Alice Marwick is one of the top academics in the country studying kids and technology and social media use. She is co-director of The Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at UNC and Director of Research at the Data & Society Research Institute. She recently sat down with me for a Q&A about her research and a big report that she and other top researchers in the field put out about kids and social media use.
In the report, they make it clear that this freak out about the impact of social media and smartphones on kids is a classic moral panic, not even remotely backed up by the data that they and other top researchers have collected for decades. Alice debunks common misconceptions about kids and technology use, calls out bad actors like Jonathan Haidt who use this moral panic to push anti-LGBTQ and censorship laws, and she details the harms of cutting young kids off from the media and technology of their time.