The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

by Jonathan Haidt

Why would anyone treat their customers that way? Because the users are not really the customers for most social media companies. When platforms offer access to information or services for free, it’s usually because the users are the product. Their attention is a precious substance that companies extract and sell to their paying customers—the advertisers. The companies are competing against each other for users’ attention, and, like gambling casinos, they’ll do anything to hold on to their users even if they harm them in the process. We need to change the incentives so that companies behave differently, as has happened in many other industries. Think of food safety regulations in the Progressive Era, or automotive safety regulations in the 1960s, both of which contributed to the long-running decline in children’s mortality rates.2