Discourse on social media is vibes-based

In the fall of 2021, The Wall Street Journal dropped a bombshell on Facebook (now Meta): “Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls.” The report drew from “The Facebook Files,” documents leaked by former employee Frances Haugen, which, among other things, discussed internal research on mental health and well-being. One in five teenagers, the documents suggested, said Instagram made them feel worse about themselves (in a UK/US sample of around a thousand users).

Fast forward to the spring of 2024, Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Anxious Generation” made it to the top charts, sparking widespread conversation about the mental health crisis among young people. Haidt’s argument very much resonated with the internal research leaked by Haugen: there is a strong correlation between the increase in social media use and the worsening of mental health outcomes among teenagers. His conclusion: the brave new world of social media and mobile phones is harming teens’ mental health.

Told in this fashion, one could believe that the reaction to these two notable events would be similar; after all, there’s so much in common between the arguments put forth by Haidt and by Meta internal researchers. They both point to the suggested negative impact of social media on teen’s mental health, but more so, they both fall short of cleanly identifying a causal effect. 

In the case of Facebook's internal documents, data was entirely self-reported, which might have led participants to list Instagram as the culprit for their mental health issues simply because this notion is already widespread in pop culture (but not in academia). In Haidt’s book, conclusions are drawn from aggregated trends of tremendously complex outcomes, making it particularly hard to discern correlation from causation. All in all, in both cases, it may very well be that “misery causes Facebook” (this pearl is by Kevin Munger), and the studies are off.

However, the point is not to dunk on Facebook's internal documents or Haidt’s book—studying the causal effect of social media on well-being is remarkably challenging, and it is not as if they overlooked an obvious research design or method that would improve the credibility of their results. Rather, my point is to analyze the reaction to these two events. The conclusions drawn from “The Facebook Files” largely agree with the “Facebook Bad” trope created after the Cambridge Analytica scandal and drew little backlash for their limitations. On the other hand, Haidt’s book was met with extreme skepticism; E.g., a book review in Nature by a leading psychologist in the area compares Haidt’s arguments to drawing similar lines on the first day of a statistics course.

But why were the reactions so different? I hypothesize that it is all about The Vibes, a term coined by no one other than the anxious generation. When The Wall Street Journal published its report, it did so against mounting skepticism and distrust toward Big Tech, particularly Facebook. In contrast, when assessing Haidt’s book, critics could not detach his argument from his position as a critic of progressive ideologies. Looking at no trend lines, I dare to say that what caused the “differential criticism” was simply Haidt’s vibes.