How Do We Reduce Political Polarisation Online? (Your Radical Questions with Jonathan Haidt)

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0:37Hello and welcome to Your Radical Questions. This is where I put your questions to one of our magnificent radical guests. This is your chance to really engage and really connect directly with the super smart, super interesting and globally influential people that we have on this podcast and to ask them about their ideas, radical and otherwise, for the future. We have got the brilliant young entrepreneur and founder. She's the founder of Sojo, a very, very influential brand. Josephine Phillips, big, big figure in modern fashion. And she is very concerned about the damage that fast fashion is doing to our planet.

1:14She's got some pretty radical ideas about what to do about it. So if you've got questions for Josephine Phillips, if you're interested in fashion broadly defined, whether it's high-end fashion or the garment making industry, whatever it might be, and you want to talk about those issues which have global impact, WhatsApp us on 0330 123 9480, 0330 123 9480, or email radical at bbc.co.uk, which is what large numbers of you did for our guest with us in the studio today. We've just recorded the main episode. He is someone that many of you have been asking us to get on the podcast. We've already had a fascinating conversation about a subject that could not be more timely.

1:53it concerns smartphones, social media, and the impact on our children. He's got a global bestseller called The Anxious Generation, a new book which he co-authored called The Amazing Generation, and now he's here to answer your questions. He is obviously Professor Jonathan Haidt. How are you, Jonathan? Very well. Thanks for having me back on, Amos. Ready for some questions from our listeners? Let's go. Here we go. Let's take it away. This is a question, and by the way, thank you to all of you who've sent me messages. As ever, I'm sorry that we can't get to all of them, but we'll try and represent the majority of you through these forthcoming questions.

2:25This one is from Matthew. Hello, Amal and team. My name is Matthew and I'm enjoying your work every week. My question for Jonathan is about the potential pitfalls of a legislation banning social media for under 16s. I work as a teacher in a secondary school that banned smartphones for students two years ago by use of magnetic pouches. and I'm very glad that that happened and seen lots of benefits. But I'm wondering who is monitoring the impacts of the social media ban in Australia, whether you consider YouTube to be a bit of an exception there and perhaps some overreach with some serious downsides to young people losing the ability to access YouTube and whether you think there's any pitfalls and downsides to these young people losing their modes of communication that they have become so used to and whether we can try to avoid those pitfalls or help those young people in some way if the same legislation were to happen here.

3:29Matthew, thanks so much. Let's do it in two bits. So what's happening in Australia and should YouTube be an exception? Sure. So I'm very glad for the question because it indicates a common misunderstanding of what Australia did. Australia did not ban YouTube. Kids can go to YouTube as much as they want. Australia did not ban access to anything. Kids can find whatever they want online. What Australia did is they said, kids are already signing a contract with a company to give away their data, give away their rights without their parents' knowledge and consent. And that's supposed to happen at 13.

4:01But in fact, it happens at seven, eight, nine, whenever. There's no limit. That's crazy. What Australia did is they said, you have to be 16 to sign that contract. And it's up to the companies who are selling this stuff. It's up to them to enforce it. And so in Australia, what happened was that if a kid had a YouTube account, YouTube Kids is different, it's not social media, so that's still fine. But if a kid had a YouTube account, they would lose that. How is that implemented? Because isn't that... Account creation. It's a limit on account creation. So like with YouTube, if you open a browser that you're not logged into, and you just go to YouTube, you can watch everything you want with no account.

4:39Now, Snapchat won't allow that. Snapchat, you have to be logged in. So they would lose access to Snapchat. That's true. And so this gets to the second part of this question, which is what would happen if the kids lose these modes of communication? And, you know, like during COVID, people would say to me like, oh, thank God for social media. How would kids connect? How would they find information if not for social media? To which my response is, yeah, imagine if the only way they could find information was Google and Bing and going to Wikipedia and reading newspaper. Imagine if the only way they could connect with their friends was to call them or text them or Skype them or FaceTime or go over to their house.

5:18So if we have these four or five companies now own our children's childhood and relationships, and they're going to bring in AIs to take over the relationships, that's the way we're going. What Australia is doing is saying, stop, enough. In order to have a deal with these companies and let them control you, you have to be 16. But kids will still have so many ways to communicate and those ways will be much healthier. Matthew, thank you very much indeed for your question. That was a wonderful and useful question because it helped us clarify something. The next question is from Hilary in Pembrokeshire.

5:51Thank you, Hilary. So I was just wondering whether taking away the internet at 16 should be phased in like the cigarette ban because I was just kind of imagining telling my 15-year-old overnight that there was going to be a ban on it and whether 13 14 15 year olds it's almost too late or there should be restrictions but not banned and that children coming up to to that age like i don't know 12 year olds 10 year olds then it should be banned because they're not going to miss it so much i just think some teenagers is their life now and it's too late to um kind of go back on that and then i sort of think surely the better way to be doing this would be to police properly what is on these social media sites like the self-harm, suicide, hate speech and porn would be much easier, surely, and better for everyone if that was just stopped.

6:43Hilary, thank you so much for that. In your first line of that question, Hilary, you referred to taking away the internet. And I think, of course, you know, we're talking about social media rather than the internet. And as Jonathan was saying in response to Matthew's question, in Australia and other places, you can still get Google and Bing and all these search engines. But Hillary's question there is about really the age at which a ban would come in, because is it too late for 13, 14, 15 year olds? That was point one. And then the second is, shouldn't we just sort of police them better? Is this not a kind of admission of our failure to police them properly?

7:14Yeah, sure. So what I can say is it's never too late. Anything we do to reduce their time on these platforms is going to be beneficial. And I say this with confidence because I teach a course at New York University called Flourishing. and my 19-year-old, mostly 19-year-old college students, usually about a quarter of them are on social media five hours a day or more. And the ones that are on it for a very long time, I force them for their project, you have to reduce that. There's no point in working on anything else in this class until you reduce that. And they almost universally get incredible results.

7:45They say, oh, now I can do my homework really quickly now. And I have so much, I have no stress over homework and I have so much time. I'm going out with friends at night now. So their lives turn around at 19. And so the idea that it's too late at 13, 14, 15, I think is not right. Puberty, I focus a lot in the book on puberty. Puberty, roughly 11 or 12 to 15, 16, is an incredibly important period of brain development. We have to do everything we can to protect kids during that time. Now, many people assume that, oh, my God, it's going to be so hard to get them off. It's going to be devastating to them.

8:19But kids adapt very quickly. When they go to summer camp with no devices in the U.S., we send our kids to summer camp. I hear you don't really have those here. But they're amazing because most of them are phone free. The kids love it. Right away, it's like, oh, we're playing. We're with other kids. So kids are adaptable. They sleep better as well, which is a big thing about screen use at night. Is your flourishing course based on this Aristotelian idea of eudaimonia? Sort of, yeah. It's based on my first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. And I reviewed ancient wisdom.

8:50and ultimately the course is about how to make yourself smarter, stronger and more sociable. Because if you do those three things, you'll be more successful in love and in work, love broadly construed. And as we know ever since the time of Freud, love and work, those are the foundations. If you're more successful in those two, you'll be happier. Hilary, thank you so much for that question. Actually, just on her point about have we policed them properly, is it consistent to say that on the one hand, so far, democracies have not done a very good job of policing this stuff, But even better policing would be insufficient.

9:23And really, a total ban is the best way to police them. Yeah, that's right. So our minds naturally go to the content. People think that regulation is about content. Can't we get all the suicide and self-harm stuff off? And of course, that would be nice. We should. But the problem is not just the content. It's really the way it changes a kid's life. So imagine if we could get all the suicide and self-harm stuff off. and girls were spending five hours a day on Instagram just swiping through picture after picture of other girls living beautiful lives, no suicide, no self-harm, would that be healthy for them?

9:59That would be devastating. They need to be out making friends, talking with their friends, not consuming the lives of others. Okay, Hilary, I think that's a very clear answer. Thank you so much, Hilary, for that lovely message. This is from Lon. It's an email which I'm going to read. Lon says, Jonathan, I'm 18, so a member of the, quote, anxious generation, unquote. Given the harm caused to myself and my peers through our early use of the internet, I am supportive of measures to reduce children's exposure to harm online. However, I also feel that the risk of political polarisation through social media remains high for over 16s.

10:36This is especially true for my age group, which will not be affected by a potential ban, yet has and will continue to be politically socialised online. How do you think we might tackle the issue of polarization among adults whilst balancing civil liberties concerns? Wow, that is an incredibly hard question. And I don't really have an answer. And there's an interesting reason for that. When I started writing this book, it was actually a different book called Life After Babel, Adapting to a World We May Never Again Share. And I was going to explore what social media and the technological environment have done to liberal democracies.

11:08My own country is imploding in a lot of ways, many linked to the technological change. So I started writing that book. And I thought I'd start with all this leftover data I had from The Coddling of the American Mind about teen mental health. When teens moved on to these platforms, their mental health collapsed. Now let's look at democracy. I should just say, forgive me, The Coddling of the American Mind was a book you co-authored with Greg Lukianoff, which looked at the way in which a culture of safetyism, a kind of almost therapeutic impulse, had affected the way in which American children were growing up.

11:38And it was a pun, I think, on Alan Bloom's book of 88, The Closing of the American Mind. That's right. So my own research long ago was on moral development, moral psychology, which became cultural and political psychology. Why are left and right so different? So I'm really interested in the problem that he raises. And I set out to write a book on it. But here's the problem. I don't really know what to do about it. There are some design features. We could make things less viral. We could reduce because the people who get the most amplification are the most extreme. so we could change some settings, we'll make it less viral.

12:10But the fixes for the democracy problem are really hard and they would all be political. That is, one side would support it, one side would oppose it, so it's not likely to get done. So it's a really despairing situation. One thing, if platforms had no your customer laws, if platforms knew at least who the people were, even if you don't say it publicly, then you'd get rid of the bots, you'd get rid of some of the trolls, but even that wouldn't solve it. So that's really depressing. and while I was writing this and I started with the kids issue and I saw how big it was and then I realized wait a second this is gigantic and I know exactly what to do and it doesn't cost anything to do it and it's completely bipartisan so we are going to do it so what I decided is I'm not going to write the democracy book for many years also my country is changing so fast by the time it came out who knows what state we're going to be in so I've decided to really focus on reclaiming childhood let's let's at least get kids to have a normal childhood worth having worth remembering if we can't do that then i think it's gonna be very hard to have a continuation of democracies anyway can i just pick you up on that idea of your country imploding um and it's no one simple explanation of what's going on but when you say it's imploding do you feel that the damage being done as you see it right now is so severe that it'll be very very hard to undo and do you think that it's a funny thing one of the conservative philosopher roger Scruton said, one of the insights of conservatism is that social goods are easily destroyed, but not easily created.

13:41That's right. This idea that actually real lasting damage is done to America right now, which is going to be quite hard to undo. Yeah. So there's a pessimist case and an optimist case. I don't know what's going to happen. But briefly, the pessimist case is, as you said, we are a nation built on laws and norms, and we have democratic norms, and there are norms that we're restraining the president. and those are changing. We're in a much more savage information world. Social media encourages playing to the extremes. So the pessimistic case is these things built up over centuries are being damaged.

14:14They're hard to rebuild. And since the next generation coming along, we've not prepared them for democracy. So it's going to get even worse. AI is going to make things even worse. We're not going to know what's true ever again, really. By a year or two from now, it'll be very hard to know what's true. That's the pessimistic case. There is, though, an optimistic case, which is Americans like people everywhere. Americans are still really decent people who don't think that we should be sending in the military to shoot protesters, who don't think we should be stabbing our friends and allies in the back, who don't think we should be conquering other countries by force.

14:47And so while Donald Trump is a unique person, and just to be fair to his supporters, as David Brooks says, Donald Trump is usually or is often the wrong answer to the right question. He is often pointing to real problems that we have. And the things he's breaking, the optimistic case in my heart is that Donald Trump is a forest fire. And if you try to suppress forest fires forever, the forest gets sick. You do need to burn up some things and start again. David Brooks, just for people who don't know, he's a huge influence on me as well as you have been. David Brooks is a New York Times columnist who has written many, many books, including The Road to Character.

15:21I mean, he's basically a kind of a soft, what we would call one nation or moderate conservative who is sort of looking with horror at what Trump has unleashed. And on that question, on that issue of having the wrong answer to the right question, another way that people here sometimes frame it is that he is a man prone to exaggeration, you might say, or outright deceit, who sometimes tells the truth, sometimes speaks to a kind of underlying reality and asks people to confront things that they haven't done. But he is kingly. And Joe Biden would say last year, we have no kings in America. There is a sense in which Trump is operating like a king with a court.

16:00That's right. Although kings often had a certain kind of dignity to them. There was a court decorum. Many people are saying this is more like Putin's Russia, like a mafia boss. It's a very old pattern of alpha males to act in this way. and the whole point of the of the american legal system is that for example the military is not pledging loyalty to the president it's to the constitution and the country so yes this is something unlike anything we've ever had in the country and it will end and when it ends it could go many directions but some of them are good things could come good things could come from this and technology is driving it as you've as we've been alluding to let's get back to technology and smartphones this is a question from charlotte i'm a full-time working mom three teenage boys and a long-time smartphone free childhood campaigner i just wanted to say i feel in the last two weeks it's been like a light's been turned on in the uk it's really an incredible shift in parliament and in the media and my question for jonathan is what do you see as the most significant next step we can take and also what gives you the most hope right now that we can actually turn this around.

17:10I'm a huge fan of Jonathan Heights and also of Radical, so I'm really excited for this Q &A. Thanks. Oh, Charlotte, thank you very much. You can come back every single week. And by the way, thank you to Lon before that. So, Charlotte, what's the most significant next step we can take and what gives you most hope? So the two giant steps that we're taking, so phone-free schools really became popular in 2025 and an age limit of 16, or in some countries 15, But an age limit of 16 is already going to be very, very popular in 2026. I predict at least seven to 10 democracies are going to enact that in 2026.

17:46And then that's going to spread around the world. So that's huge. The next steps are AI, especially relational chatbots. Social media came and hacked our children's attention and took almost all of it with devastating consequences for their cognitive development. Now what's about to happen is AI is coming for their attachments. Children need an attachment to their parents, and then they develop it for friends and for romantic partners. But all that's going to get sucked away by AIs, and our kids are not going to develop properly if we don't do anything about it. So what gives me hope is while it looks like it's just like a hydra, it's a tidal wave.

18:22It's never ending, the technological assault on our kids. What gives me hope is that when my book came out, the main counterargument I got was the horses left the stable. You can't put toothpaste back in the tube. The technology is here to stay. But what we've discovered, what gives me hope is we've discovered, you know what? If your children's life depended on it, you'd find a way to put toothpaste back in the tube. And that's what smartphone-free childhood has done in the UK. That's what mothers groups all over the world are doing. So the fact that we're winning so quickly, I never thought we would get phone-free schools and age limits in the first two years.

18:58I never thought that was going to happen. So you do feel you're winning? Because we've got a question from John saying, what does success look like for you in 2030? you would say it's a continuation of this pushback. No, if we're going that far ahead, I would say success looks like the reclaiming of childhood. Where mammals or children love to play, if anyone's raised a puppy or a kitten, you know, they need to play. You know, imagine if puppyhood and kittenhood became you sit there and you watch videos of puppies and kittens playing. Like, they wouldn't grow up to be normal cats and dogs. And I want the same for our children.

19:29Success looks like all over Britain, all over America, all over the world, nine and 10 year olds are beginning to go out and play with each other and no adult supervision. And we have to be more intentional about that. We can't just say, get out of here, go. We have to think about safety issues, but it can be done almost everywhere. So success looks like children playing and having a normal, healthy human childhood, at least through puberty. Jonathan, it's such a pleasure and privilege. It's wonderful to chat to you. And the fact that you've gone from Davos to Downing Street via the Radical Studio is a huge compliment to our listeners.

20:03So thank you so much for your time. Hugely, hugely grateful. And thanks also for sticking around and answering our listeners' questions. We'll be back with another episode of Radical on Thursday. But until then, from Jonathan Haidt and from me, it's goodbye. Thank you, Amal.

20:24What would you do if your deepest secrets were held to ransom? In 2020, every patient who had used a Finnish psychotherapy service called Vastamor had their therapy notes stolen and held to ransom by a faceless, remorseless hacker. It could be some extortionist gang from Eastern Europe, or it could be somebody living next door to me. I'm Jenny Kleeman. Join me as I discover just how vulnerable our deepest secrets can be. I think I'm going to have a heart attack. From BBC Radio 4 and Intrigue, this is Ransom Man. Listen first on BBC Sounds.

21:28in-depth conversations with fund managers, strategists, and experts about how markets really work. And join me for a separate episode where I answer listener questions on how to make those markets work for you. Follow Merrin Talks Money on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.