. These are RCTs, random control trials. This is how we, this is our best way of proving causeality.

31:12That's academic research works, yeah. And the debate is that some studies don't find it. Well, guess what? Those studies tend to blend in one-day experiments, meaning you tell kids you can't have your phone or you can't have social media for one day. That's withdrawal effects. Nobody expects, you know, like you take heroin addicts, you take away their heroin. Are they happier? No. But once they go through withdrawal, they're much happier. One day is not long enough, in short, to be able to judge the effects. It's interesting. We're talking at the start of, towards the beginning of 2026. Huge numbers of people listening to this will know someone who's decided in January we're going to do less time on social media.

31:48Just ask them. Just ask them. My wife is one of them. Just ask them. Do you know what they say? They say it's great. And suddenly I'm doing these other things. I'm reading. I'm talking to someone. Okay, that's line five. Let's get six or seven. Yeah, just very briefly. Then you also have longitudinal studies, which are more statistically complex because you're just looking at does an increase or a large amount of use at time one. predict that you will be more depressed at time two? Or is it that depressed people at time one use more social media to look for information, whatever? That's Meta's argument has always been that it's the reverse correlation.

32:20That, well, yeah, there's a correlation, but it's because depressed people, they use our product to find community. They use it to find information. That's why depressed people, that's why there's a correlation. That's their claim. But what we found when we dig into the longitudinal studies that are cited by our critics, They point to three studies in particular. We go into them. Two don't show anything of the sort. They don't show anything. And one of them does show a little bit of reverse predictability, but also forward predictability. In other words, both ways. So depressed people are more likely to use it, and using it makes you more depressed.

32:51So that still points to guilt. Okay. And point seven, so longitudinal is six, seven. And seven is the natural experiments. And so there are now, we found seven or now eight studies published around the world in which they look, like in British Columbia, high speed internet arrived in different places at different times, in Spain, in Italy, in the US, Germany. So we have studies from a lot of these countries. And what they do is they say, you assume that modern social media, which is very video based, you can't do that without high speed. I mean, remember how long it used to take to load things?

33:23So you only get the big jump in social media use, especially photo and video stuff, when you get high speed internet. So what happens when it comes into a region as opposed to another region? Answer, psychiatric disorders, especially among young women, increase after it comes in. So when you have critics say to you, you're misrepresenting the science, are there sort of two pillars to what you do? One is these seven pillars of evidence you've just cited. And the other is kind of a kind of pushback where you say, what do you think is going on? And I wonder if in this context, I could raise developmental psychologist Candice Odgers, professor at University of California, Irvine and Duke University and I should say again, in this bit I think is, if I may say impartially admirable, you really engage with your critics, you're not one to shy away Candice Rogers wrote a review of your book in Nature where she said first, this book is going to sell a lot of copies because Jonathan Haidt is telling a scary story, dot dot dot, that many parents are primed to believe, second, the book's repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children's brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science.

34:28Worse, the bold proposal that social media is to blame might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental health crisis in young people. Well, what Candice says in that article is that the real causes are poverty, racism, and inequality. Okay, those do make you at higher risk for mental illness. Did those suddenly radically increase in 2012 in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, in Scandinavia Europe I don't think so so I keep saying okay if you have an explanation for why the historical trans stuff why why did it go up so much you got to come up with another explanation for what changed and her explanation doesn't fit at all one of the uh striking things about some of your earlier work is you looked at what um engaging with taboo subjects like incest whatever it does to the brain what have you seen you're a social psychologist and social scientist in terms of the neuroscience here what evidence do we have about the impact of social media and smartphones on developing young brains yeah so what candace says in that article is that there's no evidence that this is affecting that this is changing brains in a major way or something like that there's no big change okay if this was causing big changes like you could see oh there's a hole in the brain okay that would be incredibly serious um but nothing does that other than prenatal alcohol.

35:50If you get a tiny change, so suppose you've got a boy who plays a lot of video games, gets a lot of quick dopamine. If you get a tiny, tiny little change in the reward circuitry or in the attentional circuitry, that's going to determine the course of his life. That's going to make him successful or a failure. So tiny, tiny changes in the brain can have an enormous impact. And there is a literature, I haven't reviewed it, so I can't say which study, But Candace's suggestion that it's only a big change that counts. No, any tiny change. And as I think she would acknowledge, learning, anything you do habitually is going to change the brain.

36:25Neuroscientists say neurons that fire together wire together. And so in the first five years, there's incredibly rapid change. And then in puberty, again, a second sensitive period, incredibly rapid change. The brain is changing based on its interaction with the environment. And so nobody, I mean, you couldn't be a psychologist and believe that a kid who plays video games and porn and social media eight hours a day is going to not have his brain changed compared to that same kid if he'd gone out and played soccer, football, talked with kids, flirted with girls. And on that point, you're a parent.

36:57You mentioned your daughter. I think you've got two teenagers. You've been very, very keen for them to have a childhood where they, for instance, walk to school on their own. There's huge numbers of stories. I think, funny enough, just by coincidence last night as I was looking through your substack, my algorithms must know me so well, that a clip of Rahm Emanuel, former chief of staff to Barack Obama, former mayor of Chicago and ambassador to Japan. And Rahm Emanuel was saying, I'll tell you what, words to the effect, I'll tell you what a beautiful life is. A beautiful life is a kid that can walk eight blocks to school on their own.

37:32And, you know, it's such a low bar. It's such a low bar. We're just so intuitive. I've got a nine-year-old. I feel queasy. I live in a nice part of North London. I feel queasy about it. There's two things I want to help people understand. One is I don't think there's anyone that really is engaged with your work that could argue that you're against technology full stop. I think you celebrate these extraordinary machines. I think you recognize the engineering power that's behind them. But the other thing is I think there's a spirit of your work, which is just to let children be children. Exactly.

38:01And that most human societies have flourished on the understanding that there are some things kids should not be allowed to do up until a certain point. That's right. And it's up to parents to say that you can do that, just not yet. That's right. So let's understand. Technology makes things easy for us. You and I are very busy. We get too much email. We use technology to take shortcuts. It makes us more efficient. Children need to do hard things thousands and thousands of times. They need to do hard social things thousands and thousands of times. They need to start conversations and be rebuffed but not wilt and run away.

38:32They need to learn how to flirt with whatever sex they're attracted to. This is hard work. And when they have a phone, they don't have to do it. They don't have to ask anyone for help or information. They don't have to approach anyone in person. They can go on dating apps when they're older. So the technology makes things easy, but you don't want to make everything easy for your child. You want your child to struggle and learn. That's how they learn. In The Amazing Generation, which is a version of The Anxious Generation, but for kids ages eight to 13, Catherine Price, who's the genius who figured out how to, it's not a translation of The Anxious Generation.

39:07It's a totally new book that goes over the same material and makes the case for kids. And it's not, you know, kids, don't be on smartphones. It's bad for you. It's kids. Ask your parents what they did after school. Ask your grandparents. Did they have fun after school? What did they do on weekends? Have you ever seen a movie that took place in the 80s or 90s? What do you think? So all kids know that kids used to be out having fun. And that stopped. That stopped in both of our countries in the 90s and early 2000s. Now, we had a crime wave we could blame it on. You didn't. But it's just part of the Anglo thing.

39:38We're overprotective.

40:05miss out. Thank you so much. And now back to Professor Jonathan Haidt.

40:18So the subtitle to The Amazing Generation is Your Guide to Fun and Freedom in a Screen-Filled World. I've read The Anxious Generation as I have a couple of your previous books. I haven't read this yet and I'm looking at it now and I'm very excited about watching my own son, read this tonight, as he will. You've written this as a sort of mindful that there are different messages for different audiences. You've got a message for politicians, which I want to get to. You've got a message for parents. What's your message for children? The message for children? Well, we boil it down to the rebel's code.

40:53We say, look, listen to the older teenagers, listen to Gen Z and the degree of regret, the way they say, I lost my childhood. I didn't really do anything. I wish I hadn't spent so much time on my video games when my grandfather was visiting because then he died and I never got to know him. So there's enormous regret in the older generation. What we're saying is be a rebel. Don't let the tech companies, because we show here's how they get you. Here's what they do with dopamine. Here's how they don't let their own kids use it. They want you to live your life on a screen, but you don't have to be a rebel.

41:30And so we have the rebel's code. It's two simple principles. One, use technology as a tool. Don't let technology use you. So we're not saying, you know, grow up with sticks and stones only. And the other is fill your life with real friendship, freedom, and fun. Because once you go on social media, you're going to have hundreds and hundreds of friends. But if you have hundreds of friends, you have very few real friends, very few close friends. And Catherine also wrote a book called The Power of Fun. And fun is just such a clever formulation. Fun is playful connected flow you're in a play state you're connected to another person and we are physical creatures who really we we affect each other the synchrony of our bodies and flow you get lost in this in the zone when we remember our being kids you remember like playing dodgeball or sharks and minnow or tags or whatever it was there's an intensity an intensity with you you and your teammates are doing something it's also in those in those in those it's in those flow states that you learn, amongst other things, stratagems for cooperation, give and take, sacrifice, the necessary, I mean, unless we get to a world in which Mark Zuckerberg's chatbots replace all social relationships, you're going to have to deal with other people.

42:40And childhood is a good place for learning to deal with those other people. That's an incredibly persuasive, I think, message for children. What's your message to parents? Basic guidelines. I mean, there will be people here who are aware of your work, some who are less so, some who are deep in it, some who oppose what you're doing. As a broad principle, just give us three or four rules that parents could live by, for instance, about screens in bedrooms. Let me just first start that by saying I have incredible sympathy because I'm in the same situation. I made some mistakes. I did a good job on social media, but I didn't do a good job on device regulation.

43:11So I sympathize. As a social psychologist, my rule is if one person does some bad thing, that might be a bad person. But if 90 % of people are doing something bad, that's a bad situation. We're all stuck in a bad situation. We're all sick of it. It's not your fault that there's this pressure for all kids to be on because all other kids are on. That's not your fault. So that's the prologue. So now what are the principles? The first principle is once you understand it's a collective action problem, that everyone is trapped. And if you try to get off and you're alone, you're in worse shape. So principle number one, find allies, find other families.

43:47Okay. So you're raising your kid in North London, you said? How many kids? You have four kids? Four. How many other families are there within walking distance for your nine-year-old? Plenty. Plenty. Okay. Plenty. So what you do is you form a playboyhood. You say, hey, look, do you want to have our kids have more of the kind of childhood we had? And let's say four of the seven families say, yes, okay, let's form a playboyhood. The kids, they can connect either by landlines. Americans are putting in landlines now again for the kids. Or when they start secondary school, they have a brick phone, a flip phone, whatever.

44:19The kids can connect. And the idea is all of our houses are open. The kids decide. And maybe it's just on Fridays. Maybe just do it on Fridays to start. Every Friday after school, the kids decide we're going to start at Billy's house. And you might even say, you know, mom says we can play half an hour of video games if we're together. So playing videos together isn't so bad. Although I shouldn't have said that. I don't. But the point is the kids get to decide. I do exactly. I'm obsessed with outside play. Yes. And even negotiating. I mean, I live on a one-way street. But even negotiating the fact that a neighbor comes out.

44:48Do you know what? it's that which they want to recall when they're older. You think about what does your child, when they get to your age, what do they want to recall about? They want to recall the fact that they could run on the street. When you said a moment ago that you, when you're growing up, your parents said in the age of sort of growing TV consumption and families coming together. Get out of the house. Get out of the house. What was it you said? Don't come back until the lab's coming. Speedlights come on, yeah. I can't imagine saying that. And I feel so sad that I've never said that to my children.

45:12Actually, think about it. That's actually a good ambition for maybe the next few years. Yeah, but because play is a collective action problem too. If you send your nine-year-old out and there's nobody else out there, he's worse off. There's no benefit to that. So it's a collective action problem. If you have a group of families, you send the kids out and they are so excited. I promise you at school, they're all going to be challenged. What should we do today? Oh, you want to go to the pizzeria? You want to go get ice cream? No, let's go down to the stream. Let's go to the park. They're going to be so excited and they are self-governing.

45:36Now we live in democracies. The whole point of a democracy, the whole reason that my country broke away from yours is that we said, you know what? We think we can be self-governing. We think we don't need a king. And you guys said, oh, you'll be back, you know, as in Hamilton. But we made a go of it. We discovered that you can be self-governing if you teach the skills of democratic citizenship to your kids. And that especially happens on the playground. Because what's happening? The kids learn to make the rules, to enforce the rules, to resolve disputes, to keep the game going. So when the kids have that independence, they learn to be self-governing.

46:07We've got to – if we want our democracies to survive, we have to raise a generation that is suited for democracy. Instead, we're raising little authoritarians. But you had the decency, little authoritarians. Or prepped for authoritarianism. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That sounds like a pun on Edmund Burke's little platoons. We've gone from little platoons to little authoritarians. Yes, oh, I like that. You were decent enough to say you made mistakes when it comes to device regulation. Looking back, what are some of the guidelines? This is not a sort of sanction manifesto. You're not seeking office. But what are some of the guidelines you might say to parents?

46:38For instance, might you say no screens in bedrooms, no social media until a certain age? How would you do device regulation better? Yeah. So let me give you two principles here. So the first principle, this is the one I wish I'd done, is no screens of any kind in bedrooms ever. Now, you can start that. When your kids are young, you can start that. And you can have a TV in the common room or family room or kitchen. You can have a computer. There are all kinds of reasons why they might use those. But you say no screens in the bedroom. When I was a kid, the idea that you'd have a TV in your bedroom was insane because you'd watch it all the time.

47:10So if you start with that rule when they're young, then they're not going to – the stuff is like a gas that expands to fill every moment. So if you have that rule, it won't fill every moment of your kid's day. You might have to make an exception when they have a lot of homework and they need to take their laptop in for two hours in the evening when they're 12, 13, whatever. But if you start with that rule, your life's going to be a lot better, a lot less conflict. So that's one. The second is let's talk about good screen time versus bad screen time. It's actually very simple. Here's what's good.

47:38Stories. Stories are good because humans are storytelling animals. Humans have always raised their kids in a sea of stories inherited from previous generations with some modification. Our brains are like LLMs. Our brains are like they are neural networks. They need lots of patterns. And fiction, stories, myths are the fastest way that we tune up along with real experience and travel, things like that. So your kid needs a lot of that to get smart. So what do you think about doing movie night with your kids? Does that seem like a healthy thing or is that screen time? I've erred on the side of quite enjoying it.

48:12Yes, you're right. And partly because it's just a communal experience, particularly if you invite some neighbors around, which you might well do this Friday, but also that feeling that there are certain traditions you want them to know, famous things, but also that sense that they can actually sustain attention. Yes, you got it. That's the key. Rather than just doom scrolling, flick, flick, flick, flick, flick, flick. Exactly. You know, that's a different kind of neurological experience. I'm going to follow, you know, Dracula or whatever it might be for a long time. Exactly. Those are the two endpoints.

48:43So watching a good story, a long story, ideally an hour or longer, teaches skills of attention about characters in a moral world that have dilemmas, teaches moral development. Watching it socially improves relationships. So all that's good. You know, a movie or two a week for your kid is great. And if you use that to get some time to prepare dinner, you know, okay, you can have a half hour of the movie at five o 'clock every day. Like, that's great. There's no problem with that, okay? The opposite is what you just said. The opposite is fragmenting time. The worst thing you can do is hand your kid a touchscreen device because a touchscreen device is a little Skinner box.

49:21Stimulus, dopamine, response, reward, repeat over and over again. And it mostly ends at short videos. and the short readers are not stories. There's no morality. On the question, you very kindly said that you're going to stick around and answer some of our listeners' questions and we've had loads of them, often from parents, but not only, and some from skeptics. You'd be very generous with your time. I just want to put one thought to you about where this all goes. We're talking at a time when there's new guidelines coming out from the UK government. As you say, we could be at a global tipping point.

49:48The argument against a social media ban for under-16s that I hear most often, sometimes from surprising places, is that if you do that, what you end up really in practice doing is sending kids to darker corners of the internet. And if you move them away from regulated big platforms of the kinds that we've talked of here, you'll end up sending them to kind of, you know, the old school chat rooms and dark places where cyberbullying is more prevalent. And it's a problem of implementation. What do you say to that argument? So this assumes that the kids are desperate to be on social media. And if you block them from some, they're going to find others.

50:24And what we see over and over again is what the kids are desperate about is not being the only one out. They're desperate to not be left out. So it's too soon to know exactly what's happening in Australia, but I can tell you this much. I had a good long talk with Jeff Hancock from the Stanford Social Media Lab. He is the psychologist who's been selected to be in charge of the evaluation of what's happening in Australia. And he told me last week, just a quick update in Australia, Julie and Grant, their eSafety Commissioner, reported that Australia removed something like 4.7 million accounts from Australia's 2.5 million kids in that range.

50:59So the platforms have complied. That's going down. More accounts than children. Okay. So now then how do the kids adapt? Now, if you're a 14-year-old who's been kicked off, you're going to be mad and you're going to say, well, I'm going to use a VPN. And sure enough, VPN use spiked at first. But what Jeff told me is it went way up and then it went back down to where it was. Because the damnable thing about social media on a smartphone is that the kids can use it literally 500 times a day. Whenever there's five seconds down, they take it out. But if every time they take it out, they have to load up the VPN and then go on, that's a little bit of friction.

51:35A little bit of friction and they find something else. Do you know, I spoke to, on the radio show I work on, I spoke to some 13-year-olds, sorry, 12-year-olds last week. And they were so clear. they said they'd hate it at first, but after a week they'd be absolutely fine. And isn't that what it is to be a parent? What it is to be a parent is to say no in order to, you know, tough love, whatever you want to call it. Listen, you've been so incredibly generous. And the one thing I'd say before we conclude this episode, and we answer some listeners' questions for our next bonus episode, is I really, I know you're so in demand.

52:03And I know that Emmanuel Macron in Davos and Keir Starmer in West Street and in Downstreet want you. But I would love at some other point to talk to you about The Righteous Mind because there is a long history of Jonathan Haidt's social psychology before you got to this extraordinary cause. And I think the one thing I'd say even more in the anxious generation or the amazing generation is if people want to understand why politics and religion seems to defy good people, I think a lot of it is explained in your book of 2013. So one day I hope you and I can talk about that as well. I'd be very happy to.

52:33Our democracies are going kind of crazy for the same reasons in the same ways. And again, I believe it has to do with the technological change. If democracy is a conversation, it was one thing when the conversation was in books, magazines, newspapers, television, news. And it's another thing when it moves on to Twitter. And that's what's happening now is we have democracy on Twitter and it's not working very well. At least we've got podcasts. Yes, long podcasts. Yes, they are a blessing. I love a lot of technology. Jonathan, it's great to speak to you. Thank you so much. You too. Thank you.

53:08now you heard jonathan mention meta quite a lot in that interview and i think you heard me push back uh consistently and also put their position to him meta have sent us a statement and i think it's important uh that we convey that to you so a spokesperson for meta said the following and i quote we agree with jonathan height that keeping teens safe online is critical that's why we've made meaningful changes like teen accounts to limit who can contact teens, what they see and their time on our apps. However, two recent independent large-scale studies in the UK and Australia, including one from Oxford, show the complexity of teen mental health and that many factors beyond social media influence it.

53:48Any serious conversation should reflect all the evidence and social media's positive role for teens, friendship, skill building and finding community. Friendship skill building and finding community. And I should also say that we also approached TikTok and Snapchat, but didn't receive statements from either company.

54:12Now, you might remember that last year I had a truly extraordinary conversation, one of the most amazing encounters I've ever had, frankly, with a remarkable man called Jacob Dunn. He was possibly the most interesting person I've ever met. He also is possibly the only person I've ever met who's killed someone because he killed James Hodgkinson with one punch whilst on a night out in Nottingham well over a decade ago. Jacob went to prison for manslaughter and since then he's developed a really extraordinary relationship with James' parents, the parents of the man he killed with that one punch through restorative justice.

54:48and his story is so extraordinary that it's the subject of a play called Punch which sold out on the West End, sold out on Broadway and it was written by the great James Graham. James Graham, who also wrote things like the TV show Quiz or Brexit and Uncivil War and Inc and lots and lots of remarkable plays including Dear England, which was the one about Gareth Southgate, is Nick's guest on Political Thinking this week. So if you enjoyed the conversation with Jacob Dunn and I know from the numbers a lot of you did, please do make sure you check out Nick's interview with James Graham. Just search for Political Thinking with Nick Robinson on BBC Sounds.

55:27And that is it for this episode. To make sure you don't miss your Radical questions and Jonathan Haidt's answers, do please subscribe to Radical with Amol Rajan. If you do that, life just gets better. I mean, I'd say my own academic research and anecdotal evidence would suggest that more than 99 % of people who have subscribed to Radical have loved doing it because that's what you say to me in your wonderful messages. So to make sure you don't miss future conversations, including question and answer episodes, please subscribe to Radical with Amol Rajan on BBC Sounds. And remember, if you want to watch this as a vodcast or what we used to call television, you can do so on the iPlayer.

56:05Just search for Radical with Amol Rajan on the iPlayer. We'll be back at the same time next week. Goodbye.