Taylor Lorenz Rejects the Moral Panic Over Tech Bans for Kids

0:28Some people love her. Some people love to hate her. shovel snow today, or hopefully you can just sit on your couch and snuggle up and listen to this conversation. Before we get to part one of my conversation with Taylor, just wanted to remind everybody, if you're watching us on YouTube, please give us a like, give us a rating if you're watching us on the podcast platforms. Every like helps, every comment helps. And of course, you can always still reach me. My email address is at the bottom of my daily column in the 1600 every morning. But yeah, so today we're talking to Taylor Lorenz. If you don't know who Taylor Lorenz is, you probably don't spend a lot of time on the internet and God bless you for that.

1:03It's a hellscape out there and that's no offense to Taylor, of course. But yeah, so Taylor is an independent tech journalist. She's really probably one of the preeminent tech journalists working right now. She's the founder of UserMag, which is a great sub stack I would recommend everyone subscribe to, host of the Power User podcast and the author of Extremely Online, the Untold Story of Fame, Influence and Power on the Internet. And she's with me now today. Taylor, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it. So I, you know, we were just talking off camera. There's not a particular story that I brought you on to talk about.

1:37There's just kind of a lot going on, needless to say. And I kind of wanted to just sort of get your take on a lot of things. Starting with, I read an interesting conversation that you had with the conservative activist slash journalist Chris Ruffo. And he called you the defining journalist of the woke era, which I thought was kind of funny. Did you take that as a compliment? It's so funny. The crazy ways that people come up with to describe me. I mean, I'm a millennial journalist that's well known. I wouldn't say I'm particularly like woke, I guess. I mean, I have like strong beliefs in social justice, like I would say, but I'm also very, you know, kind of libertarian on a lot of my beliefs in terms of free speech and civil liberties and stuff like that.

2:27So, yeah, I don't know. But I guess thanks. Shout out to Chris for, you know, whatever that means. Well, it's funny because to me, he's sort of the defining journalist of the anti-woke era. So I think it probably was a compliment. He does some interesting work, lots of which I don't agree with. But that's a topic for another time. And I do want to I want get your thoughts on civil liberties and, you know, internet censorship, but I want to stay on this topic of, you know, woke or wokeism, which is, you know, a word I detest. But I think it's sort of, it has become sort of like the catch-all phrase for, you know, a sort of progressivism, you know, rooted in social justice, I suppose.

3:11It seems like, I think everybody would kind of agree that we're sort of well past, you know, peak woke, such as it were, right? And I mean, You know, Trump being reelected was kind of the nail on the coffin. The resistance is a shell of itself, if there even really is a resistance anymore. Why did, you know, why did it flame out? Why did wokeism sort of flame out like it did? Yeah, I did a long sort of deep dive video on this topic on my YouTube last year about sort of this death of wokeism or the resistance or whatever, and how people sort of refer to actually 2020 as peak woke. I would argue that while, you know, of course, I think that Trump's second election was kind of maybe the nail in the coffin of a specific type of sort of quote unquote wokeism.

3:59Biden's election was also like the death of woke. I think that, you know, what we saw when a lot of people think of like woke culture, they think of progressivism through the lens of conservative reactionary YouTube content or conservative reactionary Twitter content. They're often, you know, when you say picture like a social justice warrior, a picture of somebody that's woke, they often picture, you know, people that are caricatures that they've seen in the conservative media. So, you know, I think it's interesting how the right was so effectively able to create this kind of like boogeyman. But I think part of the reason that people lost faith with like that brand of progressivism is because it was always completely hypocritical and surface level.

4:44If you look at the quote unquote like resistance. Very performative. So performative. Like it was, you know, the like pink pussy hats or whatever. But then, yeah, you know, voting for ICE or whatever. You know, it was just like a lot of like hypocritical things of people sort of purporting to care about social justice, especially a lot of like privileged white people, right? Like purporting to care about social justice, but not actually really doing anything other than buying, you know, like a Ruth Bader Ginsburg resistance T-shirt. Notorious RBG. I still make fun of my parents for having that mug in their cupboard.

5:18um it's i've heard a lot of people talk about this this idea of like sort of the woke right sort of springing out of you know the manosphere and it's it's interesting right so you have like i think the you know the way that i sort of saw it was after charlie kirk was tragically killed you know you had this this push on the right coming from people like jd vance it wasn't just sort of like you know online trolls basically saying like you should tattle on your neighbors if they're out there, you know, you should cancel people who are, you know, reveling in the death of this guy. And look, I thought that that whole thing was gross with people coming out and sort of like dancing on his grave.

5:54I think that's gross when anyone does it. But, you know, you've also got people who are now complaining online on the right about like who's on SNL or like complaining about Bad Bunny being at the Super Bowl. Which they've always done. They've always like outwoked the woke, like all of these things that the far right kind of likes to ascribe to liberals as annoying as like centrist liberals can be. And like, you know, there's a lot of things that I don't love about, like mainstream kind of like liberal culture. It can be corny, like the Hamilton era, the Hillary Clinton era. Like it feels very cringe now, right?

6:29Yes. And it was it was, again, so contradictory and hypocritical and nonsense. But the right has has been professional victims for over a decade. You know, this is like their favorite pastime is to cancel people online. So to the point that they actually, I think, have set themselves up well because they they were so sort of aggrieved by not having more influence in traditional media and traditional Hollywood that they built their own kind of like media echo, you know, chamber just to kind of validate their own beliefs. Yeah. And there's just there's just such loser energy emanating from this kind of like the manosphere.

7:03I guess another term I despise, but everybody uses. You know, I'm sure you saw, I mean, you saw the video last week of Nick Fuentes and Clavicular, who's a name. I don't want to even know. I don't know who that is. I don't want to know who that is. And a bunch of these, you know, Andrew Tate, a bunch of these losers. And they're, you know, they're at this nightclub, this like lame nightclub at Miami and they're, you know, playing the Kanye Hale Hitler song. It was just like, talk about cringe. I mean, it's, it feels like, it's like the mirror image, but worse because these guys are just outwardly racist also, right?

7:32Yeah. I mean, they're just engagement farming. Like, I don't even think they care that much about racism other than understanding it as a means to generate attention and controversy. Like, they don't hold any sort of beliefs. I mean, Clavicular, who you just mentioned, has been consistently pro-Gavin Newsom. He went on Michael Knowles' podcast to defend Gavin Newsom. And he posted about it again just yesterday, calling JD a fat, ugly slob and saying Gavin Newsom mogs him. It's basically his favorite politician. It's based on nothing. Basically because Gavin Newsom's handsome. That's his thing.

8:06Exactly. And this is a 19-year-old looks maxer who only cares about physical aesthetics. But I just want people to understand how shallow and loosely held these beliefs really are. When they're doing this stuff, they're just their engagement farming. No, I think that's a good point. I've watched a fair amount of Nick Fuentes since the Charlie Kirk assassination. And, you know, when I watch him, I mean, obviously he says really offensive stuff, right? He says disgusting things. Hitler was cool, you know, plenty of stuff like that. I get the sense when I watch him that he doesn't mean any of that, that it is just about not even just trolling.

8:41But I guess what you're saying, that definition is the right one. It is engagement farming, right? It's this belief that you have to be attention matters more than anything else in the attention economy, right? Yeah, there is a researcher, academic guy named Aiden Walker, who's amazing. He has a subset called How to Do Things with Memes. And he wrote this great piece about what he calls a content maxing. And it's essentially, yeah, about how the right has adopted these engagement farming tactics and how it's, it's some of it's trolling, but a lot of it is literally just like, what can I say to get the most attention online?

9:16That is what I will do and say. And I don't have, you know, there's no morality behind it. Like they don't believe in anything. It's very nihilistic. Very nihilistic. It is. Let's talk about Gen Z for a minute. So, you know, we're both millennials. Yeah. Elderly. Elderly millennials. Exactly. Geriatric millennials. Geriatric. I consider you something of a Gen Z whisperer, though. God. Just because you know, that's a compliment. I mean, you do really great reporting. I feel like you sort of have the finger, your finger on the pulse of this generation in a way a lot of other journalists our age and older just don't.

9:56And it's a fascinating generation, right? I mean, I don't, I still sort of have a hard time understanding, you know, what to make of young people today. I mean, in some ways, it's like it almost feels like they're in another like they're living in like another world. I'm not articulating myself very well. But the question that I had for you specific to this was you did a piece on your sub stack. It was great. It was called 2016 Nostalgia Slop is Taking Over. And it was it was just an article, an essay about why Gen Z has become so obsessed with 2016, which was 10 years ago. And, you know, again, as somebody who lived through that era, that was not a particularly that was not a nostalgic time for me or for anybody, I think.

10:43What why are they so into this? I think what's so interesting, actually, when I was going back and researching, you know, to write about this and do like a video on it, is that 2016 was this pivotal moment. Obviously, we had the Trump election and Brexit. And I would say post 2016, really 2017, when Trump took office on, it was sort of just chaos online. But 2016 was actually also the year that we got algorithmic feeds for the first time. So Instagram was previously ranked chronologically. Twitter until mid-2016 was ranked chronologically. I didn't realize that. Yes, it's later than you think, right?

11:18It's kind of wild. Because Facebook was much earlier. Facebook did newsfeed back when I was, I think, in college. And that was kind of like the beginning of the algorithm, right? But yes. So Facebook, right. Facebook had sort of the original algorithm because they ranked the newsfeed algorithm. But Facebook also went through a radical change in 2016, if you remember, when they started to prioritize meaningful connections, which meant that they sort of started to basically they radically altered their algorithm, ultimately in a way that actually gave rise to like a lot of extremism and misinformation and bad stuff.

11:50But I think that that's it's just so funny to go back and think about what Facebook was like before 2016, what Instagram was like before 2016, Twitter, etc. They were very different platforms. And so I think that year was so pivotal, not just in like culture and politics, but also in tech. And so you started to see the institution basically of all of these tech platforms. And I think a lot of people, they miss those more fun, optimistic days when you'd go on Instagram and just be able to catch up with your friends. You weren't being sold stuff. No, we had Cory Doctorow on who coined the term the institution of the Internet, which I mean, just a brilliant guy and a brilliant idea.

12:26It's funny now when you because when you go on the Internet, you forget that there was a time not that long ago when it wasn't the algorithm didn't really sort of ruin everything. Right. I mean, I remember Instagram, you know, when it came out in the beginning, it really was sort of like the next step of Facebook. It was about, you know, following your friends. And, you know, maybe there were some sort of like proto influencers out there. Now, I mean, I can't even open that app anymore. I've, you know, I've stopped following people, everybody except for my wife. And I don't like I don't like anything because I just don't I don't trust that that algorithm.

13:00Is that I mean, is that like an OK Boomer thing of me or am I on to something? No, I think you're feeling what so many users are feeling, which is just fatigue. I mean, we saw for the first time ever last year, social media use as a category actually declined. People are spending less time on these platforms as the user experience degrades, as they're, you know, shoved more, more ads are shoved in their feeds. And also now we're dealing with the rise of AI slop, which is taking over Instagram, but also YouTube, et cetera. So it's just really hard to find useful, meaningful content from people that you know and care about.

13:33What do you use to keep up with your friend? Not in like when you're not working, when you want to see, you know, when you want to try and keep up with your friends, family. Yeah. It's so funny. I was thinking about this recently because I do think that my use has mirrored a lot of the broader trends in the sense that I spend an enormous amount of time in group chats now and on Discord. And I used to spend so much more time in the open web. And I think it's just so full of content now. I wrote this piece actually in 2017 or 2018. That was a prediction for Neiman Lab. They do these annual predictions.

14:04And I talked about how like the social part of the internet and the media part of the internet will split. And this is something that actually Evan Spiegel of Snapchat and a couple other like tech people were started to talk about around this time. And I have to say, I do think it's come to fruition where increasingly we're seeing these social platforms dominated by sort of professional content. And this is based, this also is sort of backed up by the fact that they're all launching television apps. They want to become like competitors to Netflix, you know, and that's how Instagram kind of sees its future is competing with YouTube, not text, allowing you to text your friends.

14:39And so I think we're having social experiences separate from the social media experiences, which are becoming entertainment experiences. It's funny. It's all, it's all right. It's all sort of collapsing in on itself. Everybody wants to be YouTube. YouTube wants to be TV. TV wants to be, I don't know what. But staying on this topic of sort of like Gen Z and, you know, the social media landscape. So Australia. So they came out with this. They're sort of the first out of the gate with this social media ban, which I believe started at the beginning of this year. So correct me if I'm wrong here, but the way I understand it is if you're at least the way it's supposed to work.

15:15If you're under 16, you're basically you cannot use the social web. Now, first of all, how how is this actually work in practice? It has something to do with age verification, which I know some states are doing here with pornography websites. Oh, no, they're not. Is it different? Tell me. Yeah. So first of all, I think people need to understand that age verification is identity verification. They can't know how old you are until they know who you are because there's no reliable way to. We don't actually all age at the same rate. You know, it's not like when you're 17, you know, and 300 days old, you look radically different than when you're 18 or whatever.

15:52You know, so so you have to verify your identity. So these bans, which are based on absolutely nothing, no science, it's all about removing anonymity from the Web. And that's what it is. So it's not just that millions of young people suddenly can't access the web and crucial information, but it's also about removing millions of other people who might not want to, who might just want to access the web or access information without giving up their government identity. and having that government, you know, having basically their government identity attached to every single piece of content that they consume online, which can then be used against them in a court of law for like a terrorism case or, you know, other speech laws and stuff, which Australia is also trying to pass.

16:37So these are really, really dangerous. We're seeing the rise of mass surveillance. We're seeing this level of surveillance happen here. As you mentioned, there are 25 states right now that have identity verification laws on the books or are in progress of putting them on the books. This was actually one of Joe Biden's and the Democrats sort of favorite things that they want to do is remove all anonymity from the Web, which is deranged and also extra deranged to do it under a Trump presidency. Like all of it's deranged. Well, especially, yeah, because the MAGA's whole thing has been, you know, we've been victimized going back to that, you know, the pathology of victimization on the right.

17:13But they I mean, you could argue that they have, you know, some of these people have been censored by, you know, Facebook during COVID and they're sort of like disparate examples. But you would think that there would be more of a pushback against the stuff on the right. It's really it's really important to understand the difference between MAGA conservatives and traditional conservatives. If you talk to traditional like Republican classic conservatives, you're right. They want a limited government. They don't they don't they don't support this stuff. This is why, like, you know, Rand Paul and these libertarians, like they're very against it.

17:45But the majority of the MAGA movement is not traditionally conservative. They're authoritarian and they actually love. They're big government. Yes, they want big government to do it. You know, they want to expand our police force, expand everything. They want to expand surveillance specifically. So they're very pro these authoritarian policies and the Democrats as well. I think because the Democrats have been so unsuccessful on the Internet, they have decided to side with, you know, push these extreme far right authoritarian tech policies, which are very dangerous. And none of this help. You know, we know that this actually endangers children and not just that.

18:20I wrote a piece for The Guardian last year. I'll just say this quickly because we have similar stuff happening in the UK now. When the UK's Online Safety Act went into effect last year, the first content that we saw removed from the web, because, you know, you mentioned earlier, oh, it's like adult sites. Most people think that's porn or something. No, no, no, no, no. It just means content that's not acceptable for minors. So we're seeing reproductive justice content, any information about abortion censored off the web. Some of the earliest content censored off the web, and I mean for adults as well as children, anybody that doesn't want to verify their identity, was actually information about war crimes.

18:55It was the subreddit dedicated to documenting and investigating war crimes. We saw masses of police violence videos removed under these policies, arguments that it's not safe for children. So we've seen how the governments across the West are using these laws that are nonsense. You know, they're selling bullshit to parents, basically being like, oh, you know, protect Johnny from social media. But, you know, by enacting this mass surveillance state that we're actually going to use against our own citizens and, you know, immigrants and stuff like that. And so it's your work has actually really changed my mind on some of this stuff, because I really struggle with this because I'm so I'm a parent.

19:31I've got a four year old daughter. I worry deeply about the impact of not just social media, but sort of like the Internet and screens writ large. Right. On her and on her her generation, as well as on, you know, the slightly older generation. But, again, I don't think the answer to this cannot just be mass censorship and digital surveillance. Right. I mean, first of all, it seems like it's a First Amendment. I wouldn't even pass First Amendment here. Oh, no, it can. At least how they're doing it in Australia. Right. Well, it very much can. It very much can. Because we've seen, again, under the Democrats specifically, we've seen this erosion of protections for free speech.

20:10Right. We had the age verification case that was brought before the Supreme Court, you know, that we that was that went very badly for people that care about privacy. So. So, no, I mean, I just want to say something to address something that you just said about, you know, being worried for your kids. I totally understand parents concerns. I hope that they will be comforted by the fact that every single piece of major legitimate research we have on this topic actually shows that social media use, moderate social media use, is helpful to children compared to another two other huge studies just came out this week showing this again, that actually it does not harm children to be on social media.

20:46Now, actually, it's using social media in moderate amounts is actually more healthy than not using social media at all for children, because these are communication tools at the end of the day. These are the tools that children use to go make plans to hang out with friends. Now is excessive like unhealthy use? Sure. Just the way that, you know, if your child was sitting in his bedroom, you know, 16 hours a day. Watching TV. Yeah, like blasting. Right. Like that's unhealthy. OK, that's just broad based unhealthy behavior. But this idea that social media is bad is just it's like sort of destroying the minds of the youth is bad.

21:20If you want healthier social media platforms, that said, say we buy into all the moral panic. Right. Say we say, oh, yeah, it is destroying the kids' minds, which it's not. But say we do believe that. And I think to some extent it is bad and, you know, it's predatory in terms of the advertising. We should pass comprehensive data privacy reform that removes the profit. I was going to ask you about that. Yep. incentives from social media so that we don't have these engagement based algorithms that are optimizing for outrage. Like we don't have to have social media that looks like that. We can crack down on big tech, but that's not what surveillance laws do.

21:49They reward big tech. Well, that's a very important point. And right. I think that right. I think that my skepticism just comes so much from I just don't trust these companies. Right. I don't trust Mark Zuckerberg. I obviously don't trust Elon Musk. I don't trust whoever owns TikTok at the moment. Masseri at Instagram. I just don't trust any of these people because, you know, again, They're corporate stooges, frankly, and they have a profit motive, right? These are public companies with shareholders. And I don't believe that, you know, what they are doing for – I don't believe that their interests are aligned with our interests or our children's interests.

22:22But I agree with you that, like, the cat is out of the bag. It's not, you know, banning Instagram or TikTok. It's just a non-starter at this point. It wouldn't even work. But so talk to me more about comprehensive data privacy reform. Like, what would that what would that look like in practice if we had an administration that was serious about it? Yeah. I mean, we unfortunately don't have any data privacy protections in America, essentially, which is terrifying. And I think a lot of people are learning this the hard way now with ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, and what Doge did with all of our personal data.

22:53You know, because we don't have any data privacy and because now we're actually mandating that these companies collect even more biometric data, companies can use that data to, you know, do surveillance pricing on us. And when we go to look up on Walmart or something, a price of something, we're shown a higher price. We're given higher insurance rates. You are denied a job because an AI algorithm that harvested a mass amount of your data from social media companies, you know, decided that you were maybe not reliable in some way. There's so many bad things that we suffer because we don't have data privacy.

23:30So we could have data privacy laws that protect our data that say, hey, you actually can't just harvest biometric data on children and then use that to target them in predatory ads and use that to target them with exploitative content. You know, you can't market to children. You can't sell to children. You can't harvest children's data or any adult's data. You have to protect it. You know, basically more privacy protections on the web was what it would look like. So you could use more platforms anonymously, basically giving people back the power to like kind of how it is in the real world, right?

23:59It used to be, I mean, now we have CCTV cameras everywhere, but if you just want to go and buy something from the store, like that, that purchase shouldn't follow you around for the rest of your life. Like, and then you shouldn't be getting Instagram ads for it, you know, 10 years later targeting you or whatever. There's that famous story about like how Target, you know, Target knew a woman was pregnant before her own father because. Right. Yeah. So yeah, they were like serving her ads for diapers. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, what's so insidious too is that these companies know when people are vulnerable.