Kapow! Batman, Robin, and the template of moral panic – part 1

This is Part 1 of a three-part series. Part 2 will examine how the engineering logic of television scheduling became the algorithmic logic of social media feeds. Part 3 will look at what a US jury found that the science could not yet prove.

Every generation convinces itself that its children are the first to be broken by a new medium. Every generation is wrong in roughly the same way. The debate over smartphones and adolescent mental health follows a template that is more than five centuries old, and recognising that template is not an excuse for complacency. It is the prerequisite for thinking clearly.

That is the uncomfortable starting position for this series. 

The framework that names what is happening

In his 1972 book Folk Devils and Moral Panics, sociologist Stanley Cohen described a structured sequence in which a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests, amplified by media, moral entrepreneurs, and the institutions of social control. Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda later identified in their book Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance five diagnostic elements: concern, hostility, consensus, disproportionality, and volatility.

Apply those five elements to any of the panics in the table below and they fit cleanly. They fit the 18th-century reading fever attributed to Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther. They fit the 1870s panic over dime novels, in which Jesse Pomeroy’s violent crimes were attributed to printed poison. They fit the 1954 US Senate hearings on comic books, driven by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, which argued Batman and Robin were covertly gay and Superman un-American, evidence later shown by historian Carol Tilley to be fabricated. They fit the 1985 Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) hearings where Tipper Gore’s discovery of Prince’s Darling Nikki on her daughter’s Purple Rain album produced the Parental Advisory sticker.

Each produced self-regulation: the Comics Code Authority, the Parental Advisory sticker. In hindsight, both achieved less than their proponents hoped and caused less harm than their critics feared. The default hypothesis for any new claim that media is destroying the children should therefore be skepticism or at least some self-restraint in terms of intervention.

The medium changes; the accusation does not

The Swiss polymath Conrad Gessner warned in the 1500s that the printing press was producing information that was confusing and harmful to the mind. Socrates, in Plato’s Phaedrus, complained that writing itself would create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls. An 1883 article in The Sanitarian argued that schools exhaust the children’s brains and nervous systems with complex and multiple studies. In 1936, Gramophone magazine reported that children had developed the habit of dividing attention between the humdrum preparation of their school assignments and the compelling excitement of the loudspeaker, meaning radio.

Vaughan Bell’s 2010 Slate piece on the history of media technology scares traces this pattern from Gutenberg to Facebook. It reads as well in 2026 as it did sixteen years ago, precisely because it refused to be sensationalist: it pointed out that every technology panic looks exactly like the previous one, that the evidence for the latest is thinner than the headlines, and that the moral entrepreneur being quoted is not necessarily a reliable narrator.

The recurrence of these themes points to what researchers call neophobia, a fear of the new that is most acute in elder generations watching their children adopt communication tools they did not grow up with. The dynamic involves what might be called a Puppet versus Agent conflict, in which adults frame children as passive victims of media industries while overlooking children’s capacity to find genuine literacy, community, and social value in new platforms. Comic books produced sophisticated visual readers. Radio produced a generation with strong audio information processing. The children are rarely as passive as the panic portrays them to be.

What the current alarm actually claims

Jean Twenge lit the fuse with a September 2017 Atlantic cover story, arguing that around 2012, as US smartphone saturation crossed 50%, adolescent indicators of loneliness, depression, and suicide began climbing in ways unprecedented since the data series began, and that much of this deterioration could be traced to their phones. In March 2024, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt extended the argument into a full causal theory in The Anxious Generation, coining the great rewiring of childhood and naming the phone-based childhood as the major cause of a global mental-health crisis. Haidt’s prescriptions held the number one position on the New York Times bestseller list for months.

The alarm was then institutionalised. US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a formal advisory in May 2023 stating social media presents a profound risk of harm to adolescent mental health, and in a June 2024 New York Times op-ed called on Congress to mandate a tobacco-style warning label on social media platforms. Australia moved furthest: on 10 December 2025, the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 took effect, barring anyone under 16 from holding accounts on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, X, Threads, Reddit, Twitch, and Kick, with fines up to A$49.5 million for non-compliant platforms.

The Haidt and Twenge thesis, translated into policy at speed, is the current iteration of the panic template. And the template tells us where the argument is most likely to break down.

Where the template usually breaks down

The classic moral panic fails on proportionality: the claimed harm is real in some form, but the scale and the mechanism are overstated. Wertham’s data on comic books was fabricated. The PMRC’s claim that Judas Priest lyrics caused two young men to attempt suicide was not supported by evidence and was rejected in court. The 1972 US Surgeon General’s report on television violence, the most rigorous attempt to apply the tobacco-evidence model to a media panic, concluded after three years and 23 commissioned studies that the relationship between viewing and aggression was context-dependent and exceedingly difficult to disentangle from other factors in an individual’s life history. This did not stop The New York Times from initially headlining the report as TV Violence Held Unharmful to Youth, or senators from subsequently claiming a definitive causal link had been established. The translation of ambiguous evidence into confident headlines is sadly a structural feature of the panic, not an accident.

The current evidence on social media and adolescent mental health sits in a familiar place. Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski at Oxford found that digital technology use explained roughly 0.4% of the variation in adolescent well-being, an effect they described as comparable to eating potatoes. Their 2019 Nature Human Behaviour paper analysed three datasets covering approximately 355,000 participants. Candice Odgers, a developmental psychologist at UC Irvine, wrote in an April 2024 Nature review that the repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science, and that hundreds of researchers have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Science magazine’s Holden Thorp, reviewing the debate, concluded Haidt is out ahead of the science, an assessment Haidt himself has seemingly acknowledged.

Why this panic is not quite like the others

Skepticism is the right starting posture. It is not the whole posture.

Three features distinguish the smartphone debate from the Filthy Fifteen or Seduction of the Innocent, and they are the reasons even careful skeptics should not simply file this under history repeating itself.

First, the insiders are confessing. In November 2017, Facebook founding president Sean Parker told Axios the platform was designed around a social-validation feedback loop engineered to consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible by exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. Weeks later, Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook’s former VP of user growth, told a Stanford Business School audience that the short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we have created are destroying how society works. Tristan Harris, a former Google design ethicist, built an entire movement around the same argument: the Center for Humane Technology and the 2020 documentary The Social Dilemma both contend that persuasive design deliberately exploits psychological vulnerabilities. Fredric Wertham never produced testimonies like that about DC Comics, and no comic book publisher was ever found liable for the harm those testimonies described. In March 2026, a Los Angeles Superior Court jury found Meta and Google legally liable for the depression, body dysmorphia, and suicidal ideation suffered by a plaintiff who had begun using YouTube at age six and Instagram at age nine, ordering the companies to pay six million dollars in damages. The verdict is one of more than 2,000 pending lawsuits against the platforms on similar grounds. We will look at this more specifically in Part 3 of this series.

Second, the subgroup signal is real. Multiple analyses find the correlation between heavy social media use and depression is roughly twice as large for teenage girls as for boys. CDC data show US adolescent girls’ rates of persistent sadness and suicidal ideation climbed sharply after 2012. Quasi-experimental studies, including the rollout of Facebook across US colleges and the spread of high-speed internet in Spain , found meaningful negative effects on mental-health indicators, effects an order of magnitude larger than the null cross-sectional correlations. These are not fabricated. They are small, contested, and real.

Third, the indicators actually moved internationally and in sync. The rise in adolescent depression, self-harm hospitalisations, and suicidal ideation that began roughly between 2011 and 2013 shows up in US, UK, Australian, Nordic, and Canadian data. A genuine trend is not the same thing as a panic-manufactured one.

The honest but boring synthesis

The honest synthesis is also the boring one. The average effect of social media use on adolescent well-being is small. The effect on vulnerable subgroups is plausibly larger. The direction of causation is genuinely unclear: depressed adolescents may use social media more rather than the reverse. The claim that platforms are rewiring children’s brains is not supported by neuroscience. The claim that nothing is happening is not supported by the data. What that gap means for the evidence, the engineering, and the law is the subject of the next two posts in this series. 

Written by Caroline De Cock, LL.M., Head of Research