Thank you to the witnesses for your testimony today. It's been very interesting.
Perhaps, to start with you, Ms. Broder, we're talking a lot about civic resilience, and it often gets tied to the digital space. I'm curious; my question is, are you familiar with the work of the American author Jonathan Haidt and a book called The Anxious Generation? This is a work by a social psychologist with a Ph.D. He teaches at New York University right now. His work has just been shared with me.
His whole thesis in the book, if you have a chance to read it, is basically that the generation born after 1995, so starting in 1996 and onward, all—and I count myself in that, because I was born in 1997—got social media right when we were going into the high school era. This had a dramatic effect on puberty and brain growth. Haidt has empirical evidence in his book to show that, as a result, levels of anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicide dramatically increased from 2010 to 2015, which were exactly the years when I was in high school. It has continued to get worse since.
I'm curious to know whether you have a comment. It's not a problem if you haven't read the book, but I'm wondering whether you've looked at the generational impact that access to social media, at such a young age, has had on brain development, and where that's leading my generation and all the ones that are coming after mine, in terms of civic resilience.