Jonathan Haidt
Free speech and the harms of social media (The Anxious Generation).
Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and professor at NYU's Stern School of Business, known for The Righteous Mind (2012), The Coddling of the American Mind (2018, with Greg Lukianoff), and the #1 bestseller The Anxious Generation (2024), which argues a phone-based childhood is driving a youth mental-health crisis. He co-founded Heterodox Academy (viewpoint diversity in higher ed) and writes the 'After Babel' Substack.
The strongest case
Adolescent anxiety and depression have risen since the early 2010s alongside smartphones and social media, and the timing, dose-response, and international scope suggest a phone-based childhood displaces the play, sleep, and in-person connection kids need; on campus, norms that shield students from disagreement undermine both resilience and the pursuit of truth.
And against
Scholars including Candice Odgers and Amy Orben argue he mistakes correlation for causation: large studies find only small, mixed, or null associations between screen time and adolescent well-being, and there is no rigorous evidence social media is 'rewiring' children's brains, so the book overstates its causal claims.
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