Jonathan Haidt supports a social media ban for teenagers. I don't.

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0:32The New Statesman.

0:37Hey, Jonathan, Olly Dugmore from The New Statesman. I cannot wait for our conversation later. I think, you know, this is one of the defining issues of our time, social media use, the extent to which, or not, it's impacting teenage mental health. I mean, our listeners will know that my position on this is that I don't support a ban, but obviously your work underpins a lot of the policy prescriptions and the shifts that are happening in our politics and elsewhere too. So I think this will be a really, really good conversation. I can't wait to meet you. See you later. Ali, this is so exciting. You laid out for me where you disagree with me.

1:11Love it. I want you to hit me with everything you've got. I want you to give me every possible argument you have heard for maintaining the status quo and letting kids get on social media at age seven and letting them talk with anonymous men. I want to hear it all, Ali, and especially about the role of the government. Let's get into it. And at the end of our conversation, I believe I can shift you at least a little bit because I think we're going to clear up a lot of misunderstandings about the regulations and the Australia bill.

1:41They've banned it in Australia. We're going to ban it in the UK. Of course, I'm talking about social media. And our guest this week is a man who was instrumental to it all happening. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist by training, now a public intellectual. He's written several books you may well be familiar with, The Coddling of the American Mind. His latest, The Anxious Generation, ignited policy discussions about the integration of technology into childhood. As you heard there, Haidt and I disagree about some of the solutions to this problem, and you'll hear plenty more about that over the course of the conversation.

2:16But there is also a lot we agree on. I'm Oli Dugmore. This is The Exchange from The New Statesman. Enjoy the interview. Jonathan Haidt, hello, how are you? Very well, Ollie, very nice to be here. Likewise, I'm really excited for our conversation. Could you start by explaining what your research has shown and what you're suggesting as a solution? Sure, sure. Well, what the research of many people has shown is that teen mental health in the United States was pretty stable until around 2012 for about 15 years. And then all of a sudden, the lines for depression, anxiety, self-harm, suicidal ideation, and even suicide go way up.

2:53And when we saw that that was exactly the same in Canada, the UK, Australia, and in Scandinavia and most of the West, it became clear, well, something big is happening here. And what could it possibly be that's affecting teens around the world, especially targeting preteen girls? Okay. So it's not the global financial crisis. That was several years earlier. So the only explanation that anyone has proposed, and Jean Twenge was one of the first to propose it. She's a social psychologist. 2012 is when teens traded in their flip phones. The millennials all had flip phones. They went through puberty on a flip phone or basic phone calling and texting their friends.

3:322012 is when it flips, when now suddenly the smartphone is the thing. And by 2015, teen life has been rewired in a sense, and it's all on smartphones. So I've been studying. And of course, that's just a historical correlation that does not prove causation. So my team and I and a few other researchers, we've been bringing together all the evidence. We'll get into this, I hope, because there's seven different lines of evidence, six of which show causation, one of which is straight correlational. So we have this gigantic problem, the biggest mental health problem known in history, certainly in modern history in the West.

4:06We have a kind of an obvious solution, which the kids themselves think is part of it, which the parents think is part, which the psychologists. So we've got a kind of an obvious explanation for it. We've got a lot of research linking it beyond the correlation. And we've got some very simple fixes, which cost about$7 to implement. Like they're really free. Like you never get gigantic social problems that you can solve like for no money. and wherever we look in the US and the UK and Australia, it's bipartisan or it's not a left-right issue because people on the left have kids and people on the right have kids and they all see it.

4:45So I'm really excited that the world is like suddenly waking up, not just to the problem. We've all felt the problem for a while, but since Australia's bill went into effect on December 10th, the world is waking up, the democratic world is waking up to the possibility, you know what? We can actually do something about this. The Chinese, they're on it. They can regulate. They can do whatever they want. But the democracies have been utterly helpless in the face of the technocrats, in the face of a few giant California companies. Tell me what those$7 solutions are. What are they? What are your ideas?

5:16So in my book, The Anxious Generation, which came out in 2024, the key to it was understanding that we're stuck in a set of collective action traps. Every parent might want their kid to not be on social media, but she comes to you and says, mom, everyone else is on. I'm being excluded. And that's why we all give in. And that's why the trap continues year after year after year, another year of kids going off into the depths of despair, depression, and meaninglessness. And so I'm a social psychologist and I focus on how we affect each other. And so I propose four simple principles that would break us out of the collective action trap and roll back the phone based childhood and restore a play based childhood, which is what we evolved for.

5:59It's what kids need. It's what us older people all had. It's fun. So they are very simple. One, no smartphone until age 14. Parents need a clear line. Otherwise, it just keeps drifting down lower and lower. So no smartphone until 14. You can have a flip phone, basic phone. You can call. You can text. But you don't need a supercomputer or a distraction machine with you all the time. Second principle, no social media until 16. We'll get into this. But talking with anonymous strangers on a platform designed to addict you, That's kind of an adult activity. And so I'm saying, ideally, it should be 18.

6:33But as a political compromise, I think we could get 16. And it's working. We're getting 16. The third one is phone-free schools. You have to store them at the beginning of the day. You give them back at the end of the day. This is the$7. Because you can do it for nothing. Just put them in envelopes. But sometimes that costs a little bit. It's not expensive. And the fourth is far more independence, free play, and responsibility. in the real world. Because this isn't just about taking away the phones. This is about restoring a fun, exciting childhood, one that you actually might remember. A lot of kids aren't going to remember.

7:07All they did is scroll. They don't really have much to remember. So if you add up the cost to do all of those together, it's about$7. I don't know. I mean, I don't know the number, but it's not much. It sounds about right, to be fair. None of them really need an appropriation. There are norms that could be supported by laws in a couple of cases. Yeah, look, I agree with a lot of what you're talking about there. Not least the play-based childhoods. I'm not sure there is much of a use for smartphones on school campuses. I actually also, by the way, in terms of, you know, ed tech, I'm really quite hesitant about the proliferation of screens in classrooms as well.

7:39But where I do disagree with you is on this social media band. Now, we'll get to the course of that over the course of the conversation. We will tease out some of those differences over the course of the conversation, Jonathan. All right. I'll defer to your timing. I also want to talk about social media's impact on boys in particular as well. Because I think a lot of this conversation is about girls, rightly so. But there's obviously two sides to it. But before we do that, do you use social media? A little bit, yeah. What do you like about social media? Well, I've been on Twitter since like 2010 or a long time.

8:12And it used to be fun. And that's the thing. We'll get into this. These platforms start off as fun and then they get in shitified and they become socially toxic and they destroy democracy and all of that. But, you know, Twitter used to be fun and I'm still on it. Although it actually kind of drives me crazy. I hate it when people are saying horrible things about me and it actually sometimes does get to me. So I have to sometimes like, I just can't look at it. But these are incredibly powerful tools for causing social change. Adults can use them as tools. People will say, oh, it's ironic that you're getting your message out on social media.

8:50No, these are adult tools. Adults have a need to network. Seventh graders, or let's say 12-year-olds, do not need to network with strangers. They don't need that tool. And my team, we do post on Instagram and LinkedIn. So my team, we do post to get the word out, but I try never to engage. Engaging with someone on Twitter, that's the whole business model. That was the business model of the people who built the Roman Colosseum. They said, let's build this giant coliseum and let's put some people and some animals in there and let's give them weapons. Let's have them kill each other. People will pay to see that.

9:26And so Twitter and Facebook, they figured out how to do that. So I generally hate social media and I don't like what it does to me. And when I do post something that's not trivial, I check it 20 times in the next couple hours to see how many likes is it getting? What are people saying? I can't help it. And so, yeah, I have some experience with it, but I'm 62 years old. I didn't grow up with it. I'm coming to it late. It's really interesting to hear you say that. I have a similar relationship with it, which I think one of the central paradoxes of my life is that I believe these platforms to have so far been a net negative for our societies.

10:03But I have spent my entire professional life making content for those self-saving platforms. Yeah, it's political. Yes, it's journalism. And, you know, I would obviously make the case that the work that I've done overall, you know, is enlightens people, shares new perspectives. But nevertheless, I do believe those, that the platforms have had a negative impact. And so how I reconcile those two things in particular. And I think your point about what the social media sides have become is really important because I'm a millennial. There was a time in my childhood where we didn't have a computer, didn't have internet.

10:35I remember the dial up modem. You know, when I was at school, I had what would now be called a dumb phone. Then it was the cutting edge of technology. You know, I used to get the bus to school, so I needed to be able to text and call my parents if it was late or, you know, any and all of that. And those early social media sites, MySpace, Bebo was one, even the early iterations of Facebook, you know, we're talking about a product that didn't have infinite scroll. To the extent that they were algorithmically driven, it was primarily sort of a chronological timeline in terms of the content that was being serviced to you.

11:07And most of what you saw was from your friends and family. And I think that version of the platforms is just a world away from what they are now. And so when people, my generation points the past, well, I grew up with social media. It was okay. It's apples and pears, really, I think, when you're comparing the two. Go on. Sorry. Oh, yeah. No. So actually, this is super interesting because there's this really interesting finding. I talk about it in The Codly American Mind by some political scientists. And I think Andrew Gilliam is the one name I remember among the authors. What they found was that however the political world looked to you between the age of about 16 to 24, that stays with you for life.

11:47So if you were 18 in 1968 and you're a white person, you're going to be on the left. Whereas if you are a white person who was not born in that window, you're probably going to be a Republican in the United States. So there's like a sensitive period. And what I'm hearing, it just occurred to me hearing you talk, because the millennials are a fascinating generation. You're the last sort of psychologically normal generation. You're the last happy. And actually, your generation is the most intelligent in history. Intelligence was going up and up and up slowly. Yes, I'm just trying to flatter you with statistics.

12:19It was going up and up and up until your generation. And now everyone actually is getting dumber now, but especially the younger people. So it's very interesting to think that the internet that you saw, I saw it when I was in my late 20s. And it was incredible. I mean, when you first saw a web browser, how can it find everything instantly? It was a miracle. And so I think a lot of people, they have that, and the early days of social media, all the way up through the Arab Spring, they have this idea like, oh, the internet is so wonderful, could be so wonderful. But what I think has happened as the business model changed and Facebook sort of pioneered the engagement-based, addiction-based business model and everybody copied her.

13:03I think what has happened is the dynamics of Silicon Valley now are not about a normal market where you make products that delight and amaze people. It's you make products that grab their eyeballs or that addict them or that hook them up in ways that are bad for them, but good for you and your advertisers. So I think we have to sort of abandon our old techno-optimism. I'm a child of the 20th century. My first memory of the outside world is the moon landing. I desperately wanted to be an astronaut. Technology used to be amazing and it used to make our lives better, even if there were some fluctuations.

13:36But I think things are different since around 2010. And that's why I think we have to look with new eyes at social media, AI, ed tech, and a lot of new technologies that really mess with our sociality. Yeah. Okay. So does social media make people more anxious? Like let's talk about causation and correlation. Tell me about the evidence. Sure. So in addition to the historical correlation, which was this happened and at the same time this happened, okay. Then there's also just a statistical correlation. For all these technologies, if you look at the heavy users, so for social media, let's go five hours.

14:09Five hours a day is actually the average. But if you look at people who use it six or seven, if you look at, they always, in every study, they always are more anxious, depressed, they have more problems. But again, that's just a correlation. Maybe anxious, depressed people prefer social media and it's reverse correlation. Okay, that's all possible. So what do we do in the social sciences? People say, oh, how can you possibly tease apart correlation and causation? That's what we do for a living in the social, that's like our job. So there's a lot of ways. The most basic way is the experiment. You have a random control trial, you randomly assign 300 college students to keep going as normal control group and 300 are supposed to cut their social media use down to an hour a day for two weeks, for example.

14:53And then you just see, and you track their mental health afterwards. This is the most basic. It's kind of a toy model because we're just taking adults who've been on it for years. And then what happens if you reduce? And the answer, there's at least two dozen studies, publications, and then within them is multiple studies. But when you look at those that went at least a week, a day is not enough, but if you look at those that went at least a week, and you look at the outcome variables of anxiety and depression, almost all show a reduction in anxiety and depression. So that's very, very clear evidence of causation.

15:26And one of them was done by Metta. It was called Project Mercury. They found results they didn't like. They buried them, but they came out from Francis Haugen, the whistleblower. So that's just one line of evidence of causation. And that's usually the main one that we go to. But what my team and I have done is to say, wait, there's actually so many different kinds of evidence. So another kind is called the natural experiment. What happened, I was just in Spain, there was a big study, an important one in Spain, when high-speed internet came into different provinces at different times. So you look at that, and then you also look at records for psychiatric institutes and who's discharged or admitted for what diagnosis.

16:03What they found is a close link, but when you get high-speed internet, then you can have social media with photos and videos. is girls' rates of mental illness increase in tandem with the high-speed internet penetration. Boys don't. So that's a natural experiment with a lot of ecological validity. And we found eight of those. Seven of them show a clear effect. And one, it's interpreted as being just it improves the economic outcome. But the point is, that's a whole other line that isn't being talked about. And those are natural experiments. Then there are longitudinal studies. where you see what changed first and afterwards.

16:43And most of those show that first you get increases in social media use, and then you get changes in mental health. Not all of them. That one, there's more on both sides. But the bulk of them do show that. But here's what we did, which I think is novel. We said, it's not just about looking at time on device and outcome. Let's treat this like a court case. We have a victim, a whole generation that's more anxious and depressed. We have an alleged perpetrator, the social media industry, especially Meta, Snap, and TikTok. Google also, it's a little more complicated, but Google for the addiction on YouTube.

17:19So we have victims and we have perpetrators. If the victims say, he did it, like, I know this guy, he's the one who attacked me. That's evidence of causality. That's not a correlation. They say it. And there's a survey of British youth, I think it was 62 % said that social media is bad for their generation. There's strong support for... Well, let's say... So, young people say that they were harmed. And then what if they're eyewitnesses? Well, who has the best view of what's happening? Their parents, their teachers, the principals, the therapists, they all say, he did it. There are surveys, he did it.

17:59That's not a correlation. That's a direct report of what they saw. And they saw millions of iterations. And then what if the prosecutor said, and I've got text messages from the perpetrator. And he told his buddy, you know what? I'm going to mug this kid. It's three o 'clock. And then, yep, I mugged him. Here's what I got. And he shows that in court. Now, is that a correlation or is that evidence? Well, if anybody was paying attention to the court cases in Los Angeles, that's what we've got. I mean, we've got thousands of emails and internal reports. This is how the brain develops. This is when you can get them.

18:38This is the sweet spot of social comparison. How do we get girls to be stuck in there in the sweet spot? I mean, it's disgusting what they knew, what they said, and they did it. They did it knowingly. One of the most delicious things to come out of the LA trial where Metta and YouTube were found guilty of causing addiction, is the evidence was so egregious against them that their insurance companies who were supposed to pay their damages, they went to the court in Delaware state that handles insurance matters. And they said to the judge there, you know what? California law says that if you cause harm intentionally, we don't have to cover you.

19:15We're not on the hook. And the judge agreed. So because the harm was so egregious these companies don't even have insurance protection that's how that's how disgusting they are their insurance companies won't cover them yeah it's horrific isn't it horrific to hear what about the covid lockdowns because as far as natural experiments go i mean you know we're talking about uh face-to-face contact and obviously schooling enormously important for this well all cohorts um what happened what does that show yeah so if you trace out most of these, the mental health stats, what happens, so every trend that we're talking about here was deeply in place by 2019.

19:56Nothing started during COVID. And if you look at the trend lines, most of the trend lines, they're flat until 2012, roughly. They then begin going up. You hit COVID and a lot of them for girls accelerate. They now go up a lot. And then post COVID for girls, they come down a little, but it's really mostly just like sort of back on on the trend line or maybe it's leveled up a little bit. Boys, you get only a small increase. It didn't affect their mental health as much. And people think that like, well, COVID some alternate explanation instead of the social media. But what is it about COVID that hurt kids?

20:33Was it the virus? No, the virus didn't do much to them. Was it the fact that in 2019, what they desperately needed was less time on screens and more time out playing with each other and what they got from COVID was, oh, you can't go outside and play. It's too dangerous. Or, you know, you can't get near each other. It's too dangerous. So here, kid, you know, no more school, sit here and be on a screen all day. And so this was especially devastating. Your kids are very young. This was especially devastating for all of them. But from what I'm hearing, especially the kids who were toddlers then, they're showing up at school at age four, five, six with severe language delays, behavioral delays.

21:16So COVID hurt kids in many ways, but one of the main ones was it did exactly the opposite. What I'm saying in the book is we have overprotected our children in the real world. We've underprotected them online. COVID made us double down on those two mistakes. Yeah. That's interesting to hear that because I would have anticipated, you know, some sort of really dramatic reversal in either direction, particularly if we're talking about, okay, you know, the importance of face-to-face contact, and then all of a sudden that six to eight hour window where kids are in school, they don't have that anymore.

21:47I would have perhaps expected those trends to really, really accelerate. And it's interesting to hear you say that there's that gap. It's a couple of times now in our conversation so far, there is a gap between boys and girls in how this happens. I mean, talk to me about that. What explains that? Sure. So the entire new digital world that engulfed kids in the early 2010s, once they got devices in their pockets, always on, always connected. There are many, many different effects. And in the social sciences, we tend to lock in on one way of operationalizing the problem. So what's first notice was, hey, rates of depression, anxiety are going up, especially for girls.

22:22Okay, what's social media, depression, anxiety? And that's where the academic debate has been concentrated, that one thing. But there's so many different inputs and so many different outputs, including cognitive ability, attentional capacity, physical health, exercise, sleep. I mean, there's so many different harmful outcomes happening here. And if we just look at depression, anxiety, and social media, then it's a girl's story more than a boy's story. Boys aren't being made depressed and anxious so much, but boys on social media suffer a lot of harm. So for one thing, all the dangerous challenges, there's one called the subway surfer challenge.

23:01So in New York City, there's signs on the subway urging boys, don't do it. Meaning, don't climb on the actual subway car so that you can take a video of yourself and post it to TikTok. Don't do it because you're going to smack your head on a tunnel and die. And so that sort of thing is much more boys than girls. Drug overdose deaths, I don't know if those are more boy than girl, but a lot of the fatalities from social media are because it makes drug purchase. It puts every kid in touch with drug dealers and they buy lots of drugs. Kids are not buying fentanyl. They're not trying to buy fentanyl, but they buy things that have fentanyl and then they die.

23:41So that's a huge form of harm that hits. I know a lot of boys. I think a lot of girls too. And so for boys, what I found is the way to understand what's happening to boys isn't social media depression. Don't focus on those two variables. For boys, focus on their dopamine systems. Focus on the, you know, dopamine is the neurotransmitter of reward, but it's more like motivation and learning. It's, you know, you do something, there's feedback from the world. And if it's good, your brain releases a little bit of dopamine, which says, do that again, do it again, do it again. And everybody has that.

24:15But the industry seems to be concentrating on doing that to boys. And so it starts with... So video games are all optimized for quick dopamine. So boys are much, much more like... Almost all video game addiction is boys. Porn is also dopamine. Porn is after boys. I can't believe how much nicotine kids are now consuming. It took us decades to get smoking out of childhood, and now it's back, and that's all dopamine. And then there's gambling, sports betting, crypto investing. All this is aimed at boys, at addicting boys, bankrupting them, setting them up for failure in life. So that's what I focus on for boys.

24:57Social media was where we got into this, and that was the original sort of academic debate. But I think we have to look at the entire environment. Then we see girls, I think social media is the center of it for girls, but for boys, it's all the other things. So parents of boys, if you're out there parents of boys, arrange your boys' childhood studies. is lots of slow dopamine, projects that are going to be amazing when he finishes them, but he can't finish it in seven seconds. He can't finish it in two minutes. It's going to take hours and then he might do it. So building something, pursuing some goal.

25:29Boys really need that. It's much easier to get boys off track and have them end up in your basement in their 20s than it is girls. Girls tend to, even with all the depression, anxiety, girls in both of our countries are much more likely to finish a secondary school, finish university, get a job, move out of the home. Boys get off track more easily. And the entire tech industry is doing its best to keep them off track. So it struck me from our conversation so far, a lot of the things we've spoken about is potential harms that can take place on social media. One example you've given is, for example, around strangers, grooming, that sort of thing happening on the Internet.

26:04There we're talking about, you know, purchasing illegal drugs, potentially overdosing, other real world harms. And to me, it seems that a lot of those problems, they still exist whether or not those children have access to social media, right? You know, you can make this a lot of the conversation as well is about abuse, bullying, harassment, all of those things. They all still exist in the world outside of social media. So how do you how do you think about a social media ban alleviating those problems? Because presumably the children are still going to bully each other in the playground, just not on Snapchat.

26:36Yeah. So when you make a vice frictionless and free, when you say everyone can gamble all the time, this is especially going to hurt kids and especially boys. Now you might say, oh, but they'll find ways to gamble. Yeah, some of them will, but like 2 % as many. And so making vice frictionless and free, always available, just vastly increases the amount of vice consumed. So porn, when I was young, boys found porn magazines, but we didn't have super high quality porn with us all the time. And so vice within limits can be part of life. But when kids are being raised in a complete surround of hypersexuality, pornography, gambling, materialism, so the dose makes the poison, a little bit of that isn't going to kill them.

27:34But if that's what childhood has become for a lot of kids, this is a complete disaster. Let's keep going. Give me every, just like that, like, oh, but won't they do it anyway? The bullying. Yes, there's always bullying. But it's one thing when it's just a group on the playground or a small group. When you think everyone is laughing at you, and that's what happens on social media. And all of us have felt, all of us who've been canceled or attempted, have felt like, because you don't know how far it goes. When everyone is laughing at you or joining in to pile on, it's very, very common that kids think about suicide because that's what shame does to you.

28:15You want to disappear. And social death is more painful than physical death. Physical death is one and done. Social death goes on and is unbearable. We're going to take a short break now. We will be back after this.

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29:39This is one of the central tensions, I think, because on the one hand, you've got your work in The Coddling of the American Mind, right, which is about the importance of, you know, suffering setbacks, developing resilience as a result of experiencing perhaps a degree of suffering or a degree of difficulty, establishing boundaries. And then on the other hand, we're here talking about potentially banning children's access to these platforms. And part of my thinking is, is there not a tension between those two things? Because I absolutely don't seek to minimize the real and present harms that exist on these platforms.

30:17But for me, the process of adolescence is one of pushing boundaries, risk-taking, getting it wrong, getting it right, figuring out where those limits are. and that perhaps it might be better, particularly as we, I mean, we live in a digital native world now. It's going to be a component part for the rest of these children's lives. Should they not be forming norms, learning how to operate on these platforms from a young age, rather than saying, no, up until 16, you know, we're going to get, and there'll be this cliff edge at the end of it. Yeah. Well, you know, they're going to be having sex for the rest of their lives.

30:47So why don't we give them a head start? I mean, if we start them at four, they're going to be a lot better. They're going to be much better lovers. No, there are developmental timings. There are developmental pathways. Kids need to develop basic skills and especially basic social skills. They need millions of face-to-face interactions. The brain is deeply embodied. The brain develops in interaction. It's kind of a loop between the brain, the body action, and the world, especially the social world. That's the way it evolved. That's what kids need. This is like Vygotsky and Laurier, 1920s, 1930s discoveries about child development.

31:24And so that, you know, like you climb a tree, you fall down. You try to flirt with a girl, she makes fun of you. Like all that, like you need millions of things like that. And a varied, varied tableau of it. Like you need lots of different kinds of things. What if we take all those experiences, cut them by 90 % because there isn't any time. If you're on social media five hours a day and you're on your phone for another three or four, that's it, like you go to school and you're on your own. That's basically it for half of the kids. what happens you lose out on all this like rich all these different kinds of experience you have just one one or two kinds and there's there's no embodiment it doesn't involve your body it doesn't involve face-to-face contact you lose the ability to have a normal face-to-face contact and so in theory if this was 15 years ago i would have said you know yeah maybe we'll see like maybe you know being bullied and cyber bullied like maybe that'll really toughen kids and then they won't care what people think anymore.

32:20When I talk to my students, that's not what happens. When you get bullied, when you get piled on, you get gun shy, you are afraid to speak. So in theory, it could have been that way, but it doesn't seem to be. But let's be sure to get, okay, I want to be sure when we talk about the Australia bill, what's happening in the UK. So I just want to make sure we leave time for all that, because I'm happy to talk about the harms of social media all day long, but let's be sure we get to the next phase. We absolutely will. I think one of, particularly in the UK context, one of my problems with the people that have advocated for this course of action, and up until recently, actually, they were primarily coming from the right of British politics.

32:56And then obviously, the Labour government here has adopted this as a policy proposal. One of the things that I found deeply frustrating about it was that point that you were making about the digital world and the real world. Because I think for a lot of those original advocates, rather than seeking to understand, well, what is it that perhaps children are seeking escapism from why are they trying to escape into these digital worlds what is it about their physical realities that they don't like or want to get away from that part of the the thinking just wasn't there you know in the uk in particular you know it was part of the austerity agenda since the financial crash we've seen particularly youth centers but in general community third spaces places that that children would essentially be themselves but you know maybe with the degree of supervision but are largely left to their own devices closing down when you when you talk about If you want to get a pitch at Goals, which is like a football pitch provider in the UK, you want to hire a five-a-side pitch for an hour, it costs you 60 quid.

33:51And obviously, two teams are five, okay, six pounds each. But for most kids, six pounds a week is pretty expensive. And I really think that if you are going to advocate for closing this digital world down for them, that has to operate in tandem with a theory of their lived experience. And if it doesn't, I think that's a really, really dangerous path for us to go down. You have to have those two things in tandem, right? I think it has to be, you can't just say, okay, in the UK, we're going to ban this. Great. And what are you doing about youth centers? And if those two things aren't happening, it's a really, really dangerous mix.

34:22I could not have said it better myself. When I said it costs$7 to fix this, I was wrong because$7 is what it costs for the first three norms. The fourth one is far more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world. and the real world is getting more and more built for cars, not kids. So when my parents were growing up in New York City in the 1930s, they would play stickball in the street. And when a car came, they'd call a car and they'd step out. And they were all out all day long. And when I was growing up in the 70s in the suburbs of New York, we weren't playing in the street, but we were running around each other's yards and nobody knew where we were.

34:58And we were building forts and we were getting into trouble. And in the 1990s, in the Anglo countries, we got afraid of our neighbors. We got afraid that there would be sexual abusers and kidnappers. And you didn't have the high crime rates that we had in America. But the Canadians did it too. They didn't have much crime. But we stopped trusting our neighbors. We stopped letting our kids out. We started making it like if a mother takes her eyes off her kid, doesn't know where they are, she's a bad mother. But kids have to be supervised all the time. This is terrible. There are some ways you can fix this for no money.

35:29I founded an organization called Let Grow, letgrow.org with Lenore Skenazy, a woman who wrote the book Free Range Kids. So one thing, and there's something you should do with your kids when they're older, you can form a playboyhood, which is you get a few families that just agree, okay, we five families are a playboyhood. And on Fridays, the kids, they decide. Totally up to them whose house they go to, what they do. Just they can't leave anyone. They have to stay together. That's amazing independent. That costs nothing. On the other hand, there's all kinds of ways we need to change the built environment that cost a hell of a lot of money.

36:02Because we're talking about construction. We're talking about youth centers. And so I hope that, okay, actually, you know what? I've heard this multiple times about the shutdown in the UK of these youth centers. I hope that whenever this bill goes through, I know what Starmer proposed was really promising as a general direction, but I think the details are not worked out. Yes, we have to get kids out of the toxicity of the digital world, and we have to have a place for them to go. We have to have more, they're called third places. So home and school are the two main places kids are. But we need places, you know, stores that cater to kids without fearing shoplifting.

36:41I mean, you know, often they don't let kids in because of shoplifting. So we have to figure out how to solve that. And some of them, you know, youth centers for teens, there will have to be some supervision, there will have to be some staffing. So yeah, that is going to cost money and it has to be done. It is part of the solution. Thank you. You mentioned Anglo countries there. And I just wondered how you account for. There are differences, aren't there, in the data where you look at nations that still have that same high level of social media and smartphone use, but perhaps don't have the sort of concurrent mental health negative outcomes in the same way.

37:14I'm probably talking primarily about Asia here and Southeast Asia. I mean, how do you account for the differences that we see there? Yeah. So let me start with the West because we have much better data there. And originally I thought, you know, there's the overprotection piece and there's the tech piece. And I don't know which one is bigger. But once we found that Scandinavia, so what generally happened is the Anglo countries all freaked out in the 90s together. Not New Zealand. That's the one place in the Anglo world where kids are still allowed to climb trees. But in the other countries, like, no, too dangerous, can't do anything.

37:46Surprisingly, in Northern Europe, where they do let kids out, they never lock them up, they also have the same mental health crisis. And I think the reason is because it's the societies that are freest. Okay, so if you are free, if you can make your own choices, if you're not bound into tradition or family or religion, freedom used to be often associated with good things, good outcomes. But what we see in the data, when you break up the lines by religiosity or by politics, what we see is a much sharper increase for kids from non-religious homes than compared to religious homes, and a bigger increase for kids who are on the left compared to the right.

38:23Now, in my book, The Righteous Mind, I show that part of the difference is that conservatives have a more binding sort of lock in, duty, honor, see your grandmother, pray. I mean, there's just much more constraining. And there are good things and bad things about that. But when the tsunami hit, when social media came to wash kids away, the kids who are locked in in tight communities were somewhat protected, whereas the kids who are freest, and the Anglo and Scandinavians are the freest societies of the major societies in the world. They're the ones who suffered the worst damage. Now, what about East Asia?

38:57East Asia is the original source of all the psychological work on tight versus loose cultures. Obviously, much more collectivist, more binding. And so we don't see it at 2012. Now, they've been using different platforms, different technology. They've been tech obsessed, at least Islamic Korea and Japan, if anything more so even than the West. But my group is just now getting clear data from Korea and Japan. I wouldn't trust anything from China. And what they've told me, this was just last week, they told me, yes, we are seeing it much more recently. So it wasn't in the early 2010s for the East Asian countries.

39:38That's all I can say because I don't have exactly what they found. But oh, if you're listening to this, please go to afterbabel.com. That's my sub stack. It's free. You don't have to pay anything. That's where we put out all these research reports. And in a few weeks, we'll have a report on East Asia. Yeah, I should say as well, you know, I've been reading that Substack for a long time. And you guys are very clear-eyed about the evidence. And, you know, the strength of it in some instances, relative lack of strength in others. I think it's a really clear, really good way for people to get an objective understanding about the academic research that's going into this.

40:10Let's talk about Australia then and the ban there. I mean, what do you make of how it's going there? You support the implementation of the ban there? Yeah. So one way to look at it is this. There's a famous quote attributed to the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu. He said, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, but if the first step is difficult, you should quit. Wait, I'm sorry. Hold on. Hold on. I know he said the first part, but the second part, I think that was added on by people who say, hey, Australia didn't Get rid of social media in the first six months. I guess that didn't work.

40:47Back to the drawing board. Okay, let's look at what Australia did. First of all, Australia didn't ban social media. Australia said, let's look at this moment when a kid signs a contract. Right now you can be seven and you can sign a contract to give away your data and subject yourself to all these terrible things. You can be seven as long as you can say you're 13. Your parents have no, you know, unless they lock you up and keep you from the internet, they can't stop you. That's the status quo all over the world. And the Australians said, no, enough. You have to be 16 to make that decision. You're not 13 or seven.

41:20You're not old enough to decide this or to deal with this. You have to be 16. And you know whose job it is to verify? For the first time in history, it's not the child's job. It's not the parent's job. For the first time in history, the people are making a dangerous consumer product, pushing it on kids, making money from it. How about we have them do it? That's what we do for alcohol. That's what we do for drugs. That's what we do for almost every other vice. So that's what they did. And they're the first in the world to do it. And they had to go in soft. They couldn't say, okay, companies, you have to get to zero or we're going to fine you.

41:56That's impossible. The age verification technology is getting better rapidly. So right now there is age verification technology, and most of them are using the facial structure by Yoti, things like that. It's okay. It's much better than nothing. It can be fooled. This is round one. This is day one. Now that there's a market, guess what? The market is responding. And there are so many more things coming online because Australia and now dozens of other countries are going to follow it. And so free market has a lot of amazing things about it. One is if there's a global demand for better age verification, we're going to get better age verification.

42:33So here's what the Australians did. They said, on December 10th, all the companies have to do something. They have to show us that you've got something. And they all did, all 10 of the covered platforms. They said, yep, we got it. Here it is. And they looked and said, okay, you got something. Great. Okay, now let's see how it goes. And those companies then removed 4.5 million. They closed down 4.5 million underage accounts from the two and a half million Australian kids in the age range, because lots of kids have multiple accounts. Now, of course, kids are still getting on. If we ban cigarettes tomorrow, kids would still find cigarettes.

43:09So kids are still getting on. This is round one. The Australians, the regulator, they've now collected evidence. They know which platforms are complying. I think four of them showed really poor compliance. And so they've been warned, okay, round one, you didn't do very well. You got to do better. So this is what I mean by a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. There's no way that step could have gotten... But here's what else has happened. It's so amazing what's actually happening. So the first thing is, by a couple of measures, between 25 and 40 % decrease in social media use, sometimes in the last week.

43:45There are multiple measures, but we are seeing a substantial decrease. As a social scientist, do you know what I would pay to get a 30 or 40 % reduction in any harmful behavior in the course of five years, that would be great. So they've already gotten some reduction. Now, some really brilliant social scientists have pointed out, if you hit 70 % compliance, then it kind of becomes self-sustaining. And they're right about that. So we're not yet there. But this is round one. And another exciting thing that's happening is that it's incentivizing all the platforms to be better. Because so many countries are going to come in behind Australia, and a lot of them are focusing on features.

44:28And which ones should be covered? It's not clear. Oh, Roblox. Oh, you cleaned that up? You no longer have children talking with anonymous men? Oh, okay. Well, maybe you won't be covered. So one of the objections I was waiting for you to say is, oh, age limits, it lets the companies off the hook. That's an argument. There's a few phrases that you hear so often that I wonder if they're pushed by the social media companies. Off the hook. as if putting on an age limit means like, oh, we don't have to make it safe anymore. There's an age limit. Like, no, 16 and 17-year-olds are still minors, so you can still get your ass suit off.

45:04And if you don't want to be covered by the next 20 countries to do this, why don't you make your platform safer? And they are. They are. Platforms are seeing this and they're saying, okay, let's dial back those features. No, I very definitely want to see these platforms on the hook for sure. yeah so talking about Australia right there was a study in the BMJ I think it was last week showing that so far it's about 85 % of Australian teens had still accessed social media in the past seven days and a lot of that was using their old pre-existing accounts it was about 15 % had set up fake accounts and only 3 % were using VPNs and the UK is looking at that and we're seeing in our legislation in the conversation around the policy here talking about rather than just being a reasonable expectation which I think is roughly the language that's used in the Australia bill we're talking about having something much more robust for the companies.

45:51And so this might mean, I think there's a couple of ways of doing that, right? One is at device level where you might have a device that is literally locked and says, you know, the person that owns this is under 16. It cannot access any of this stuff. Another might be at the account level. So the social media platforms themselves are responsible for verifying the age. And I think one of the big downsides for me in doing that is, you know, one way of doing it is just to upload a form of ID, right? You know, that we all do when we create an account. And therefore you can say, okay, well, this person has a driver's license.

46:17It says at this age, this person has a credit card. They wouldn't be able to get that if they were 13 years old, yada, yada, yada. But that for me, that connection between the digital persona and the real world persona, I think there's a really significant compromise there in terms of the privacy for those adults. And that's something I have real reservations about, particularly in terms of a sort of a free, fair, private internet. Particularly, that might not be the internet we have right now, but an internet that we want. Yeah. There's a pretty significant imposition, isn't it, to put on our society?

46:50Okay. So, boy, the free speech implications, I'm extremely concerned about those. And we're sitting here in a country that has jailed thousands of people for tweets. Yeah. So, look, that's got to stop. This is a unique reason why people in the UK might be more concerned. So I take the privacy concerns very seriously. a lot of my work before this book was on the importance of free inquiry in universities where we were under some threat again implemented by social media by intimidation on social media but let's put this into perspective what are we talking about here we're talking about the moment in which a child is about to give away the store they're about to say okay you can take everything from me.

47:33You can sell it. You can market to me. You can take my privacy, please. Okay? So that's the moment that they're about to do. And then the question is, can the state ask that the platform have a way to get this piece of information about age? All you need is yes or no over 16. You don't need to know their age. You don't need to know their hair color. You just need to know yes or no. That's it. One binary piece of information. And just since Australia was implemented or announced, Apple and Google have both made it easy to do that. And so Apple, for one example, in California, some US states, you can upload your driver's license to your Apple wallet.

48:17There's lots of good reasons you want to do that. Once you've done that, Apple can now vouch for you with absolute fidelity, absolute certainty. You trusted Apple. Apple knows who you are. Apple knows how old you are. So if you now try to access a porn site from your iPhone or your computer, the porn site, and this is what Pornhub actually says they want, Pornhub can just, they don't have to know anything about you. Just yes or no. That's it. One bit of information. Yes or no. And an Apple device can now say yes or no. There is zero, zero privacy concern in that case. Okay? Google has an API. I don't know exactly how theirs works, but Google is doing something similar.

48:58And all of this is just in the last year. So thank God for Australia. If Australia had not done that, then you couldn't come out harder than Australia did. But because Australia did it, created a market, shown that it's possible, everyone else can come in a couple steps ahead. Yeah. I think on the free speech point as well, there's the additional factor. I think sometimes it gets underplayed, which is the actual right to free expression of the children themselves. and clearly limiting their access to their platforms. Well, that's right. Okay, let's talk about it. What do they do on social media platforms?

49:30What's the main thing they do on social media platforms? Is it give their opinions? Well, ideally, it should be them talking amongst their friends, right? Should them just be in conversation with each other? Yeah, that would be great. That would be the purpose of it. And if someone would come up with a platform that did that, it wouldn't be covered. And now someone will. Originally, Facebook was sort of that, like you talk to people. That's long gone. Yes. It's overwhelmingly short videos. Everything is becoming short videos. Watching an endless stream of short videos is not free speech, okay?

49:59So what would happen if kids can't get on these giant, manipulative, addictive short video generators? What would happen? They'd have to go to much safer platforms, platforms that aren't covered under the ban because they don't have these harmful design features. How free do kids feel to speak on Instagram or TikTok? How free do they feel to speak? We have a post coming out at After Babble very soon on the Australia bill and all the amazing changes that are happening. And one of the points we make in there is that these platforms are terrible places for free expression. People are intimidated.

50:37They're great for the extremes. If you're on the far right or the far left, you can yell and scream all you want there. but most kids, most adults feel intimidated. These are not good places to host free and open inquiry. And as long as they take up all the, like imagine these are the tall trees that are taking up all the sunlight. They block the sunlight from hitting the forest floor. You can't compete with them. They've got a lock on the market. Then we have a terrible speech climate forever, plus all the mental illness, the sextortion, the drug deaths, all that. But if you scale them back and say, you know what, you guys, you can't do this to kids anymore.

51:11You can't do this to children. Now let a thousand flowers bloom. And they're already, we have the example of a site for LGBTQ kids in Australia that saw a huge increase. And it's a moderated platform. So you can't, you're not going to have men there trying to sexually exploit children. It's a safe place where LGBTQ kids can go. And they had, I think they had a 300%, it was some huge increase since the Australia law went into effect. So I think the net effect is going to be, in the long run, I think will be a better speech climate for teens than the one we currently have. One of my big concerns, I think, is for children who are from marginalized groups, perhaps might be based on their sexuality or race, that in their real world community, possibly ostracized or indeed maybe even actually physically under threat, finding community in the online world.

52:02And I think that's one of the big possible risks and downsides of a ban is that just as children mature at different rates, there are some kids who would be absolutely fine to access this earlier. There'll be some who should probably be accessing it later. You know, they'll develop at different speeds. Similarly, you know, there's a multiplicity of childhood experience. And when you have something blanket like a ban, you know, the young gay kid that grows up in a, you know, heavily Christian, really orthodox community that struggles with their sense of identity, loses access to that community is something that I'm really worried about.

52:35And, you know, over the course of, and I'll let you come back on that point in a second, but if I could just sort of like broadly try to bring my sweep of questions together, the way I feel about it is this, which is that there are trade-offs here in terms of freedom of speech and privacy. We're seeing in the preliminary data that's coming out of Australia that at present, you know, there are gaps in the ban and people are finding their way around it. Round one. Absolutely. And, you know, I just I'm really hesitant to to impact those two things where I think are super important to free and fair societies for things that we're not even sure actually might work.

53:16And indeed, there are gaps, some gaps in the data around whether or not there is a connection between these two things. It feels like such a really quite disproportionate policy response to the problem. That's where my reservations are. Okay, no, that makes sense. That's beautifully expressed. One of the common arguments, one of the common phrases is the lifeline argument, which is a version of what you're saying here. And what I usually hear is, social media is a lifeline for LGBTQ kids. You know what was a lifeline for LGBTQ kids? The internet. So you're of just the right age. It was magnificent.

53:53And any kid who was isolated, suddenly infinite information. They can get infinite. And all kinds of ways to meet other gay kids, other trans kids. So the internet was a lifeline. And this was the internet before it got inshittified. The inshittified internet is a poison line. It is not a lifeline for LGBT kids. So I have an article in The Atlantic with Zach Rauch and Lennon Torres, who's a trans activist. And Lennon talks about what happened to her. When she was 12 and 13, she was on all these platforms and the things that men did to her. And once they got photos, they could extort her. They could force her to do...

54:26I mean, it was horrible what these men did to her. And we back that up or we complement Lenin's testimony with surveys which show who is the group that is most likely to say that social media harmed their mental health? LGBTQ kids. Who is the group that's most likely to be victimized? LGBTQ kids. So I wouldn't say like, oh, some are ready to use these exploitative, manipulative platforms at 14, others not till 16. I would say these platforms are poison, poison, especially for LGBTQ kids. and as long as that scene is the only way then they're going to keep drinking poison but once again limit those dangerous platforms to adults release 16 plus and lots of great options are going to flourish they're already there they're just so small they can't grow so i totally accept your framing of the problem and the need to respond to it and i think the status quo is not responding to it and a ban on the dangerous platforms and it's always the platforms are always pick because of their danger.

55:26It's not, oh, people are talking to each other? Let's stop that. You know, no one's doing that. So nobody's talking about banning WhatsApp. WhatsApp is weird. Lots of stuff happens. But direct communication is not under these bans. Yeah, I mean, those closed system social media platforms, I mean, you particularly look at sort of moral panics that have kicked off and content that's gone massively viral on WhatsApp, quite often based on the misinformation and the downsides. By all means, I'm not saying that WhatsApp is, you know, some sort of panacea. It's not hurting kids in anything like the way TikTok and Snapchat are.

55:56I think it's a theme throughout this conversation, right? We've spoken a little bit about that earlier internet, right? And I do wonder if there's a version of this. Is there a version of Facebook, TikTok, take your pick, that is a more child-friendly one? The service is the type of – I'm thinking about the things that people used to write on their – You know, Ollie Dougmore is watching TV. One like, maybe a comment. You know, that was what posting on social media was like. And it was direct. It was between people you knew, you know, the sort of the engagement based algorithm and the capacity for Firestorm and all of that wasn't really there in the same way that it is now.

56:37That's right. And whether or not there is a version of those platforms that could exist for children to use with some pretty safe guardrails. I actually I think there'd be a fair few adults who'd be interested in using platforms like that as well. Right. Yeah. In theory, there should be. It should be possible to retrofit these platforms to make them safe for kids. Here's another thing we could do. Suppose you wanted a bathtub. You could take a refrigerator, lie it on its back, plug up the lead. You can retrofit a refrigerator to become a bathtub. Or you could design a bathtub to be a really good bathtub.

57:08These platforms were designed, and we know this from their internal documents, these platforms were designed to soak up every moment of attention that they can grab. They were designed to prey upon girls' insecurities. That's the design. It's very hard to retrofit a product designed to be exploitative to be one that is good for kids. And so this was, in fact, I should mention, you have one of the most amazing people here in the UK, B-Bahn Kidron. She was the one who really got this kicked off in the UK and around the world. She has a new book called Users. But she talks over and over again, has been saying for 10 years, the importance of design for safety.

57:44These products have to be designed from the start for safety if we're going to have kids on it. And so I don't – so Meta has shown us over and over again they will not reform. They are just – they've just made it really clear we can never trust them. They've proven that. We're running out of time together, Jonathan. But just listening to the way you talk about these platforms, it does make me – and particularly given your broader training as well, you know, where is morality in this conversation? You know, where particularly on behalf of these corporations with the GDP of, you know, medium size, sorry, with the total market cap that's equivalent to the GDP of a medium sized country.

58:21Where is the morality in the way that they operate and function? Because it seems to have gone missing. That's right. So I teach in a business school. I used to teach our professional responsibility course at NYU Stern. And this is what we start with is what's the right theory here? Is it shareholder primacy? Is that their only duty is do whatever it takes to make as much money as you can for the shareholders? That's what some of our students believe. Or is it stakeholder theory where you have all these duties? And the law in America is actually ambiguous. And I can understand if companies say, you know what, we're just going to make money.

58:53But here's the thing. If that's what they do, they have to commit to doing it legally and in ways that are not exploitative, that are not imposing external costs on others who are not party to the deal, and they're not doing that. And so the major platforms, they cause all the market failures. They have monopoly in a complicated way. They have information asymmetry. They cause harms to lots of people. And they are despoiling a public good, which is children's attention. So I don't expect these companies to be saints. I don't expect those companies or any publicly traded company to put the needs of kids first.

59:38I don't expect that. And I don't demand that. Where I think we could begin, I'm hesitant to use the word evil, but I do think that when a company goes to the extent of finding out that they're hurting kids and then burying the results, as Meta does over and over again, When Snapchat found that they were getting 10 ,000 reports of sex extortion from their users, not a year, that was each month. When they do that and they don't do anything about it, now I think they are so negligent. Companies have a duty to at least not hurt kids. We're debating this in the US and in the UK. Is there a duty of care?

1:00:21Do they have a duty to actually care for kids' well-being? That's debated. But they certainly can't be doing things that they know are hurting kids. And the fact that they keep doing it and are so committed to doing it, I think we can say they are behaving far outside the moral universe that the rest of us live in, where we don't think you can do these things to kids. There are plenty of British policymakers who listen to this podcast and will be sort of watching for any advice and insight that you can give for people that are considering implementing this ban. I mean, what would your watchwords be for those people who are thinking about doing this in the UK?

1:00:59How best to do it? What would your advice be? Well, certainly you want to think about accountability and incentives. Those are the things that are really going to move the needle. A couple of general principles of legislation for social change. One is simple rules work. Complicated ones don't work as well. And so try to keep it simple. That's why age 16 is just a very clear, bright line that parents can use. So keep it simple. Bright lines are good. Think about the incentives for the companies that you're putting in. And so Australia did it the simplest way. They just said, okay, these are the platforms that are causing the problems.

1:01:39These are the platforms that are covered. So Indonesia is the second country. Theirs has already been implemented. Indonesia takes a variation of that. And Indonesia says, we're not specifying platforms in the law. We're specifying features, infinite scroll, notifications at night. And then I forget how they do it. We have a post on how Indonesia is working, whether it's like a regulatory agency that decides, I forget. But the point is, Indonesia says, here are the seven or 12 features that we're concerned about. Okay, you want access to Indonesian children? Let's see how you stack up. Boy, does that give them an incentive to improve.

1:02:13So you want policymakers, you want simple, clear rules that people can follow that incentivize companies to make safer products. That's how you get change at massive scale. Jonathan Haidt, it has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for giving us your time. I really appreciate it. Well, thank you, Ali. But now I have to ask you, have I moved you at least a little bit towards being more open to legislative action as a way to change a complex system that is harming children you have moved me uh a little bit jonathan i will i will grant you that i do believe in the power of legislation to shift complex systems particularly ones that harm children the there are there are a few things and i but i have i haven't meant to sort of had the final word on this, but you've given it to me, so I will say so.

1:03:05But for me, I think there are a few sort of central tenants to having a functioning democracy. And free and fair speech, freedom of association, a free press, and a few other things, I think are really, really fundamental. And, you know, I think listeners will have heard our conversation and seen that there's actually a fair amount that you and I agree on in this conversation, right and it is not because you know i'm absolutely not seeking to minimize the harm that's happening to children and and but really for me it's i just i want people to pause and think about the trade-off that is happening here because it's a really really important one and just because on some occasions you know there's popular support for doing something and this this measure is one there is huge almost universal degree of support for it does not always mean that it is the right course of action.

1:03:59And that's just where my hesitation is. So don't get me wrong. By no means, I don't think that it's some horrendous, silly idea that we shouldn't even countenance. But for me, I'm not there yet on advocating for a ban. I still have hangups around that. Okay. I'll call that a win for me. Jonathan Haidt, thank you so much. I appreciate it. My pleasure, Ali. That was Jonathan Haidt. I'm Oli Dugmore, and this is The Exchange. On Friday, we're going to bring you an extra episode with Mehdi Hassan. He and I spoke about the change of labor leader and what it all looks like from America. We'll see you then.

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