Is Social Media Destroying a Generation?

• Girls' rates of depression and anxiety doubled between 2010 and 2020 across the US, UK, Canada, and Australia simultaneously. That pattern follows smartphone adoption, not economic cycles or any other candidate explanation.
• Social media is specifically engineered to exploit the adolescent brain's sensitivity to social approval; the infinite-scroll and notification design was built to maximize engagement, not wellbeing, with internal research at Meta showing the company knew of the harm.
• The solutions are achievable and demonstrably work: age verification, phone-free schools, and redesigning feeds away from social comparison have shown measurable wellbeing improvements where tried. The only obstacle is political will.

Debater: To be announced

• The most rigorous pre-registered studies, including Przybylski's work on 350,000 teenagers, find effects of social media on wellbeing smaller than wearing glasses or eating potatoes; the effect sizes disappear when you control for prior mental health history and socioeconomic factors.
• Mental health deteriorated across the same period in communities with minimal smartphone access and improved in some with heavy use; that pattern is inconsistent with a simple screen-time story and consistent with economic precarity and pandemic disruption.
• Blaming the phone is convenient for everyone: politicians don't have to fund mental health services, parents don't have to examine household stress, and tech companies pivot to 'safety' features without substantive change. The moral panic serves powerful interests.

Debater: To be announced