Odgers versus Surgeon General (Nature's Review of The Anxious Generation)
Assertions by Candice Odgers imply that the Surgeon General is incompetent and guilty of spreading unfounded fears about social media.
We have seen that, in her review in Nature of Jon Haidt's book The Anxious Generation, Candice Odgers has ignored nearly all the evidence supplied by Haidt and then misrepresented the entire field of research on digital tech as completely void of any substantial links to adolescent mental health whatsoever.
This post is part of a series concerned with the review in Nature of Haidt’s book:
Note: the intent of this series is not to defend Haidt — he is capable of doing so on his own. The intent is to show how the debate about his new book is dominated by ideologies instead of criticism. That does not mean that there is no legitimate criticism of Haidt — I myself hope to have provided such criticism in the past and hope to provide more of it in the future.
Longitudinal Studies
Today we will look at how Odgers misrepresents evidence from longitudinal studies, about which Odgers makes quite a sweeping contention:
When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers.
Note the word when:
When associations over time are found, they suggest […]
This rules out the existence of longitudinal studies that found associations and yet do not indicate these associations are explained by mental health problems causing social media use.
An Inconvenient Study
Now contrast the above assertion by Odgers with the following passage from the Surgeon General report Social Media and Youth Mental Health:
The study in question is Associations Between Time Spent Using Social Media and Internalizing and Externalizing Problems Among US Youth and anyone can check that the authors do not suggest that this association is likely due to ‘young people who already have mental-health problems’ using social media more often.
In fact, the authors argue precisely the opposite:
Unlike a prior study, we adjusted for mental health problems measured before the exposure, which is critical for reducing the influence of reverse causality.
There is nothing in the study to suggest that the causal direction insisted on by Odgers explains the doubling of risks.
Now this is not an obscure study. It was published in 2019, it has 340 citations in Google Scholar (apparently more than any other longitudinal study of its kind), and the advisory in which it was mentioned was recently discussed publicly by Odgers (see Is social media fueling youth mental health crisis?).
Alternate Realities Redux
How can have Odgers discussed the Surgeon General advisory and yet not know about this longitudinal study that is mentioned prominently in the short report of mere 25 pages?
How can Odgers make assertions so general and absolute about longitudinal studies if she is so ignorant of the most important studies in the field?
Or is it that Odgers knows perfectly well about this study but simply believes, along with Nature editors, that ideological persuasion of the public justifies any means necessary?
After all, her previous arguments depended entirely on her refusal to acknowledge nearly all the evidence presented by Haidt as well as on her refusal to acknowledge the evidence of elevated risks accumulated by digital tech studies.
The Surgeon General versus Odgers
The Surgeon General advisory is not at odds with Odgers only regarding longitudinal studies; it is at odds with her regarding all types of studies, the difference between the Surgeon General and Odgers being that the Surgeon General does not pretend evidence of profound risks to adolescent mental health does not exist.
Indeed the advisory emphasizes the evidence of risks:
[…] the current body of evidence indicates that while social media may have benefits for some children and adolescents, there are ample indicators that social media can also have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.
[…] We must acknowledge the growing body of research about potential harms, increase our collective understanding of the risks associated with social media use, and urgently take action to create safe and healthy digital environments that minimize harm and safeguard children’s and adolescents’ mental health and well-being during critical stages of development.
The advisory then briefly lists some of the evidence indicating harm, including the longitudinal study mentioned above, survey data revealing various elevated risks (including the paper by Y. Kelly that we discussed previously), and experimental and quasi-experimental studies.
In other words the short advisory lists several of the many studies revealing profound risks, the evidence of which Odgers flat out declares to be non-existent despite the supposed efforts of ‘hundreds of researchers’ toiling over the years to find associations with harm.
The advisory also declares:
Nearly every teenager in America uses social media, and yet we do not have enough evidence to conclude that it is sufficiently safe for them. Our children have become unknowing participants in a decades-long experiment.
Finally, the advisory exhorts society to take action to protect children:
Wait, this could have been easily written by Haidt himself, who has argued that preponderance of evidence is a sufficient reason to protect children before a scientific consensus is reached on the extent of the harmful impact.
And yet this is precisely the kind of a message that Nature and academicians like Odgers denounce as ‘hysteria’ and ‘panic’ and so on when it is voiced by Haidt.
Note that criticism of the Surgeon General (Vivek Murthy) would indeed be justified if Odgers was correct about the supposed lack of evidence that there are profound risks to adolescent mental health from social media.
Had Nature allowed Odgers to criticize the Surgeon General with the same disregard to facts and reality that she demonstrated while attacking Haidt, the chances would have been high that such scholarly malpractice would not have been politely ignored by the wider medical community the way it is being currently tolerated by her colleagues in psychology.
Conclusion
Odgers is factually wrong about longitudinal studies, continuing her strategy of asserting falsehoods founded on the pretense that inconvenient evidence does not exist. This make-believe world clashes with the reality acknowledged by the Surgeon General advisory that notes the “profound risks” revealed by the very studies Odgers ignores. The message of the Surgeon General is close to that of Haidt — but Odgers and Nature apparently do not dare to criticize the Surgeon General directly.