Jonathan Haidt

If you kept him off social media, you did his brain a big favor.

So this is a very important point that each social media platform is different.

It appeals to different kids.

It does different things and it causes different kinds of harm.

So let's start with Instagram.

That's the one that all the girls are on.

Instagram is the most powerful way to destroy a girl's self-esteem and sense that she's beautiful because it puts girls into constant competition, comparing.

It used to be, you know, you'd compare to the 10 or 20 girls in your class, but now you've got thousands of girls and young women who are gorgeous.

So social comparison is particularly bad on Instagram.

Instagram I think is the biggest single, there are many reasons, but Instagram I think is the biggest single driver of depression and anxiety in teenage girls, especially preteen girls.

TikTok's very different.

TikTok does have some of that, but TikTok is more about quick entertainment.

TikTok, because it pioneered this very addictive paradigm where you're watching videos and if you've been watching it for five seconds and it doesn't seem super interesting, let's move on.

So you press and then the next one's not so interesting.

And then you press and the next one's really funny.

So that's a slot machine.

So TikTok is the fastest way to addict your kids to short little attention span things and to teach them that if they ever feel five seconds of boredom, that they should change it.

So TikTok, I think, is the biggest driver of stupidity of, you know, and the kids themselves call it brain rot.

So TikTok is, I believe, literally driving, I mean, test scores are going down around the world since 2015.

And so TikTok is not so much about depression.