Everyone Is Wrong About RFK Jr. and Cellphones

There's no strong evidence that cellphones cause cancer. There also isn't strong evidence that cellphones cause teen depression.

I agree with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that cellphones probably don't belong in classrooms. They are likely to distract from learning, to impede socialization, or both.

But Kennedy has a different concern. He recently told Fox & Friends that he's worried the phones will case "neurological damage to kids" and "even cancer."

The difference between Kennedy and me—well, there are many, but the key difference for our purposes today—is that I don't mistake my suspicions about cellphones, socialization, and learning loss for demonstrated scientific facts.

Many other people have criticized Kennedy from a superficially similar angle: Like me, they think there are good reasons to keep cellphones out of classrooms, and like me, they don't think Kennedy's reasons are among them. But these critics argue that phones cause depression, anxiety, and other mental-health issues—and like Kennedy, they seem convinced that these concerns have been vigorously borne out by the scientific method.

Yet the claim that cellphones and social media cause mental health problems is also tenuous. RFK Jr. is wrong to be fearmongering about neurological damage and cancer. But it's not much of an improvement to act as if Kennedy's fearmongering is whacko while their fearmongering is just Science.

Evidence Could 'Look Very Damning' 

Kennedy told Fox that cellphones "produce electromagnetic radiation, which has been shown to do neurological damage to kids when it's around them all day, and to cause cellular damage and even cancer."

As is often the case with dicey information, Kennedy's statements aren't simply pulled from nowhere. Cellphones do emit radio frequency radiation. And while most research finds no association between cellphone usage and DNA damage or cancer, "there's a lot of low-quality research in the literature that, if you wanted to collect all that and put it together, it would look very damning," as Jerrold Bushberg, a radiation oncologist at the University of California, Davis, told NBC. "There are many activist groups out there that promote those studies and say that that's the truth."

The NBC piece goes on to point to a couple studies which could suggest a link between cellphones and cancer, but it also notes some reasons why these studies might not be reliable or might not apply to humans:

In a 2017 study, McCormick and his fellow researchers exposed rodents to radio frequency radiation and found a possible increased rate of certain tumors. However, findings in lab animals don't necessarily apply to humans, given the many biological differences, and the studies contained limitations that prevented the researchers from drawing conclusions.

A decade earlier, a study looked at cellphone use among more than 5,000 people with brain tumors and found a possible increased risk of tumors in the 10% who used their phones the most. But the research relied on people's memories about past phone use, which aren't always reliable, so its results (like those of similar studies) are hard to interpret.

The National Cancer Institute, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency "have all said there's not enough scientific evidence to associate cellphone use with cancer," reports NBC. But it adds that "the International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified radio frequency radiation as possibly carcinogenic, meaning it cannot rule out a causal link."

"It is true that in 2011 the hyper-precautionary International Agency for Research on Cancer classified cellphones as a 'possible carcinogen,'" noted Reason's Ron Bailey back in 2013:

But as a somewhat snarky response in the Journal of Carcinogenesis pointed out, the agency classifies coffee and pickles as possible carcinogens, too. Meanwhile, the National Cancer Institute flatly states that "to date there is no evidence from studies of cells, animals, or humans that radiofrequency energy can cause cancer." A 2012 comprehensive review of studies in the journal Bioelectromagnetics found "no statistically significant increase in risk for adult brain or other head tumors from wireless phone use."

(See also: "'Anything Is a Possible Carcinogen'—More On Cell Phones.")

And of course, if cellphones were causing things like brain tumors—one of the most frequent concerns about potential dangers—one would expect to see brain tumor rates rising dramatically. They are not.

The bottom line is that it may not be absolutely bonkers to posit a potential link between cellphones and certain physical health dangers. But Kennedy is overstating the evidence and ignoring evidence to the contrary.

And that's just what those saying that cellphones cause teen mental-health problems are doing, too.

Screen Time 'Proven' Problematic?

In pushing back against Kennedy's claims about cellphones and cancer, a lot of entities draw a contrast between his concerns and more respectable concerns about phones.

"Studies have found that excessive use of social media via smartphones can negatively impact teens' mental health, elevating their risk of depression and anxiety," NBC declares. "Scientists have also long understood that cellphone use in school can lead to poor academic performance, including lower grades."

A community note under an X post sharing Kennedy's statements says: "Despite widely circulated conspiracies and some tests on rats, there is no evidence in humans that cell phone radiation negatively impacts young people. Excessive screen time on the other hand have been proven to be problematic."

Yes, there are a number of studies showing associations between cell phone usage and various psychological ailments or negative mental states. But these studies suffer both from methodological flaws and from people drawing flawed conclusions from them.

The biggest issue in all of this tends to be people assuming causation from correlation. Research will show a link between high social media use, phone use, or screen time more generally and some negative psychological attribute or maladaptive trait, and people—even some who pay lip service to the maxim that correlation is not causation—will be quick to cite this research as evidence that social media and cellphones are causing a mental-health epidemic.

Yet it's possible—and plausible—that young people suffering from or predisposed to depression, anxiety, and other issues are more likely to retreat into TikTok videos, to compulsively check Instagram, to go down Reddit forum rabbit holes, and so on. That would make the screen time a symptom, not a cause.

After all, the majority of young people today have and use cellphones, but a much small percentage are prone to what can be termed problematic phone use. If cellphones were the craziness catalyst many claim they are, we should expect to see much higher numbers.

Of course, it's possible that most young people can use cellphones and social media responsibly but for some subset of them, these things are very bad—perhaps even worse than whatever alternative escape mechanism these troubled teens might embrace in their absence. This, however, is not the claim people tend to make. And even if this is true, it does not follow that we should severely restrict phone or social media use for all young people simply because it may have negative effects on a small percentage of them.

Another issue is with the way these studies are conducted. Studies often ask young people to recall and rate their own social media and/or phone usage, which may not provide reliable answers. (NBC notes this flaw when describing the study showing an association between cellphones and cancer, but apparently it's different somehow when kids are recalling how much time they spent on YouTube.)

The statistician Aaron Brown has laid out a lot more methodological flaws with various teen tech panic studies. Many of the papers Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, has cited in his arguments "contained coding errors, inappropriate statistics, and other issues," Brown points out:

Most downloaded some data of little relevance—either cheap to generate, like surveying your sophomore psychology students, or data collected for a different purpose—and analyzed it with an off-the-shelf statistical approach.

Haidt cites 476 studies in his book that seem to represent an overwhelming case. But two-thirds of them were published before…the period that Haidt focuses on in the book. Only 22 of them have data on either heavy social media use or serious mental issues among adolescents, and none have data on both.

The bottom line: It's not absolutely bonkers to posit a potential link between cellphones and certain mental-health dangers. But like Kennedy, proponents of restricting internet access and phones for young people tend to overstate the evidence on their side and ignore the evidence to against them.

A Case for Phones in Schools?

Kennedy and the phones-cause-depression crew and I may all agree that getting phones out of schools seems like a good idea.

But do you know who does not agree with us? A lot of parents. According to a survey conducted last year by the National Parents Union, most American parents want kids to have access to cellphones at schools. (Parents were also less down on phones than you might expect, with 46 percent saying phones had a "mostly" or "entirely" positive effect on their child's life and 42 percent saying they had an equally positive and negative effect.)

I have also heard from teachers who agree that teaching would be easier if no one class carried a phone, but who also point out that a zero-tolerance phone policy means teachers have to spend a lot of time policing phone use, and that this could be an even bigger disruption to learning than the phones are.

Perhaps the phones-in-schools issue isn't quite as simple or clear cut as it can seem at first.

But one thing seems abundantly clear: School cellphone policies should not be set by the federal government. They probably shouldn't even be set by the state. These are matters best left to individual schools and school districts.

Local authorities are best equipped to know how big of a problem phones in school really are among their particular student bodies and how local parents and teachers feel about the issue. They're the ones most likely to know whether restricting phones in their schools is feasible, and the best way to implement any anti-phone policies. (Do students leave their phones in a central place? Are they allowed to use them in the hallways between class, or not at all?) And they're the ones who know what resources schools can devote to restricting phone use.

There is no universal effect of phones on young people's psychological health or emotional well-being. We shouldn't expect there to be a one-size-fits-all approach to phones in schools.

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More Sex & Tech News

• Continuing the trend of "anything I don't like is an antitrust violation," the Federal Communications Commission is threatening to block telecom and media mergers for companies that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

• The European Union's executive body won't stop attacking American tech companies, notes Reason's Jack Nicastro.

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