Candice Odgers

I'm not saying there are no harms.

What I am saying is that the story that we're repeatedly told as parents and policymakers and people that are invested in young people themselves are told the story that social media is universally harmful, that it is damaging brains, right, that is leading to an epidemic of mental health problems that simply isn't supported by the data.

And so this gap is really puzzling.

And so this is a really interesting thing for me is adults make all these assumptions about what young people are doing online, what they're seeing, why they're there.

And those assumptions are based on their own use.

And adult use is not great.

We're not great at this.

And our mental health is not great.

So a lot of the assumptions we make about young people and what they're doing online are just they're just wrong.

Well, they're doing a lot of things.

I mean, the biggest thing they're doing is listening to music and consuming content, right?

Social media is actually the new television.

It's not actually social media like we thought of it before.

It's very parasocial, right?

And so most of the content is built by people.

big influencer reports.

And the action among kids is really in these side group chats or discord.

And that's where all the interaction happens, right?

On these platforms where they have these smaller groups, usually people that they know offline, and they're pulling in content from online or social media and from youth culture and sharing it there.

But they're not out there creating a ton of the content that's online.