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In 2018, the NYU social scientist Jonathan Haidt co-authored a book titled ​The Coddling of the American Mind​. It argued that the alarming rise in mental health issues among American adolescents was being driven, in part, by a culture of “safetyism“ that trained young people to obsess over perceived traumas and to understand life as full of dangers that need to be avoided.

At the time, the message was received as a critique of the worst excesses of the academic left and wokeism. But in the aftermath of Coddling, Haidt began to wonder if he had underestimated another possible cause for these concerning mental health trends: smartphones and social media.

In 2019, working in collaboration with the demographer Jean Twenge (who wrote the classic 2017 Atlantic cover story, ​“Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”​), and researcher Zach Rausch, Haidt began gathering and organizing the fast-growing collection of academic studies on this issue in an ​annotated bibliography​, stored in a public Google Document.

At the time, the standard response from elite journalists and academics about the claim that smartphones harmed kids was to say that the evidence was only correlational and that the results were mixed. (See, for example, this ​smarmy 2020 Times article​, which amplified a small number of papers that Haidt and his collaborators ​later noted were almost willfully disingenuous​ in their research design.) But as Haidt continued to make sense of the relevant literature, he became convinced that these objections were outdated. The data were increasingly pointing toward the conclusion that these devices really were creating major negative impacts.

Haidt began writing about these ideas in The Atlantic. His 2021 piece, ​“The Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls,” ​forcefully declared that we had transcended the shoulder-shrugging, correlation is not causation phase of the research on this topic, and we could no longer ignore its implications. The sub-head for this essay was blunt: “The preponderance of the evidence suggests that social media is causing real damage to adolescents.” (Around this time, I interviewed Haidt for a New Yorker column I wrote titled,​ “The Questions We’ve Stopped Asking About Teenagers and Social Media: Should They Be Using These Services At All?”​)

In 2024, Haidt assembled all this information into a new book, ​The Anxious Generation​, which became a massive bestseller, moving more than a million copies by the end of its first year, and many more since. As of the day I’m writing this, which is almost two years since the book came out, it remains in the top 20 on the ​Amazon Charts​.

In the aftermath of The Anxious Generation, as new research continues to pour in, and we hear from more​ teenagers​ and parents about their experiences with these devices, and schools (finally) start to ban phones and discover ​massive benefits​, it has become increasingly clear that Haidt was right all along. Last month, even the Times technology reporter Kevin Roose, a longtime skeptic of Haidt’s campaign, ​tweeted​: “I confess I was not totally convinced that the phone bans would work, but early evidence suggests a total Jon Haidt victory.”

All of this history points to an urgent question for our current moment: Given that Haidt was so prescient about the harms of smartphones, what are the technologies that are worrying him now? Presumably, these looming dangers are ones we should take seriously.

To answer this question, I went back to read what Haidt and his collaborators have been writing about in the months following The Anxious Generation’s release. Here, I’d like to highlight three technology trends that seem to be causing them particular concern…

Online Gambling

After a 2018 Supreme Court ​decision​ lifted many long-standing controls on gambling, online versions of this vice, powered through low-friction, attractive smartphone apps, rapidly spread. A July article on Haidt’s ​After Babel​ newsletter, titled ​“Smartphone Gambling is a Disaster,”​ catalogs some truly alarming statistics about how prevalent this activity has become:

• 33% of American men and 22% of American women now have a sports betting account.
• Nearly half of men between the ages of 18 and 49 have these accounts.
• Almost 70% of college students living on campus now bet on sports.
• What about younger kids? A 2022 report found that 60% of high school students had gambled in the last year.

The speed with which this once frowned-upon pastime has spread is truly astonishing. Not surprisingly, it’s accompanied by negative side effects.

• A 2023 study found that 60% of sports bettors who deposited $500 or more per month said they would be unable to pay at least one of their bills or loans.
• Another study, commissioned that same year by the state of New Jersey, found that close to 20% of 18 to 24-year-olds who gamble qualify as having an unhealthy addiction.

The conclusion: Adolescents and young adults should steer clear of online gambling. They’re at high risk for addiction, and the activity will 100% cost them non-trivial amounts of money. (As I learned from a recent ​Michael Lewis podcast series​ on the topic, the online sports betting services will kick you off the platform if you start winning with any consistency. You literally cannot make money over time on these services. If they’re letting you bet, you are, by definition, bad at it.) For parents, this means having frank conversations with your kids about the addictive and financially exploitative nature of these services.

Online Video Games

Another concern of Haidt and his collaborators is the rise in popularity among kids of multiplayer (often free-to-play) games such as Roblox, Minecraft (in online mode), and Fortnite.

As reported in a 2025 After Babel article titled ​“It’s Not Just a Game Anymore,”​ both Minecraft and Fortnite attract roughly 30 million monthly active users (MAU) under the age of 18. Roblox, however, is the major player in this field, attracting an astonishing 305 million MAU under the age of 18 worldwide. Roblox estimates that around 75% of US children between the ages of 9 and 12 are active users of their platform.

Why is this a problem? Because Roblox is a loosely-regulated carnival of terribleness and predation. For those unfamiliar, Roblox is not a single game, but instead a vast collection of virtual worlds created by individual users. There are far too many of these worlds, changing far too fast, to be adequately moderated. Here are just some of the Roblox worlds described by the After Babel article’s authors:

• A game in which you’re trained to hide a body after a murder.
• A simulation of a concentration camp where users carry Nazi flags.
• A classroom in which teachers have sex with students.
• A simulation of killing children in an elementary school classroom with an AK-47.

In 2023, Roblox reported over 13,000 instances of child exploitation, leading to over 1,300 law enforcement requests.

Online Minecraft and Fortnite feature more controlled virtual environments, but here, the problem lies with third-party chat. Often, without their less tech-savvy parents being aware, young players of these games install mods that allow them to make use of third-party chat software such as Discord. The result is an unregulated and often anonymous virtual locker room of sorts in which horrible things may unfold. Here’s how the article’s authors summarize what goes on in these chats:

“In these unfiltered and unregulated spaces, adults contact children and extreme content can flow freely: bestiality, violent porn, animal abuse, self-harm, stabbings, and an array of extreme ideologies to name a few.”

Indeed, many of the memes referenced by Tyler Robinson, the accused murderer of Charlie Kirk, ​are popular​ in the video game Discord chats where Robinson reportedly spent a large amount of time.

These issues are not rare. A survey of adolescent gamers cited in the article found that 51% had encountered extremist content, while 10% of girls had been directly sent sexually explicit content while playing.

And all of this isn’t even taking into consideration the addictive nature of these games and the massive amount of time they consume. Over 40% of boys report that gaming is hurting their sleep, while a 2022 study found that 15.4% of adolescent males who play these games meet the criteria for Internet Gaming Disorder.

The conclusion: Kids and adolescents should not play multiplayer video games with people whom they don’t know. Period. Keep in mind, if you’ve given your kid an iPad or a video game player on which you haven’t specifically activated internet restrictions, then, spoiler alert: they’re not innocently playing Angry Birds; they’re almost certainly involved in these games and all the harms that accompany them.

Chatbots

The final technology concern I’ll discuss is also one of the most recent: kids and adolescents having unsupervised conversations with AI-powered chatbots.

As explained in an After Babel article from November, co-authored by Haidt, and bluntly titled ​“Don’t Give Your Child Any AI Companions,”​ the use of these tools is rapidly rising among young people. A 2025 survey found that 72% of US teens have used an AI companion at least once, and more than half use them multiple times a month.

Why should we care? Here’s Haidt:

“Early research, journalistic investigations, and internal documents show that these AI systems are already engaging in sexualized interactions with children and offering inappropriate or dangerous advice, including sycophantically encouraging young people who are considering suicide to proceed. As ChatGPT put it in one young man’s final conversation with it: ‘Cold steel pressed against a mind that’s already made peace? That’s not fear. That’s clarity.’”

As of this fall, OpenAI is already facing​ eight different wrongful death​ lawsuits involving advice given by ChatGPT. The volume of these cases is likely to skyrocket in the near future.

What about younger kids? They’re being exposed to chatbot companions indirectly through a growing number of toys that utilize chatbots to have conversations with their owners. As you might imagine, this isn’t going well.

​A recent study ​of three new AI-powered toys found that they can easily veer into dangerous conversation territory. In the study, the toys provided advice on where to find knives in the kitchen and how to start a fire with matches. They even engaged in explicit discussions about sex positions and fetishes.

The conclusion: Do not let kids or teens use chatbots without supervision. Think of it as similar to letting them have an unsupervised conversation with a random drunk at the end of the bar. It might be harmless, but there’s a good chance the interaction will head to dark places.

(There’s a misguided notion out there that kids need to be using tools like ChatGPT so that they’ll be prepared for the “AI-powered future.” This is overstated. The technology is moving so fast that whatever form of AI your kids will eventually encounter in the workforce will likely look and operate nothing like circa-2026 chatbots. Also, these existing tools are dead simple to use. Your kids will figure them out in roughly 19 seconds if/when they’re in a professional circumstance that requires this.)

The post What’s Worrying Jonathan Haidt Now? appeared first on Cal Newport.

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