I’ve been listening to TWiT since about 2007, and have been a supporter through Club TWiT since it started.
Lately, Leo and the panel often discuss the impact of social media on society, including the decline of journalism, the spread of disinformation online, and its impact on users. As an academic who teaches and studies journalism and media literacy, these discussions are very relevant, especially the recent focus on banning or limiting social media for young people. Many have argued that social media use by young people might be a cause for a number of poor mental health outcomes, and that their use should be limited. Leo frequently comments that he isn’t a fan of these arguments, but does acknowledge that there are some issues that need to be addressed (and that he isn’t the most objective of sources on the matter).
When discussing these issues, Leo frequently references a review of Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Anxious Generation,” from Candace Odgers, and published in Nature, that argues there’s little empirical evidence linking social media to poor mental health in youth. Odgers is, admittedly, a respected and senior researcher at UC Irvine, but this view to me seemed a bit reductive.
I read Haidt’s book, and afterwards, found the review misleading due to its omission of a much larger part of Haidt’s argument that changing social norms around how children are raised and how they interact with the larger world are also considerable factors to young people’s poor mental health outcomes. After hearing Leo continue to cite Odger’s review on multiple episodes of TWiT, I finally wrote a letter to Nature offering a counterpoint.
It was published in the May 23 issue (PDF here)) and also online. While yes, it’s only a correspondence, its a big deal to me, as an academic, to have my name indexed in Nature. So while yes, it still pains me to hear Leo mention this review, I do thank him for the inspiration.