- il y a 4 mois
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00:00Bonjour ARCAM, bonjour France.
00:04This is Jonathan Haidt, the author of The Anxious Generation.
00:07I'm so pleased to be invited to address this ARCAM conference
00:10because France is a leader on these issues and there is so much more to do.
00:15What I'd like to do, I'll go ahead and share my screen.
00:18I want to show you a presentation.
00:22And in fact, this is a presentation that I had the honor of giving to President Macron
00:29in April.
00:32He was so kind to me.
00:34And so I've expanded it a little bit for you, but let me lay out the story of what is happening.
00:40So you have the big picture at your conference.
00:44So my book, The Anxious Generation, is a tragedy in two acts.
00:49In act one, we lose the play-based childhood.
00:55In act two, the phone-based childhood comes storming in with these technological innovations,
01:02such as Instagram and front-facing cameras.
01:04I can summarize the whole book by saying that we have overprotected our children in the real world
01:09and we have underprotected them online.
01:14The report that you've produced is spectacular.
01:17I have never before seen such a clear enumeration of the harms
01:21and the frequency and who's experiencing them.
01:24So you're well aware that this new phone-based childhood is full of harms.
01:29We're talking harms every day.
01:32Kids experiencing these harms on a very regular basis.
01:35I also really loved the way your report laid out in this graph,
01:38showing us the most harmful platforms to the right and the most popular platforms on top
01:47so we can really see that the mass damage to children and adolescents is being done by TikTok,
01:53first and foremost, followed by Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube.
01:58I hope you'll sign up for my sub-stack.
02:01It's a free blog at afterbabble.com.
02:04We have collected quotations from employees of these companies,
02:09collected by state attorneys general who are suing them.
02:13It is absolutely astonishing what they know.
02:15They know they are harming kids.
02:17They are covering it up.
02:18So we must regulate them.
02:21We must protect children from these.
02:23As I'll say, we must raise the age to 16.
02:25These are just not appropriate places for children.
02:29In my longer presentation, I go through a long list of harms from a social science point of view.
02:34I'm going to skip the physical harms such as damage to eyesight and the skeletal system and sleep.
02:41And I'll go right to the mental illness, which has been the center of the debate.
02:45What we saw in the United States, what first hit me off, is that mental illness exploded.
02:50These were the rates among college students.
02:52It just exploded between 2010 and 2015, and then it kept rising.
02:57This is all before COVID.
02:59And it isn't just self-report data.
03:01It's also behavior.
03:02This is the number per 100,000 that are taken to emergency rooms for self-harm.
03:08No trend.
03:09In all these graphs, there's no trend before 2010.
03:11And then this happens.
03:13So it's not just self-report.
03:16And when I discovered that it's not just the U.S., this is what blew my mind and made me realize I have to focus on this.
03:23I have to write a whole book just on this because it's the exact same story in all of the English-speaking countries and across almost all of Europe.
03:31We don't have good data from the developing world.
03:33So just to show you a bit of international data, in Britain, this is self-harm according to medical records, and we see the exact same pattern in the U.S.
03:42Something happened in the early 2010s, and girls around the world became more depressed, anxious, and began to cut themselves and harm themselves in other ways.
03:53Across Europe, we see the same thing.
03:54I don't have self-harm data, but the HBSC survey covers all the European countries.
03:59Again, no trend in psychological distress before 2010, and then between 2010 and 2015, same thing happens.
04:05Zooming in on France, we see exactly the same pattern.
04:10So why is this happening in so many countries at the same time?
04:16The explanation that I put forth in the book is this.
04:19And again, nobody has offered another one that can work across countries.
04:24Suppose we have two sisters.
04:26One was born in 1995.
04:29That's the last year of the millennial generation.
04:32She hits puberty around, she begins, well, let's say in 2012 is the year that Instagram comes out.
04:40Let's focus on that.
04:422012 is when Instagram comes out.
04:43All the girls get on it.
04:45This sister, born in 1995, she's 17.
04:49She is 17 years old in 2012, which means that she has just finished puberty.
04:54And so her mental health is fine.
04:57Instagram didn't get to rewire her brain during the peak period of neural redevelopment, wiring, myelination.
05:05So her mental health comes out fine because she had a flip phone or a basic phone during puberty.
05:10But suppose she has a younger sister born in the year 2000.
05:14What was her childhood like?
05:16She turns 12 in 2012.
05:18That means that she probably, her first phone was probably a smartphone with Instagram and a front-facing camera.
05:25And she went through puberty taking pictures of herself and scrolling through millions of photos of girls living better lives than she has.
05:33She was raised in the attention economy.
05:35And I believe her development was changed because of that.
05:39So that, I think, is the big picture of this very brief and intense window, 2010 to 2015, when the technological environment changes radically.
05:47And so the social relations, the sleep patterns, the sexual development, everything changes in those five years.
05:55Childhood used to look like this.
05:56Kids were outside taking risks, having fun.
05:59If you found an extraterrestrial somewhere in your town, you and your friends would put it in a bicycle and ride around town.
06:05But now, childhood is phone-based.
06:08Kids have to go home, and boys in particular have to be at home to use their own video game controller to play with their friends.
06:15We have radically changed childhood in ways that I think block human development.
06:21Now, I focused on mental illness in the book, and that's the biggest, most visible thing.
06:26But it turns out there's something even bigger.
06:28I now believe that the destruction of the human ability to pay attention is even more serious for societies than is the explosion of mental illness.
06:37So about two years ago, we began to notice, wait a second, test scores are falling.
06:42And we discovered this thinking, oh, COVID, COVID restrictions.
06:46You can see how much they dropped between 2020 and 2023.
06:50But what people didn't notice at the time was that the drop began in 2012.
06:55It did not begin in 2020.
06:56But all right, people expected there'd be a post-COVID recovery.
07:00And if you look at the top scores, if you look at the smartest kids, or I should say the best students in any class, they have rebounded a little bit since COVID.
07:10But look what happened to the bottom 50%.
07:13The bottom 50%.
07:15They began to decline in the mid, around 2015.
07:19And they keep going down and down and down, even post-COVID, whether we look at math or reading.
07:24And we found this across multiple exams and multiple countries.
07:29The bottom half, who are the people most distracted, they're the ones who use social media most.
07:33They have the least self-control and willpower.
07:35They're being destroyed by whatever is happening.
07:38Education is dropping for most of our students, or at least half of them.
07:42Here's data from PISA internationally, and we see the same thing.
07:47No trend before 2010, and then we see a drop in all subjects.
07:51In the Financial Times, John Verne Murdoch recently aggregated a few interesting studies.
07:57This is a study of American high school students.
07:59How often did they have difficulty thinking or concentrating?
08:01What we see is no real trend before 2015, and then we see an increase in self-reports of ability to think and focus.
08:10Okay, that's young people, which is what I've been focusing on.
08:12But what really shocked me is he shared a study done in the OECD of mostly European nations.
08:17And what we see, if you look at the light blue lines on the bottom, that's literacy.
08:21The ability to actually read a few pages of text and then talk about what you read.
08:26It used to be that only about 15% to 20% of adults couldn't do that.
08:33Those are the levels shown in the light blue lines.
08:35We enter this period, and all around, it's increasing.
08:39That is, more adults are functionally illiterate now than was the case in 2012.
08:44Again, I think it's because we're all so distracted.
08:47We're all getting interruptions.
08:49We're all losing the ability to focus for a long enough period of time to read a book.
08:53We appear to be experiencing a broader erosion in the human capacity for mental focus and application.
09:02I'll just say one word about girls versus boys.
09:05Most of the attention has been on girls because that's where the data is clearest.
09:09The correlational studies in particular, girls who are heavy users are much more likely to be,
09:14three times more likely in some studies, to be anxious or depressed compared to light users.
09:19And in chapter six of the book, I go through all the different reasons why growing up on social media is much harder on teen girls than it is on teen boys.
09:28And I didn't actually know what the story was for boys when I started the book.
09:32But by the time I finished, I think we figured it out.
09:34It's not social media per se, and it's not video games per se.
09:40It's the constant efforts by corporations to hook boys on products, to market to them, to grab their dopamine systems and give them little hits of dopamine on a variable ratio reinforcement schedule, which is the most addictive.
09:56So it begins with the video games.
09:58The great majority of boys play video games.
10:01A little bit of video game play does not appear to be harmful.
10:04But it goes on to Pornhub.
10:07It goes on to vaping and marijuana pens, which also are addictive through dopamine.
10:14When boys get a bit older, they begin bedding, which is all gamified.
10:17That is like slot machines, very addictive.
10:19And even investing, even investing in the stock market is now gamified.
10:24So it's open season on boys.
10:26Boys are losing the ability to focus, to work.
10:29Many of them are spending their days in a haze of video games, porn, and gambling.
10:36This is absolutely destructive to society.
10:39There will be very few, or I should say many fewer marriageable men coming up for the women.
10:46The boys are dropping out of school.
10:48They're not getting jobs nearly as often as the girls and women are now.
10:51If any of you have seen the movie Adolescence, you know that video games are no longer just video games.
10:58Video games are online communities, which are increasingly like social media, where boys are exposed to warped ideas.
11:06It's almost impossible to make the jump from boy to man if your guidance is online.
11:11This painful scene in Adolescence, where the father understands that his boy committed a murder.
11:18We just had a case of this in the United States.
11:21As you may know, we had a major political assassination.
11:24A young man named Tyler Robinson murdered Charlie Kirk.
11:28And it was his father who turned him in.
11:30So again, we can only imagine the pain in that family and the trauma that this young man caused to the nation.
11:37And again, it's all going back to video games.
11:40The things he wrote on the bullets were video game references.
11:43He was socialized in the world, not of the games themselves.
11:46Well, yes, of the games, but of the communities.
11:51So I'll skip the spiritual degradation.
11:54We don't have time for that.
11:55But my point is, across almost any measure of human development,
12:00human beings born in Western nations after 1995 are doing worse, are deteriorating.
12:07Something has gone terribly wrong for children and teenagers in the Western world.
12:13What do we do about it?
12:14Well, in the book, I analyzed how these are all a bunch of collective action problems.
12:20All the boys have to be on video games because all the other boys are on video games.
12:23All the girls have to be on Instagram because all the other girls are on Instagram.
12:27They don't want to be left out.
12:28They don't want to miss out.
12:29Everyone needs a smartphone because everyone else has a smartphone by the age of 11.
12:33Well, 11, 12, 13 is when they generally get smartphones.
12:35So how do we break out of this?
12:38How do we break these collective action traps?
12:41I've offered four norms, four norms that if we all work together, if families and schools
12:47and legislators and regulators work together, we can roll back the phone-based childhood.
12:53We can restore a play-based childhood.
12:55So the first is no smartphones before age 14.
12:58Give them a flip phone, a basic phone.
13:00Let them call.
13:00Let them text.
13:01Don't expose them to push notifications, variable ratio reinforcement schedules, social media,
13:07social comparison.
13:08Now, here, I'm calling for a norm, not a law.
13:14But what you can do, what governments can do, is mount a major public health campaign.
13:20Any program that visits new mothers, explain to them that touchscreens are severely addictive.
13:24They interfere with your child's ability to pay attention or to form relationships.
13:28Do not let your child have a touchscreen device.
13:30No phone, no iPad.
13:32Not that they can never see one, but they must not have their own until they are 14.
13:38The second norm, no social media before 16.
13:41Many of us, including my family, we're trying to do this, but we're putting our kids at a
13:45disadvantage in the sense that everyone else is online.
13:48Of course, in the long run, my kids and other kids who are kept off will have an advantage
13:52because they can talk to people.
13:54They can focus.
13:56But here's where law really, really would help.
13:58Thank God for Australia.
14:00Australia is the first nation to really raise the age to 16 and require the companies to
14:05enforce it themselves, just as we would do for any other company that is selling a vice
14:10product to children.
14:12We don't expect the parents to have to keep their kids out of casinos and strip clubs and
14:16bars.
14:17That's the job of the casino, strip club and bar.
14:21So raise the age to 16.
14:23I know in France you had done something about the age of 15.
14:27I know you're thinking of that as the age.
14:30I urge you to go to 16 for two reasons.
14:32The first is because puberty is the most sensitive period.
14:36We must protect puberty.
14:38Puberty starts a little earlier for girls.
14:40So typically girls are done by about age 15.
14:43They're still in adolescence.
14:45But the major period for girls begins 10 to 12 typically, depending on how you count it.
14:50But generally by 15 or so, 14 or 15 girls are done.
14:55Boys are a year or two later.
14:56So boys are still generally in puberty at the age of 15.
14:59Really, the age should be 16, frankly.
15:01But my goal was not what is the healthy age.
15:04My goal is what is a norm that we could get as a national norm and maybe as a global norm,
15:09which we'd reinforce everybody.
15:12And so since Australia and many other countries – Australia already has it built in.
15:16It's going to take effect December 10th.
15:19Australia set the stage with the age of 16.
15:22I think that's the right age.
15:24Other countries are going to follow suit with 16.
15:26I urge you to make it 16 as well.
15:30I know that President Macron is going to work first with the EU.
15:33And if he can get it through the EU, that would be, of course, the best.
15:36But he said if he can't get it through the EU, I believe he said he will then try to raise the age in France.
15:40I hope it will be the 16th.
15:43The third is phone-free schools.
15:44Now, here's a place where France really led.
15:46I think you were one of the first nations to enact laws on this.
15:49But I believe it did not separate the phones from the kids.
15:52I think it was either just classroom ban.
15:54In any case, French kids still had their phones during the school day.
15:58So in America, 19 states have now banned – they take away the phones in the morning,
16:03give them back in the afternoon.
16:04The results are spectacular.
16:07Kids are laughing in the hallways.
16:08Discipline problems are down.
16:10So I urge France to go all the way and make a national law that kids are separated from their phones.
16:16They cannot be texting between classes.
16:19And finally, more childhood independence and free play.
16:22This is not as severe an issue in France as it is in the English-speaking countries.
16:26But what I've seen all over Europe is it's moving that way.
16:29Families are telling me, well, yeah, we still let our kids out, but not quite as early, and we monitor them more.
16:36So the world seems to be following the bad example of America.
16:40You must resist, protect unsupervised play.
16:42That's where kids learn to work out conflicts.
16:44That's where they grow the most.
16:46Now, I think France can and should and really is playing a leadership role here for these four reasons.
16:54First, the United States created the problem, and we are completely incapable of solving it.
16:58Now that we see the heads of all the tech companies on stage with Donald Trump at the inauguration, it's now very clear.
17:06The tech companies can do whatever they want in the United States.
17:08Our Congress is useless.
17:09Our Congress is not going to do anything to stop them, as far as we can tell.
17:13We need you.
17:15We need France.
17:16We need the EU.
17:17We need Australia and the UK.
17:18Second, because President Macron has been an early and outspoken leader on this issue, he talked long ago about the digital jungle and his concerns about it.
17:30Third, as I said, France was among the First Nations to do something about phones and schools.
17:35And finally, French public opinion is unusually supportive.
17:39Data for More in Common from last year.
17:41They surveyed four countries, and they asked, do you think social media has a positive or negative effect on the lives of children aged 15 or under?
17:51And the percent who said negative impact was actually highest in France.
17:55So French public opinion was already ahead of the UK, Germany, and USA in recognizing the harms, those many, many harms that you laid out in your RCOM report.
18:06And also, I point out from this More in Common study, that the support is across all parties.
18:14This is an amazing thing that we see in the United States as well.
18:17The United States is so polarized.
18:19If the Democrats want something, the Republicans will find a reason to hate it.
18:23We can't agree on anything in the United States except this.
18:27The phone-free schools movement was led by Republican governors of states and Democratic governors of states.
18:33Because Republicans, Republican politicians almost all have children, and Democratic politicians almost all have children.
18:41All parents see this.
18:42And so parents around the world are taking action.
18:45So this, if you want a policy that will unify France, that will get broad support from parents in all parties,
18:53phone-free schools, age verification, raising the age, all of these things are broadly popular.
18:58So, in conclusion, I've argued that there is, beginning around 2012, a mass destruction of human potential across almost every measurable outcome variable.
19:11I've suggested that the solution is collective action.
19:14Regulation is one of the main ways that civilized nations do collective action.
19:19And so I wish you well in this conference.
19:23I hope you will take bold action.
19:26I could give you an entire other talk on the evidence for what I have said.
19:30I tried to lay out the problem.
19:32If you go to my sub stack, afterbabble.com, we go through the correlational studies, the experimental studies.
19:37We have quotes from the people in the companies.
19:39We have surveys of parents.
19:40So the evidence that social media and the phone-based childhood is harming children is overwhelming.
19:46I'm putting that together in a whole series of papers.
19:49But for now, I wish you all the best.
19:52I wish you success.
19:54And bonjour et merci.
19:56Merci.