Candice Odgers

You know, the smartphone ban studies are now coming out and showing us that the effects on things like learning and attendance and bullying are zero or close to zero.

And so you're talking about bans in school, in school.

So, yeah.

But I think it's interesting.

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.

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