My First Amendment concerns with ‘The Anxious Generation’

I love and respect my friend and co-author Jonathan Haidt, but I don’t always agree with him.

About a decade ago, I had a weird idea.

At the time, I had for 13 years defended free speech and academic freedom in higher education at FIRE — then the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, now and Expression — but something began to change around 2014. There was a sudden surge in attempts to deplatform speakers, and students were arriving on campus requesting things I’d never heard of, like “trigger warnings,” “safe spaces,” and the policing of “microaggressions.”

Throughout most of my career, students were the best constituency for free speech on campus. So, this sudden turn alarmed me.

I was developing a theory about what happened, but I wanted to talk it through with someone knowledgeable. That’s when I asked Jonathan Haidt out to lunch to discuss it. Jon is a world-renowned social psychologist and professor at New York University. We met at an Indian restaurant near his campus, and I started to lay out my thoughts.

Due to my own struggles with depression and anxiety, I learned a lot about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which, as the Mayo Clinic puts it, “helps you become aware of inaccurate or negative thinking so you can view challenging situations more clearly and respond to them in a more effective way.” Given that experience, I came to believe that this new wave of college students was justifying deplatforming and censorship by rationalizing a series of exaggerated negative thought patterns called cognitive distortions.

In prior years, censorship was driven by administrators. I would describe 2014 as the “Year of the Heckler” because so many student-driven, anti-speech incidents occurred. Those heckling crowds were the precursor to later incidents like the 2015 confrontation of Nicholas Christakis at Yale, where students surrounded Christakis on campus, screamed at him about feeling unsafe, and demanded his and his wife Erika’s resignation — all because Erika sent a letter saying students are mature enough to handle offensive Halloween costumes without the university intervening on their behalf.

I told Jon that I thought this way of thinking would not only be a disaster for academic freedom and free speech, but also for the mental health of these students. And even though my idea was weird, Jon loved it and suggested we write about it together. I was over the moon to get to work with him. What followed was the beginning of a working relationship and friendship that continues to this day. 

Together, we wrote the article “The Coddling of the American Mind,” which appeared in The Atlantic’s September 2015 issue and quickly became the magazine’s second-most-read cover story. Our thesis was simple: We have unwittingly taught a generation of students the mental habits of anxious, depressed, polarized people, and we need to rethink how we do everything from parenting to K-12 to higher education.

In 2018, Jon and I expanded that essay into a book of the same name.

As we investigated what was so different about the students hitting campus around 2014, we came to believe that a big part of the answer was that this was the first generation to grow up with smartphones in their pockets. Indeed, Rikki Schlott, the Gen Z co-author of my latest book, “The Canceling of the American Mind,” has had a smartphone since she was 10. She can personally attest that being on social media 24/7 was profoundly unhealthy for people in her generation — especially young women. 

FIRE interns have described to me a ruthless and brutal “kill-or-be-killed” environment in both junior high and high school thanks to social media. As Abigail Shrier noted in her book, “Bad Therapy,” “Many teens maintain a cache of screenshots to incriminate their friends just in case they should need to retaliate against an accuser.”

That sounds like a pretty depressing and anxiety-inducing way to grow up. Through our research, Jon and I were both persuaded that childhood and adolescence would be a lot better if social media and smartphones were sidelined.

Which brings me to Jon’s newest book, “The Anxious Generation.” 

‘The Anxious Generation’ is an excellent and important book

True to his brilliant mind, Jon deftly weaves research in social psychology with history, religion, and sociology to produce a compelling and powerful read. It’s a compassionate, beautifully written, and deeply researched work that makes powerful arguments about the mental state of our youth today and how we can improve it by avoiding phone-based childhoods.

The book also goes to great lengths to recommend certain “norms” that parents can adopt to improve their kids’ experience growing up. Perhaps most important among them is making time for more unsupervised mixed-age play and allowing for more freedom, responsibility, and independence throughout childhood. As a Gen-Xer who enjoyed and benefited from a great degree of personal freedom and independence in childhood, this is a no-brainer to me. Play allows for socialization, imagination, and learning how to handle stressors and relationships in the real world.

Throughout the book, Jon consistently argues that there has been too much “overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world,” which is why he also recommends parents not give their kids smartphones before high school and keep them off social media until they turn 16.

These are smart and powerful norms that I plan to follow with my own kids, and I think we would all be better off if more parents and schools adopted them.

Another recommendation is for phone-free schools. After all, we wouldn’t let kids have a fax machine, a radio, a television, or a landline phone on their desk in class — so why should we let them have access to what amounts to all of those technologies and more? This solution alone could make a huge difference in the lives of young people and should be tried at schools across the country.

And there are other solutions I couldn't agree with more, like increasing vocational training for young people, sending your kids to traditional/tech free summer camps, making playgrounds a bit more risky and fun, encouraging students to take working gap years between high school and college, and passing “meaningful childhood independence” laws that will help protect parents who allow kids the same freedoms everyone currently over the age of 30 had as a kid.

However, as a free speech advocate and First Amendment lawyer, I believe some of Jon’s proposals that reach beyond norms and into government legislation go too far and would restrict free speech rights. 

While his proposals appear on the surface to be aimed only at minors, in reality, they would implicate the rights of adults, too. What’s more, minors do have free speech rights, even if the breadth of those rights aren’t exactly the same as those of adults. I also think broad government interventions often create more problems than they solve and have a tendency to start in a sphere that seems limited but then expands. Lastly, I believe a good rule of thumb is to try the options that pose the least potential for abuse first.

Proposals aimed at minors also threaten adults’ free speech rights

In “The Anxious Generation,” Jon proposes two primary legislative changes:

• Raising the age at which young people can access online services that require personal information like social media platforms without parental consent from 13 to 16.

• Writing laws that mandate age-verification via third-party services in order for people to access certain online content and services.

To this end, Jon has endorsed state laws, like the one enacted in Florida, that attempt to do some of the above (and more). Florida’s law requires social media sites to “[t]erminate any account held by an account holder younger than 14 years of age,” regardless of parental consent, and requires parental consent before 14- and 15-year-olds obtain an account.

Laws like Florida’s are explicit attempts to limit minors’ access to social media, but they will also end up limiting adults’ access. 

The ability to share and access information is a fundamental right under the First Amendment, and a hallmark of the free and open internet. And while government efforts to restrict minors’ access to certain information and services on the internet might sound appealing on their surface, they will necessarily require determining the age and/or identity of every potential user first — including adult users.

That requirement alone raises significant privacy and free speech concerns. If you are a person afraid of being arrested by your government or canceled by your peers, anonymity is critical. Think of people who have no choice but to have anonymous accounts, like religious dissenters in fundamentalist communities or political dissenters who fear losing their livelihoods. A recent poll from The Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University found that two-thirds of Americans are uncomfortable sharing their identification with a social media site, and even more are uncomfortable sharing their child’s identification. Those numbers are about the same for sharing biometric identifying information.

Jon sensibly tries to come up with the approaches that pose the least harm from a privacy standpoint, but he rightly has to concede that there’s no legislative way to achieve this without some risk to privacy rights for all users, including adults.

The United States has a long history of attempting to burden adult access to information in the name of child safety. We also have a long history of our courts striking down those attempts as unconstitutional.

Since the 1950s, the Supreme Court has rejected attempts to censor books, for being harmful to minors; the mail, for containing information about contraception; phone calls, for being “indecent”; cable television, if the adult cable TV channels weren’t sufficiently scrambled; and the internet, multiple times, for giving minors access to potentially harmful information. 

In all of those cases, the Supreme Court kept returning to one simple idea: You can’t unduly burden adult access to information in the name of protecting children. As the Court in the aforementioned contraception case stated, “The level of discourse reaching a mailbox simply cannot be limited to that which would be suitable for a sandbox.”

Minors also have free speech rights

People sometimes have the mistaken impression that First Amendment rights are something that we receive on our 18th birthday. In reality, minors also possess First Amendment rights (albeit in a form sometimes limited by agency and context).

The Supreme Court has historically ruled in favor of the free speech rights of minors. In a 2010 ruling on the sale of violent video games, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority that “a State possesses legitimate power to protect children from harm… but that does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed.”

Restricting minors’ access to social media and other online interactive services will restrict their access to ideas, community, and the benefits that come with them. In economist Tyler Cowen’s interview with Jon, Cowen, who runs the venture capital firm Emergent Ventures, explained how young entrepreneurs often get in touch with other like-minded entrepreneurs through social media. “That’s how they all meet, these kids,” said Cowen. “That’s how they get in touch with each other. They see what they’re working on. It seems to me just an enormous benefit.”

Defenders of Jon’s legislative proposals might counter that these laws wouldn’t really regulate speech. Jon himself wrote that “it’s the medium itself that is harming kids” and it isn’t really the content that’s in question. But “social media” is defined by its content. In his book, Jon himself identifies content on social media that contributes to the harms he’s hoping to address. For example, he talks about how the flood of filtered images on platforms like Instagram triggered anxiety in teen girls “because most were now below what appeared to them to be the average.” And once you get into restricting things based on content, you’re in First Amendment territory. 

As a federal court put it in February when stopping an Ohio law requiring parental consent for children under 16 to make social media accounts, “The features the act singles out are inextricable from the content produced by those features.” Moreover, the court said, the Ohio law “infringes on minors’ rights to both access and produce First Amendment protected speech.”

Being a civil libertarian has taught me to prioritize considering the worst abuses of a new government power over the potential good that it might do. People across the political spectrum increasingly seem to think that every problem can and should be solved by top-down solutions. One major difference between Jon and me is that I am much more of a bottom-up person.

Parents, not the government, should determine what’s best for their children

Parents have a number of tools at their disposal to regulate and manage their kids’ social media access and intake via parental controls, time limits, and more. They also don’t need to buy their kids a smartphone, which typically requires a costly data package and a credit check. These points are met with a collective yawn by proponents of legal restrictions, and Jon himself has waved them away. During his interview with Cowen, Jon said, “very few people are able to use parental controls well.” He has also pointed to the exhaustion parents feel in denying their kids access to a smartphone and social media.

It may be true that parents don’t do a good job of utilizing existing parental controls or that they are worn down by their kids’ demands. But is this an argument for finding ways to better help parents, or for having the government step in to play parent?

To paraphrase an old adage, it is unfair to deny a man a steak because a baby can’t chew it.

Ultimately, government bans are one-size-fits-all. That means that those kids who benefit from social media — and there are plenty of them, as Cowen points out — would be out of luck. Parents know their kids better than anyone. Let them, not the government, make the decisions about what media they consume.

We’ve adapted to technological change before

In “Coddling,” Jon and I tried to provide parents with the best possible options for resolving the issues we identified. One very important recommendation we offered is the old saying, “Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.”

We cannot make the world perfectly safe for kids. Even if we could, we’d deny them so much of what it means to be alive and to grow into functioning adults. Resistance builds muscle, after all. Rather than attempt (and fail) to “NERF” or “bubble wrap” the world, what we should do instead is teach kids how to live in and work with the world as it is. 

Of course, this doesn't mean we shouldn’t try to make the world a better and healthier place. What we should do is apply an approach often used in medicine, which says, “start low and go slow.” Let’s try one proposed solution — like making public K-12 schools phone-free all day — see how things turn out, and proceed from there. This may seem overly cautious, but when you’re dealing with government interventions that implicate the free speech of both young people and adults, it’s a good idea to pace ourselves rather than throwing the kitchen sink at the problem.

When it comes to laws that will always — and I mean always — have effects well beyond their original intent, we have to pull the brakes. It’s much easier to protect rights from being lost than it is to get them back once they’ve been taken away. Free speech is the most important right to preserve because, as many have said before, it is the one right which secures all others.

One thing that gives me hope is that we’ve adapted to profound technological changes before. In the short term, the printing press led to an explosion of witch trials and bloody conflict over faith and politics that ravaged Europe. But over time, we adapted. We learned to live with and benefit from the printing press. It was responsible for a flowering of philosophy, thought, discourse, and human progress that would have been unimaginable without it.

The printing press brought millions of people into contact with one another. Social media has done that with billions, instantaneously. It’s no surprise that it has been disruptive to our politics, our culture, and our lives — including our children’s lives. This is what it feels like to live through a fundamental sea change in information and communications technology. 

But as we learned from previous massive technological shifts, there’s no easy, top-down solution that can just fix everything. Nothing can put the printing press, radio, television, or the astounding phenomenon of social media back in the bottle without threatening our fundamental liberties — not to mention risking reversing the dozens of social, political, intellectual, and creative advancements that we’ve grown to take for granted.

There are surely steps we can consider that can make things a touch better. But the only way to really deal with the problems we see among our youth is to develop cultural norms that help parents, communities, and young people grow up in a way that best reflects not just the wisdom of today but also the wisdom of the generations that came before us.

Like it or not, we live in a world with social media. We will likely never live in a world without it again. The way forward is to learn how to live in this world. It won’t be perfect, it won’t be easy, but we will find a way through. We’ve done it before.

Author’s Note: HUGE thanks to

Adam Goldstein

,

Angel Eduardo

,

Perry Fein

, and

Nico Perrino

for their great help with this beast of a piece. 

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