Student protests over the war at Gaza are unlike those from recent American history. In the 1960s, students protesting the Vietnam War chanted “Make Love, Not War.” Civil rights activists sang “We Shall Overcome.” In 2024, campus demonstrators, though, shout, “Death to America” and “We are Hamas!”

That shift in substance could be less about the state of the world today, and more so about the way that people born between 1997 and 2012, known as Gen Z, encounter it. “It’s not just something magical about being born in 1997 that makes you have different politics,” social psychologist Jonathan Haidt tells the Sun. “It’s that you went through puberty on social media and that makes you a very different kind of person, a very different kind of activist.” 

The baleful relationship between youth mental health and social media is the centerpiece of Mr. Haidt’s new book, “The Anxious Generation,” which made it to the top spot on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list. He argues that the rise of smartphones has “rewired” childhood in the last decade, spiking the rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide among young Americans today.

Mental health issues have also taken a toll on university life. “When Gen Z arrived on campus in 2014, they brought with them more anxiety and therefore more cognitive distortions,” Mr. Haidt says. “They saw threats much more frequently, even when there were no threats. They were in the safest, most progressive, anti-racist spaces ever created, but they felt unsafe, and they saw racism fairly pervasively.”

A study of college students in 2009 — before Gen Zers came on campus — by psychologists Malte Klar and Tim Kasser found that activists were more likely to be “flourishing,” meaning happier and more fulfilled, than non-activists. The same cannot be said for young activists today. 

Young liberal women, who spend by far the most time on social media, are suffering the highest rates of depression and anxiety, Mr. Haidt says. Across the Western world, this cohort is generally moving rapidly to the political left, while their male counterparts are moving slightly to the political right.

These diverging political views, along lines of gender and age, came with the rise of what Mr. Haidt and his colleague Greg Lukianoff call “safetyism” in their  book from 2018, “The Coddling of the American Mind.” Around 2013, Messrs. Haidt and Lukianoff contend, elite universities began to prioritize feelings of safety over academic rigor, leading to the silencing of speech. 

University leaders haven’t helped much. By accommodating student demands, administrators have set a precedent for one subset of students to dominate campus dialogue. “They made the bed that they’re now lying in,” Mr. Haidt says. “They established the principle that if students think they’re right, then they get to shout down speakers.”

Social media, meanwhile, is making campus activism easier than ever. Organizing a protest with hundreds of thousands of people no longer requires an established group with members who pay dues or professional staffers who plan targeted actions. The rallying cry doesn’t need to be tied to a particular policy solution — though some students are calling for divestment from Israel. Today, a compelling Instagram post is enough to mobilize the masses.

“Online activism tends not to change the world, but tends to be very explosive, unstable,” Mr. Haidt says. “It has very unusual and frightening mob dynamics and it spreads falsehoods at lightning speed.” Instagram and other sites aren’t the productive platforms for social justice work that they appear to be, he warns.

“You get activism that is not grounded in reality, not concerned with actually making change,” Mr. Haidt says. “The basic dynamics are performative for each individual within the context of a group protest.”

A new working paper in the National Bureau of Economic Research by two professors, Amory Gethin of the Paris School of Economics and Vincent Pons of Harvard Business School, finds that out of more than a dozen recent social movements in America, none seemed to change minds or affect electoral behavior. 

Mr. Haidt points to one example of successful Gen Z activism — the “March for Our Lives” movement to end gun violence, launched by Parkland students after the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. States have since passed more than 250 gun safety laws. “It wasn’t just fantasies and slogans,” Mr. Haidt says of that movement. “It was real research on the complexity of the problem and it was targeted at changing laws.”

Signs are emerging that social justice activism can even backfire on the cause at stake. Accusations and divisions over issues of race and gender have brought some Washington-based advocacy groups to a standstill. “Progressive organizations are becoming generally dysfunctional because of all the internal infighting brought about by constant struggles on social media,” Mr. Haidt says.

Students at Columbia and other campuses have, however, found success in shutting down university events, including graduations, and President Biden, feeling the political pressure of this “Instagram Intifada,” is vying to win their votes in November. 

Mr. Haidt offers a bit of wisdom for Washington. “If the future of the Democratic party is shaped by activists with high levels of anxiety, this is going to lead to policies and activities that are likely to alienate most of the middle of the country,” he says. “I think this bodes very poorly for the Democrats’ chances going forward.”