Corporate Agenda: How National Academies Protect Social Media Companies while Forsaking Science and Adolescents
The Committee on the Impact of Social Media on Adolescent Health attacks concerns over adolescent mental health in order to endorse the notion of a corporate crisis caused by unfair public perception.
In the previous article, titled Manufacturing Dissent: How a National Academies Report Misrepresents Consensus on Adolescent Mental Health as Chaotic Discord, we saw that the recent National Academies report from its Committee on the Impact of Social Media on Adolescent Health portrayed an alternate reality of widespread discord among psychologists regarding the notion of an adolescent mental health crisis and that it embellished this fiction with further misinformation and insinuation that undermined concerns over adolescent well-being (especially over increases in suicide rates).
What purpose does this serve?
A Crisis of a Different Kind: Corporate Crisis
The Committee on the Impact of Social Media on Adolescent Health was ostensibly formed in large part due to the severe deterioration of adolescent mental health.
The Committee report, however, starts with a concern over a crisis of a very different kind.
The very first mention of a crisis in the Social Media and Adolescent Health report, early in the Introduction, is one that is presented by the Committee as a “watershed for Facebook and the social media industry” — the public reaction to the revelations by Facebook whistle-blower Frances Haugen:
At the center of this crisis was the perception that Facebook was willing to overlook the risks of their product and publicly misrepresent their internal findings if doing so advanced the company’s growth or market standing. [p. 16]
Note how the Committee portrays the events as a crisis of public perception — the problem is not, according to the Committee, that Facebook (now Meta) was actually willing to overlook the risks of their products and keep their findings secret.
The crisis declared by the Committee is also entirely a corporate crisis — the concern here is about the well-being of the social media industry, not about the effects of social media on adolescent health.
It turns out that this corporate crisis is the only time in the report that the Committee acknowledges there is a crisis of any kind.
Questioning Adolescent Crisis
The affirmation by the National Academies committee of a corporate crisis is in a stark contrast to its adversary stance towards the notion that there is an adolescent mental health crisis.
The first time mental health crisis is mentioned in the report, it is placed in quotation marks (a body of epidemiological literature describing a “mental health crisis”) by the Committee, so as to impress upon the readers that it is not the view of the Committee itself that adolescent mental health is in a state of a crisis.
Shortly afterwards the Committee repeatedly (but falsely) attacks the notion that there is an adolescent crisis, as discussed in Manufacturing Dissent: How a National Academies Report Misrepresents Consensus on Adolescent Mental Health as Chaotic Discord.
Corporate Welfare Redux
Why did the Committee decide to question the notion that there is an adolescent mental health crisis? Why did it go so far as to create an alternate reality and spread severe misinformation?
It is all in support of the Committee’s overarching concern for corporate welfare, as is clear from the text that appears shortly after the committee implied that psychologists who speak of an adolescent mental health crisis are somehow incompetent (due to ‘confusion’) and immediately after its attack against concerns about adolescent suicide increases:
To be sure, any incidence of suicide, especially among young people, is too much. At the same time, an overemphasis on the recent past could lead an observer to a mistaken emphasis on recent explanations (e.g., teen suicide has risen with use of smartphones and social media, therefore they are related). [p. 19]
Despite the obligatory ‘suicide is bad but …’ preamble, the purpose of the alternate reality and misinformation is now clear: to portray the social media industry as the victim of unfounded concerns about adolescent well-being (especially suicide) that has led to a ‘mistaken’ emphasis on social media as a possible culprit.
The committee is not merely warning about jumping to conclusions, it attacks any emphasis on social media as a potential source of harm — indeed it declares this to be a mistake.
The committee then goes one step beyond and outright declares one must not focus on the most plausible explanations at all:
To better understand this problem, it is necessary to look beyond seemingly obvious explanations and identify the young people in need of help.
In other words, when trying to understand the rise of lung cancer during the 20th century, the scientists of the 1940s made the grievous mistake of focusing on the most obvious explanation — the rise of smoking. At least according to view espoused by the Committee on the Impact of Social Media on Adolescent Health.
Note that looking at “obvious explanations” in no way precludes identifying “the young people in need of help” — the second part of the sentence is a classical non sequitur. Note also that identifying kids in need of help is precisely what has led to the concerns over social media effects — e.g. see the Zuckerberg apology during the recent Senate hearings.
Should there still be any doubts that corporate welfare lies at the heart its primary concerns, the committee gets specific:
Nevertheless, a suspicion that social media is at the root of young people’s mental health problems has motivated state legislatures around the country to curb adolescent use of social media and take action against the companies that profit from it. [p. 20]
So here we have it: concerns over adolescent mental health lead to concerns over social media impacts that in turn lead to legislation ‘against’ the companies that profit from it — and it is the welfare of these companies and their profits, not adolescents and their mental health disorders and suicides, that are the true concern of the Committee.
This completely undermines any notion that the committee is impartial and should have been trusted with the task of determining the ‘impact of social media on adolescent health’ (as its very name specifies).
Furthermore, the fact that the National Sciences committee is not only blatantly partial to corporate interests, but also spreads severe misinformation and insinuation in its effort to protect social media companies, makes its ‘consensus study’ ethically and scientifically disgraceful.