“Breaking Points<\/a>” August 11, 2025, alarmingly headlined: “Viral Chart EXPOSES Internet Fueled Personality Destruction,\u201d with blaring subheads: “Studies show internet is ruining our cognitive abilities.\u201d \u201cEspecially for young people,\u201d podcast hosts Saager Enjeti and Krystal Ball warned, reeling off terrifying claim after claim about online perils (but somehow failing to foreswear that personality-destroying cognition-ruining internet themselves).<\/p>\n The evidence? Statistician John Burn-Murdoch of\u00a0The Financial Times<\/a><\/em>\u00a0created charts from the\u00a0Understanding America<\/a>\u00a0survey, which \u201cBreaking Points\u201d uncritically featured. Popular media presentations of the 2016-2025 trends, shown in the following charts for two key measures, certainly look frightening, illustrating a society in calamitous decline:<\/p>\n However, those who look closely for even a few seconds \u2013 certainly not Saager, Krystal, or other media sources I found \u2013 will notice two severe problems. First, the vertical axis showing averaged responses to questions on a scale of 1 to 5 is severely truncated in order to grossly exaggerate age differences and trends. Differences and trends are further embellished by presenting them in tall, narrow charts.<\/p>\n In contrast, below is a presentation of the same numbers\u00a0in honest fashion<\/em>, using the full 1 to 5 scale in figures that have equal vertical and horizontal dimensions:<\/p>\n Presented accurately, these statistics and trends would never have gone \u201cviral.\u201d They look like the near-nothings they are.<\/p>\n Psychologist and statistician Christopher Ferguson takes a\u00a0deeper look<\/a>\u00a0at the Understanding America and\u00a0Financial Times<\/em>\u00a0data and concludes: \u201cNo, conscientiousness hasn\u2019t collapsed among young people in recent years.\u201d<\/p>\n Further, neither media commentators nor the study in question even tries to show that \u201cthe internet\u201d (as opposed to, say,\u00a0reasoned assessments of real-world developments<\/a>) is to blame for these minimal trends. Like social-media panickers, they just assume it must be \u2013 a highly arguable assumption, given that internet and social media use was well established back in 2016 when things were supposedly rosy.<\/p>\n Nor do they show whether, to cite the most salient trend, people of all ages (especially younger ones) might be acting rationally to be somewhat less trusting today than in 2016.<\/p>\n An individual, especially a younger one, might see our leading institutions are acquiescing and even backing genocidal foreign policy, doing nothing about climate change, widening economic inequality, financing more sumptuous lives for the privileged by dumping massive debt on young and future generations, and retreating back into openly Jim Crow racism, among other evils only barely anticipated back in 2016. That could be seen as untrustworthy and depressing, depending on one\u2019s politics.<\/p>\n My humble assessment is that anyone who feels \u201ctrusting\u201d today \u2013 along with anyone who is\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0getting more depressed at leaders\u2019 rising brutalities and betrayals \u2013 is either not paying attention or brainlessly delusional.<\/p>\n But the point here is that even by the Understanding America data, the most salient decline in the averaged trust score, from around 4.1 in 2016 to 3.8 in 2025 on a scale of 1.0 (totally untrusting) to 5.0 (totally trusting) among ages 16-39, is hardly unexpected or catastrophic. The age 16-39 score in 2025 still approaches \u201cstrongly trusting,\u201d well above the scale median of 3.0.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know how\u00a0Burn-Murdoch<\/a>\u00a0characterized these data, and I\u2019m not about to pay the firewall fee to find out. I\u2019m more interested in how the \u201cviral\u201d media communicates them to the public. To listen to Saager and Krystal (and others) rant, we should\u00a0immediately<\/em>\u00a0shut down the internet\u00a0entirely<\/em>, confiscate everyone\u2019s cell phone, computer, laptop, and tablet, and mandate daily in-person coffee klatches and beer-bowling.<\/p>\n Either that, or inaugurate authorities\u2019 and media\u2019s critical responsibility on youth and culture-war issues, an American first, to replace the endless shrieking.<\/p>\n As I\u2019ve documented repeatedly,\u00a0young people were not better behaved<\/a>, less troubled,\u00a0thriving educationally<\/a>, or more pro-social in pre-internet decades. In fact,\u00a0they acted much worse<\/a>\u00a0than Gen Z does today.<\/p>\n Our top officials have refused \u2013 flatly \u2013 to pay\u00a0any<\/em>\u00a0attention to what teenagers tell us on leading surveys is\u00a0causing their depression and anxiety<\/a>. Teens\u00a0overwhelmingly cite household grownups\u2019 abuses, violence, mental illness, and addiction<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 and self-aggrandizing authorities stubbornly refuse to listen. In this reality vacuum, demagogues blaming the internet and social media based on\u00a0thin evidence<\/a>\u00a0have hijacked discussion, sabotaging badly needed confrontations toward real problems.<\/p>\n For the record: I am not affiliated in any way with social media, tech, or related interests, nor have I ever been paid by them. I despise Zuckerburg, Musk, Bezos, and the lot. Nothing here should be construed as approving of the way social media and tech moguls operate.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How to go viral with dire-sounding \u2013 but phony \u2013 \u201cstatistical trends\u201d Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| August 2025 “Breaking Points” August 11, 2025, alarmingly headlined: “Viral Chart EXPOSES Internet Fueled Personality Destruction,\u201d with blaring subheads: “Studies show internet is ruining our cognitive abilities.\u201d \u201cEspecially for young people,\u201d podcast hosts Saager Enjeti and Krystal Ball […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-161180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=161180"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161180\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":161181,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161180\/revisions\/161181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=161180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=161180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=161180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/substackcdn.com\/image\/fetch\/$s_!rhqj!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F86765ecc-3995-4377-a108-440879d31135_1425x963.png\")
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