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?