Candice Odgers

And so there's there's a lot of factors and saying it's a lot of factors doesn't.

to sell a story easily, right?

It's easier to say it's social media and it's smartphones and to shut that off.

But when you compare all the factors that contribute to youth mental health, social media often doesn't make the list.

Yeah, I think it is simple to scare people with statistics.

And, you know, I'm a quantitative psychologist as well.

And I teach graduate statistics and we can draw a lot of scary, scary graphs.

And that happens.

Unfortunately, that happens in the media every day.

And whenever I see one of these graphs, what I do is I do the thing where I expand the axes and say, what's really happening?

And then I go back to the original source.

And it is stunning how many times these lines are cherry picked or manipulated.

We saw it actually this week in the Financial Times.

There was a big graph and they said since the inception of the smartphone, birth rates have declined around the world.

And so it was also birth rates did decline after the Great Recession because...

You wouldn't have any money.

Right.

There's the money thing.

But the whole focus was on smartphones.

And so people now can use AI and take a picture of that graph and go back and check it against the original data.