Generation Z’s real social media sin has nothing to do with “mental health”

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| February 2026

Allied government/Big-Tech powers pushing censorship, mass surveillance, and repression target teenagers and online freedom. But those are just the beginning. Their larger goals are truly terrifying.

The emotional, trivial-effect anti-teen/social-media junk dominating legislative and popular media forums continues to be demolished by exhaustive research. The latest (December 2025) is a multi-year study of 25,600 teenagers by a University of Manchester team whose findings “do not support the widely held view that adolescent technology use [social media and gaming] is a major causal factor in their mental health difficulties.”

No matter. More than a dozen articles fronting today’s MSN news feed panic over teens and social media, what “parents can do” and what smartphone, under-16, and age-verification bans policy makers should legislate this week. None have the remotest connection to research reality.

For the moment, let us put aside the dismality and begin with the few hopeful developments.

University of Surrey criminologist Emily Setty’s research documents several crucial realities that young people understand but aging just-ban-teens officialdom can’t get through their deteriorating-memory, -learning, and -cognition cerebral cortexes mired in the past.

“Young people do not experience online and offline as separate worlds, but as a single, interconnected continuum,” Setty reports. “Social media is not an external danger that young people occasionally visit. It is woven into their everyday social worlds.”

For illustration, watch FX’s “Social Studies,” supposedly presented to raise alarms about young “digital natives.” In fact, it shows the opposite – how Los Angeles’s most-online teens merge active social media and vibrant public lives.

“By cutting young people off from the spaces through which they meet real personal, interpersonal and social needs, a ban risks leaving them unmoored,” Setty concludes. “A recent joint statement signed by more than 40 children’s charities, digital safety experts and bereaved families warns of the danger that blanket prohibitions may isolate vulnerable young people from peer support networks and crisis resources.

“Young people are not passive victims of technology but can identify problems and articulate the kind of digital lives they want… Policy must start from how young people actually live, not from adult fears about technology.”

Policy is going with the fears. In a transparent sham, UK officials are deputizing sycophant “consultants” whose bigotries against transgender students now will be directed to uphold the UK’s destructive anti-youth social media restrictions.

From another angle…

Socialprofiler’s new analysis of 756 million user profiles on Instagram, TikTok, and X, likewise “reveals that generational stereotypes often contradict observed data”:

· Gen Z [ages 19-25] “focuses on social justice issues like LGBTQ+ rights and climate change,” BLM, and “Palestine solidarity,” while

· “Older [ages 46-60] users are more likely to promote political polarization, and to embrace conspiracy theories about UFO, aliens, the Illuminati, the Earth being flat, ‘alternative knowledge’,” and like “right wing” ludicrosities.

This ain’t your (grand)mommy’s and daddy’s “generation gap.” It’s Margaret Mead’s and Alvin Toffler’s 1970s warnings of a future whose elder elites sink into baseless visceral horror at social/demographic/technological change and become societal wrecking balls. More below.

Socialprofiler’s study concludes: “While Gen Z shows higher engagement with progressive social issues and left-leaning political content, older generations demonstrate stronger engagement with traditional partisan politics and party-affiliated content… The left-leaning party category covers a younger demographic generation,” but “the Republican party category is much more represented across all platforms.”

Why are the repressors toward Gen Z so widespread and adamant?

… that all Republicans and 95% of Democrats in power (yes, including liberals who benefit from young people’s activism) spurred on by loud academics and Big-Tech profiteers are salivating to enact a barrage of terrible censor-media and surveil-users bills?

My first, simple explanation has been that ban-teens authorities – Republican and Democrat alike – are transparently furious at Gen Z’s techno savvy and politics, led by young people’s opposition to Israel’s genocide and activism over climate change. The rising frenzy in Congress, states, and countries to ban teenagers from “adult content” on social media and ramp up mass surveillance of internet users has nothing to do with anguished tears over teens’ “mental health.” It’s straight-up political oppression.

Analytical technomedia critics, led by Taylor Lorenz, warn that driving the “protect children!” crusade is government/Big Tech’s greed to harvest ever-more information on users (including children) via “age verification” subterfuges to cement their mass media control and profit. Their repressions are aided by authoritarian right-wingers like the Heritage Foundation and “stupid, stupid liberals” all too willing to succumb to the latest moral panic.

The resulting avalanche of national and state legislation to banish internet anonymity by requiring IDs, facial and biometric scans, and detailed personal information to access “adult content” (a codeword for narrowing accessible sites to those approved by government/Big Tech) are “terrifying” to Americans’ freedoms of expression and privacy, Lorenz declared in a highly enlightening 1/27 interview with Francesca Fiorentini.

Unfortunately, that compelling case appears just the interim. Even more sinister goals underlie today’s repress-youth/censor-surveil juggernaut.

The explosion of nihilism

Past moral panics over youth, including Democrat/Republican anger at 1960s youthful pro-civil-rights, anti-Vietnam-War activism leading the “generation gap” over social and political issues, bitter as they seemed at the time, were nothing like today’s nihilistic apocalysm.

Today’s nihilism is not good-old Sixties “burn-it-down-then-build-something-better” revolutionary spirit. It is “burn-it-all-down-and-let-‘em-die” destruction.

Philosophical nihilists of the past variously called for a reawakening to lead us to nirvana. The huge following of the Doors’ Jim Morrison, the “Age of Aquarius,” Greening of America, The Making of A Counter-Culture, etc., all brimmed with hope for a better world. Naive, simplistic, obnoxious, acidulated (in Morrison’s case, drunken) as these might have been, they were at least hopeful.

Today’s nihilists are nothing like that. They actively seek to abolish humanity’s future wholesale — and say so outright. Diverse, multicultural America in a multi-polar world is their idea of global dystopia. They see nothing to rescue.

Emerging, powerful nihilists are assuming dominance over the West’s discourse and future, openly advancing plans so destructive they stand ready to eliminate constitutional rights, traditions, education, and America itself:

· MAGA/racist-Right nihilists: President Donald Trump’s core “God is on our side” supporters earnestly believe liberal, immigrant, racial, and LGBTQ minorities who “are not like us” aim to exterminate and “replace” them. Their vision: End-of-Times destruction of human civilization, a few “Christian” raptures, everyone else dies horrifically to spend eternity hell-burned.

· Zionihilists: fanatic supporters of Israel, diagramming with MAGA “Christian Zionists,” who actively push to end the United States, UK, and Western democracies to eliminate all pro-Palestine activism. Something about Israel incites more destroy-everything frenzy than any previous cause. Their vision: Greater Israel; everyone else can die.

· Environmental nihilism: climate change and related Green activism threaten the profits and dominance of major corporate interests and demand sacrifices of aging generations who would rather sabotage all of humanity’s future than suffer any diminution in their opulence and convenience. Vision: living out their limited time in comfort; younger/future generations, especially Greta Thunberg, can go die.

· Botarchy nihilism: “freedom cities” (isolated fortresses, like Superman’s Solitude) ruled by a few AI-reconstructed billion/trillionaire behemoths; we 99.99999% excess meat-bodies can die.

One nihilism example of many amid these cheery scenarios: Trump’s energy policy is not about standard free-market maximization of capitalist production. It is harm maximization. Its dictatorial subsidize-coal/sabotage-wind goals are to hasten global warming, vastly increase diseconomies and pollution, ignite wars and chaos, and ramp up environmental and societal destruction. It seeks to assure no future.

Heritage’s Project 2025, the Trump administration’s playbook, codifies concrete, sequenced steps to nihilistic armageddon. End democracy. Embrace fanatic religious adventism. Wreck the economy. Create chaos. Burn it all down. Harm and destroy people’s lives to elevate Ayn Rand’s Superman.

Established Democrats (and the UK’s Labour Party) would seem the natural political counterweight to nihilism, yet their strategy and vision remain stuck in slower, disastrous corporate consensus. Corporate Democrats and Labour fear younger Democratic and Green Party challenges more than they fear Trump and have shown they will forge common ground with far-Rightists to suppress them.

The Democrats’ base of younger but increasingly broad ages (as Martha Stewart’s granddaughter showed, the young can be persuasive with their elders) plus growing mostly-young MAGA defectors are the only real opposition to rising nihilism, which is why Heritage and corporate Democrats prioritize their silencing.

Am I overstating the rising forces of nihilism we see frankly, openly intoning their seemingly insane – it sounds impossible – yet steadily advancing blueprints? Their hardwired no-future schemes – greased by the ID/censor/surveil state/“protect children!” edicts they push every day on CNN, CBS, Fox – can’t really happen… can they?

Authorities are recasting young people’s concerns about climate change, Gaza, social justice, family crises, etc., as “mental illness”

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| January 2026

Let’s start with the clueless condescension, because it gets scarier.

National Public Radio’s 1A (First Amendment)’s lengthy 12/18 “Navigating modern adolescence” managed to dodge ALL the family, community, economic, and global issues teenagers tell major surveys are their biggest worries.

Instead, NPR depicted teen concerns as mere “rabbit holes” social media companies cook up to “monetize” the adolescent’s “brain and a body that are changing dramatically.” “Their stress is not about you,” NPR’s clinical psychologist soothed parents and grownups.

Of course, no one mentioned the Centers for Disease Control’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, the big one everyone talks about but no one cites truthfully. Among teens who suffer depression, suicide attempts, gun carrying, fights, dating violence, etc., the biggest associates by far are parents’ and nearby adults’ psychological abuse (suffered by 62% of teens), violence (35%), “severe” mental health problems (35%), drug/alcohol abuse (30%), and criminal arrests (20%).

Nor did NPR’s experts and host mention the other big, definitive youth survey, Monitoring the Future, which shows poor relationships with parents, not social media use, are the biggest drivers of youthful unhappiness. Teenage girls concerned about climate change and social issues are unhappier than those who shrug them off, MTF’s latest survey finds.

Officials and big interests don’t like young activists; they prefer the shrug-offs. Just tell teens, “It’s not so bad,” NPR’s experts advised parents and clinicians.

Young people have no real problems… just social-media-created “phobias”

“Why ‘peniaphobia’ [fear of being poor] is exploding among young people (and why we should be concerned),” headlines The Independent, London’s liberal-left paper (except on youth issues).

Seven in 10 18-29-year-olds think their generation will not be better or as well off as their parents.

Sure, young people are being “brutally confronted with precariousness: student jobs lost, difficulties paying rent, and recourse to food banks” and “a feeling of economic vulnerability,” the article admits, alongside failing to refute young people’s well-founded fears of poverty. But those aren’t the real problem.

What’s the real problem? You guessed it – “social media platforms,” whose materialistic images “play a major role in spreading this anxiety. On Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat, the most popular content depicts idealized lives: dream vacations, luxury outfits, immaculate apartments, dazzling professional success… A lifestyle that seems out of reach for many, fueling feelings of failure or inferiority.”

Young people’s economic fears are really just an “insidious illness” driven by social media’s shallow “race for success… as if not being able to be first calls their entire life into question,” a child psychiatrist explains. “For some young people, this translates into a constant fear of ‘failing in life’ if they don’t quickly achieve a certain level of material comfort. The constant comparison, combined with fear of the economic future, makes peniaphobia a breeding ground for mental distress.”

“How can we allay (young people’s) fear of being downgraded?” the article asks. Not by leaders actually confronting wealth concentration, unaffordability, unemployment, housing and health costs, environmental degradation, Artificial Intelligence, etc. Perish the thought.

No; experts’ solution is for young people to disconnect from social media, do breathing exercises, and “seek professional help” for their “phobia” to “understand its origins and develop appropriate support.”

Socially conscious young people – especially liberal girls – are mentally ill

NPR’s and The Independent’s hosts and psychologists sound AI-programmed, like ordering, “Siri! Devise a sentence or two dismissing young people’s real concerns.”

However, they’re not the worst manifestation of growing mainstream-liberal pretend-sympathy campaigns that recast social-media “victimized” young people’s – especially young women’s – concerns over climate change, Gaza, social justice, and larger issues as psychoses treatable by counseling and online banishments.

U.S. psychologist Jean Twenge declares Gen Z liberal girls’ social-justice and climate-change concerns are frivolous; psychologist Jonathan Haidt ignores them altogether. Girls are depressed because they’re duped by social media’s shallow looks-and-popularity images and bullying by “mean” teenagers, Twenge says. Haidt insists liberal girls just need to get off social media and perhaps get psychological treatment. Teens only use social media for porn, cyberbullying, spreading bad values, and contact with predators, Haidt and Twenge say.

Both rely on their own prejudices against young people instead of evidence; they both ignore Pew Research, CDC, and other major surveys showing large majorities of teens use social media beneficially and encounter much more meanness from adults at home than online. No matter. Emotional calls to ban teens from social media are quotable and popular.

Right-wingers rejoice in these inchoate attacks on young people, but Democrats are leading the reprogram-youth crusade. Online analyst Taylor Lorenz condemns “dumb, dumb, dumb” progressives and liberals who lead the charge to internet-ban and age-restrict Gen Z teens, potentially crippling their global advocacy for progressive causes.

And it gets still worse

This banish/redirect-youth crusade gets scarier still, as if the bottom has fallen out of human beings’ long, painful struggle toward decency. You can plumb the darkest pits of the savage “manosphere” cave and not find anything approaching the evil expressed by the Obama presidency’s Hillary Clinton and Sarah Hurwitz and roomfuls of applauding billionaire-funded luminaries.

Hurwitz, Clinton and their top-level audiences are deeply upset… not at the “carnage” and “wall of dead children” in Gaza, their own words describing the mass-slaughter by Israeli forces armed by US, UK, and German governments.

No, Clinton and Hurwitz declare with shocking candor (they never thought their words would become public) to approving corporate, political, religious, media, and foundation elites, the villains are social media platforms like TikTok that are “smashing our young people’s brains” by showing real on-the-ground reporting, graphic videos, and embarrassingly direct quotes from the Israeli press and leaders’ openly genocidal statements on Gaza.

Clinton and Hurwitz yearned for a past when “responsible” Western media censored harsh realities from public view. The “constant exposure to graphic images from Gaza social media feeds filled with footage of dead and injured Palestinian children are creating an emotional shock that ‘makes it impossible’ for her to defend Israel’s actions in conversations with young people,” Hurwitz complained.* Jewish schools should ban smartphones and social media until senior year, she said, to — you guessed it — “protect students’ mental health.”

Hurwitz is outraged that young people, especially Jewish students, are “confusing… essential Holocaust education” with the logical ethical principle that “big powerful people hurting weaker people,” as Nazis did to Jews, is wrong, an inhumane atrocity.

No, no, no, Hurwitz insists, the overly-egalitarian claim that the Holocaust lesson is “never again” for all peoples is “anti-Semitic.” Rather, Jewish and other young people must be taught that “big strong Israelis… hurting emaciated Palestinians” (her words) is morally right.

An eye-blink ago,1980s and ‘90s authorities worried that violent movies, rap, and video games were de-sensitizing children and teens to violence and molding a generation of “adolescent super-predators.” All baloney, as it turned out, but now, authorities complain that real images of harsh brutalities from Palestine are over-sensitizing young people’s humanitarian empathies, interfering with official carnages.

More nihilist than the darkest “manosphere” pit

If Western culture retains a shred of the civilized decency we boast about, the likes of Hurwitz, Clinton, and like-minded elites would be ostracized from public discourse. Instead, the reverse is happening: more dictatorial censorship edicts across the West to suppress all dissent – especially by young people, and especially concerning Gaza, climate change, and social justice.

Congressmembers freely declare they forced the sale of TikTok to a pro-Israel mega-billionaire not for “national security” or other made-up subterfuges, but to suppress young people’s pro-Palestine views. The UK and German governments allied with Big Tech (which delightedly exploits government “age verification” mandates to gather users’ private information) likewise are decimating free speech principles to shut down advocacies officials broadly label as “anti-Semitic” and “terrorism.”

The 1984 metaphor is overworked, but still… it’s hard to imagine worse Orwellisms than Clinton’s denunciation of real-death videos from Palestine as “made up” because they challenge official narratives, or the coalescing of government, Big Tech, anti-youth, psychological, and established media interests around sweeping dictates to bar young people and dissidents from vital online resources in the name of preventing “mental illness.” We’re living a dystopian cliche.

*I’d love to see Hillary and Hurwitz debate political scientist Norm Finkelstein, Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, or campus activist Simone Zimmerman on the “facts” of Israel-Palestine. Never going to happen. The elites hide in safe, billionaire-sponsored forums and controlled media like Fox News and Morning Joe.

Social media isn’t driving the teenage “loneliness epidemic”

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| January 2026

Americans of all ages suffer a “loneliness epidemic,” former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy announced in 2023, fostering health damage rivaling smoking “15 cigarettes a day.”

“In recent years, about one-in-two adults in America reported experiencing loneliness,” Murthy lamented. “Across many measures, Americans appear to be becoming less socially connected over time… Instead of coming together, we will further retreat to our corners—angry, sick, and alone.”

Well, that’s dark. We’d better remedy why we’re lonelier.

One big “socially isolating” factor Murthy cites, among several (after all, Robert Putnam’s [in]famous “Bowling Alone” essay first appeared in 1995, when primitive PC dial-up howled at 16 slow Mhz), is our devices: “social media, smartphones, virtual reality, remote work, artificial intelligence, and assistive technologies, to name just a few.”

Psychologist Jean Twenge argues that’s too wimpy: social media, particularly smartphones, are the villain. Severely truncating charts (i.e., chopping off the lower and upper 60 points on a scale of 100 to make trends look wildly more terrifying), she declares: “There’s something about being around another person – about touch, about eye contact, about laughter – that can’t be replaced by digital communication. The result is a generation of teens who are lonelier than ever before.” [Correction 1: online videochats do transmit eye contact and laughter; imagine the panic if they also transmitted “touch.”]

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his After Babel disciples agree. They insist their own generations that grew up in the 1970s and ‘80s before social media were happy, well-adjusted, and never lonely or anxious (“Phones?” one boasted. “No. We had each other.”) [Correction 2: teens of the 1950s-1990s logged plenty of phone time, along with hours of television and radio.]

Haidt sold at least one young core follower on his nostalgia of past adolescent bliss: “a time we never knew,” Freya India laments: now, her psychically tortured Generation Z suffers “anxiety (in) a phone-based world” of “loneliness, yes, but also the grief. The loss. The feeling of wanting to be free from the only world we’ve ever known.”

[This view has always puzzled me. If you feel so terribly oppressed by cellphones and social media, solutions abound: (a) don’t get a cellphone and online connection; (b) use the “off” button; and/or (c) click online tabs to block sites causing loneliness, grief, loss, anxiety, and entrapment (controls so easy even this 75-year-old regularly works them); then (d) go outside and frolic with friends in the soccer field sun and froyo fern patio. Look around. There’s no gun to your head! You don’t have to spend dark lonely months hunched over porn, Nazi, bullying, pro-ana, hate-your-body sites!]

Of course, there would be downsides, the same as if past generations had dumped their televisions, radios, Princess phones, arcade gaming, etc. (which likewise were lambasted as “addicting”). Still, a vocal fraction really seems to feel compelled to use technology to self-destruct.

Haidt also fails to mention that cities, malls, downtowns, etc., were so terrified of the teens of his day that hundreds of jurisdictions enacted juvenile bans and anti-cruising ordinances, culminating in the Clinton (yes, that Bill Clinton; ironic, huh?) administration’s mid-‘90s push for daytime/nighttime curfews so strict that teens would be allowed in public only a few hours most days of the year. And to stop the “touch” Twenge celebrates, thousands of schools, youth organizations, workplaces, etc., adopted “3-foot” personal separation rules.

All this leads to the final irony challenging the massive campaign berating us (and teenagers) that social media (especially smartphones) has horribly rewired today’s youth, the ultimate shocker…

TEENS’ LONELINESS HAS NOT RISEN OVER THE LAST HALF-CENTURY

I graphed all 48 years of Monitoring the Future’s survey, the only one to ask the same question (“a lot of times I feel lonely”) of a consistent number (around 2,000) of high school seniors under the same selection process every year.

The change in high schoolers’ reporting loneliness – using a standard regression trendline to incorporate all years in the series instead of just cherry-picking the years that show what I want – is far below even tiny significance levels (d = 0.047, nothing), as the figures illustrate.

Sources: Monitoring the Future, 2025; Pew Research, 2007-2025.

Demolishing Haidt’s nostalgia, Twenge’s celebration, and India’s illusion of joyous warm-body togetherness prior to the social media/cellphone era, teens’ self-reported loneliness was high in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s – long before social media and cellphones “destroyed adolescence.”

· When Haidt was 17 in 1977, 0% of youths had social media or cellphones, yet 37% of his teen peers reported to MTF feeling “lonely… a lot.”

· In 2024, 95% of teens use social media and cellphones, and 38% report loneliness to the same survey.

Not exactly the Four Horsemen. In fact, teen trends have been better on loneliness and many other indexes than those for both young adults and all adults.

How to rig your advocacy

Note how easily “trends” can be rigged to show whatever an advocate desires by cherry-picking which “before” and “after” years to compare – a disgraceful subterfuge routinely used in pop-academics’ and media discussions of social media:

· Want to show teenage loneliness has skyrocketed due to social media? Compare 2021 (46% reported being lonely) to 2007 (22%).

· Want to show teenage loneliness has plummeted due to social media? Compare 2007 (22%) to 1995 (36%).

Both comparisons are bogus. The first ignores that teens’ social media and cellphone use were already well entrenched by 2007, with only small increases afterward (see first figure). The second comparison tracks true growth in teens’ internet and cellphone use but then picks an arbitrary cutoff year (why 2007? Why not another year?)

Twenge’s exaggerated graphs fixated only on 2007-2019, a period when social media use stayed the same at over 90% and cellphone use rose only from 60% to 80%. By comparing two years in which a lot of teens used social media, Twenge actually shows social media is not the cause of the rise in loneliness she deplores.

Twenge obsesses over smartphones, whose popularity escalated in the post-2013 period. However, treating smartphones as somehow cataclysmic is also puzzling, since a smartphone is just a portable phone with internet capability, both of which teens already had. Further, teens’ loneliness had already increased from 22% in 2007 to 31% by the early 2010s before smartphones proliferated.

It would be interesting to study why (a) teens’ loneliness plunged in the early 2000s (my best guess is Millennials’ aforementioned froyo and soccer, replacing Gen-X mosh pits, mood rings, and pet rocks); and (b) both teens’ and adults’ loneliness rose in the 2010s before the COVID-19 pandemic, got worse during the pandemic, and now may be falling. Authorities’ blinding obsession with social media has quashed investigating more promising explanations for teens.

Perhaps teens’ definition of “lonely” have changed over time

How would a teenager of 1975 who talked on the phone for hours with friends, or a teen of today who videoed, gamed, messaged, and chatted with friends online, answer the open-ended question: “a lot of times, I feel lonely”? Has the rise of broader communications technologies in the internet era – sophisticated videochats and messaging supplanting the waxed string/tin cans, walkie-talkie, post-it note, and voice telephone of the past – changed the standards for describing oneself as “lonely”?

The next substack deals with nuances no one, amid the emotional panic over teens, social media, and mental health, seems interested in exploring.

Part 3: One more – really bad – emblem of progressive podcasts’ grotesque hate speech toward young people

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| December 2025

On Tuesday, Saager Enjeti, the self-described “conservative” co-host on Tuesday’s Breaking Points podcast, declared that the “really sick” emails from Harvard University’s uber-economics professor Larry Summers showing “no moral standards,” seeking pedophilic sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s advice on “exploiting his relationship” to win sex from a reluctant young female mentee, were “literally like teenage behavior.”

This is utterly appalling. If Breaking Points had any normal respect for stopping hate speech, Enjeti would be apologizing profusely to save his job. Hate is not acceptable simply because the group one attacks can’t fight back — some would consider that even more egregious, as evidenced by the Epstein case itself.

Yet, Enjeti got no pushback from co-host Krystal Ball. I can only assume that Enjeti and Ball must regard the teenagers they associate with in their personal lives as sick, depraved, exploitative sex criminals. They certainly couldn’t justify such bigotry with scientific research.

Summers, age 70, former Democratic U.S. Secretary of the Treasury serving President Bill Clinton (!), university president, and holder of a stellar Beltway-Eastern-elite resume, indeed was acting depraved, immoral, crude, pathetic, and criminal.

Not that Epstein wasn’t the ideal choice for such advice. At the time (March, 2019) of Summers’ buddy-buddy emails pleading for Epstein’s “wingman” counsel on how to exploit young women, Epstein’s own resume included a publicly known conviction for sex-trafficking middle-school girls and was continuing his depravities right up to his soon-to-arrive second arrest.

Summers’ execrable behavior was in no way “literally… teenage,” just as it was in no way “literally Jewish” (Summers’ ethnicity) or “literally Indian American” (Saager’s ethnicity) or “literally White suburban middle-aged” (Ball’s).

Imagine the enraged backlash if Enjeti had cited ethnicity rather than “teen” age as the demographic feature characterizing Summers’ and Epstein’s predations.

I worked with hundreds of teenagers over 15 years. What I saw is confirmed in studies, surveys, and statistics. Teenagers, like adults, act in all different ways – something media stereotypers can’t seem to get through their primitive, hate-driven cerebral cortexes.

Of course, there are small fractions of teens who are rapists and exploiters, just as there are fractions of every demographic group who use power and violence to leverage sexual advantage. The 17-year-old alpha richie cynically seducing an outcast 13 year-old, the billionaire “teen model” executive exploiting his older-male privilege to score middle-schoolers, the celebrity director and his casting couch, the 70-year-old topline professor forcing his institutional power on harassed mentees, the politician chasing interns… all are part of a long history of grotesque sexual predators wielding illegitimate personal power, not representatives of their demographic groups.

Why can’t the progressive brain, or the conservative brain on progressive podcasts, grasp this simple, scientific, egalitarian fact?

Note that Enjeti accords older ages individuality. He never stereotypes Epstein’s or Summers’ behaviors as typifying “old men.” To the contrary, he declared – even amid the large numbers of aging elites who participated in and/or continued associating with convicted pedophile Epstein – that it’s “weird” for older people to behave that way. Yet, he turns around and, citing the behavior of older men, mass-trashes all teenagers as depraved sex criminals. Whenever they and liberal-left colleagues don’t like an adult’s behavior, they transfer blame by calling it “juvenile,” “teenage,” etc.

It’s an irony that many men achieve pinnacles of power and prosperity in advanced age when (to paraphrase elder Kurt Vonnegut), “I look like an iguana.” But I think we can buck up and accept the compensating advantages without turning coercive.

You, Enjeti, are the sick one. Ball should be ashamed of her silence letting you get away with anti-youth hate speech day after day and indulging it herself. Why, progressives, do you hate young people – your staunch allies on the left – so relentlessly?

Progressives’ brainless disdain for young people, Part II

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| December 2025

They’re at it again. Consider this my self-therapy.

A day after posting my complaint about progressives’ post-election return to trashing the young people who most vigorously support progressive causes, I made the mistake of listening to Bitchuation Room’s Francesca Fiorentini (age 42) and Majority Report’s Emma Vigeland (age 31) prove once again, with the latter’s nasty quips, why I ended my subscription to Majority Report a year ago.

Sabotaging their progressive takes, Vigeland’s and other leftist podcasters’ rants against young people are as crazed and bigoted as any MAGA ranting against transgenders, inner-citians, and dark-skinned immigrants.

(Vigeland is just one mooer in the herd, as I’ve pointed out. Breaking Points’ sorta-conservative Emily Jankowski demeans the young as suffering “undeveloped brains;” sorta-conservative cohost Saager Enjeti berates them as criminals and online degenerates; definitely-leftist cohosts Ryan Grim and Ball dismiss the young as social-media-duped groypers; Kyle Kulinski constantly sneers the young are “black-pill” 4chan morons; Hysteria’s Erin Ryan and Alyssa Mastromonaco demean young adults’ “undeveloped frontal lobes” and “not-good ideas;” Bitchuation Room’s Francesca Fiorentini berates the young as social-media brain-rotted Nihilistic Violent Extremists; on and on.)

Vigeland’s two dumbest comments this week (after she and Fiorentini admitted young people are the vanguard of liberal-left causes like Palestinian rights) were to insist that young people have “undeveloped brains,” and that older progressives such as herself enjoy the privilege to graciously expect “young people,” namely “young men,” to “apologize” for supporting Trump.

Let me repost – again, wearily – the networks’ definitive 2024 election exit poll of 23,000 voters the Vigelands and other progressive podcasters of the world should damn well know about or have the decency to shut up if they don’t:

Table 1. Who voted for Trump in 2024?

Source: CNN (2025).

The claim that “young men” are Nazi/MAGA/rightists whose repenters need “forgiving” by progressives (who Vigeland gave attention to after complaining that “young men” get too much media attention) is conceited, anti-youth hate speech.

Now, it is true that men ages 18-29 did vote for Trump by a whopping 1 point (more recent polls and elections show young men moving rapidly to the left), while Vigeland’s female age eschewed Trump by 15 points. However, young Whites voted against Trump more than older Whites, including Vigeland’s own 30-44 age group.

But if Trump-voting is the sin requiring penance, look at the ages/sexes from which Vigeland should be demanding apologies: all Whites over age 30; men age 45-64 (the age of Vigeland’s co-host, Sam Seder), men age 65+, men age 30-44, Latino men age 45-64, women age 45-64, and only then, men age 18-29… along with 41% of her own cohort.

But liberal/left commentators do not collectively vilify older ages and their “deteriorated brains” for right-wing proclivities. By Vigeland’s logic, every cohort, including her own, requires forgiveness by women ages 18-29, the most anti-Trump age demographic.

NO! The problem is NOT “undeveloped brains”

Leftist FDR said young people’s ideals were the key to improving the world. Conservative Churchill said the young have hearts but not brains. By today’s liberal/left “development” dogma, the young have no heart and no brains, yet vigorously support leftist causes.

Why do so many progressives flock to the “brain development” argument (a throwback to 19^th century biodeterminism) when youth rights and socioeconomic arguments are vastly more liberal and fact-based?Do progressives listen to their own podcasts? Are they saying progressives have “less developed brains” and are unable to understand consequences? Are they saying progressive ideas are “not good”?

The “brain development” myth (originally concocted 30 years ago to win lighter sentences for a handful of juvenile murderers) was refuted in the 2010s by the demise of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) brain-scanning on which the 1990s-era “science” was based, and the massive improvements in Gen Z behaviors demolishing the myth of the “risk taking” adolescent. Unfortunately, it still hangs on among interests like the Sentencing Project that should know better.

In fact, there is no “developed brain;” the brain changes throughout life. Biodeterminists could blame podcasters’ anti-youth bigotries on their over-30-age loss of memory and learning genes and decline in cognitive capacity. But that would be unfair.

Now, the big question prompting current idiocies

Are Jeffrey Epstein and ilk evil, depraved exploiters? YES.

Not because the brains of the teenaged females he recruited lacked the “developmental” capacity of his mature, 50-aged male brain to make reasoned decisions – that’s as ludicrous as it sounds.

Rather, Epstein’s criminality derives from gross power imbalance. Society arbitrarily awards his aging-male status vast resources, rights, and power that are denied to young people. Epstein’s recruiters made the imbalance even more exploitable by targeting impoverished, abused girls with few options rather than, say, trolling middle schools in toney Palm Beach (median income, $175,000). I once taught at an upscale alternative high school. The students there would never be sex-trafficked; they enjoyed far better choices.

A real progressive argument for youth

Brain development is not the problem, as the vast differences in risk by teens of differing poverty levels and family abuses show.

The real reason American society has no right to punish teens like adults for similar actions is because American society accords teens vastly fewer legal rights, control over their environments, economic wealth, and independence than adults – a crucial, ignored point Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy made in his famous Roper v Simmons opinion restricting the juvenile death penalty.

The best analyses show there is no “developmental” hierarchy, at least not between ages 12 and 70 or so. Adolescents have more flexible brain physiology with more open synapses affording broader ranges of thinking, while over-25 grownups have more efficient, “pruned” neural pathways promoting specialization. These types of thinking – general tendencies, not hard wirings – ideally work together to fashion societies able to meet changing conditions with innovation and focus.

Traditional wisdom and experience were vital to survival in tribal cultures. Now, expanded thinking is crucial to survival across global, long-term dimensions. Diverse ways of thinking are needed – the experiences of immigrants adapting to new cultures, of young people more adept with emerging technologies and ways of living together, and older people who bridge past and present. To call one kind of thinking “inferior” or “undeveloped” (as right-wing biodeterminists and too many progressives do) sabotages the diverse perspectives globalizing future-facing societies demand.

Human societies have been proving for millennia that they will not protect young people against predation, other than by ineffective supervision regimes restricting mainly girls’ lives. The confused, belated, repressed response to Epstein is only the latest example, and only among the rare cases that become known.

The remedy is for young people, whose behaviors in Gen Z are now healthier than those of older ages, to assume the power and resources to protect themselves. That remedy is sabotaged by progressives’ baseless insistence that young people have inferior “undeveloped” brains and bad thinking.

Progressives’ rising contempt toward young people is very disturbing. It shows that even among those professing respect for science and egalitarian values, the liberal-left simply indulges self-flattering myths to demean a young constituency whose support they depend on. That truly is bad thinking.

Progressives loved young people after Democrats’ November 4 sweep … for a whole week

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| November 2025

Progressives should thank whatever god(s) they praise that young voters ignore the destructive trashings liberal-left podcasters spew about them day after day.

Young voters, including young men, led the November 4 election’s stunning sweep by Democrats, not only voting far more progressive but sometimes (as in New York City) overruling more conservative older voters. Progressives were delighted.

Network exit polls show 78% of voters ages 18-29 voted for Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as New York City mayor; 60% of voters age 45 and older voted AGAINST him.

Similar margins reverberated across other elections. In New Jersey and Virginia statehouse races, seven in 10 under-30 voters went Democratic, compared to tossup margins among voters 45 and older. In California, a thundering 80% of 18-29 year-olds voted for the Democrats’ our-turn-to-gerrymander countering Texas Republicans’ we-started-it-gerrymander, heavier than older voters’ “yes” voting (in today’s California, even old White men are liberals.)

In California and New York City, young men and young Whites both voted more progressive than women over age 30, and much more than men over 30 (liberal/left podcasters’ agemates).

No matter. November 4 is already forgotten.

I follow progressive podcasts daily, with mixed mental health consequences.

Right-wingers’ hatreds toward minorities, immigrants, non-binaries, etc., are baseless bigotries, but at least berating their liberal opponents makes political sense. In baffling contrast, progressives’ hatred against young people, their natural allies, is brainlessly factless and self-destructive.

The vilest epithets in the progressive vocabulary are not “MAGA” or “fascist,” but “juvenile,” “young,” and “teenage.” Leftist youth-hating bashers include both those who seem to resent their own kids and those who cast their teenagers as unique Wunderkinder.

After November 4’s stunning victories, it took just a week for progressives’ neanderthal anti-youth rage to resurface. Breaking Points’ Krystal Ball and her husband, Secular Talk’s Kyle Kulinksi, couldn’t restrain their animosity. “Young men” ape groyper Nazi Nick Fuentes, Ball recited for the millionth time, adding that “young men” were an important part of the Trump coalition.

No, they weren’t. Men under age 30 comprised a whopping 7% of Trump’s total vote, exit polls showed. Ball’s own cohort, women age 30-44, gave Trump a much larger share.

Later on, Ball and cohost said Trump won “young people.” No, he didn’t. He lost among voters under age 30 by a landslide 11 points.

Why do progressives keep hashing and rehashing and rerehashing such destructive falsehoods? Why do they keep insisting “young men,” “young conservatives,” “young people,” whatever stereotype du jour pops into their heads, are Nazi-Fuentes America Firsters? Why is the liberal/left so obsessed with Fuentes (they complain about him nearly every damn day) when dozens of right-wing podcasters have far more older followers?

The only thing I can figure is that commentators from centrist Ezra Klein leftward to Ball and Kulinski would be delighted to hound young people into really supporting Nazis and MAGAs so they could smugly moralize against youthful stupidities and blame their favorite youth-corrupting villain, social media.

Conceit plays a big part. Progressives routinely pretend their older ages are more benignly liberal, tolerant, and disciplined than savage younger ones. Kulinski puffs up his Millennial generation as history’s most enlightened and liberal. No, they’re not. EVERY survey, poll, election, statistic, and science resoundingly shows Millennials are more conservative and worse-acting than Gen Z by every measure – crime, violence, shootings, overdoses, suicides, politics, etc.

For example, Kulinski’s own demographic, men ages 30-44, supported Trump in 2024 by a 7-point margin, and men ages 45-64 by a 20-point rout. Yet, Kulinski and fellow podcasters incessantly blame the small fraction of young people who follow “manosphere” sites for Trump’s victory, not his own “30-age men,” “older men,” and “older people” demographics who actually were responsible.

Kulinski’s hatred toward young people is so intense he actually spits. In his 11/11 podcast, he raged against “a lot of young men” in “sixth grade” he slanders as “little Andrew Tate demon wannabes treating women like shit” who need a “stern father figure in their life who can put them in their place and tell these fuckin’ snot- little brat weasels, you’re acting like a prick and no one likes you and is ever going to like you…” on and on, Kulinski’s creepy recapitulation of MAGAs’ Freudian daddyfyings of Trump. Put down the vape and take your own oft-dished advice, Kyle: shut the eff up.

Ephebiphobia is just another bigotry

The unwritten liberal-left rule seems to be that older subgroups can be berated for what they do, but young people as an entire group deserve mass condemnation for who they are.

Progressives understand Sociology 1 fairness when applied to older groups with power: entire demographics are not responsible for the acts of their individuals or subgroups. All Jews are not to blame for what Israel does. All older people are not guilty for Trump’s barbarities. Yet, the liberal-left suddenly abandons that principle when it comes to young people: all Gen Z must be held collectively guilty for one 20-age shooter, a Nazi groyper cult, a youthful cyberbully.

While leftist podcasters do berate commentators with older followings, the left’s mass-villification against young people as a demographic contrasts starkly with their nuanced individualization of their own grownup ages. For example, leftists’ rightly condemn elite middle-aged and elder luminaries, including President Trump, who persisted in close associations with financier Jeffrey Epstein long after his conviction as a pedophile trafficker and even as they knew Epstein was continuing his sordid behaviors – in fact, many top-level leaders were directly involved in them. Yet, progressive anger at these “disgusting,” “depraved” elites has not devolved into blaming “older men” as a demographic.

Progressives’ also bafflingly refuse to highlight stunningly positive facts about Generation Z, such as the 85% plummet in young-age crime, the 50% drop in youthful gun violence, or the facts that today, persons under 25 account for disproportionately tiny fractions of drug deaths, suicides, crime, violence, and terrible voting as they became America’s most racially diverse, multicultural age.

The more the young affirm leftist values of safety and multiculture, the more the liberal-left rants against the young and insists the opposite is true. Kulinski’s, Ball’s, and other progressives’ mass-blaming of “manosphere” and Fuentes-enamored “young men” resembles MAGA’s mass-blaming of “antifa” for everything they don’t like.

Kulinski cited (and re-cites) one New Jersey gamer who had been suspended from school for child pornography, then stalked, swatted (harassed), and brutally murdered two teen girls as an all-American baseball-loving cherub whose motive (which authorities still have not announced) is entirely explained by the boy’s fleeting mentions of rightist celebrities.

Where did progressives’ hatred toward the young come from?

The rising, irrational animosity of the liberal-left toward young people over the last half-century derives from two principal realities: (a) today’s over-25 generations are seriously messed up (drugs, mental illness, crime, narcissism, family chaos, political phobias); and (b) young people are becoming steadily darker in skin color, driving racialized fears liberals are forbidden to express as such, leading to fixating on young age (i.e., “youth violence” in politician/media discourse means “too many Black people on the street”; “juvenile crime” means “Black crime”; etc.)

None of that is acknowledged. Breaking Points’ sorta-conservative Emily Jankowski demeans the young as suffering “undeveloped brains;” sorta-conservative cohost Saager Enjeti berates them as criminals and online degenerates; definitely-leftist cohosts Ryan Grim and Ball dismiss the young as social-media-duped groypers; Kulinski constantly sneers the young are “black-pill” 4chan moron types; Hysteria’s Erin Ryan and Alyssa Mastromonaco demean young adults’ “undeveloped frontal lobes;” Bitchuation Room’s Francesca Fiorentini berates the young as social-media brain-rotted Nihilistic Violent Extremists; on and on.

Is it really over-30 brains that are incapable of rationality?… the deterioration in aging progressives’ thinking – the loss of memory and learning genes, the decline in cognitive capacity that comes with uncritically indulging echo-chamber mindsets. I know I’m losing it.

But even amid different, lesser unfairnesses, sarcastic critics of over-70 leaders as all brain dead concede individuality. Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, and other octogenarians retain cognitive marbles. Setting some upper “age limit” for public service to balance absurdly arbitrary younger-age limits is just more generalized bigotry.

Progressives have deteriorated alarmingly since 1936, when President Franklin Roosevelt gave intellectually respectful, honest addresses to young people. Imagine if a politician today tossed consultants and big-donors aside and said the kind of things FDR said (worth quoting at length):

“You who fill this great armory tonight represent a cross-section of millions of young people who have come to maturity since 1929. You are the symbol of young men and women living in every State of the Union, affiliated with every political party and belonging to every so-called stratum of society.

The world in which the millions of you have come of age is not the set old world of your fathers. Some of yesterday’s certainties have vanished; many of yesterday’s certainties are questioned. … The facts and needs of civilization have changed more greatly in this generation than in the century that preceded us.

I need not press that point with you. You are measuring the present state of the world out of your own experiences. You have felt the rough hand of the depression. You have walked the streets looking for jobs that never turned up. Out of that have come physical hardship, and, more serious, the scars of disillusionment.

The temper of our youth has become more restless, more critical, more challenging… wanting to know what we propose to do about a society that hurts so many of them… You have a right to ask these questions—practical questions. No man who seeks to evade or to avoid deserves your confidence.

Many older people seem to take unmerited pride in the mere fact that they are adults. When youth come crashing in on them with enthusiasms and ideals, they put on their most patronizing smiles, and pat the young man or the young woman on the shoulder, and in a worldly wise sort of way send them out with what they call their blessing. But—as every young person knows—that is not a blessing; it is a cold shower. What they have really said to you is this: “You’re young. Enjoy your enthusiasms and your ideals while you can. For when you grow up and get out in the world you will know better.”

And the tragedy is that so many young people do just that: they do grow up and, growing up, they grow away from their enthusiasms and from their ideals. That is one reason why the world into which they go gets better so slowly.

… It is clear that many of the old answers are not the right answers. No answer, new or old, is fit for your thought unless it is framed in terms of what you face and what you desire, unless it carries some definite prospect of a practical down-to-earth solution of your problems.

… You are young enough in spirit to dream dreams and see visions—dreams and visions about a greater and finer America that is to be; if you are young enough in spirit to believe that poverty can be greatly lessened; that the disgrace of involuntary unemployment can be wiped out; that class hatreds can be done away with; that peace at home and peace abroad can be maintained; and that one day a generation may possesses this land, blessed beyond anything we now know, blessed with those things—material and spiritual—that make man’s life abundant. If that is the fashion of your dreaming then I say: “Hold fast to your dream. America needs it.”

Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama owed their elections to young people, yet – on the crass advice of the worst person on earth, Rahm Emmanuel – betrayed them at every turn, blaming the young for every social problem from crime, shootings, and drugs to welfare; backing repressive policies from harsh day-night anti-youth curfews to bans on contraceptive access; all while doing nothing to help them beyond accidental serendipities and scattered graduation-speech platitudes.

It’s time for generational improvement. Whether the young, given power, would run things better is legitimately debatable, but it’s time to find out. What we do know from painful reality is that sluggish, aging brains harboring fears and prejudices cannot govern changing multicultures.

FDR remains right 90 years later: America needs more undeveloped frontal lobes.

If we really want to deter suicide and self-harm, we should prescribe social media to teenagers, not ban it

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| November 2025

The anti-teen-social-media case keeps falling apart even as it peaks politically.

Girls report feeling more “sad or hopeless” (53%) than boys (28%) do, the 2021 and 2023 Centers for Disease Control surveys show. Authorities and media commentators, in psychologist Jean Twenge’s typical claim, declare girls’ rising depression, suicides, and self-harm are just because…

“…social media provides an endless way for other kids to be cruel, they can never achieve the perfect bodies they see on Instagram, they are constantly judged for their appearance in the endless selfies they are compelled to post, unknown adults can sexualize them, they are continually stressed about how many likes they’re going to get, and some social media accounts glorify (and even instruct about) self-harm.”

We get it. Twenge thinks teenage girls are stupid, vain, mean, and shallow. That is not at all my experience working with teenagers for 30 years in family, community, and wilderness programs and school/university settings, but Twenge’s stereotype is common. Her rant offers zero evidence, which seems to enhance, not dampen, the media’s adoration.

Let’s consider its basic statistical case:

· 59% of girls who use social media frequently daily or more report chronic sadness, compared to 49% of those who use social media less often (boys’ comparable figures are 31% and 27%).

· Of the 22% of girls who are bullied online, 77% report persistent sadness, 29% report a suicide attempt, and 13% report self-harming, much higher percentages of mental distress than reported by the unbullied.

Twenge and others insist that mere “positive correlation” no matter how limited, selective, and “small” is all that’s required; social media must be the problem. Don’t look any further. What else could girls possibly be sad about?

The huge factor Twenge leaves out

Here’s one hint from the same girls on the same survey. Of the 22% of girls who report being bullied online (cyberbullied):

· 84% ALSO report being bullied (emotionally abused) at home by parents and household grownups,

· 59% have parents with “severe” mental health problems,

· 50% have parents who abuse drugs/alcohol, and

· 48% have violent parents who hit, beat, slapped, kicked, etc., their kids and/or each other.

Of the 12% of boys who report being cyberbullied:

· 78% ALSO report being emotionally abused at home by parents and household grownups,

· 45% have parents with “severe” mental health problems,

· 42% have parents who abuse drugs/alcohol, and

· 46% have violent parents.

Funny, Twenge and others who incessantly deplore social media, cyberbullying, and girls’ mental troubles never mention these crucial contexts.

This dereliction is unconscionable, since the 22% of girls who are bullied online who also are among the 70% who are abused by grownups at home suffer the most severe mental health problems themselves (84% of these multi-bullied girls report chronic sadness, one-third have attempted suicide, 14% self-harm… can you blame them?). How can authorities simply dismiss this multiple tragedy?

I keep talking about this because others won’t

As dissected repeatedly on this substack, the statistical flaws in social-media-blamers’ simple “correlation equals causation” argument are threefold: (a) their correlations of social media use and mental health are woefully weak, barely “small” in effect; (b) it is confounded by a reverse correlation; that is, depressed teens use social media more; and, worst of all, (c) it suppresses far more important factors in teens’ lives that cause sadness.

Twenge and others’ negligible social-media effect sizes result from their exclusion of a broad set of factors – parents’ and adults’ abuses, violence, drug/alcohol problems, poor mental health, and jailing – the 2023 CDC survey shows are absolutely critical to those seeking a true teen mental health picture.

My last few postings analyze the effects of parents’ drug/alcohol abuse, which multiple measures show has soared over the last 15 years to a staggering 5.5 million hospital overdose emergencies and deaths among parent-aged adults in 2024. The CDC’s survey found 34% of girls and 25% of boys reported drug/alcohol abusing parents.

Suddenly, the whole perspective shifts

Tables 1-6 do something no other analysis does: they divide the effects of teens’ social media use (as defined by the CDC) into two categories: those with parents who abuse drugs and/or alcohol, and those whose parents don’t. The first 3 tables show raw percentages.

Source: CDC 2024.

Three-fourths of girls and nearly half of boys whose parents abuse drugs/alcohol suffer serious sadness, compared to fewer than half of girls and one-fourth of boys whose parents don’t abuse drugs/alcohol (Table 1). Sadness is somewhat more prevalent among teens who use social media more.

Complications follow. When it comes to suicide attempts and self-harm requiring medical attention – much worse than simply being sad – parents’ drug/alcohol abuse is a major associate. Girls who use social media often are at much LESS risk than girls who rarely use social media. Boys and teens whose parents don’t abuse drugs/alcohol show more ambiguous results for suicide attempt, but the self-harm pattern is clear: both sexes show substantially LESS risk the MORE teens use social media, regardless of whether their parents abuse drug/alcohol (Tables 2, 3).

That’s startling

Both girls and boys who use social media more are somewhat sadder. Yet, these sadder, social-media-frequenting girls are much less likely to attempt suicide and to harm themselves than social-media-avoiding girls. A similar, weaker pattern is found for boys.

You can do the math from the table. Among sadness-prone girls with drug/alcohol abusing parents and who rarely use social media, 45% go on to attempt suicide and 1 in 6 self-harm. Among corresponding girls who often use social media, just 29% go on to attempt suicide and 8% self-harm. Boys and teens whose parents don’t abuse drugs/alcohol show a similar progression – more social media use seems to deter really bad outcomes.

You’d think authorities would be falling over themselves to understand what mechanism connected to social media use is associated with deterring girls in particular from going on to rash acts. We want to prevent suicide and self-destructive behaviors, right? (…right?)

That not one major authority mentions this startling fact shown their own official CDC survey documents tells us how dishonest the entire teens-and-social-media discussion has become.

How important are these factors?

It isn’t just raw percentages or “statistical significance” that matter; far more important is how much relative influence different factors have on teens’ mental health.

Tables 4-6 show the odds ratios (which compare the odds of an event happening to the odds of that event not happening) for 3 outcomes – teens’ sadness, suicidality, and self-harm – and 2 potential causes: social media use, and parents’ drug/alcohol abuse.

Source: CDC 2024.

An odds ratio of 1 denotes no effect; below 1, a reverse effect. For most social science work, weaker odds ratios of 0.7 to 1.4 shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Even odds ratios of 1.4 up to 2.5, or 0.7 down to 0.4, indicate only small effects. That smallness, not the mere fact of statistical significance (that is, the 95% confidence intervals in parentheses are both higher or both lower than 1.00), ethically should be reported as the main finding.

At odds ratios of 2.5, and especially 4.0 or higher (or below 0.4, and especially 0.25), we sit up and take notice. These are medium and strong effects. You can start to claim a real finding (always couched as, “merits further investigation…”).

Odds ratios can be used to calculate Cohen’s d, the standard statistic of “effect size.” It has its own distribution. Let me speak plainly:

· d below 0.20, you got nothin’, shut the hell up;

· d = 0.20 to 0.50, small, you ain’t found much;

· d = 0.50 to 0.80, medium, use your indoor voice;

· d = 0.80 or above, start shouting.

In the upper lefthand corner of Table 4, girls who use social media frequently are 1.56 times more likely to suffer serious sadness compared to girls who use social media less. The odds that the true proportion falls between 1.35 and 1.81 are 95%, which is “significant.” However, this translates into a d value of 0.25, barely above “small.”

You’ve just seen the entire statistical case that social media harms teens’ mental health; in fact, my numbers are more generous than most studies find.

It’s downhill from here

The blame-social-media mob might be able to whisper that social media might be weakly associated with more sadness in some girls, pending investigation into multiple factors, but is far below the level needed to recommend policy.

Otherwise, the blame-social-media endeavor is a hoax – especially when we get to the important stuff like suicide and self-harm. Social media use has no effect on suicide attempt and actually appears to help deter self-harm.

However… parents’ drug/alcohol abuse? Consistently, the negative effects on teenagers’ mental health are worth talking, and sometimes shouting, about.

Usually, a regression analysis just confirms odds-ratio findings. Here, stepwise regression comparing the effects of two independent causes (social media use and parents’ drug/alcohol abuse) on three dependent outcomes (teens’ sadness, suicide attempt, and self-harm) rejects social media use as a significant factor in all 3 cases and leaves only parents’ drug/alcohol abuse (p=0.000 for all outcomes).

It’s no contest

The CDC’s results, and mine here using the CDC’s definition of social media use, are very similar. Parents’ drug-alcohol abuse is so dramatically more important in influencing teens’ sadness, suicide attempt, and self-harm that blaming social media is a waste of time.

It’s important to recognize the CDC survey further shows the teens most at risk of poor mental health suffer not just one family issue, but an average of 2-3 serious parental and family risks, which diminishes social media below “nothing” as a cause of poor mental health.

The only way to elevate social media use even to minimal importance as a factor in teens’ mental health is by arbitrarily excluding parents’ troubles from analysis. Even then, social-media-blamers typically produce anemic d values of around 0.20 at best, which they wildly ballyhoo to permissive journal editors and gullible politicians and media editors as apocalyptic proof that “social media is destroying a generation.” Except for a few media-vulnerable teens and adults who do need help, the social-media panic is descending into destructive fraud.

Why do teenaged girls have such low rates of suicide and drug death?

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| November 2025

Teenaged girls report much more sadness than boys or grownups. Yet girls are vastly safer from suicide and self-inflicted death. What are we missing here?

Thirty years ago, sociologist Meda Chesney-Lind deplored the “criminalization of girls’ survival strategies” by authorities who callously ignored violent and sexual abuses inflicted on girls, then forcefully stepped in to arrest and confine girls who ran away or “incorrigibly” defied their abusers.

Today’s bizarrely contradictory numbers warn that authorities who ignore widespread abuses and family troubles girls’ suffer are similarly “pathologizing girls’ survival strategies” by mischaracterizing girls’ understandable depression as a teenage “mental health crisis” justifying severe restrictions on teens, including bans and parental controls on vital social media use.

I’ve detailed Centers for Disease Control survey numbers showing how depressed girls from troubled families use social media to reduce their suicide attempts and self-harm. Independent numbers also indicate more serious survival strategies girls – and some boys as well – in difficult circumstances ignored by authorities use to avoid deadly outcomes. Of course, authorities and commentators then pathologize girls’ strategies rather than the conditions that caused them.

We’re getting the teenage “mental health crisis” all wrong – perhaps deliberately so

Among commentators’ many grotesque misrepresentations of suicide and drug overdose is their universal refusal to acknowledge and incorporate the vital fact that teens’ rates, especially for girls, are far below rates of supposedly stable grownups.

The following tables show the CDC’s latest, 2023, estimates of hospital emergency (ER) cases for self-inflicted injuries (self-harm and overdose overlap), along with tabulations of deaths in society from corresponding causes. Teen and parent ages of nearly equal population size are depicted so the numbers can be directly compared:

Female age 10-19

Hospital ER visits: 134,500 for self-harm, 114,300 for overdoses

Actual deaths in society: 724 suicides, 646 fatal drug overdoses

Male age 10-19

Hospital ER visits: 35,900 for self-harm, 66,300 for overdoses

Actual deaths in society: 1,913 suicides, 1,057 fatal drug overdoses

Female age 40-49

Hospital ER visits: 21,800 for self-harm, 114,700 for overdoses

Actual deaths in society: 1,787 suicides, 7,152 fatal drug overdoses

Male age 40-49

Hospital ER visits: 20,800 for self-harm, 240,600 for overdoses

Actual deaths in society: 6,156 suicides, 17,085 fatal drug overdoses

The ratio of self-harm hospital cases to deaths:

Girls age 10-19: 185 to 1

Boys age 10-19: 19 to 1

Women age 40-49: 12 to 1

Men age 40-49: 3 to 1

That is, girls give plenty of warning of distress before killing themselves. In contrast, boys and adult women provide little advance warning. Adult men? practically none.

The overdose ER-to-death pattern is also intriguing:

Girls age 10-19: 175 to 1

Boys age 10-19: 60 to 1

Women age 40-49: 16 to 1

Men age 40-49: 14 to 1

Girls have as many overdose ER cases as adult women, while boys have fewer and adult men the most. Yet, teens register very few deaths from overdoses in society. The adult ER pattern appears to reflect real trends toward more deadly drug abuse, while the teen pattern, especially for girls, reflects more of a warning flag.

One could argue that girls, like Suicidal Tendencies’ inept “Suicidal Failure,” are inclined to dramatic gestures but just aren’t good at killing themselves. However, the opposite is more plausible. We would expect that as inexperienced drug users, teenagers would be more likely than adults to lack physiological tolerance for drugs and to make fatal overdose mistakes.

This may be why supposedly “volatile” teen girls have few suicides and o.d. deaths

It seems likely that girls are far less likely to commit self-inflicted fatality because they are far more likely to seek help, both via greater social media connections and by more dramatic self-harm gestures to get attention and time to deal with their distress. The overdose and cutting harms girls choose are much more forgiving and treatable attention-getters than self-inflicted gunshots, hangings, or jumping off the Golden Gate that tend to win attention posthumously.

The “survival strategy” interpretation helps explain the apparent puzzle that social media use is connected with more depression and sadness among girls, and also with less suicide attempt and self-harm.

Naturally, top authorities and commentators simply fixate obsessively on social media use, exclude all factors related to parental abuses and family problems no matter how compelling, ban all mention of girls’ unexpectedly low rates of suicide and overdose death… and then complete their circular feedback loop by concluding that girls’ own social media use must be what causes their “mental illness” and ER cases.

This GIGO approach results in the pathologizing of girls’ survival strategies. I apologize in advance for the next posting, which will detail the mathematics of social-media versus parent-addiction causalities of both girls’ and boys’ mental health issues.