Let’s Kill “Social Media”

In the early 2010s, teens traded in their flip phones for smartphones and the phone-based childhood began: their social lives moved on to social media.

Jonathan Haidt, “How screens stole childhood — and how to get it back” (“TED Talk”, April 2026)

Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues have been on a long-standing concerted campaign to criminalise some murky concept of “Social Media” for many years — perhaps already close to a decade. Contrast this with some critical statements made in a review of his most recent book:

First, this book is going to sell a lot of copies, because Jonathan Haidt is telling a scary story about children’s development that many parents are primed to believe. Second, the book’s repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science.

Candice L. Odgers, “Is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?” in “Nature”, Vol. 628, p. 29 (4 April 2024 [ https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2 ] )

Further, Candice L. Odgers concludes:

Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, is a gifted storyteller, but his tale is currently one searching for evidence.

ibid.

The way I see it, Mr. Haidt can hardly be referred to as a scientist at all, as he cannot seem to define the thing (“social media”) he apparently hopes to aim at in using the crosshairs of his misguided finder. Indeed: I have yet to meet anyone who can provide an adequate, useful, so-called “operational” definition of this illusory term. I believe so much hot air and hogwash have been spread so far and wide since it was first used (I believe by Mark Zuckerberg) that it should be entirely banished from any lexicon intending to be somewhat scientific in nature.

Today, the term is nothing more unusable nonsense.

Anyone who continues to use this term ought to be referred to as a popular (i.e. “populist”) quack, charlatan, and perhaps worst of all: propagandist.

What I really want to know is: Who are these quacks, charlatans and propagandists working for? Obviously, someone must be paying these quasi-scientific thinkers to dream up these stories, get on stages to present them, and act like they are doing anything meaningful … besides misleading the public at large down rabbit holes to nowhere.

Let me offer my own very speculative and so far still completely undocumented hunch.

I think it is funded by no other than the invisible college of Silicon Valley global leading companies … those with abnormally high concentrations of billionaires and trillionaires who seek to blame some scapegoat phenomenon for innumerable social problems — they all want to blame someone else. They all find “social media” to be a very useful concept because nobody can define what it is (and therefore, their own “unicorn” many-times-over company cannot be blamed). So they pay these bigwig quacks and charlatans exorbitant expense accounts to go on never-ending whirlwind tours of storytelling scary ghost-stories over and over again … thereby feeding a frenzied public with ever more outrageous scapegoat bullshit to hack around on.

Personally, I myself feel strongly vindicated by the fact that Ogden’s critical review appeared in a leading “rational media” [1] scientific journal.

[1] See “Rational Media“[ https://phlat.design.blog/2024/01/14/rational-media ]