The happy-sounding “World Happiness Report” is a reactionary anti-youth shill for authoritarian governments and Big Tech

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

Its junk science and repressive recommendations hype social media’s “harm” to adolescents in order to obscure young people’s real issues that threaten corporate/government power.

Just reading the benignly titled World Happiness Report 2026 reveals dozens of fatal flaws, omissions, and biases destroying its credibility so thoroughly that outside refutation seems overkill. But let’s begin.

The World Happiness Report doesn’t even pretend objectivity.

Its executive summary begins: “In North America and Western Europe, young people are much less happy than 15 years ago. Over the same period, social media use has greatly increased.”

So did global authoritarianism, adult opiate abuse, slaughters of children, pandemic shutdowns, polar bears not finding ice, a myriad of causes for worry and unhappiness the report’s hundreds of pages ignore.

Instead, the self-flattering “world’s foremost publication on global wellbeing” declares its narrow fixation upfront: “This report does not attempt a comprehensive synthesis of the academic literature… instead, we started by asking two leading critics of social media, Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch, to lay out their case.”

Apparently fearing insufficient bias, the WHR then adds two more blame-social-media luminaries, Jean Twenge and Cass Sunstein, as lead chapter authors. But somehow, they don’t have room to include any skeptical scholars such as Candace Odgers or Christopher Ferguson refuting the blame-social-media crusade.

The WHR authors then announce their correlation-equals-causation (actually, tiny-correlation-ballooned-into-wildly-exaggerated-causation) method: “We conclude that heavy users of social media are at risk, especially in English-speaking countries and Western Europe… Social media is harming adolescents at a scale large enough to cause changes at the population level.”

What the WHR leaves out is huge

For those impressed by their multi-national samples and slick presentation, consider first what authors omitted from their discussion of “adolescent mental health.”

Nowhere in the massive report can the terms (or equivalents) “child abuse,” “parents’ addiction,” “parents’ violence,” “adult abuses,” “parents’ mental health,” “parents’ criminality,” “family dysfunction,” etc., be found.

The basic variables the WHR excludes are beyond crucial. The US Centers for Disease Control’s analyses of its comprehensive surveys associate parental abuses, violence, addiction, and mental health problems with two-thirds of teens’ poor mental health, 84% of teens’ drug abuse, and 89% of teens’ suicide attempts. Multi-factorial studies that include such factors find they dominate teen problems while social media use is trivial.

The WHR is like a “scholarly study” of Hiroshima’s 1945 mortality that leaves out the atomic bombing.

Omitting vital factors invalidates the WHR on its face

Instead, WHR authors fixate on trivial correlates their own scoring shows explain close to nothing.

“Internet use is associated with several drivers of wellbeing, including trust, perceived social activity, and social connection,” WHR authors begin their truncated analysis. “…Younger generations have faced large declines in interpersonal trust, perceived social activity, system trust, and feelings of safety, leading to sizable predicted declines in wellbeing. Older generations, by contrast, show greater resilience. Improvements in attachment to country and, in some regions, increases in feelings of safety help offset declines in trust, and the stronger causal weight these channels carry for older adults moderates the overall impact.”

The definition of their “problematic social media use” criterion contains elements that overlap with definitions of poor outcomes. Even with this auto-correlation flaw, their analysis’s regression coefficients average 0.15, statistically significant due to the enormous, 300,000-plus sample but barely above random noise in terms of effect size.

Nor do WHR authors consider that maybe the problem is not Facebook or Instagram. Just maybe, valid, real-life reasons – economic attrition, family and social concerns, global mayhem, environmental awareness, etc. – explain why system-subsidized older generations appear “resilient” (authors leave out massive multinational adult opiate epidemics) while “the young experience large changes in key social variables.”

That’s the report’s schtick. Whatever the issue, WHR authors, excluding alternative explanations and shrugging off minuscule effect sizes, insist the problem always must be social media: “Generational differences are widely visible in terms of the happiness gains or losses achieved from heavier use of the internet.”

WHR “findings” are speculative and predictable

Its authors write: “Across nearly all indicators, we observe a substantial deterioration among younger Europeans, particularly among Gen Z in Western Europe. Trust in people and in institutions declined sharply, social meeting frequency fell, and perceptions of one’s own social activity declined even more dramatically.”

Why? Well, authors “suggest” (without analysis): “heightened pressures of online comparison.”

Meanwhile, “older adults increasingly benefit from stable trust levels, improved feelings of safety, stronger attachments to country.”

Why? Authors speculate (without analysis): “Perhaps more purposeful digital use.”

“Younger adults, by contrast, face eroding social capital, shrinking offline social networks, and intensified comparison pressures.”

Why? Authors speculate (without analysis): “Digital environments” and “internet use interacts with these shifts, amplifying vulnerabilities among younger cohorts while offering modest support to older ones.”

Authors then conclude (from statistically trivial findings and without multifactor analysis): “Internet use is most harmful for Gen Z, moderately harmful for Millennials, close to zero for Gen X, and slightly beneficial for Baby Boomers.” Adolescents’ problems “potentially” are “the result of increased social media use among young people, with the effect often found to be more pronounced among girls.”

Could younger generations be having problems because older generations are getting richer as younger ones do worse, with girls bearing the highest poverty rates? Older generations are hoarding resources while younger ones anticipate the brunt of severe climate change, an issue to which girls are uniquely attuned? Older generations are starting wars they send young people to fight? Older generations’ rising drug abuse is endangering young people, especially girls, in families and communities?

These are just a few examples of WHR’s self-flattering recitation. Indulging “perhaps,” “suggesting,” speculating, they return again and again to obsession with social media to the exclusion of vastly more crucial issues and trends.

WHR authors wildly contradict themselves

“Across most regions, adolescents with high levels of problematic (social media) use report higher psychological complaints and lower life evaluation in 2022 than in 2018,” WHR authors declare, deploying “feeling low, irritability, nervousness, and sleeping difficulties” as their measures to evaluate adolescents’ health.

Again, what could possibly be causing that? Abruptly, we get a different answer: “This intensification coincides with the COVID-19 pandemic,” WHR authors admit in a far-down paragraph not repeated in executive or media summaries. Note this bizarrely contradictory paragraph:

“Globally, adolescents aged 15-24 still report higher life satisfaction than adults aged 25 or above…”

[What? doesn’t the entire report blare the young are more miserable?]

“…but the gap is narrowing in Western Europe and recently reversed in North America and Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) due to negative trends for young people. In middle-to-late adolescence (age 15-24), there was a positive 2006-2019 global trend in life satisfaction…”

[What? Isn’t that when so-damaging social media and smartphone use exploded?]

“…which ended with the pandemic, in line with adult trends.”

What? During the eruption in teenagers’ social media use during the 2000s and 2010s, their life satisfaction was high, improving, and paralleled adults’ lower-satisfaction trends… only to decline during the COVID-19 pandemic, along with adult trends.

No matter. WHR authors’ ultimate culprit must always be social media: “One plausible explanation is that the COVID-19 pandemic, which dramatically increased adolescents’ reliance on digital technologies through remote schooling, reduced face-to-face interaction, and expanded online leisure time. These changes may have amplified the psychological and emotional costs of PSMU for adolescents overall.”

In another contradiction, authors go on to admit, ‘way down: “Our study cannot account for bidirectionality, namely that the direction of causality between PSMU (problematic social media use) and wellbeing cannot be disentangled.”

What? Doesn’t the entire report and its PR blame social media for adolescent troubles?

I repeat: the entire WHR is junk. Everyone who considers themselves a scholar owes it to basic academic integrity to distance themselves.

A comic interlude before we turn sinister

WHR authors declare: “Research has highlighted the importance of consulting children directly… Evidence from the health literature further supports children as reliable and accurate reporters of their health and well-being, emphasizing the importance of their self-reported perceptions in understanding their experiences.”

Cue laugh track. The authors (who, like Haidt, must be lobbying for invitations to Davos) demonstrate no interest in what teenagers actually say except when it’s what they want to hear. Here’s yet another pivotal example:

“Compared to light users, a larger percentage of the heaviest users (7+ hours a day) had both the highest level of life satisfaction (10) and the lowest levels (0–4). The same was true for non-users of social media, with higher levels of both very high and low life satisfaction. Thus, there is more variation in life satisfaction among non-users and heavy users of social media compared to light or moderate users. Among girls in most regions, non-users of social media were the most likely to report complete satisfaction with their lives, although in some regions, heavy users were also more likely to report complete satisfaction than moderate users.”

Interesting! Now: why would teenagers who use social media the MOST and those who use social media the LEAST report both the HIGHEST and LOWEST levels of satisfaction compared to teens in the middle reporting moderate social media use?

You’d think mature, brain-developed, critically-thinking scholarly brains would leap at engaging such an intriguing question. Wrong again. The WHR has no use for critical thinking.

That makes me feel like the back-of-the-class kid wildly waving my hand: “I know I know! Call on ME!”

Use the definitive 2021 and 2023 surveys by the CDC (the US’s leading health agency) to divide teens into (a) those who have been abused by violent, troubled parents, versus (b) those raised in non-abusive families. Bingo!

Abusive, screwed-up families drive both more teenage depression/problems and more social media use. The teens in between who use social media moderately, 1-4 hours a day, suffer the fewest abuses and have the fewest problems.

That is why – my turn to speculate – major interests, represented by WHR authors, so strenuously avoid parent and family dysfunction issues. The mammoth, definitive CDC surveys and analyses appear nowhere in the WHR source list, which lists only sanitized, trivial-effect references.

The WHR serves authoritarian and corporate repression

WHR authors find that “low-SES [low socioeconomic status = poor] adolescents bear the greatest costs of compulsive or addictive digital behaviours, while their more advantaged peers are relatively more protected from these harms.”

Naturally, WHR authors fail to incorporate these same SES variables when comparing the happiness indexes of generally poorer adolescent generations to those of generally richer older generations. The authors abjectly obey authorities’ prohibition on teen-adult economic comparisons. Instead, WHR authors ritualistically attribute young-age “unhappiness” — yes, again — to “problematic social media use” and older adults’ “resilience” to “more purposeful digital use.”

Culminating a report whose analyses are drastically self-limited in service to authority are authority-serving policy recommendations.

WHR authors propose to do exactly nothing to ameliorate poverty, raise living standards, confront educational and economic oppression of women, break up global corporations and Big Tech monopolies, and/or forcefully address climate change, war, the adult opiate epidemic, and other global realities critically affecting young people.

Instead, WHR authors recommend mainly psychological interventions: “From a policy perspective, these findings suggest that interventions aimed at improving wellbeing cannot focus solely on individual screen time. Rather, they must address the broader social ecosystem: the decline in trust, the weakening of community bonds, and the highly comparative nature of online environments, especially for young people. Strengthening civic institutions, fostering offline community engagement, and improving digital literacy may help reverse some of these trends. At the same time, thoughtful regulation of social media environments (particularly those that algorithmically amplify comparison and visibility) could play a role in mitigating harmful effects.”

They continue: “Interventions should combine family-level support, school-based digital literacy, and accessible mental health services, while remaining sensitive to cultural and contextual differences in how young people experience and evaluate their lives online. Creating more equitable digital environments will require regulating platforms, as well as strengthening the social resources that help adolescents navigate a highly digitalised and unequal world.”

Basically, WHR authors recommend:

Just restrict teenagers’ social media use while “educating” and psychologically counseling them to accept and “navigate” poverty and inequality. “Regulate” platforms to ban young people from the online information, communication, and expression opportunities they use to challenge the powerful. “Teach” Gen Z to accept inequality and the elite order while strengthening institutions that enforce conformity.

It’s no coincidence the World Happiness Report 2026 echoes exactly the “online safety” repressions pushed by Haidt, Rausch, Twenge, the far-Right Heritage Foundation, Big Tech (X, Meta, Google, Apple, Anthropic, etc.), corporate CEOs, and rising government authoritarians in the USA, UK, Australia, and globally. Their “protect children!” measures feature “age verification” identity schemes that vastly expand the power of Big Tech and Big Government to collect more information to surveil users (especially young users), abolish online privacy, censor information they don’t like, and crush smaller platform competitors.

The WHR is yet another tragedy of today’s academic and institutional capitulation to worldwide authoritarianism. And that is exactly why it will enjoy widespread official acclaim.

Los Angeles mental health authorities and media are hell-bent to convince teenagers they’re terrifyingly suicidal. Why?

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

L.A.’s teens’ suicide rates are 60% below the national average and have plunged 40% since 1990 and 75% since 1970. Yet, LA experts and media frantically strive to persuade teens they’re suicidal.

Suicide, except to end irreversible pain and debilitation, is a tragedy. The best science should be applied to prevent it.

Yet, authorities and media reporters distort suicide by teenagers as a mere commodity manipulable to whatever serves their self-aggrandizement, alarmism, and profit.

Back in 1997, before the Los Angeles Times became the closed-up billionaire-owned mess it is today, I convinced a reporter to write an article on the city’s massive decline in suicide, including among teenagers. Figure 1 illustrates the trend.

Source for figures: Centers for Disease Control, Compressed mortality file, 1968-1998; Multiple cause of death, 1999-2024. Includes certified suicides and suicide-suspected undetermined deaths. Rates for teens are all suicides for under age 20 divided by population age 15-19. Trendlines (dotted) are logarithmic (y = a * ln(x) + b).

I had thought such a massive, encouraging decline would break the press’s rigid negativism on covering teenagers. Was I dumb.

The resulting front-page article began by claiming 2 pre-teen children killing themselves had never occurred before in history. (Tragedies? Yes. New? No. I sent them the oldest vital stats record available showing 3 suicides among L.A. children 9 and younger in 1908. No correction, of course.)

Then followed paragraphs and paragraphs of scary sensationalism about how parents and professionals should panic that bleak music, violent games, television, and baffling “teenage” rashness was driving ever-younger 1990s teens to kill themselves.

Oh, by the way, the final paragraphs murmured, L.A. teen suicide rates HAD FALLEN sharply in recent decades. In short, the article you just read was a crock.

I was furious at the time but, in retrospect, should have been grateful. At least the 1997 article mentioned, albeit at its ass end, that teen suicide was declining. The Times back then (but not now) published op-eds like mine challenging such bad reporting.

My naïve conceit was that genuinely concerned, well-motivated authorities would be eager to study why teen suicide fell so much to… you know… learn what might prevent more. L.A.’s pioneering Suicide Prevention Center founded by concerned professionals had organized a conference at which experts would confab on how to build on these highly encouraging youthful trends. They had to cancel it when only four people registered.

Things got worse

In 2026, the Los Angeles Times spiced its unhinged prose on the “social media addiction” trial (an article Taylor Lorenz dismembered) with a link to another recent piece headlined, “As teen suicide surges…”

The headline led an article stuffed with standard-issue garbage: “In California, teen suicide has been rising faster than in most states”; “the age at which children kill themselves has been falling”; “the same strong social connections long considered protective for girls are now putting them at risk”; “the rate among Black and Asian youths is now higher than among white ones”; on “social media… graphic details and salacious speculation are algorithmically funneled to children”; “school policies may be making things worse”; more “pediatric psychiatrists” are needed; the usual.

Rising? Check. Younger? Check. Girls? Check. Minorities? Check. Pop culture? Check. Schools? Check. More shrinks? Check. The article’s boilerplate nonsense appears in EVERY article about teen suicide going back decades.

All junk

Teen suicide has not been “rising in California.” It is not rising “faster than in other states.”

CDC suicide numbers show that L.A., a giant county with 1.1 million teenagers, now averages around 40 suicides among ages under 20 per year, including 7 among teens under age 15 and 14 among girls. Small numbers like these fluctuate, allowing any unscrupulous player to pick any years to compare to declare whatever they want.

The general trends: rates plummeted from the 1970s to around 2000, went up and down in the 2000s, rose in the 2010s, then fell in the 2020s for both teens and adults (see Figures 1, 2). Normally, analysts would look for trends that affect all ages, such as the 2008 economic crash, 2010s opiate epidemic, 2020-22 COVID-19 pandemic, and massive increase in student debt. But that assumes interest in real causes.

Teen girls’ suicides remain rare, even in a huge metropolis

Back in the early 1970s, around 70 L.A. boys and 50 girls committed suicide every year; in the 2020s’, about 25 boys and 14 girls per year; in between, a general decline with small numbers bouncing around. The larger trends are shown in Figure 3.

The Times article hyped girls’ hospital emergency visits for “suicide attempts.” Yet, nowhere did it (or any other article I can find) ever mention that teen girls are far less likely than males of every age and females of every adult age to commit suicide. A teenager is 2 to 3 times more likely to suffer a parent committing suicide than the other way around, but when have you ever seen an article on that?

None of the experts quoted put two and two together to contemplate whether “suicide attempts” are troubled girls’ way to get attention for severe problems before they result in actual suicide. These are forbidden topics. Rigid press rules ban comparing teens favorably to adults or treating girls as anything other than brainless self-destructors.

Instead, the article declared that “new data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show 1 in 3 teen girls has seriously considered suicide, sparking fears among some suicidologists that the same strong social connections long considered protective for girls are now putting them at risk.”

Unconscionably, the article ignores that the same CDC’s survey showed the biggest reason by far that teen girls attempt suicide and harm themselves is not their “social connections.” It is their parents’ abuses and parents’ “severe” mental health, drug/alcohol, and violence problems in their homes.

Blacks’ and Asians’ suicide rates are not “higher than among Whites.”

That subterfuge results from redefining Hispanics as “white” while just omitting Hispanics – beyond ludicrous in 60%-Hispanic L.A.

In short, the Los Angeles Times story apes the same old lying-press dictates:

· Today’s youth are always bad and getting worse.

· Girls, minorities, and “younger and younger” teens are always driving crises.

· Teens may never be compared favorably to adults or to teens of the past.

· Teen problems must never be connected to adult abuses and troubles.

· Teens must never be portrayed as improving (exception: only if a big interest is positioned to grab credit).

· Instead of citing low teen suicide rates (i.e., that 2,499 out of 2,500 L.A. teenagers will not commit suicide at any time during their teen years), every reporter is required to ritually recite in tones of alarm: “suicide is a leading cause of death among teenagers.” (Of course it is; teens rarely die from cancer, heart disease, COVID, etc.)

Reporters – all reporters – follow these dictates so slavishly they might as well carry criminal sanctions.

The tragedy atop tragedy is that Americans stigmatize suicide as a moral failing. Mental health professionals, politicians, and reporters exploit this stigma by relentlessly presenting suicide as a problem of stigmatized populations like teenagers – especially girls, minorities, and younger ones – and by blaming easy cultural scapegoats rather than popular institutions.

Los Angeles has among the world’s most diverse, dynamic youth whose overwhelmingly encouraging trends deserve tough, fair analysis – not the same-old trashings founded in authorities’ and the press’s ancient press dogmas.

Jonathan Haidt, globally acclaimed expert and policy guru on teenagers, mental health, and predators, never mentions Jeffrey Epstein. That’s weird.

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

Even weirder: Haidt’s crusade to ban teens from social media is enthusiastically backed by Big Tech, Big Money, and Big Government.

In societies that actually cared about children and teenagers’ safety and mental health, politicians, professionals, academics, and commentators would focus 99% of their attention and policy energy on preventing (a) family abuses, addiction, violence, mental disturbance, etc., and (b) institutional abuses in schools, churches, sports, youth programs, and international rings often run by elites. These affect millions of young people and kill thousands.

Instead, 99% of attention is fixated on social media and smartphones, which a mountain of studies and every analyst from psychologist-statistician Christopher Ferguson to independent researchers to blame-social-media activists themselves agree that scientifically, social media is a trivial factor in teens’ mental health. Even assuming the very few but constantly highlighted tragedies occurred solely because teens went online, social media’s danger to youths is vastly smaller than dangers elsewhere in society.

While these upside-down priorities are relentlessly promoted by psychologists Jonathan Haidt, Jean Twenge, and fellow crusaders, the fault lies with governments and powerful interests who elevate their blame-teens-and-social-media crusade — which conveniently serves as a distraction from their own derelictions.

Reciprocating, “protect our children” crusaders like Haidt and Twenge observe Harpo-like silence* on the mammoth Jeffrey Epstein scandal in which scores if not hundreds of elite predators credibly appear to have victimized hundreds to thousands of children, teenagers, and young women – a zillion times more from this one scandal alone than anything attributable to social media.

Instead, Haidt, Twenge, and favored politicians break their arms patting their own backs for their “courageous attack against Big Tech” to “save our children!” from lurking online predators and “addictive algorithm” corruptions.

Cue laugh track

In truth, Big Tech, global elites, and governments, far from opposing these “attacks,” enthusiastically spend tens of millions of dollars pushing Haidt’s teen social-media bans and “age verification” schemes.

Governments along with Apple, Meta, X, Anthropic and other tech and AI moguls eagerly champion the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) that Haidt pushes. These biggies contribute millions of dollars to front groups like the Meta-funded Digital Childhood Alliance and join with far-right lobbies like Heritage Foundation to promote passage of KOSA, the App Store Accountability Act, and “age verification” mandates.

That is, the child-exploiting, child-corrupting, child-endangering Big Tech demons join saintly anti-social-media crusaders in Big Love for “child protection” laws.

All just weird, don’t you think?

Why on earth would Big Tech and AI agree to decimate the foundational internet law’s Section 230, which shields online platforms from legal action for individual users’ content? Why would they invite regulation on themselves?

Because, you see…

“Child safety” legislation like KOSA actually protects Big Tech by shifting blame to teenagers depicted as so weak, corruptible, and liberal (keep that last to a whisper) that they require authoritarian crackdowns to restrict what they see and do online.

To punish teens, KOSA and purported “age-gating” measures vastly expand the power of Big Tech, elite interests, and increasingly authoritarian governments to:

· Exploit “protecting children” as a smokescreen for stopping young people from accessing information government and Big Interests disapprove of, arbitrarily labeled “adult content;”

· Suppress Gen Z’s progressive young people from using social media to organize activism around issues like climate change, social justice, and Gaza;

· And the biggie: harvest vastly more profitable data on users, especially children, via “age verification” requirements mandating hugely expanded personal identification details.

Metering the oxygen

Epstein and institutional scandals also present a potential political problem for Haidt and “ban teens from social media” crusaders.

Public outrage at the burgeoning Epstein scandal embroiling global elites in an expanding web of predation and corruption is causing shamings, resignations, and arrests afflicting tech, corporate, academic, political, and royal luminaries, even threatening to topple entire governments.

Meanwhile, Haidt has socially climbed from NPR interviews and TED talks to World Economic Forum soirees. He has every incentive not to offend 10- and 11-digit billionaires at Davos, where Epstein is a bit of a sore subject.

So, Haidt and Twenge are silent* on mega-predator Epstein’s decades of victimizations of teens while pushing a diversionary blame-social-media (translation: blame those leftist teenagers) tactic. Haidt’s and big powers’ mutual interest in burying attention to the Epstein predations expose the sinister underbelly of their joint “save children!” crusade.

In turn, power elites celebrate and reward silence on interrelated institutional abuses, an alliance that effectively reverses what governments should be doing to truly protect children.

By “interrelated,” I mean that family and third-party abuses like Epstein’s are tragically connected. Epstein and his modeling-agency/trafficker allies preyed on teens from disadvantaged and troubled families.

That, in turn, should be a mammoth issue in the United States, whose teens tell our leading health survey that 35% of the adults in their households are violent, 30% abuse drugs/alcohol, 40% suffer “severe” mental health problems, and 20% have been jailed.

Again, cue laugh track.

The dilemma is more subtle

Epstein’s and high-level abusers’ victimizations of children and teenagers definitely garner politician and media attention. Ordinarily, Epstein’s predatory prominence should be threatening Haidt’s and ban-teens crusaders’ campaign to dominate headlines and declare social media as the big predatory threat to children.

Suppose – indulge my fantasy for a moment – conscientious leaders who actually cared about young people were shocked by the Epstein scandal into looking at the larger picture and concluded: why are we wasting all our energy on social media? We need to prioritize real-life family, institutional, and global-predator abuses as the big threats to youths’ mental health and safety.

Some logical authorities – I’m really indulging fantasy – might even start questioning why we would cavalierly ban teens from social media when our own major surveys show vulnerable and abused youth in families use social media more for contacts and health.

That is, attention to real threats to children and teens potentially risks slamming the brakes on the raging hegira to blame social media for endangering children and to punish teens with restrictions. Worse, it would put officials’ and institutional derelictions front and center.

That, of course, can’t be allowed.

Unfortunately for young people but fortunately for culture-war crusaders and government and private elites, no one important is interested in opening the worm-can of comparing the mammoth dangers of family, institutional, and related real-world predations to the trivial dangers of social media. Instead, these issues are kept separate while popular “protect children!” schemes are designed to increase government and Big Interest power even more.

That is my theory of the web of otherwise mysterious silences and alliances governing teens, safety, mental health, social media, predators, and Epstein. Figuratively speaking (well, occasionally, literally), no one wants to be pushed off the back of their yacht or found hanging in a cell.

*Repeated searches turn up no cases in which Haidt or Twenge spoke up – even casually – on Epstein. I tried different word combinations. Nothing. If anyone has a citation to the contrary, please forward to me.

Perfect! Right and Left are rigidifying their superficial pet “explanations” for why a mass shooter did what she did

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

Ideological bigots make ONE shooter the poster for Canada’s 100,000 transgender individuals and 5 million teens/young adults long before facts are known.

Back in 2020, 51-year-old alcoholic, arsonist, and police car enthusiast Gabriel Wortman carried out multiple shootings, killing 22 people in Nova Scotia in 2020 – the deadliest shooting rampage in Canadian history.

Strangely, no one argued there was something terribly wrong with middle-aged men, or blamed them for being straight or buying booze, accelerants, and used cop cars.

October 2017

The Canadian government since banned 2,500 types of assault weapons, including the dozens America’s worst mass shooter, 64-year-old heavy drinker and gambler Stephen Paddock, assembled.

Paddock fired more than 1,000 rounds from his hotel room perch at a Las Vegas music festival, killing 60 people, wounding at least 413, and causing 450 more injuries in the ensuing panic.

Recalls satirist Kinky Friedman’s tune memorializing 1966’s University of Texas Tower shooter Charles Joseph Whitman, whose rampage took a leisurely 96 minutes to gun down 45 people with his .36 Magnum, killing 14 (47 total casualties, adding two knife murders back home). No one suggested a crisis among ex-Eagle Scouts, ex-Marines, or men with flat-top crewcuts, though Friedman did warn, “There’s still a lot of Eagle Scouts around.”

Also, “Who are we to say the boy’s insane?” You see, nothing much changed in half a century except that Paddock used far more lethal AR10/15 bumpstocked riflery and took a mere 10 minutes to inflict 473 gunshot and 927 total casualties in Las Vegas.

Strangely, no one argued there’s a crisis among aging adults or called for older people to be banned from guns, drinking, and gambling.

No one, despite this unsettling fact: Paddock’s gunfire killed and injured more people in 10 minutes than are killed and injured in all school shootings in 5 years. That shocker is one gun-rights and gun-control lobbies alike absolutely ban from ever being mentioned in American media and political forums.

February 2026

Now, a mass shooting by Canadian 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar killing 9 and injuring 25 is generating the next predictable round of sweeping generalizations.

It must have been her “transgender identification” (right wingers, delighting in misgendering, called her “him”). Ban the 100,000 Canadians who identify as transgender, the large majority under age 25. They’re all guilty!

It must have been that she was “‘addicted to gore and violence web sites” (mainstream/liberal/Leftists). Surely blaming video games and “addictive” social media will be next. Ban 5 million young Canadians from everything: gender transitions, social media, Grand Theft Auto, whatever pops into aging heads must be “the problem.”

Fun for all!

Don’t bother us with details

The tragedy couldn’t have anything to do with the slowly emerging facts that Jesse’s family was bizarrely “nomadic” and moved every few months, that her parents were bitterly divorced and estranged, that authorities had seized firearms from her home and then for no apparent reason returned them, that she had dropped out of school years earlier and been repeatedly detained for mental health troubles, that her mother was a “conservative-leaning libertarian” who declared of anti-transgender bigots, “Do you have any idea how many kids are killing themselves over this kind of hate?” … and more to be discovered.

Complications! No fun!

If everyone else can speculate, so can I. Citing neuroscience: the left-right opiners’ over-25 brains, far from being “developed” and “mature,” are deteriorating relics losing memory and learning genes and cognition by the day. You can tell I’m losing it.

I suggest that’s why the accusers after every tragedy involving a young person blare the same quick recitations before the facts are even nearly known.

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?