When we write history, it tends to be tidy and led by great men. In real time, it’s messy but still astonishing. Last weekend, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who leads a private army called the Wagner Group, attempted what many have called a coup against Russian President Vladimir Putin. Technically, it failed. He landed in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, pledged to march to Moscow, and then turned around. Nothing about this series of events suggests expert planning or high competence. Prigozhin is a former prisoner and a former hotdog salesman. Staff writer Tom Nichols puts him in a league with “gangsters” and “clowns.”

But sometimes gangsters and clowns are the ones who shake up the established order. Prigozhin’s march lasted barely 48 hours, yet it seems to have changed the conversation about Russia. Putin appears shaken and, as staff writer Anne Applebaum put it, “panicky.” His response to such a direct threat has been surprisingly tentative. The mutiny may have technically failed, but it left some revolutionary thoughts in people’s minds. Putin is not, in fact, invulnerable. Which means Russians might have a choice.

In this episode, Atlantic staff writers Anne Applebaum and Tom Nichols explain this week’s wild turn of events in Russia and the door those events opened.

“We’ve lived with Putin for 23 years. We’ve kind of internalized his narrative that he’s untouchable and he can stay forever, and that he reigned supreme,” Nichols says about this remarkable moment. “That’s gone. And so I think it’s a pretty natural thing to wonder: If he’s not that powerful and if he doesn’t have that kind of support, how long can he remain in power?”

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Over the weekend, something wild happened in Russia. A man named Yevgeny Prigozhin seemed to start a rebellion. His private army, the Wagner Group, fights alongside Russian troops in Ukraine. But this weekend they turned their guns against Russia itself. They took over a major southern city called Rostov-on-Don and then pledged to march on Moscow, making it hundreds of miles before turning around.

Was this a mutiny? Was it a failed coup? People are debating Prigozhin’s motives and whether he thought he had internal support. Zooming out, though, what it means is that one man—a guy who was in prison, then became a hotdog salesman, and then rose up to become a loyal protégé of President Vladimir Putin—turned on Putin, humiliated him, and somehow survived. We’ve been told that Prigozhin is now in Belarus. Anyway, the news is moving quickly and there’s been lots of speculation. Two people I trust to ground us are Atlantic staff writers Anne Applebaum and Tom Nichols.

So Tom, the past week’s events in Russia have been called a coup and a mutiny; however, you refer to it as a falling-0out among gangsters. What did you mean by that?

Tom Nichols: Well, the problem is that the Russian state is a conglomeration of power players who are much like the five families—you know, in the old Godfather movie—these are mobsters, and Putin is the gangster in chief. But he has capos under him. And there was some issue there about territory and control with Prigozhin and his forces, who were going to be pulled in under another one of Putin’s cronies, the minister of defense.

And, um, things got outta control.

Rosin: So how does Prigozhin fit into that picture? Sort of where is he in the gangster taxonomy?

Nichols: Well, he’s got his own crew. He’s a powerful captain. He’s got his own army. He has, you know, 25,000 well-armed, battle-hardened men who answer to him. And another capo was threatening to take that away from him, and he wasn’t going to stand for that.

Rosin: So you see it less as a geopolitical battle than just an internal fight for power between two people?

Nichols: People have multiple motivations for doing things. I think a lot of what Prigozhin tapped into is real. People are, both in the military and back home, fed up with the way that the guys in Moscow have run this war and taken immense casualties and pretty much gotten nowhere. I mean, that’s a real thing.

It’s a real problem, but it’s also in part a struggle for power among these players. So there are multiple things going on here and, and not all of them, I think, are clear to us over here right now.

Rosin: Right. So Anne, looking towards the real motives that Tom brought up, Prigozhin has for a long time been openly criticizing the war in Ukraine and the motives for the war in Ukraine. What types of things has he been saying, and why do you think they struck a chord?

Anne Applebaum: For the last several weeks and months, really, Prigozhin has been blaming the leaders of the army, the leaders of the military, for failing to provide leadership, failing to provide equipment. I mean, he’s focused in particular on the minister of defense, [Sergei] Shoigu and the army chief of the general staff.

And he talks about them using very insulting language. He talks about Shoigu, you know, living a luxury life. And [Valery] Gerasimov being a paranoid, crazy person who shouts at people. These are very personal anecdotal descriptions of them. Um, which may well ring a bell among people around them as something that’s true.

More recently, and right before his strange ride to Moscow, he came out with a much more substantive critique. In other words, he began talking about the causes of the war itself. He said, well, the war was—the only reason we’re fighting this war is because Shoigu wants to advance. He wants to be a marshal. You know, he wants a better rank.

And because lots of people in Moscow were making money off of the 2014 occupations of Ukraine territories in the east that they gained at that time, and they want more. They got greedy and wanted more.

In other words, it’s not a war for empire. It’s not about the glory of Russia. It’s not about NATO. It’s not about any of the things that Putin has said. It’s just about greedy people wanting more. The appeal of this narrative is that it’s very comfortable for Russians to hear that there’s a reason why they’re failing. You know that there are specific people to blame.

Rosin: And you mean failing in the war in Ukraine?

Applebaum: I mean failing in the war in Ukraine in that they were supposed to conquer the country in three days and that didn’t happen. There’s been massive casualties [and] losses of equipment. It may also have an echo among people who want someone to blame for general misery. The economy hasn’t been going well for a while. People can see corruption all around them. It’s not like it’s a big secret. And pinning it on specific people saying these guys are responsible for failure might be something that a lot of Russians want to hear.

Rosin: Yeah. I can see as you guys are talking how it can be both a gangster war and something that is sincere and taps into a true vein of discontent. Like, it can be both of those things at the same time. Now, this question is for either of you: We are getting news trickling out this week about the possibility that Prigozhin had some kind of support in the Russian military. If that’s true, and I know that’s a big if, what does that change about how we should understand the situation?

Applebaum: So I assumed he had some kind of support in the military, both because of the way he behaved in Rostov-on-Don, where he seemed chummy with the generals at the head of the Southern Military District and where his soldiers were tolerated and almost welcomed in the city. He couldn’t have done that and he couldn’t have kept going without somebody being on his side. And it seems like he expected more, or he thought there would be more support, so that doesn’t surprise me at all. I mean, the precise names of who it was and what their motives were, I don’t think we really know that yet, although there have been concrete names mentioned in the press. But he clearly expected something more to happen.

Nichols: Yeah, I agree with Anne. I don’t think you march on Rostov-on-Don and then turn north toward Moscow and think that you’re on your own. There may have been some specific people that he had spoken to, but I think there was also a larger expectation—because remember, Prigozhin’s a pretty arrogant guy, and there is a lot of discontent in the Russian military—that he was just expecting that there would be units that he would just pick up along the way or that around Moscow would get word of this and say: We’re on your side.

And I’ve been curious about Putin’s tentativeness, his procrastination and all this, and I wonder, given these reports, whether he had concerns himself about which units—if he ordered an attack or if he wanted to do something more demonstrative—which units would actually obey his orders or which units would actually stay with him or join the mutiny if they were forced to make a choice. But again, we can’t know that for sure. But it certainly makes a lot of sense that Prigozhin wasn’t going to do this without having spoken to somebody in Moscow and in Rostov-on-Don.

Rosin: Right. So the reason this continues to be a live issue is because it matters who supported him. It matters because it speaks to the degree of insecurity on Putin’s side, and it speaks to sort of how strong the discontent is.

Nichols: It matters because it says that the Russian government and the Russian high command have serious stresses and cracks that are now obvious that had been either smaller early on and hidden, or that had somehow been papered over. But the idea that somehow Putin is completely in charge and invulnerable to challenges—that’s gone.

Rosin: Yeah, and that’s important. Now, Anne, if Prigozhin, as you say, was aiming for something bigger and it didn’t quite work out or technically failed, as we talk about it we still have to grapple with what happened on the other side, which is that he arrived in a Russian city and the citizens kind of shrugged. What did that tell you?

Applebaum: So I thought that was quite significant. We’ve all read many times these somber analyses of so-called polling data from Russia saying that people support Putin. What this showed was that the citizens of Rostov-on-Don weren’t particularly bothered that a brutal warlord showed up in the city, said he wanted to change some things and get them done.

Maybe he was going to go and take Putin’s people down. Maybe he was going to go and take Putin himself down. And they applauded him and they were taking selfies with him. And they started chanting when the Wagner Group was pulling out of Rostov-on-Don on Saturday evening—they were chanting, “Wagner, Wagner” in the streets.

That shows that the support for Putin is pretty weak. It’s passive. He’s the guy there and we don’t see any alternatives, but the instant an alternative emerges, well, you know, that might be interesting. I mean, Prigozhin is not exactly an attractive figure, but maybe from their point of view, he’s more honest; he seems more effective.

And as I said in the beginning, he’s offering them an explanation that’s psychologically comfortable. Why is this war going so badly? Why haven’t we won? Why is everything so corrupt? Why is the army so dysfunctional? Why are so many people dying?

Okay, well he just gave us a reason. The reason is because there are these corrupt generals in charge and they’re doing a bad job. And that’s something that people would like to hear. They want an explanation for this strange war that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere and is only causing damage.

Rosin: Now, Tom, in the aftermath of all of this, Putin has given a statement talking about treason, not naming Prigozhin explicitly. And given what Anne just said, and what you just said about how strong a challenge this actually is, what is this hesitation about? I mean, this whole incident could have ended with Prigozhin dead, but instead he’s in Belarus, or we think he’s in Belarus. And he’s alive, or we think he’s alive.

Nichols: I think both of them are feeling about to figure out who their allies are and they’re both making appeals to society that are meant to isolate. In Putin’s case, he’s just isolating Prigozhin without naming him, saying: Hey, all you heavily armed crack commando mercenary guys, I understand that you were led astray. And it’s okay to come home.

So when he talks about traitors, I mean, this isn’t Stalinism. He’s not saying, Oh, that whole unit, they’re all dead. He’s trying to plant internal divisions there. As is Prigozhin, who has been really careful to say, Look, I’m not trying to overthrow the president. I’m not trying to overthrow the government. But these two guys at the top, Shoigu and Gerasimov, the minister of defense and the chief of the general staff, they gotta go. And if I have to march to Moscow to get them out, then that’s what I’m going to do.

So they’re both being very careful not to proliferate more enemies in society or among the other elites than they need to. Now, for Prigozhin, that makes sense. For Putin, that’s very revealing. I mean, he’s the president of the country and here he is, kind of tiptoeing around, trying not to aggravate thousands of armed men who were part of a mutiny. So while they’re both doing the same thing, I think it’s really revealing that one of them happens to be the president of the country.

Rosin: Yeah, and as much as I understand the iconography of Putin is important—who’s weak, who’s strong—as a unit of analysis. Strong man, shirtless on a horse, does not necessarily wanna lose out to a hotdog-salesman ex-prisoner.

Nichols: Right. He actually appeared in public the first two times—he looked awful; I mean, it looked like a bunker video—where he is standing in front of a desk and he’s kind of raging to the camera. He finally came out again with all of the pomp and all the trappings of his office, coming down the big staircase and the honor guard snapping to attention.

And addressing the troops, the officers, he said something really interesting. He said: You prevented a civil war. Which is not true. Nobody actually did that. It’s certainly not true that the army put down a civil war in the offing. Nothing like that happened, and to make that appeal is to try to pull the military closer to the president, to say: You’re my heroes. I know you saved the country and you will keep saving the country. Which to me was a really striking thing to do. Again, as you and everybody’s been pointing out, Prigozhin is still—at least we think—still alive and running around issuing statements.

Rosin: So what comes next? After the break, we speculate. But with restraint.

[BREAK]

Rosin: Now, because both of you have studied the situation so closely, my natural temptation is to lob a lot of future-prediction questions at you. Like, what does this mean for Ukraine and what does the weakened Putin mean for a global order? Is it just too hard to speculate?

Applebaum: I feel there are so many missing pieces of this story and so many oddities about it that don’t add up. I would need to know more before I would be confident about telling you that, you know, at 7 o’clock on September the first, X or Y will happen next. Almost everything we know about this story, I mean, it’s like the shadows on Plato’s Cave, you know? We’re seeing the reflections of activities. There are these Russian military bloggers who you have to follow in order to understand any of this. And of course, they’re telling the story from their point of view.

State television is telling it from Putin’s propaganda point of view. It’s not as if we have a reliable source of information who will lay it out for us and give us the facts. Even the story as we’re speaking. I mean, this may even change before this podcast comes out, but as we’re speaking, we’ve been told by several very unreliable people that Prigozhin is in Belarus,—by the Russian spokesman and by the Belarussian.

And, you know, those people have lied so many times that until I see a photograph of Prigozhin, I don’t believe it. He’s gotta have a photograph of him in Minsk and I need to know that it’s not Photoshopped. And then I’m sure it’s true. So that’s why I think it’s very hard to—you don’t wanna make too many sweeping conclusions yet.

I mean, we know what we saw on Saturday. And what we saw on Saturday was a mutiny, and it did demonstrate far more weakness in the state and unpreparedness than anybody was certain was there. We know that Putin was the first to start using the language of civil war. He did it on Saturday morning, and so that indicates that he at least thinks something very serious was happening.

Which is an indication, again, that there may be more to the story to come, but making clear predictions about what will happen, certainly to the war in Ukraine—I mean, I’m not sure yet that it has affected the war in Ukraine. Maybe it will affect Russian troop morale. Maybe it lets us know that there will be more trouble with the military command.

But it hasn’t had a specific effect on the ground yet that we can see. And until that happens, I’m just reluctant to make too many predictions.

Nichols: Yeah, I think when it comes to the war in Ukraine, too many people have had this idea that all the Russian forces are going to stop and say, No, wait. We’re not going to fight until we get this sorted out. Um, they’re still fighting. The situation at the front is the situation at the front, and that doesn’t really change because of this.

So what Ukraine has to do, and the support we need to give them—that doesn’t change … the reluctance to prognosticate. Well, you know, there were a lot of people who said the Soviet Union couldn’t fall. People that study Russia have figured out that you can get burned on these predictions, in part because when you’re predicting stuff, you tend to be predicting the behavior of institutions writ large because you know how they operate. This is all contingent on individuals, and trying to predict the behavior of these kind of Mafia-like characters is really difficult to do, because that could all change in a moment when they decide to shift alliances or one of them runs afoul of another of them.

So I’m with Anne here. I don’t want to get too detailed about what’s going to happen next week … This definitely wounded Putin and he is in a different situation than he was.

I don’t think there’s any going back to sort of pre-June in Russian politics right now.

Rosin: Yeah, I mean that’s important enough. As you were talking, Tom, I was thinking if you write the histories of a lot of mutinies and coups, they do start with an action by someone who seems like a gangster and seems to be behaving in a ridiculous way. Like, coups can start in ridiculous ways.

Applebaum: It is also true that coups and mutinies that don’t succeed can have an impact on politics too. And there’s some famous examples from Russian history: There’s a revolution that doesn’t succeed in 1905, but it had a profound impact on the state. It forced the czar, Nicholas, to pass a constitution and create a Duma—a Parliament.

It very much changed the way that he was perceived. And then in the run-up to the Russian Revolution in 1917, there were also a number of strikes and moments, you know, and other, different kinds of events that happened. And some of them were unsuccessful. The Bolsheviks had a march that was unsuccessful, but ultimately there was a revolution.

They did take power. And those earlier events, you know, looked retrospectively more important than they may have seemed at the time. And it’s too early to say whether that’s what this is. But it’s clearly the case though that a failed event can have political consequences even beyond those of the immediate moment.

Nichols: Right. The 1991 coup was a complete clown show, and it failed. The guy that was actually was supposed to step in as president and replace Gorbachev was, like, drunk all the time, and the whole thing was just a complete mess. But it had a profound impact on the final days of the Soviet Union and on the collapse of the Soviet empire and the emergence of the countries of the post-Soviet space. Most mutinies and coups don’t succeed, but as Anne pointed out, they can have an immense impact just because they happened at all.

Rosin: Now all I wanna do is ask you guys to speculate, because now it’s very interesting. Now I’m thinking: Okay, so which directions does it go? You know, Is there a future for Prigozhin? Is he making a play to replace Putin one day? Are there other Prigozhins out there? I mean, are any of those answerable questions?

Applebaum: I think you can talk about options. Again, you can look at the past. It seems to me, in the case of Putin, one possibility is: Now that there’s been a challenge that didn’t succeed but that revealed weakness, will there be more challenges? And so you might say, Well, that’s clearly now an option in a way that it wasn’t before last week.

You could also guess that Putin might now try another crackdown. What do leaders do who have been weakened? Leaders like him. Dictators. Well, one of the things they do is they lash out and they try and reestablish their preeminence or their dominance. And they do that by arresting people or purging people. I don’t know what that would be in the case of modern Russia. Cutting off the internet? Or shutting the borders? I mean, you can sort of imagine scenarios, because he will now need to make up for the fact that he’s seen to be weaker. And I’m not saying either one of those will happen, but those are things that, based on how these things have played out in other times in other places, you can guess at.

Rosin: Yeah. Anne, as you look at this, I’m trying to put myself in your head. You’re sort of looking at the dictator’s playbook, watching how he rewrites the story of what just happened in real time and trying to see what other dictators would do or have done in the past. Is that how you track these events?

Applebaum: Yes. And I’m also thinking of Russian history. In the history of the Soviet Communist Party, every time there was a failure or a disaster, they would try to re-up the ideology and sort of restart the project and crack down. It goes in waves, all the way from 1917 up to 1991. And you can imagine a similar pattern working itself out here, yes.

Rosin: Yeah.

Nichols: I feel like I’m going back to the toolbox of the old-school Sovietology that I learned back in the 1980s. And so, rather than prognosticate, I’ll just say the things I’m looking for. I’m literally now looking at videos of who’s sitting next to whom at these meetings. Who’s still in. Who might be out.

I’m looking for personnel changes. Does the minister of defense survive? Does the chief of the general staff get replaced? This now becomes kind of a game of trying to follow all of these people and their portfolios as some kind of indicator of what’s actually happening behind the scenes.

Rosin: Tom, what’s the larger through line you’re tracking? You’re tracking the chess pieces—who’s going here and who’s falling off the board—but what’s the bigger story?

Nichols: I think it’s going to be: Is Putin trying to shore up his power base or is there an alternative base forming against him? I think that’s the thing to watch. You know, we’ve lived with Putin for 23 years seeming to be [invincible], except for when he first arrived in power and when he had a serious challenge around 2011.

We’ve kind of internalized his narrative that he’s untouchable and he can stay forever. And that he reigns supreme. That’s gone. And so I think it’s a pretty natural thing to wonder: If he’s not that powerful and if he doesn’t have that kind of support, how long can he remain in power?

Because until now he has made sure that there were no alternatives to him. And I think what Prigozhin did was to say, well, there could be at least some alternative. Maybe not good ones. But you can in fact oppose this guy and criticize his team and get away with it.

Rosin: Yeah. Basically, Russians, you might have a choice. That’s as much as we can say.

Nichols: Not a great choice, but a choice somewhere.

Rosin: Yeah. Anne, this may be a strange way to put it, but is there a sense that this incident exposes how alone, or kind of lost in his own head, Putin is? He conceived of the war in isolation. The military was never necessarily enthusiastic. Now we have a vision of him not exactly sure who his allies are and who’s on his team, and I just got this vision of: dictator alone.

Applebaum: So we’ve had intimations of that for a couple of years now. In fact, Prigozhin himself has hinted that Putin doesn’t really know what’s going on [and] they’re lying to him. And many others have said that too. So we’ve already had this idea that he doesn’t really know what’s going on on the battlefield. And this incident did make it seem like he also didn’t really know what was going on at home.

I mean, for someone who’s now saying they had foreknowledge of this, he didn’t react like somebody who was confident of the outcome. The speech he gave on Saturday morning was panicky. It was about the civil war in 1917 and “our nation is at stake.”

He didn’t give off the impression of someone who was staying in charge. And so there very much is the impression that he somehow lives in this by himself, surrounded by security guards in some bunker. And that feels more and more like an accurate description of his life.

Rosin: Yeah. Well, I guess a lot more to come this week. This year. For a while. But thank you both for helping us understand what just happened.

Applebaum: Thanks.

Nichols: Thank you.

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, the executive producer of audio at The Atlantic. Engineering is by Rob Smerciak. Fact-checking by Yvonne Kim. Thank you also to managing editor Andrea Valdez and executive editor Adrienne LaFrance. Our podcast team includes Jocelyn Frank, Becca Rashid, Ethan Brooks, A. C. Valdez, and Vann Newkirk. We’ll be back with new episodes every Thursday. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week.

Last month, the surgeon general released a lengthy advisory calling attention to social media and its effects on the mental health of teenagers. Historically, a warning from the surgeon general pointed a big neon sign at an issue that we might not be sure how much to worry about: cigarettes, AIDS, drunk driving. But people are already worried about social media—and they’re acting on those concerns. School districts are suing social-media companies for “knowingly” harming children. Legislators are grilling tech-company founders in hearings. Pundits are calling for age-restricting access to apps. Everyone just wants to do something, anything, to get this under control.

This is all understandable. Teenagers have become more anxious and more depressed. A notable rise in depression started in 2012, about the time many high schoolers got smartphones. Many parents who had teenagers during that period saw these changes in real time: A child who might have been ruffled by school social dynamics suddenly couldn’t escape them, and her mental health tanked.

The problem is real. But is it as real as the problems caused by cigarettes or drunk driving? We don’t know yet. Researchers have only started to understand who is vulnerable and what we can do to protect them. In this conversation, we talk with Kaitlyn Tiffany, who covers tech for The Atlantic and has been tracking the unfolding research into the effects of social media in detail. We won’t tell you whether to worry a lot, or not at all. We’ll just step away from the urgency for a moment to tell you what experts know, what they are guessing at, and how you might proceed in all that frustrating uncertainty.

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic. So last week I was talking to a friend of mine who shared this fantasy she has of shipping her kids to a tech-free island where there were no phones, no tablets, no video games, no computers, not even a television. Now, I’ve parented three teenagers. And I’ve had this fantasy myself many, many times.

And like all fantasies of frustrated parents, it’s useless. Like you can practically hear the teen eye rolls in the background. This episode is my attempt to be useful to address the problem of teens, their phones, and their mental health from a place of facts and research and actual knowledge.

So this week I'm going to talk to staff writer Kaitlyn Tiffany, who writes about tech and online culture, and who knows that this issue is both urgent—laws are being considered right now—and annoyingly hard to pin down.

Kaitlyn Tiffany: Obviously, in eight years of writing about social media, I would not ever argue that it’s unfair to criticize these tech companies or that there’s not a ton to criticize, but it just seems counterproductive to constantly just be blaring the sirens rather than saying anything specific.

Rosin: Oh my God, I’m so glad to hear you say that. The word I keep writing down every time, almost every time I read about teens and social media, is broad. Like I’ve, I, I’ve moved away from hysterical, which is what I used to write down, but I still feel intellectually like it’s just too broad.

Tiffany: Yeah, definitely.

Rosin: And part of why I wanted to talk to Tiffany now is that it’s not just parents who are trying to crack this. It’s teachers, the teens themselves, but also legislators. There is a real hunger to do something. Pass something now, and last week gave that a big push forward.

Archival: Today, the U.S. surgeon general released sobering new figures on teen social-media use and its effects on their mental health. Dr. Vivek Murphy says social media’s effect on the mental health of young people isn’t fully understood yet. It is a main contributor to depression, anxiety, and other problems in the nation’s teenagers.

Rosin: So Tiffany, what exactly did the surgeon general say last week?

Tiffany: So the surgeon general released this 19-page advisory about social media that basically identifies it as a quote public-health challenge, but also emphasized that there’s a lot of research that needs to be done before people can say that social media is, quote, unquote, safe. So that’s kind of an interesting approach. He’s not saying that we need to prove that it’s dangerous. He’s saying we need to prove that it’s not dangerous.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Tiffany: And he’s drawing attention to possible risks of harm, especially for adolescents in, like, specific developmental stages. So younger preteen girls—11 to 13— boys, 14 to 15 years old, but also acknowledging there are these known, quote, unquote, evidence gaps. So was the most harmful thing that you’re losing sleep? Is the most harmful thing that you are not seeing your friends in person, et cetera? But the headline, yeah, is kind of like, Everyone pay attention to this.

It could be really bad.

Rosin: Right. Okay, so here is kind of a big question. What do we know about social media and kids at this point?

Tiffany: What we know is that through the process of doing hundreds of studies, researchers have somewhat narrowed down to some really pertinent questions about when and under which circumstances social media would be bad. It’s not in all circumstances, and it’s not for everyone. I know that is very confusing, but that is pretty much what we know.

Rosin: Yeah it creates this funky moment where legislators wanna do something now. And I bet the surgeon general’s report will just make that more intense. But the research doesn’t have enough nuance right now. Like in order to know what to do, you kind of have to know more precisely what the problem is, but the research isn’t quite there yet.

Tiffany: Right.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. So maybe we should talk about how we got here.

Tiffany: Yeah, so I’d say there are three pretty significant moments we should touch on. A lot of researchers, or people who are interested in this topic, point to 2012 as being sort of the saturation point where the iPhone had been out long enough that young kids were starting to have them. It was also the year that Facebook acquired Instagram, which ballooned its growth, led to it launching on Android and becoming sort of a part of everyone’s daily lives.

Rosin: So the image we have of a teenager walking around with a phone, looking at whatever they’re looking at [on] Snapchat, Instagram, that started in 2012?

Tiffany: Yeah. Or, you know, became sort of the mass phenomenon by 2012. I remember somebody in my high school having an iPhone in 2007, but he was like the only person that everybody would, like, line up to play with it. It wasn’t normal yet.

Rosin: Yeah, 2012 was exactly the year that my then-preteen daughter got a cellphone, and that everybody suddenly had one in middle school.

Okay, let’s back up, because I didn’t ask you an important question: Are you interested in naming your generation? Just because a lot of this conversation is often framed as generational battles, so I’m curious to understand where you intersect with social media.

Tiffany: Oh yeah, sure. I’m a Millennial, so I did not have social media until, like, the very end of high school. My senior year, I got a Facebook account, and then I guess I wasn’t on Instagram until I [had] almost graduated from college because I didn’t have a smartphone right away.

Rosin: I just think it’s important to locate people in where they are. It’s like, are they the alarmed parent generation or are they the teenager? Are they somewhere in the middle?

Tiffany: Yeah, totally.

Rosin: Okay, so then it’s just everybody’s walking around with cellphones and then what happens?

Tiffany: Yeah, so, the next significant turning point is in 2017, where there is a bit of a backlash, I think partly driven by interest in some tech personalities talking about how they don’t let their kids use screens. But then actually sort of—

Rosin: Is that really—that’s, that’s one of the things that did it?

Tiffany: Yeah.

Rosin: That’s really funny.

Tiffany: I think it comes up a bit that, like, Steve Jobs didn’t think kids should use technology like that. But yeah, 2016, 2017, there’s more concern about should kids be spending the whole day looking at their smartphones. And The Atlantic actually published a really big piece by a researcher named Jean Twenge where the headline was “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”

Rosin: [Gasps] That is such an Atlantic-y headline. That’s actually one of the reasons I really wanted to talk to you, because I remember, I remember reading that story. I just remember having a huge resistance to it. Even though, you know, I wrote for The Atlantic, just thinking, like, Wow, that’s throwing the gauntlet down.

That’s, like, a really big question. I mean, I know it had a question mark after it, but it was like, have smartphones destroyed a generation?

Tiffany: Yeah. And it’s like, and we think the answer is yes.

Rosin: Right, right. All right, so what did Twenge argue in that article?

Tiffany: Yeah. So she was talking about these numbers that she’d been seeing, which come out regularly, from this survey that the National Institute on Drug Abuse conducts, asking adolescents about how happy they are and how they spend their free time. And she was noticing this correlation between spending a lot of time looking at screens and also expressing unhappiness and depression and suicidal ideation. That was the first thing that really concerned her. And then she was also pulling out these more specific data points, like a decrease in [the] number of teenagers who were driving or going out on dates or who had ever had sex. And there was the trend line showing that people were saying “I often feel left out of things,” or “A lot of times I feel lonely,” or “I get less than seven hours of sleep per night.” Those were concerning to her as well.

Rosin: So just to be perfectly clear, the headline says, has X caused Y, but what the data did was put X next to Y, right? It was just like in these last few years, teenagers have gotten smartphones. Also, in these last few years, there’s been this marked shift in a lot of markers of wellness. It was “an elbow in the data,” like that it was unmissable because it was such a sharp turn.

So it’s like, we see the sharp turn. Also, there were cellphones. There’s no causality there, right?

Tiffany: Yeah, yeah, so she’s talking about CDC surveys that were not specifically intended to look at how social media might affect teen mental health. They were, you know, sort of general as of like teen behavior and psychology.

And then she was creatively reading them and presenting a very legitimate hypothesis. But then, social-science researchers were presented with the challenge then of seeing whether that would bear out. So right after her article came out, there’s a huge balloon in the amount of research that was conducted. But, yeah, the first step would’ve just been like, Cool hypothesis. Let’s give it a whirl.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. So basically that’s what I thought. Basically what’s happening between 2017 and now is, like, Cool hypothesis. Let’s test it out in lots of different formats. Let’s road test it here and there, and let’s just see, like, does it hold up? So what were the dynamics that researchers started to hypothesize?

Tiffany: So around this time, the initial question that people had was about screen time overall. So the next notable moment would have come in 2019, when researchers from Oxford published this study that was looking for correlations between digital-technology use and well-being.

And once they found this small correlation, they then sort of set it up against some other things to provide context to readers, which is pretty innovative I guess, because it allowed the study to travel pretty far, because rather than saying, Oh, the association between technology use and well-being is negative 0.049, which is probably meaningless to most people, you can say that the association between technology use and well-being is smaller than the association that’s been found between well-being and binge drinking or smoking or even having asthma or wearing glasses. And it’s only very slightly larger than the association between well-being and eating potatoes.

Rosin: Oh, this is the potato study, right?

Tiffany: Yes. The iconic potato study.

Rosin: The Great Potato Study. I remember that study, and I remember headlines like “Screen Time Is About as Dangerous as Potatoes,” and I remember finding it also totally unsatisfying because it was like, “Oh, you know, it’s ruining a generation.” “No, it’s totally cool. It’s fine. Like, there’s no problem. Don’t worry about it.” It was like neither of those answers seemed correct or were satisfying.

Like, you could see as a parent that something historically monumental was happening and you couldn’t quite put your finger on it. And just from my perspective, like, I neither wanted to be completely, totally alarmed, nor did I want to be like, “It’s fine. Don’t worry about it,” you know?

Tiffany: Yeah, I think the value of the potato study is that it was sort of like resetting the table a bit—like the objective, you know, when the researchers talked about the study after it was published, was to kind of acknowledge that screen time as a category is just like too broad to study in a meaningful way, because people use screens for so many different things, you know? They use them to harass and stalk people, or they use them to, like, do a yoga video. They use them to research their homework. They use them to, like, mindlessly scroll through TikTok. Like, it would be impossible to get a meaningful answer at, like, a high level about how screens as a blanket category affect people’s lives.

Rosin: Right, right. It’s useful to have a reset so that we can start narrowing in on what the problem actually is, because there is an actual problem, right? Like, depression is rising. It is a real thing. I mean, I’ve looked at the same data set that these researchers are concerned about, and they’re right. It’s really stark. Like, look at rates of depression and suicidality among teenage girls, and it’s incontrovertible that something is happening. So we’re worried about something beyond just, you know, We hate Mark Zuckerberg.

Tiffany: Yeah. I mean, the legitimate worry is that there are obvious and measured increases in depression among young people. There was a big CDC trend report that came out earlier this year that was looking at the data from 2011 to 2021.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Tiffany: So in 2011, 28 percent of teenagers said they experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, and in 2021, that number had jumped to 42 percent.

And they saw big jumps in the percentage of high-school students who experienced, quote, persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, a jump in the percentage that considered suicide, as well as they started measuring for the first time the percentage that said they’d experienced poor mental health, including stress and anxiety and depression in the past 30 days. That number was 29 percent. And for female students, 57 percent said they experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, and 69 percent of LGBTQ students. So those were kind of the dramatic top-line numbers that were widely covered and alarming.

Rosin: Yeah, and I guess we can all imagine there are lots and lots of reasons why young people would feel hopeless or in despair. But I also will say I’ve had many conversations with fellow parents who would describe it as night and day, like what their child was like before they were deep in social media all day and all night and had no escape from it.

And what they were like after that was their reality. Like people can truly narrate, you know, Okay, my child was like this. They would go in their room and draw; they would read a book; even if they had a bad time at school, they could escape from it. And then all of a sudden that wasn’t possible. It became like it totally occupied their psyche.

Tiffany: Yeah, definitely.

Rosin: So, okay, so let me summarize so far. So you had the Twenge article, which was like a boom in one direction, and then you had the potato research, which was a boom in the other direction. And it just sort of flipped-flopped back and forth. There’s hysteria. There’s the bounce back from hysteria. And hopefully, what I’m hoping is that, since 2012, researchers start to get more specific.

Like they start to narrow in on who’s vulnerable and what kinds of behaviors are vulnerable.

Tiffany: Yeah. I think once you get past the Oxford study in 2019, you’re at a point where you’re saying it’s not yes or no, and we’re done talking about screens. That’s pointless. Let’s talk specifically about social media, and let’s pull the data out into more specific segments so that we can be talking about specific populations, because it’s also a waste of our time to say, Screens do X to everyone all the time.

Rosin: Okay, so you and I have had this really lovely clarifying academic discussion, but the world doesn’t necessarily have patience for our lovely little academic discussion, because there is this growing urgency for regulatory or legislative intervention, and it’s kind of becoming hard to resist.

Tiffany: Yeah, so I think the question of, like, regulatory or legislative intervention has been much more urgent and frequently asked in the last couple of years, since the Facebook files were leaked by Frances Haugen. To time stamp, this was in the fall of 2021. Frances Haugen, who was an employee at Facebook, leaked a huge batch of documents from the company to a bunch of journalists. And in the Facebook files, the most dramatic revelation was this collection of slides presenting internal research that Facebook had done where teen girls expressly said, Instagram makes me feel bad about myself or causes all of these problems for me in my emotional life.

And the thing that was sort of missing from a lot of the conversation around those slides was that they were conducted not scientifically, like admittedly not scientifically, not for scientific purposes. So there’s a pretty big contrast between that and the sort of like decades of studies proving that cigarettes cause cancer.

But the takeaway from the Frances Haugen leak was that meme of, like, “Facebook knew”—like, Facebook knew it was doing this.

And so that was kind of transitioned quite smoothly and quickly into this comparison to Big Tobacco, which is super common now.

And I get why people use these metaphors. I just, like, worry about how literal people take them sometimes, because cigarettes do not have societal benefits and people died horrifically of lung cancer. That is simply not the same thing as the questions that we have about social media.

Like, tobacco is bad for everyone. Full stop. If you smoke cigarettes, that’s bad for you, and there’s no debate about that. And social media can be bad for some people in certain circumstances, but it also would be pretty ridiculous, I think, to argue that it has no benefits whatsoever.

Rosin: Right.

Tiffany: And it’s not as simple as saying: “Drop the cigarette; it’s gonna kill you.”

Rosin: Mm, this is so helpful. I already understand so much more than I did, you know, half an hour ago when we started this conversation. For me, this is important and satisfying because almost everything I read in the popular media, like, nothing feels specific enough to me. So that’s basically what I’m looking for. It’s, like, Oh, we’re about to enter this era where we’re gonna haul people up to the Hill and make all this legislation.

But before I know how to think about all that legislation or if I think it’s the right thing to do, or not the right thing to do, I just feel like I need to understand a little better what the problem is and, like, who, who we’re targeting and what the research shows and just understand it a little better.

Tiffany: Yeah, definitely. If there are big policy changes now, it will be hard to, first of all, prove what kind of effect they have and, second of all, reverse them if they don’t work. So, the stakes are really high; we should definitely figure out what we’re doing.

Rosin: Okay, that brings us to now. So let’s you and I do it. Let’s get into specifics. What concrete things do researchers actually know? And what directions are they pointing in now?

Tiffany: Yeah, I think there are still questions that remain to be answered, and hopefully some of those will come as we’ve had more time to do, like, longer studies. There’s one that’s being done right now that started in 2016 that’s looking at the same group over a period of 10 years. So you can maybe identify specifically cause and effect, but there’s been some smaller-scale ones that I think pretty convincingly prove that there are these windows of acute vulnerability for teenagers, and specifically for young girls between 11 and 13 and boys between 14 and 15.

But for girls it’s even more apparent, and there are pretty clear relations between specific mental-health outcomes. So as social-media use goes up, the satisfaction in their appearance goes sharply down, in a study that came out last year. So those things are starting to be repeated more clearly, which also gives important clues as to the mechanisms of how social-media use would affect somebody’s mental health, because, like, in that case, that’s obviously an issue of, like, of body image and social comparison, which is about the platform itself.

Whereas, you know, some other studies have wondered, maybe it’s not anything that they’re doing online. Maybe it’s just the fact that being on your phone means that you sleep less or go outside less, or hang out with your friends in person less. So if that’s the case, you know, that becomes maybe more of an issue of parenting than if it is specifically about the content they’re being served or about the sort of basic structure of the app. Like, that’s really good to know and is important to act on. I think it is obviously still difficult to say, like, “What are you gonna do about the fact that Instagram makes girls feel bad about the way that they look?” That’s a pretty broad problem with a lot of cultural history and baggage, but it’s at least, like, something to focus on.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. It’s funny; a lot of this is, like, it sort of ends up in a commonsense realm.

Tiffany: Yeah.

Rosin: I have my parent hat [on] now. So, like everything else, it requires knowing the child, and, whether it’s a teacher who knows the child or a parent or friends, it’s like there are young girls whose brains are still developing, who are just past puberty, who are maybe self-conscious, and social media can exacerbate, it sounds like, existing dynamics that girls have struggled with forever.

And so if you know that there’s a kid who’s just especially vulnerable to those dynamics, and let’s say you notice them up all night or not sleeping or really fixated on these things.

Tiffany: Yeah, I think that’s right.

Rosin: Like, as a parent, I’ve definitely had the instinct of, like, Get off your damn phone. But it seems like if you’re actually looking for vulnerability, it’s a little more precise than that.

Tiffany: Yeah. And I think it sounds kind of hokey to be, like, “Just talk to your kids.” But these do seem to be things that kids are pretty articulate about.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. So the dynamics they’re talking about with young girls, are they just the dynamics of time immemorial? Like do they ever get into, you know, is it scrolling that’s the problem? Is it scrolling for X number of hours? Is it your close friends, or is it looking at pictures of the Kardashians?

Like, what have they ever, like, homed in on sort of, what is the behavior that leaves you feeling vulnerable? Like, is it passive or active? Is it posting pictures or just looking at other people’s pictures?

Tiffany: Yeah, there was a period where there was a lot of interest in that distinction between active and passive use: people sort of arguing that there might be a difference in terms of how social media affects you, whether you’re actively messaging people and posting stuff. And that might be good, whereas passively scrolling and, you know, just seeing things that make you feel bad would be worse.

But it kind of came down to these aren’t meaningful distinctions, because there’s good active use and there’s destructive active use and there’s good passive use. You know, I spend a lot of time scrolling on my phone, because I am reading The Atlantic, which is passive use, of my phone.

And there’s bad passive use, which would be like when you’re scrolling and you don’t know why and you didn’t wanna be, and it makes you feel bad.

Rosin: Got it. So it’s not as mechanistic as what you are doing. What matters is who you are at the moment that you’re doing it, and what your orientation towards it is. Like, if you happen to be in a moment of distress and you’re in a certain age, it doesn’t matter if you’re using it actively or passively; social media is gonna amplify your distress.

Tiffany: Yeah, and there’s been some more recent research that suggests that it could matter how you think about social media as well. So if you feel like social media is fun—it’s where I connect with my friends; I use it for the X reason and then I stop using it, because I’m in control—like, in those situations it can be related to positive outcomes, as opposed to negative outcomes.

Negative outcomes are more tied to feeling, like, I have no control over this and I’m spending so much time doing it and I don’t want to be.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. That’s important too. So that is, that’s actually, there’s another parenting lesson in there. If you can somehow orient your kid towards a feeling of control, like, Use this in a way that benefits you and don’t let it use you. Again, very commonsensical, but maybe that’s—that gives you another tool, like, I’m not just yelling at you because you’re on your phone. I’m trying to understand how you are orienting yourself and managing the time that you’re on your phone and whether it’s serving you or it’s making you feel worse.

Tiffany: Mm-hmm.

Rosin: Yeah. So despite the research being incomplete and the questions being thorny and philosophical, there are going to be things proposed. So what do you know about the things that have already been proposed?

Tiffany: So there are state laws that have been passed or proposed in many states already that would make it so that minors can’t be on social media without parental permission.

Rosin: That’s age-gating, right?

Tiffany: That’s the age-gating solution, yeah, that a lot of pundits have been sort of advocating for, for the past couple of years, including Frances Haugen. I think those will face a lot of challenges, including, like, in enforceability and just, like, First Amendment issues. A lot of free-speech-issue groups would say that it’s not productive to just prohibit young people from speaking in public.

I think just, like, personally, it just seems very punitive, even if that’s not how people, like, mean it to come off to kids. Like, how else are they gonna receive it? And it’s just a more dramatic measure than I think people are giving credit for. Because you can say, like, “Hey, well, we age-gate other things.You can’t drive until X age. You can’t drink until X age. Why not say you can’t have an Instagram until X age?” But you are in effect yanking something away from millions of teenagers, some of whom might be like really, I don't know, emotionally dependent on it. Or even just like creatively dependent or like really enjoy using it and it’s not harming them.

And it, it just seems really—it’s really dramatic and really abrupt and something that should only be considered if there’s, like, absolutely a rock-solid evidence base in my opinion.

Rosin: Interesting. I also don’t know how you would measure this at all, but it does create a sense of distrust between generations, because you could make the argument as a parent that smoking is inherently bad. You can’t smoke as a kid. Drinking is, you know, you’re just not ready to drink; you’re not ready to drive a car.

But I, but I don’t know that a kid would fully get on board with the idea that you’re not ready to use any social media at all. Like, they could understand, okay, there are some dangers out there and we should talk about it and sort of watch for vulnerabilities, but like, an N-O? I don’t know.

Tiffany: Yeah. Yeah, totally.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay, so is there, are there other proposals that you’ve seen that seem interesting or dangerous?

Tiffany: Yeah, I think the FTC is trying to, like, be a bit more creative about how to limit Facebook and Instagram’s ability to profit off of targeted advertising towards teens, which some people would maybe think of as being productive, because it eliminates a little bit of their profit motive to keep teens on the app all the time.

You know, I’m pro-privacy. I think that’s a good idea. It’s pretty complicated in that it’s not just about what Facebook does, but yeah. I mean, I think that’s a good thing to aim for for sure.

Rosin: Now, how would that address the original problem we discussed, which is depression?

Tiffany: Yeah.

Rosin: Like, I feel like a lot of this is sort of like setting up a, a kind of, like, Rein those guys in. But the problem we started out with was that social media was making kids distressed.

Tiffany: Yeah. I guess this gets at why it’s so important for the research to identify the specific problems and the specific mechanisms, because, like, if the main way that social media is causing depression or anxiety in teens is because it’s preventing them from getting enough sleep and it’s preventing them from seeing their friends in public, just purely hypothetically, like then what you could, like, deduce from that is that, like, okay, maybe these products are just too addictive, and our kids are being sort of coerced into staying on them for too long.

And it’s not about the content; it’s just about purely how much time they’re taking away from things that make them happier and healthier. So in that situation, it’s a little bit more obvious why reducing Instagram’s incentive to, like, keep kids on the app and to, you know, get more data from them that they can monetize and serve them more ads, like, Instagram would be more incentivized to focus on adults and not serve as many ads to kids. And, and you know, personally I don’t think, like, Instagram is just, like, ruthlessly driven to extract all monetary value from children. Even as, again, I don’t wanna be in the position of, like, defending a corporation, but that’s sort of the logic and that’s sort of the reason why you have to get more specific.

And if the answer is that the main way that Instagram causes depression is through negative social comparison and like poor body image instigated by seeing all of these images of models, like, no, probably privacy protection isn’t gonna solve that problem. We’d have to come up with something else.

Rosin: You know, we talked about this; it’s hard to talk about, but like, we get stuck in a moment or sort of, like, in the same way we get stuck in a musical moment. We get stuck in a kind of social-media moment.

And meanwhile, like, people have moved along. They’re using different platforms; they’re kind of navigating it much more deftly, say, than the generation or even the two years before them.

Tiffany: Yeah, I always sort of, like, marvel at my younger sister’s levels of adjustment and happiness. But, I guess, I mean, this is not scientific at all. This is just like a personal pet theory based on nothing except anecdotal experience, but, like, they are a little bit more squarely in this demographic of concern. I think two of them would be considered Gen Z? And my understanding from, from watching them or talking to them is, like, they really experienced very little strife around social media because it felt pretty natural to them, you know? They post goofy—like, ugly, sometimes—pictures of themselves. And, you know, that’s, like, funny and fun for them. I sometimes wonder if there is, like. a kind of narrow band of people, like maybe around my age or a little bit younger, who were forced to adapt to these things in real time, in the middle of puberty, which made it maybe more fraught than if you had just always thought of Instagram as something that existed and something that you were gonna one day use.

Rosin: You know, that is such a good point. It’s anecdotal, of course, but we do talk about his research as if these teenagers are fixed in time. Like there was only this one band of teenagers, but maybe they got the onslaught and then as time went on, people got more adjusted. Like, they themselves changed and maybe caught up with things.

So maybe the teenagers we’re legislating for are not the same teenagers we studied. And the problems of the earlier set of young people, they just might not be the same as the problems of teenagers now.

Tiffany: Yeah, because, like, I did have a lot of anxiety around Instagram in my early 20s when I first had it, and have gone through periods like, you know, during breakups where Instagram is like absolutely a toxic minefield for me in many ways, including, like, all of the body-image stuff we’ve been talking about. But, but I—I sometimes do, yeah, just think like, Huh, maybe there’s something about, like, kind of always having this and sort of deciding how to use it yourself and just be like, “Well, it exists; it’s part of life.”

Rosin: Yeah, no, I mean, there’s a, there’s actually a really good lesson in there, because what you’re describing about your sisters is they use it; like, it exists. They know the name of it; their older sister used it. Lots of people use it. It’s not this new, crazy thing.

And so they just do with it what they want, you know? And they kind of like make it work for them. Like, every once in a while it’s gonna get you down, but if you can use it how you wanna use it, then sure, why not?

Like, it must seem absolutely absurd. These discussions about, like, End it tomorrow. It’s like, why? You know, I’m just posting dumb pictures of my friends.

Tiffany: Yeah.

Rosin: You know, at so many stages of this, I’ve just wanted to push it away and not think about it. But the truth is, like, the depression rates keep rising. Like, there is something at the heart of this. I don’t know that we’ve made all the connections properly yet, but there is something there that we should keep paying attention to. What do you think the next few years are gonna look like? Like, what’s the best-case and worst-case scenario for how we rein this in, now that the surgeon general has said, “Time to do something about it”? Like, I bet if you look back in history, it’s like, the surgeon general issues a report, it’s a symbolic moment, and the culture around things changes. What is the best case and worst case for social media?

Tiffany: I think worst case would be what we were talking about, just really dramatic measures like a blanket age-gate that isn’t based in evidence and there’s kind of no way to undo it and no way to see what effect it has for 10 years. I think that's the worst-case scenario.

I think best-case scenario would be kind of where we are, like, watching people sort of chip away at the problem, find these specific places where we can intervene, whether that’s educating teenagers, educating parents, or whether it’s putting pressure on Facebook to do things like share data with researchers, which they can be pretty stingy about.

I think, like, that would be really productive. I think, like, part of the issue that we keep running into with this is that there’s not, like, a great headline and there’s not a silver bullet. So it is sort of just, like, the boring answer of like, Well, we need to keep learning, you know?

Rosin: Right. That would be the sexy Atlantic headline.

Tiffany: Yeah. Real nerds here.

Rosin: It would be like, Let’s figure out how social media is affecting the mental health of teenagers and put into place small measures to ameliorate it.

Tiffany: Right?

Rosin: I would totally, totally read that article.

Tiffany: Yeah. And start over from scratch in two years, once we are no longer even using any of these platforms we’ve been talking about.

Rosin: Right. That’s the subhead.