Social Media and Time Displacement (Haidt's After Babel)
Haidt portrays typical girls, even tween girls, as spending enormous amounts of time on Instagram and Facebook during the middle of the previous decade -- yet offers no evidence.
Jonathan Haidt portrays social media as the primary reason for declines in the mental health among girls (see Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls) during the last decade. One of the reasons he gives is time displacement — the notion that time spent on beneficial offline activities was being replaced by many hours spent daily on social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook.
Which Social Media?
Strangely, Haidt never defines what he means by social media activities nor does he ever discuss any categorization ambiguities. Haidt does, however, mention Instagram 20 times and Facebook 9 times.
MySpace, the immensely popular teen platform between 2005 and 2009, is never mentioned by Haidt; its dominance inconveniently predates the rise of depression among teens that started only in 2012.
Video platforms like YouTube and TikTok are never mentioned by Haidt, even though they are often classified as social media. Snapchat is mentioned once by Haidt in relation to asynchronous communication, but it is unclear if Haidt views it as social media.
Time Spent on Social Media
Haidt portrays the purported evils of social media when he urges us to imagine that a 12-year-old girl dedicates “5 hours a day taking and editing selfies, posting them on Instagram (which had launched the year before), and scrolling through hundreds of posts from others” — an astonishing amount of time to be spent by a preteen every day on such activities.
It turns out that Haidt evidently thinks such 12-year-old girls became typical by 2015:
Suppose that in 2015, a 12-year-old girl decided to quit all social media platforms. Would her mental health improve? Not necessarily. If all of her friends continued to spend 5 hours a day on the various platforms then she’d find it difficult to stay in touch with them.
This passage, which comes right after the Instagram quote above, makes no sense unless most tween girls in 2015 actually were spending 5 hours a day on activities like taking and editing selfies, posting them on Instagram, and scrolling through hundreds of posts from others.
The Primary Cause
Haidt believes social media to be “the largest single factor” in the rise of teen depression and repeatedly indicates that the primary harm of a phone-based childhood is social media — as if the damage inflicted by smartphones proliferation was mainly due to facilitating increases in the use of social media like Instagram.
Haidt mentions overprotective parenting as a lesser factor in the rise of depression, yet he never mentions activities such as playing games and watching videos, not to mention streaming services like Netflix.
To understand the overwhelming emphasis placed by Haidt on social media like Instagram, the following passage towards the end of his article is characteristic:
There is one giant, obvious, international, and gendered cause: Social media. Instagram was founded in 2010. The iPhone 4 was released then too—the first smartphone with a front-facing camera. In 2012 Facebook bought Instagram, and that’s the year that its user base exploded. By 2015, it was becoming normal for 12-year-old girls to spend hours each day taking selfies, editing selfies, and posting them for friends, enemies, and strangers to comment on, while also spending hours each day scrolling through photos of other girls and fabulously wealthy female celebrities with (seemingly) vastly superior bodies and lives. The hours girls spent each day on Instagram were taken from sleep, exercise, and time with friends and family. What did we think would happen to them?
If you read the text carefully, Haidt once again indicates that by 2015 most 12-year-old girls were spending 4 or more hours daily on activities like taking selfies, editing selfies, and posting them (plural hours) and scrolling through photos of other girls and fabulously wealthy female celebrities (again hours).
Haidt presents social media as the primary cause of declines in time spent on beneficial offline activities, at least among girls — and not just teenage girls but also tween girls. Note that Haidt needs this because self-harm and suicide rose relatively faster among tween girls during the first half of the previous decade (see The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic Began Around 2012).
No Evidence
Haidt offers no evidence to support his notion that most teen and even tween girls were spending astonishing amounts of time (4 and more hours daily) on social media like Instagram and Facebook.
It is puzzling that Haidt assumes such extreme presumptions to be so uncontroversial that they need no justification. Indeed this is in a startling contrast to his admission that the burden of proof falls on me when the assertion was the decline of adolescent mental health.
As we will see in a follow up article, available evidence actually contradicts Haidt’s presumptions about the time spent on social media activities, both in absolute terms and in terms relative to other screen activities.
Conclusion
Haidt presumes tween girls to have been spending astonishing amounts of time on social media activities by 2015 and yet offers no evidence to back up such extraordinary notion. Haidt further portrays social media activities, rather than viewing video entertainment or playing games, as the primary culprit of time displacement diminishing beneficial offline activities among both teen and tween girls — and again Haidt does so without offering any evidence.
Notes:
The Statista link provided by Haidt to show the purpotedly “exploding” user base after Instagram was acquired by Facebook turns out to be a chart of a linear growth with no signs of any immediate large effect:
