Leave social media out of it. Parents and the government are looking for scapegoats so they don’t have to face the music

What if parents’ desire to ban social media and politicians’ dream of drafting new laws were part of the same problem rather than part of the same solution? Jonathan Haidt is a leading American social psychologist and a professor at New York University; he has written a famous book on anxious generations and for years has offered an interesting, counterintuitive and non-self-justifying perspective on the so-called ‘youth malaise’, without necessarily resorting to the rhetorical arsenal we have seen so far. They do it, as we have read: they take to the streets to smash shop windows, to create chaos, to destabilise cities, because they are suffering, because they are angry, because they fall in with the wrong crowd, because they are part of the hybrid war and because, naturally, they have a mobile phone, a social media account, and are familiar with WhatsApp, Instagram and Telegram; and it is for all these reasons, says the collective sociologist, that our afternoons in the city will, for a while, be less safe than they used to be.

Jonathan Haidt’s reflection on the overprotection of children, however, offers a starting point for taking a step forward: perhaps parents who tend to seek creative reasons to vent their current frustrations on social media should take a short pause for reflection, and perhaps step away from TikTok themselves to try to tackle an issue that deserves to be at the centre of the debate. The issue is simple: if we are truly faced with a generation of young people who struggle to recognise authority, we should ask ourselves whether the adults who raised this generation did everything they could to exercise the principle of authority, or whether, on the contrary, they did everything they could to gradually relinquish it. The paradox is an interesting one: Overprotective parents, who monitor their children’s every move, who regard it as a social duty to act as their children’s trade unionists, who have brought up the younger generation to view the application of any principle of authority as a sign of an impending era of rampant fascism, are the very ones seeking external culprits to explain why their own children – and those of others – do not recognise authority. And so. It’s the fault of the state, the school system, patriarchy, Meloni, social media and everything else.

About others, not us. Haidt is certainly no sympathetic observer of social media, which he holds responsible for a significant proportion of adolescents’ psychological problems, but his perspective allows us to understand a detail omitted by the collective sociologist: adults who obsessively monitor everything their children do first teach their children to be wary of authority and then always seek an external explanation when something goes wrong. And when we look for an external cause – one that absolves us of responsibility – we usually stop there. We blame social media, technology, modernity, artificial intelligence, and the innovations that are ‘blending our children’s brains to a pulp’. Without realising, perhaps, that if a young person has a mobile phone too early, the fault may lie with whoever bought it for them. Without realising, perhaps, that if a young person uses social media even when they’re at an age when they shouldn’t be using it, parents come before the law: the blame lies with whoever puts it in their hands, without supervision, without filters. Without realising, perhaps, that the idea of banning something when faced with a problem is part of one big story in which you can find everything.

Young people are vandalising shops: let’s ban social media. The Maranza are wreaking havoc in our towns: let’s increase the penalties. Minors are committing crimes: let’s put as many of them in prison as possible. A state that, when faced with a problem, rather than thinking about how to enforce existing laws, thinks about how to create new ones is a close relative of the parent who, faced with their child’s wayward behaviour, uses a pane of glass instead of a mirror. Hybrid warfare, bad teachers, the government, schools, social media, the lockdown. Excessive use of social media can cause problems, but when faced with a young person who uses social media to express their distress, perhaps we should ask ourselves when to turn that pane of glass into a mirror for a moment, rather than offloading onto others the problems we do not know how to solve. When parents and the government, while scrolling through TikTok and shifting the problems they cannot tackle onto draft legislation, clamour for a ban on a technological tool, there is a real risk that they are seeking a scapegoat to avoid reflecting on themselves and to sidestep the issue – and this should concern us far more than the misuse of Instagram and WhatsApp.