I also have little patience for the grandstanding of politicians seeking to exploit events on campus for their own political gain. When Mike Johnson, the Republican Speaker of the House, rushed to Columbia and demanded that President Biden send in the National Guard, it was a transparent stunt. It’s hard to take the outrage seriously when it comes from a party that has trafficked in anti-Semitic tropes for years, from Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene’s nonsense about space lasers controlled by Jews to Trump posting Nazi memes featuring the Star of David over a sea of money.
The tumult on campus attracted so much attention that at times it seemed to blot out the news from the real crisis unfolding in the Middle East. That’s where most of my attention was focused. I held long talks with intelligence and military experts and retired as well as serving diplomats and decision-makers about ideas for the “day after” and a path to an enduring peace that would provide security and dignity for both Israelis and Palestinians. The issues are incredibly thorny, and the trauma on both sides from this latest round of the conflict only makes them harder to resolve. But there is no alternative but to keep working for peace.
As the war in Gaza continued, I found myself thinking back to wise leaders I’d known in the region and wondering how they would have handled the current situation.
Bill and I were privileged to call former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin a friend. Watching Rabin and Arafat—two former enemies—shake hands on the South Lawn of the White House on September 13, 1993, was one of the best days of Bill’s presidency. Rabin’s assassination on November 4, 1995, was one of the worst. Rabin was a warrior who understood that making peace can take more strength than making war. He felt deeply the human toll of violence on all sides of the conflict in the Middle East. He used to say, “A destroyed house can be rebuilt, a burned-down tree can be replanted, but a young life cannot be replaced.” We could use more of that kind of wisdom and empathy today.
I also think about Golda Meir, another former Israeli prime minister. As a young woman, I admired Meir, who took office the same year I graduated from college. She mixed humor and gravitas, chain-smoked her way through meetings with senior generals, and brought great humanity to everything she said and did. Not bad for a grandmother from Milwaukee!
Meir was prime minister in 1973 when Egypt caught Israel by surprise with the start of the Yom Kippur War. As my teaching partner Keren has written, Israeli intelligence received warnings about the invasion from a spy close to Egyptian president Anwar Sadat but discounted the reports out of a “failure of imagination.” Meir and her advisors could not conceive of Sadat taking such an “irrational” risk—an error in decision-making that Keren’s research shows is common to many leaders. She has pointed out that Netanyahu similarly misread Hamas in the run-up to the October 7 attack.
Yet in an important way, Netanyahu is nothing like Meir. She accepted a commission of inquiry into the failures that led to the Yom Kippur War and resigned from office. Netanyahu, by contrast, has taken zero responsibility and refuses to call an election, let alone step down.
A lesson of Keren’s research, and of my experience returning to the classroom at Columbia, is the importance of keeping an open mind and questioning our assumptions. As Margaret Mead said, young people keep our imaginations fresh and our hearts young, and they keep us on our toes. My students did that for me. I came to Columbia to teach and am grateful to have been taught in return.
THE KIDS ARE NOT ALRIGHT
Having a child to love, wonder at, and worry about is one of life’s greatest gifts. Being a parent is the most important job one can ever have—and also the hardest and most nerve-racking. I wrote a book about that, It Takes a Village, back in 1996. I quoted the writer Elizabeth Stone, who said that having a child is like letting “your heart go walking around outside your body.” When Bill and I welcomed Chelsea into the world in 1980, I desperately wanted to protect her from anything that might harm or disappoint her. As every parent knows, that’s mission impossible—but the urge never really goes away. Now that I’m a grandmother of three, I’m watching Chelsea and her husband, Marc, experience the same mix of joy, worry, and wonder that Bill and I did. They’re fantastic parents, and nothing makes me happier or prouder.
I also know that parents today, including my daughter and son-in-law, face more complicated challenges than previous generations. At the top of the list is technology—especially the toxic combination of smartphones and social media—which has profoundly changed childhood and adolescence in ways we’re just starting to understand. The data is blaring code red: The kids are not alright.
Today, 95 percent of teens in the United States have smartphones, and nearly half say they use the internet “almost constantly.” That includes an average of nearly five hours a day on social media platforms and video apps like TikTok, and far more for the most intense users.
Some young people find the friendship and affirmation online that they don’t get in real life, which can be especially important for those who are marginalized or bullied in school, including LGBTQ+ kids. But for most teens, many of those hours online are spent scrolling through impossibly perfect photographs of unattainable bodies on platforms like Instagram, which unsurprisingly encourages social comparison and damages self-esteem. Internal research from Meta, Instagram’s parent company, confirmed in 2019 that “we make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.” Many boys are also spending countless hours on violent video games and online pornography.
This isn’t just an American problem. One study found that almost 10 percent of young people across nearly thirty countries suffer from “problematic social media use” that bears all the hallmarks of addiction. Like with addictive drugs, heavy social media and video game use creates dopamine spikes that bring abnormal highs, followed by withdrawal that brings anxiety, aggression, and depression.
All-consuming immersion in screens and social media is having devastating consequences for young people’s mental health and well-being. They’re sleeping, exercising, reading, and dating less than previous generations. And research shows that young people who spend more than three hours each day on social media are twice as likely to experience depression and anxiety. This helps explain why depression, anxiety, loneliness—and, ultimately, self-harm and suicide—have reached epidemic proportions in recent years. A survey conducted by researchers at Dartmouth found that the number of young women who said every day of their lives is a bad mental health day doubled from 2010 to 2022. The suicide rate among people in their early twenties surged by more than 60 percent from 2001 to 2021. For ten- to fourteen-year-olds, it increased by more than 115 percent. These are numbers that should shake us to our core.
My three grandchildren are too young to experience the worst of this. Still, I can’t help but think about how they and their friends and classmates will soon be exposed hour after hour to whatever content some hidden algorithm decides to promote. And artificial intelligence is creating new risks for parents to worry about. Disturbing deepfake pornography is starting to make its way into high schools, sometimes as part of cyberbullying. AI chatbots are providing tips on how teens can mask the smell of alcohol and pot. There are new tools that can help students cut corners on homework or cheat on tests. This is all just the tip of an iceberg that’s heading straight at families and schools—not to mention virtually every other aspect of American life, from our jobs to our elections.
I am deeply worried about our children’s mental health and their sense of perspective and reality—their connections to one another and our larger society. My heart breaks for parents who don’t know where to turn for help making sense of this new world. I also fear that the consequences are far-reaching, threatening our broader social fabric and the health of our democracy.
Tackling these challenges isn’t easy. We’re not just grappling with rapidly evolving, difficult-to-understand technology. We’re also up against powerful multinational corporations determined to block regulation and keep people addicted at all costs. Plus there are political actors exploiting the dark side of social media and gaming to stoke anger and alienation and advance an authoritarian agenda. Despite it all, I believe that Americans can pull together to protect our kids and our democracy, but we must act now.
I want to raise the alarm but also offer hope. I’ve been advocating for children and families my entire career, and I know that it’s possible to make progress on challenges that may appear intractable, that it’s possible to mobilize parents and communities to defeat industry lobbyists and make a real difference in the lives of vulnerable kids. In the 1990s, when I was First Lady, we took on two of the biggest threats to the health and well-being of young people: smoking and teen pregnancy. The tobacco industry spent millions to stop reforms that would help kids but hurt its bottom line. Critics said there was no way we could bring people together to drive real change on such hard problems. The cultural trends we were fighting were too entrenched and our politics—even then—too polarized. But we did. Rates of teen smoking and pregnancy plunged. Millions of young people lived healthier lives as a result.
Today’s youth mental health crisis is an even bigger challenge. I don’t pretend to understand every aspect of the technologies harming our kids. But I do know that it’s possible to build a movement for change. I see it happening. Many parents and young people are taking back control of their lives. Schools are creating new policies to help. There are good ideas for reforms that could make a real difference. So I hope you will read this as a call to arms and, if nothing else, take comfort in the fact that you are not alone in this fight.
The technology may be new, but the roots of today’s crisis go back decades. In the ’90s, when I was not just First Lady but also the mother of a teenage girl, I feared that American life had become frantic and fragmented for many people, especially stressed-out parents. Social, economic, and technological trends seemed to be pulling us apart rather than lifting us up.
I was concerned that hours spent in front of the television and video games were taking children away from what they needed most: meaningful time with family and friends, unstructured play, and activities that engaged them physically, emotionally, and intellectually. I also took seriously what the experts were saying: TV and video games were desensitizing young people to violence. I invited Hollywood filmmakers, TV programmers, and other media leaders to the White House to talk about shielding younger audiences from harmful images and advocated for a better ratings system to give parents the information they needed to set good boundaries. I encouraged moms and dads to turn off the television more often and tried to start a national conversation about how we could better support kids and families.
In It Takes a Village, I wrote about the responsibility we all have to help create healthy, nurturing communities for children—including protecting them from out-of-control technology. Nearly thirty years later, my concerns about violence on TV seem quaint. Few could have imagined back then how completely new technologies would reshape our kids’ lives—the way phones and social media networks now inject bullying, abuse, disinformation, outrage, and anger directly into their brains. I wasn’t the only person raising questions about technology and the unraveling of our social fabric. In his seminal book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam described the erosion of social spaces and community ties. It ran deeper than I realized and was more dire than I could have imagined. But the prescriptions in It Takes a Village—putting families first, placing reasonable limits on technology, and recommitting to the core American values of community and mutual responsibility—have only grown more urgent and necessary.
Like many people, it took years for me to understand the dangers of this new era of technology. I didn’t think much about Facebook or other social media until 2008, when Barack Obama’s presidential campaign showed that these platforms could be powerful tools for connecting, organizing, and motivating people—especially young people. As secretary of state, I prioritized helping activists and dissidents across the world use technology to hold repressive governments accountable, document human rights abuses, and give voice to marginalized groups, including women and young people. In a speech in 2010, I defended access to a free and open internet as a universal human right.
In the years that followed, as I prepared to run for president in 2016, I grew intensely concerned about the looming mental health crisis in America driving what later became known as “deaths of despair,” including suicides and deaths from alcohol and drug overdoses. At the time, Bill and I were friends with three families who had tragically lost children to opioids, and I knew that more than thirty-three thousand Americans had died from overdosing on opioids in 2015 alone. But I didn’t yet connect these disturbing trends to the phones constantly buzzing in young people’s pockets or the social media networks that were chipping away at their self-esteem and connection to reality. It was only after 2016, when I saw how Russian intelligence operatives and right-wing trolls had exploited social media to manipulate voters, spread vile conspiracy theories, and poison our politics that I began focusing on the new dangers lurking online. I talked to experts, read everything I could get my hands on, and tried to understand how Big Tech companies used secret algorithms to addict users and keep them consuming potentially harmful content. The more I learned, the more alarmed I became.
I wasn’t the only one. In 2023, U.S. surgeon general Vivek Murthy released two landmark advisories that crystallized many of my concerns. The first warned that a growing “epidemic of loneliness and isolation,” fueled in part by the negative effects of social media, threatens Americans’ personal health and the health of our democracy. The second showed how heavy social media use among teenagers is driving the increase in depression, anxiety, and other mental health challenges. In the past, surgeons general have at crucial moments sounded the alarm about major crises and drawn our attention to underappreciated threats, including smoking, HIV/AIDS, and obesity. Reading these new reports, I became convinced this was one of those moments.
I also read a remarkable op-ed by Dr. Murthy in the New York Times. He wrote about his own struggles with mental health, loneliness, and social isolation and how he relied on his family and friends to help him regain his footing after a particularly dark period. It was unusually candid for a high public official, and I thought it was quite brave. I didn’t know Dr. Murthy well, but I had been impressed by him from afar. He’s the grandson of a poor farmer from India, was educated at Harvard and Yale, and became President Obama’s surgeon general in 2014 at just thirty-seven years old. The National Rifle Association nearly tanked his nomination because he had the temerity—and good sense—to call guns a public health issue. After barely winning Senate confirmation, he did the job so well that President Biden brought him back for a second stint in 2021 to help lead the nation’s response to COVID. Now he was raising the alarm about our youth mental health crisis and the risks of social media.
I called Dr. Murthy to talk about his findings. I also wrote an essay in The Atlantic to draw attention to the epidemic he identified. I did interviews on national television, recorded a podcast with Dr. Murthy, everything I could think of to make sure more people heard this important warning.
Here’s what you need to know: People who use social media for more than three hours a day are twice as likely to experience loneliness and feelings of social isolation compared with those who use social media for less than thirty minutes a day. The more time we spend online, the less we interact with each other in person. In recent years, the average time young people spend in person with friends has declined by nearly 70 percent. The more we live in social media echo chambers, the less we trust one another and the more we struggle to find common ground with or feel empathy for people who have different perspectives and experiences. This is all especially dangerous for young people, whose adolescent brains are more susceptible. “Young people are not just younger older people,” Dr. Murthy explained to me. “They are fundamentally at a different phase of development, of brain development, of social development.” Our brains don’t fully develop until around age twenty-five.
When I talk with high school students these days, they often tell me the only community they know is online. “That’s not real life,” I point out. “It’s our real life,” they say. “There are no places for us to go. No one for us to talk to.” They feel isolated from teachers, counselors, even parents.
They tell me their parents are just as addicted, glued to their own phones, not interacting. They tell me if they have problems and go to counselors at their high schools, the counselors call their parents, who often seem incapable of or indifferent to addressing their anxieties.
All this takes a toll. “Loneliness is so much more than a bad feeling,” Dr. Murthy told me, adding, “Loneliness and isolation are public health issues that should be on par with how we think about tobacco and obesity.”
The data backs this up. Shockingly, prolonged loneliness has similar adverse health impacts as smoking up to fifteen cigarettes a day. When people are disconnected from friends, family, and communities, their lifetime risk of heart disease, dementia, depression, and stroke skyrockets. It’s also a gateway to substance abuse. “If you think about loneliness as a deep source of emotional pain, it is not surprising that so many people may look for things to help relieve that pain,” Dr. Murthy said.
Researchers have found that loneliness can generate anger, resentment, and even paranoia. It diminishes social cohesion and increases political polarization and animosity. By 2018, just 16 percent of Americans said they felt very attached to their local community. Unless we address this crisis, Dr. Murthy warned, “we will continue to splinter and divide until we can no longer stand as a community or a country.”
For demagogues and authoritarians who thrive on anger and division, this dynamic is a feature, not a bug. Take Steve Bannon. Before he ran Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, he was involved in the world of online gaming. He discovered an army of what he later described as “rootless white males” disconnected from the real world but highly engaged online and often quick to resort to virtual sexist and racist attacks. When Bannon took over the right-wing website Breitbart News, he was determined to turn these socially isolated young gamers into the shock troops of the alt-right, pumping them full of conspiracy theories and hate speech. Bannon pursued the same project as a vice president and board member at Cambridge Analytica, the notorious data-mining and online-influence company largely owned by the right-wing billionaire Robert Mercer. According to a former Cambridge Analytica engineer turned whistleblower, Bannon targeted “incels,” or “involuntarily celibate” men because they were easy to manipulate and prone to believing conspiracy theories. “You can activate that army,” Bannon told the Bloomberg journalist Joshua Green. “They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.”
In 2016, I was too slow to see the impact this strategy could have. Now we should all have our eyes wide open. As the surgeon general said to me, “It is so much easier to come in and to divide people and turn them against each other when they don’t have connections with one another, when they’re feeling lonely and isolated.”
How did we get here? As the researchers Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt have documented, there is good reason to believe that the key turning point was the widespread adoption of smartphones and mobile access to social media in the early 2010s. That’s when loneliness and social isolation, depression, suicide, and other mental health challenges all got dramatically worse. By 2015, nearly three out of four teens had a smartphone. “Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board,” Haidt wrote. Haidt’s bestseller The Anxious Generation has this telling subtitle: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.
Social media companies like Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram), Google (parent company of YouTube), X (formerly Twitter), and ByteDance (the Chinese company behind TikTok) have strong financial incentives to keep people watching and clicking. Their business model is simple. In 2018, when a baffled senator asked Mark Zuckerberg how his platform makes money with a free service, the Meta founder and CEO replied bluntly, “Senator, we run ads.” If you want to understand any of the choices these companies make, it all comes back to that. More eyeballs for more time mean more ads. More data collected from users means more hyper-targeted ads. Sensational and extreme content elicits strong emotional reactions and more “engagement”—and that, too, helps sell more ads. Everything about these platforms, especially their user interfaces, algorithms, and recommendation engines, is designed to advance this goal. Like tobacco companies before them, Big Tech companies know that a more addictive product is a more profitable product.
Zuckerberg and other executives love to say that social media doesn’t create harmful outcomes; it just holds up a mirror to all the good and the bad in the world around us. That’s like when the NRA says that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. If social media is a mirror, it’s a twisted fun-house mirror that shows not reality but a picture carefully calibrated to generate emotions and engagement. It’s like the mirror in Snow White that drives the queen mad with envy and encourages her violence. Kids, with brains still developing and hormones raging, are particularly vulnerable to this kind of manipulation. Young people already struggling with mental health challenges are especially at risk.
The fact that many tech tycoons don’t let their own kids use the social media platforms they profit from is telling. They know their products aren’t safe. Leaked documents, whistleblowers, and lawsuits have exposed damning details. When a security expert for Meta flagged that Instagram’s approach to protecting teens from unwanted sexual advances wasn’t working, Zuckerberg ignored him. Zuckerberg and other senior executives have repeatedly thwarted internal initiatives designed to improve the well-being of teens on Facebook and Instagram that could have reduced profits.
