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

by Jonathan Haidt

The visually oriented platforms all used the business model developed by Facebook: Maximize time spent on the platform in order to maximize the extraction of data and the value of the user to advertisers. Figure 6.3 shows the percentage of American high school students who spent more than 40 hours a week using social media platforms. That’s like working a full-time job while also being a full-time student. By 2015, one in seven American girls had reached this astronomical level. The survey question was only added in 2013. If we had the data going back to 2010, when few teens had smartphones, the numbers would likely have been close to zero. It was almost impossible for teens to spend 40 hours a week on social media before they could carry the internet with them in their pockets.[26]