Check in the mail: our analysis of Epstein’s correspondence

14:14Dan Rosenheck:They come after years in which governments have been probably too relaxed about some of the risks that people face. there. But these blanket bans for younger teenagers may be unlikely to achieve the aims that policymakers hope they will achieve.

14:29Rosie Blau:Tom, aren't we all worried about what our kids are looking at online? There seems to be a problem here that does need solving.

14:37Dan Rosenheck:Yeah, I think it's one of those things that every parent worries about and I think probably quite a few children worry about as well. We're at this interesting moment where today's parents of teenagers for the first time are of an age where they themselves might have used social media in their own teenage years or in their 20s. We've seen a thankfully small number but significant number nonetheless of really serious tragedies involving children who've hurt themselves or even killed themselves partly as a result of things that they've seen online and at a bigger population level I think many people are trying to figure out what is behind a worldwide decline in the mental health of young people.

15:15Dan Rosenheck:There's been a statistically significant increase in depressive episodes across many countries over the last 15 years or so, which roughly coincides with the period in which smartphones and social media have become much more popular. And so people are wondering what, if anything, can be done to try and solve this problem.

15:32Rosie Blau:So what's the general perception of those bans? What do people in different countries actually think about the idea of social media bans?

15:39Dan Rosenheck:Well, I'm not sure I've ever seen a more popular policy than this. I mean, it's just extraordinary. There's huge support for this among adults pretty much all over the world. I saw one series of polls done by Ipsos last year. They did questioning in something like 40 countries and in every single one there was a majority in favour of banning under-16s from using social media. I looked down in a bit more detail at one of the polls here in the UK and it's a policy which has support among people of all ages, of both sexes, people who lean left, people you need right. I think it's one of those policies where there's kind of something for everyone.

16:16Dan Rosenheck:The left-wingers, I think, maybe like the idea of holding to account these sinister global corporations that want to monetise your children, and right-wingers, for their part, maybe want to get back to a conservative traditional childhood where kids are outdoors, building dens in the woods and that kind of stuff. So it seems to be something that really everybody likes the sound of.

16:36Rosie Blau:And yet you said at the top that those bans might not have the impact that politicians and the general population wants them to.

16:44Dan Rosenheck:Yeah, I mean, it's early days, but I think there's reason to be sceptical about how much good these outright bans are going to do. One reason that is worth saying that people sometimes forget is that social media aren't all bad for children, just as they're not all bad for adults. If children are cut out of social media, it cuts them off from one of their sources of news about the world, in particular children who feel a little bit isolated, maybe because of where they live or something about themselves, their sexuality for example going online can make them realize that they're part of a bigger community worldwide there's a lot of worry about what the ban might do to them and what they might be missing out on and we spoke to a number of Australian parents about what they thought about

17:24Tom Wainwright:this as a social worker I'm really concerned about the socially isolated kids those young people I

17:33Tom Standage:I think the threat to their well-being and lives, that outweighs the benefit of a poorly implemented ban. That's my feeling about it.

17:42Dan Rosenheck:One of the things that really struck me when I was doing this reporting was that these bans had been largely opposed by child protection groups, as I discovered when I spoke to Andy Burrows, the chief executive of the Molly Rose Foundation. The problems of bad actors and criminality won't disappear. They will simply migrate to where children go. there's a real risk that if we say that we're proceeding with a ban that immediately drains the energy away from regulating the services that are still in scope. I think many parents have in their mind a sort of idealised idea that as soon as they take away Instagram their child is instantly going to get back to the Latin poetry or learning the piano or something like that but the reality is that the kind of childhood that people perhaps had in the past has been pretty severely curtailed in recent decades.

18:34Dan Rosenheck:And that's what we heard from some of the parents that we spoke to.

18:36Rosie Blau:We can't go back to the 80s. That's not realistic either. We can't recreate times from years ago because we have fond memories of it. And I'm pretty sure some of my teenage behaviour was extremely risky. I think I'd rather Charlotte's in her bedroom on Instagram, to be honest. Tom, we've got a concrete situation, which is Australia, where under-16s have been banned from going on social media since December. How's that ban going?

19:04Dan Rosenheck:Well, we thought we'd ask the real experts, meaning teenagers themselves in Australia. And the first thing they pointed out was that they're finding lots of ways to get around this ban. They're faking their age, they're recreating accounts using other people's identities, or they're using obscure news sites like LemonAid, for example, which had a burst of popularity when the ban first came in.

19:25Tom Standage:A lot of kids have found ways around it and now that so-called harmful content is easier for them to access because parents don't have control over their accounts anymore.

19:34Dan Rosenheck:Australia hasn't banned young teenagers from messaging apps or from multiplayer online games, so cyberbullying may continue on those.

19:41Tom Standage:I do not like the ban because it's just purely isolating the people who were banned from the other people and I feel like we were born around it, our generation, and them just taking away from us is not good for our mental health.

19:57Dan Rosenheck:And then there's the worry that higher age limits may just delay problems until youngsters are 16. Then they'll suddenly gain full access to social sites that they don't have much experience using.

20:06Tom Standage:16 is such a high number. People are thinking about their jobs, thinking about university, getting their learner's permit and getting ready for the real world, their future. and not having social media is honestly kind of harmful.

20:19Dan Rosenheck:It'll be a long time until we know exactly how the Australian plan has gone, but so far it seems as if implementation isn't without its problems.

20:26Rosie Blau:So then what can be done, Tom? How can social media be made a more suitable place for teens to spend their time?

20:33Dan Rosenheck:I think there's a lot of appetite for reform here. And one thing that interests me is that whereas in the last decade or so, all the focus has been on the content on social media, it seems as if now people are moving more towards thinking about how the platforms themselves might change the design of how they operate. And we're seeing a pincer movement here where in the US there are legal challenges which have just got underway which could have some very big impacts. There's a case going on in California against Meta and against YouTube by an individual who believes that those platforms harmed her mental health when she was a child.

21:10Dan Rosenheck:And at the same time in the European Union, the European Commission has preliminarily found TikTok guilty of breaking its laws on creating an addictive platform. And it has cited features like TikTok's infinite scroll, its auto-playing videos, its personalised algorithm. And these are things which are completely core to how TikTok and apps like it operate and what makes them so popular. So if these design features of the apps are now in the crosshairs, the result could be that these apps turn out to be quite different things, not just for teenagers, but for adults too going forward.

21:47Rosie Blau:Tom, thank you very much.

21:49Dan Rosenheck:Thank you.

22:04Rosie Blau:This is hilarious.

22:05Dan Rosenheck:I see you've got the... I do, I do. Wait a minute, where are all my bits and bobs? You've got them here.

22:11Rosie Blau:I may have my blindfold on, but my excellent sense of perception tells me I'm hearing the voice of Tom Standage, one of the Economist deputy editors.

22:22Rosie Blau:What are you going to feed me?

22:24Dan Rosenheck:Yeah, you're going to find out. Right, here comes a pop. One of them.

22:31Rosie Blau:It's a good sound.

22:32Dan Rosenheck:It is. Happy sound. So what can you tell me about that wine? What does it strike you as?

22:39Rosie Blau:Not very sweet.

22:41Dan Rosenheck:Okay, what colour would you say that wine was?

22:43Rosie Blau:Oh, good question. I was assuming it was white. Ooh, maybe this is, hang on.

22:49Dan Rosenheck:I'm going to have this one.

22:50Rosie Blau:This one is a different temperature.

22:52Dan Rosenheck:Yes.

22:53Rosie Blau:Look at those skills of perception. Yeah, this does smell like red wine.

22:58Dan Rosenheck:Okay, so now we have another wine here.

23:02Rosie Blau:It's cold. I would say it is white. It's not fragrant. It's quite clear. Now I've tried it again. I think it's red. But I wouldn't be sure about that.

23:15Dan Rosenheck:Well, the answer is yes, because it's both. The third wine is this one here. And this is a wine called a blouge wine. That is a combination of blanc, white and rouge, because it's both. And what's happening there is that...

23:33Rosie Blau:I thought that was rosé.

23:34Dan Rosenheck:No, it's different from rosé. So basically with white wine, you take white wine grapes and you crush them and you have very little skin contact. You take the skins away and that's how you make white wine. With red wine, you take your red grapes, you crush them and you have a long period of skin contact. And that puts all of the structure and the colour into the wine. If you take white grapes and you treat them like a red grape, so in other words, you crush them and you leave the skins in there for a long time, you get orange wine. So that's white grapes put through a red wine process. And if you take red grapes and put them through basically a white wine process, you get rosé, almost your namesake.

24:12Dan Rosenheck:You get a wine that is much lighter than a red wine. What's happening with this wine, with Bluge, is that white and red grapes are being fermented together, essentially like a red. So it's like a red where you've lobbed in some white. Winemakers are deliberately splitting the difference between white and red. So you've got a wine that initially, when you first tasted it, tasted like a white. It had the freshness and the clarity of a white, but then it has the kind of depth and the structure of a red. And this makes it very, very versatile for food pairing. And these wines are generally being marketed in quite a funky way.

24:46Dan Rosenheck:They're not being aimed at old wine nerds like me. They are being marketed rather more like craft beer. So with names like Boogie Woogie and Superbloom, it's fantastic for, you know, a barbecue on a Sunday. Do you want red or white? Well, you don't have to choose. You can kind of have both. But the other thing that's really good about it is it turns out to be, for winemakers grappling with climate change, a really, really good hedge.

25:06Rosie Blau:And why is that?

25:07Dan Rosenheck:The trouble with red wines right now is that in many parts of the world that make red wine, if there's a heat wave or there's just a lot of very hot days, the red grapes are over-ripening. So when you come to harvest them, you get a very alcoholic wine, 15 or 16 % sometimes. If you harvest them early to avoid that problem, then the tannins basically in the skin and in the pips haven't ripened and then you get a very kind of stalky taste. It just doesn't taste right. So what you can do if you throw some white grapes in is you can leave the red grapes to ripen, you can harvest them and then you can co-ferment them with white grapes.

25:39Dan Rosenheck:And the white grapes reduce the alcohol content and they also add back the freshness and the acidity that's lost when you have these very flabby alcoholic wines.

25:48Rosie Blau:And how much of this is happening? I've not heard about it.

25:52Dan Rosenheck:The problem is that there isn't a way of tracking the sales of this wine. There isn't an agreed-on definition here. In some ways, it's not new because there have been wines in the past. I mean, some champagnes use mixtures of red and white grapes and so on. So, there is a sort of market category for this. And in fact, even the word bluige is quite controversial. Some American and Australian winemakers think that even though they're doing this style, their customers won't know what it means. Instead, they prefer to call this a chillable red or a light red. But the trouble is we don't actually have a category of bluige that we can track.

26:21Dan Rosenheck:So, you can't measure how much of this is selling. But the makers I've spoken to who are selling it say that they're seeing sales of this style going up every year.

26:29Rosie Blau:And why do you have to drink it chilled?

26:31Dan Rosenheck:Because then you get the freshness of the wine. And just, I mean, people like to chill red wines as well, actually, to make them less flabby, give them a bit more definition. So this is a wine style that is designed to be consumed just out of the fridge.

26:44Rosie Blau:And people are actually buying it?

26:46Dan Rosenheck:Yeah. This is something that the wine press has latched onto, that the sellers of these wines are seeing their sales go up, you're starting to see wine lists in restaurants and wine shops specifically saying that they have these chillable light reds of this style.

26:59Rosie Blau:Cheers. Cheers. Thanks, Tom. Thank you.

28:00Tom Standage:We'll see you next time.

28:05Tom Standage:at empowerourfuturecoalition.com slash solutions. Paid for by the coalition to empower our future. If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip-off and Grainger is your trusted partner. Offering the products you need all in one place from HVAC and plumbing supplies to lighting and more and all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock so your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER, visit grainger.com, or just stop by. Grainger, for the ones who get it done.