Episode Transcript
Episode 34.1: Looks Like Jonathan Haidt Did A Moral Panic
Matthew Remski: Hello everyone. This is Matthew Remski with an episode of the Antifascist Dad Podcast. This is episode 34.1. It's a short bonus episode called Looks Like Jonathan Haidt Did A Moral Panic.
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Okay. I'll try not to be a jerk about this, but I gotta do it.
In my book I have a section about appropriate versus overreaching and depoliticized concerns about kids and devices, so I'm going to open by reading just a few paragraphs from the book.
There are real problems in the online world and most teens can probably see them already.
What they don't need is a bunch of olds coming in and telling them how to manage this world they spend no time in and who can't understand its benefits.
The internet is still a strange place to everyone over 40 years old.
We didn't grow up with it. For us, it has shaken the world. But we are just a single generation and our concerns may be misaligned with what kids actually need to do to figure out their online life.
We are a dying breed, people who grew up in the pre-digital world and who cannot help but feel that things have changed in ways that must be a disaster. But the truth is that we don't know how this will go, and that means the real adult job is to walk beside the kids and discover possibilities with them.
Here's one example of how grownups can mess this up.
Jonathan Haidt is a popular moral psychologist with a job at a prestigious university.
In 2024 he came out with a book about how anxiety was now an epidemic problem for young people. He said the central reason for this was their online life and engagement with social media.
And he found statistics showing that mental health diagnoses for young people spiked upwards around the time social media usage increased for that age group.
Now that's called a correlation.
Two things happening at the same time. What Haidt wanted to do was to say that there was a causal relationship between the two, that mental health was declining because social media use was increasing.
But when researchers with far more expertise studied Haidt's data and conclusions, they found that he left out all kinds of other possible factors for the changes in mental health statistics.
For instance, kids on social media might be finding validation amongst each other for feelings they did not understand, and so they're motivated to go for professional help.
It might be that online life provided an anonymous space to access more information about subjects kids couldn't speak about at home or school.
Other problems involved failing to clearly distinguish between social media time spent scrolling, which may have negative dissociating effects, and time spent using DMs, which may have positive and connective effects.
Now, the buzz around Haidt's best-selling book also waved away the fact that online life in the 2010s was also associated with a large-scale rise in awareness of global social and environmental crises.
This is perhaps the most important part of all.
This mediocre book was successful in part because it allowed parents who read it to blame their kids' anxiety on something simple, something they could try to control: their phones.
One result is that attention gets deflected away from the more existential issues in which the parents are implicated.
Social media may not be great for mental health in a lot of ways. It can move too fast, encourage flimsy relationships, degrade self-esteem, increase bodily dysmorphia, spread misinformation and hook people into sales pyramids, fruitless political arguments or harmful porn.
But I don't think any of this can compare to what it feels like to be aware of genocide in Gaza, fascism in the US and climate collapse everywhere.
No amount of freaking out over your screen time will address those larger issues, which by the way, the adults are way more responsible for than you.
The internet is just another part of your world. In capitalism, there's no reason to believe you can't be as alert, creative and disruptive with it as you are with anything else.
Okay, so I filed the final draft of the book in the fall of last year and now we've got the first solid research coming through on the impacts of what Haidt actually proposed in his very popular work. Which is that all schools enforce a total device ban and that social media should be banned for everyone under the age of 16.
What bugged me most about these proposals was the totalism and lack of interest in the various ways in which these tools are used by various communities of kids.
And I'm especially pissed about the lack of curiosity shown about marginalized or isolated kids and how they figure out ways in which they can find each other, even though it might at times be a bumpy ride.
I know that online connections, regardless of the device used, can be life-saving for autistic kids, queer kids, trans kids, or kids trapped in oppressively religious families.
Well, now Haidt can start eating crow. First comes an article I actually missed because it came out in July 2025, so it could have made it into the book had I seen it. It's where psychologist Jen Lumanlan argues in Psychology Today that school phone bans address symptoms of teen stress rather than causes.
And she challenges Haidt's findings on three fronts. First, she tackles the golden age 1970s childhood he always seems to be pointing at as his sensory emotional anchor. The freedom and clarity and simplicity he romanticizes, Lumanlan says, was available primarily to white middle-class boys, while girls, Black and working-class children may not have had those experiences.
Secondly, the academic decline Haidt attributes to smartphones is statistically minimal: one to five points on a 500-point scale.
And it's not supported in the international studies, because Singapore, Norway and Sweden maintained strong academic scores despite high smartphone adoption.
Third, the research on phone bans and their outcomes is just weak.
But her deeper argument is structural.
Students turn to phones because schools fail to meet their needs for autonomy, connection and meaningful content.
So banning devices can redirect disengagement rather than meeting it.
Okay, so with regard to the school ban outcomes, the real research was yet to come. Lumanlan was looking at some initial reports, I think. But now we have a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research published by Allcott et al. This is from April of this year and they evaluated the impacts of using Yondr lockable phone pouches across a nationwide US sample: 1,341 Yondr-adopting middle schools and 656 adopting high schools.
So a lot of schools. They also conducted national teacher, parent and student surveys. And they found that the lockaway blocking pouches do meaningfully reduce in-school phone use. No surprise there.
They found that disciplinary incidents spiked initially and then faded. They found that student well-being dipped and then rebounded.
But the academic effects are near zero. Overall modest gains in high school math, small losses in middle school math. No effects on attendance, attention or bullying.
Also just out is a paper in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence from Vanluydt et al. This is also 2026 and it studied almost 1,400 Dutch secondary school students, the average age of 16, roughly half female.
This is in 24 schools and they compared outcomes in 9 partial-ban schools versus 15 full-ban schools.
They controlled for age, educational track, parental education, migration background, school size and they examined 14 outcomes across well-being, social connectedness and bullying.
And they found no significant differences between ban types on any well-being measure, including life satisfaction, loneliness and psychosomatic complaints, or on any bullying outcome.
Full bans were associated with lower student-teacher connectedness for both boys and girls and with reduced school belonging, especially for girls.
Classmate connectedness was unaffected.
So they concluded that stricter bans fail to deliver the well-being and social benefits that policymakers assume and may actively undermine students' connectedness to teachers and, for girls, their sense of belonging at school, possibly because students experience whole-grounds restrictions as punitive or because these policies reduce opportunities for informal interaction.
It just wasn't effective. And I also wonder whether online social networks are just more immersively used by girls in ways that reflect higher sociality in general.
So where are we at altogether, given the influence of scolds like Haidt?
So far, 114 education systems now have a national ban on mobile phones in schools.
That's 58% of countries worldwide, up from just 24% in 2023.
But UNESCO's Global Education Monitoring Report also notes that while reducing distraction may help, schools are also one of the few places students can develop digital literacy.
So the challenge goes beyond banning devices.
So as of now, the research base supports reduced distraction as a real concrete benefit, but it doesn't yet validate the broader mental health and academic claims that have driven the political momentum that Haidt helped generate.
Now I'm writing this while also working on a Conspirituality essay about Leo XIV's encyclical about AI.
And one of the things this document does is that it uses liberation theology to firmly embed AI — but also all of digital tech, really, including social media — in its capitalist context, saying that's the problem.
And I haven't seen or heard this from Haidt or anyone else who's finger-wagging about mobile phones. If their lead was phones give young people too much access too fast to the soul-destroying monotony of capitalism, that would land differently, at least for me. But that's not where they start.
Where they start is with the melancholy of parental alienation.
My kid is on their phone too much. They don't say hi to me. I'm feeling less connected now. On a case-by-case basis, the phone usage might actually be too much. But the conversation starts with the assumption that, in general, kids are just fine before they pick up the phone — that they're not already overwhelmed by demands. The phone can soothe but not resolve.
And the assumption continues with a depoliticized assessment of teen mental health that offers no medicine beyond the typical liberal conformism that's been standard since the 1950s. Do your work. Go to soccer practice. Play in the school band. You'll be fine.
In his letter, Leo shares some of Haidt's concern, but as we'll see, he takes a systems approach.
They both draw on the same basic psychiatric literature documenting smartphone harms to adolescent sleep, attention and emotional development.
They both call for legislative age limits and platform accountability rather than placing the burden solely on families.
But they diverge on analysis.
Haidt's framework is psychological, while Leo's embeds similar observations within a structural critique of platform capitalism and an anthropology of human dignity.
Here's a paragraph in which Leo's approach appears: in reality, every technical tool embodies choices and priorities through what it measures, ignores, and optimizes, and how it classifies people and situations.
If a system is designed or used in a way that treats some lives as less worthy or excludes them without the possibility of appeal, then it is not merely a tool to be used well, since it has already introduced criteria that contradict the inalienable dignity of the human person.
For this reason, ethical discernment cannot be limited to asking whether we are using a system for good or bad purposes.
It must also examine how that system is designed and what vision of the human person and society is embedded in the data and models that guide it.
So that's the conversation I want to have with my kids, and that, I hope, goes viral: that whatever problems the phone causes are embedded already in our manner of social organization.
The phones can hide or accelerate problems, but the capitalist production that brought them into existence remains the primary wound of our time.
Thanks for listening, everybody. Take care of each other.
