Guillermo is the CEO of Ignite, a political leadership program for young women.
It’s good news that Instagram has launched stricter controls for teen accounts, strengthening privacy settings for those under 18. Underage users’ accounts are now automatically set to private mode. The platform is also implementing tighter restrictions on the type of content teens can browse and blocking material deemed sensitive, such as posts related to cosmetic procedures or eating disorders.
This all follows calls by Surgeon General Vivek Murthy for social media companies to use safety warning labels amidst rising evidence that social media could be negatively impacting youth mental health. As the leader of a national organization that works to empower members of Gen Z to get more involved in their communities, I've seen first-hand how youth mental health challenges — exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic and its accompanying challenges — have risen over recent years.
That said, we can't lay the blame for the youth mental health crisis solely at the door of social media companies. American society is facing significant challenges such as climate change, inequality, racism and mass shootings, and young people are frustrated with the lack of action from leaders around the issues they care about. These issues are causing young people to feel appropriate anxiety, and another important way to lessen it is for us to listen deeply and incorporate them into the leadership and future of this country.
Murthy's call for warning labels follows growing concern over the mental health and wellbeing of teens. A study published Feb. 13. by his office shows that American teenage girls are increasingly depressed, saddened and considering suicide. More recently, Miss USA resigned citing her mental health. A new study shows that Covid lockdowns may have accelerated brain aging, especially in girls.
There are too many alarm bells ringing to ignore. And young people are living in a world that would make anybody anxious. My organization found that more than half of young people get their news from social media. While they may be dependent upon social media for other things, which I agree could be a separate factor in their depression and anxiety, there is also a lot to be anxious about in the news, when you consider the state of the world.
For example, living in states with abortion trigger laws is associated with higher rates of depression and anxiety after the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade. Online racism is also linked to post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms in Black youth. Climate change is affecting mental health everywhere. I do know that these are issue areas, along with mental health itself, that are emerging as critically important for young people themselves. They even place them amongst their top reasons for voting.
This spring and summer, I sat down with young people of college age in swing states across the country as part of a series of focus groups. My goal was to listen deeply to young people to try to figure out why they're so disillusioned with politics. We found that they feel unheard, and that they're also particularly anxious about getting involved when the political landscape is so polarized.
There is pressure to “pick a side,” and the impact trickles into Gen Z’s friendships and lives. They don't want to be ostracized from their friends if they speak up about issues they care about. Meanwhile, they feel the political parties do not adequately encapsulate their priorities or personal values. The resulting question for me goes beyond warning labels — which I do think are important. It's about how America meets this moment.
How do we have a conversation that engages young people, that acknowledges their anxiety and struggles, and that leads to their deeper engagement in reshaping our society as we move ahead together? I was pleased to see that the producers of Disney's “Inside Out 2” brought in teens to workshop anxiety as part of the teenage character's emotional life. We need to see hundreds more such efforts across the gamut of America’s civic, cultural, political and social life if we're to reverse the current trend of young people's disillusionment and alienation.
Amidst all this, I've found that social media has its benefits. One young woman I work with, who helps organize her peers around voting and democracy, found TikTok a great place to connect with other young people with similar interests. She even got a job working on redistricting issues after connecting with an organization through the app. TikTok is continuing to fight a battle over a possible ban related to national security issues. Those concerns may be legitimate, and the courts certainly seem to be leaning in that direction. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that young people are forming genuine democratic connections on the platform.
Social media use is not all good or all bad. We need to address its impact on all of us, and while a warning label is one step to creating awareness, we have to pair this with more listening and a collective willingness to create a safer way for young people to engage digitally. After all, if any of us were a teenage girl in 2024, we might be struggling as well, both online and in the real world.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.