Social Media Goes to Court

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1:04You're listening to The Political Scene. I'm David Remnick. Early each week, we bring you a conversation from our episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour.

1:16This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Talk about the right book at the right time. Two years ago, a book called The Anxious Generation came out, and it was an instant bestseller. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist teaching at New York University, laid out a very stark thesis, that Generation Z, the kids born with smartphones in their hands, have been harmed profoundly by those phones and the social media programs on them, harmed emotionally and intellectually by the addiction mechanisms programmed into the technology.

1:59Now, some readers scoffed initially, calling it the latest panic over new technology. And some academics have said that Haidt doesn't quite prove the negative effects he attributes to social media. But for a huge number of people, the anxious generation nailed it. The book has now spent nearly 100 weeks on the bestseller list, and more important, it's helped to galvanize a movement. It inspired the world's first national law to verify the age of social media users. It also encouraged school districts to restrict the use of phones, and you see that happening all over the country. There have also been lawsuits in California that are aiming to pin liability for harms on the social media platforms themselves.

2:44I spoke with Jonathan Haidt when The Anxious Generation first came out two years ago, and he joined me again the other day. Jonathan, I really wanted to have you back. We had a wonderful conversation a couple of years ago, and you've done a lot of work since then. And I've done a lot of thinking about it, too, I must admit. And I think I'm not alone. Your book has been cited as part of the inspiration for some new laws that are trying to shield children from social media. And a trial has just started. That's right. In the state of California against social media companies. And that seems really significant.

3:20Talk me through what's going on in California. That's right. So these companies have, they were given blanket immunity for action back in the 90s. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act said we can't sue Meta or TikTok because of what someone else posted on Meta or TikTok. As a First Amendment idea? It was actually done to incentivize the companies to moderate because they were afraid if they moderate, if they take anything down, now they're responsible for every single decision. So Congress said, you know what? You can go ahead and take down porn and don't worry. No one can sue you if you leave something up.

3:56They wanted to give them more freedom of action. And so it was a good idea originally. But the courts have interpreted so widely that you have all these parents with dead kids. And in many cases, it's just crystal clear. I mean, the kid got sextorted on Snapchat and was dead that night. You have kids who, you know, a happy 11-year-old girl, she gets on Instagram, and a few weeks later, she's developing an eating disorder. So you have all these parents whose kids have been killed or damaged, and not one has ever gotten justice. Not one has ever even been able to face Meta in court. FortMed has never faced a jury.

4:30None of these companies have ever faced a jury because they keep saying, oh, Section 230, you can't touch us. Now, how insane is it that the makers of the largest consumer product in the world, that is the one that most children use, that seems to be harming and killing a lot of them, can never be held responsible for their actions? Do you have any numbers for this? So in terms of sextortion, we know one number from Snap was that they were getting 10 ,000 reports of sextortion from their users in 2022. and that wasn't 10 ,000 a year. That was 10 ,000 a month, a month. And so 100 ,000 reports. And as they said themselves, this is probably the tip of the iceberg because most people don't report.

5:07And also, again, the kids, the boys who kill themselves, they don't report either. So, and with AI automating sex extortion, it's going to go way up. When we look at harms to mental health, we tend to find 20 to 30 % of the girls are saying it harmed my mental health. So that puts you up over 10 million right there. And that's just in the US. So if we look at the harms to mental health, what we try to argue in this paper is the specific harms that we go through, the direct harms and the indirect harms, are at such a scale that this could plausibly have caused those big increases in 2012 in mental illness.

5:40So what's happening in California? What's happening in California is that of the thousands and thousands of case of parents who are suing, it can't be combined into a class action suit because a class action suit requires that all the plaintiffs have been harmed in the same way. And in this case, the stories are all a little different. So what the justice system is doing is they've created what's called a multi-district litigation in which several thousand cases will be heard by a single judge, a single court in California. Now, of course, that's impossible. So the idea is the two sides argue about which cases to consider.

6:20They pick bellwether cases. Those cases go to trial in front of a jury. And then based on what those jury trials are, it'll kind of be clear which way everything has to go. So that's where we are. There are so many members of Gen Z and young people who are advocating for reform. And so they're sitting in the courtroom. What's the desirable outcome? The desirable outcome is that a jury, which decides questions of fact, decides that, in fact, social media is addictive. And it was designed to maximize engagement. They use various tricks to basically addict kids. When you say tricks, what do you mean?

6:53Oh, you know, you ever notice when you, you know, on an iPhone, when you pull down, like you want to check your email? You pull down, and then it kind of bounces up and you get new ones. Yeah. That was literally copied from slot machines. Literally. I mean, these guys, they took a course at Stanford called Persuasive Design in the early 2000s. Right. One of the founders of Instagram took the course, and they used behaviorist principles. I met with some leaders of Apple, and I raised a couple of these. It's just in conversation, raised a couple of your main points. What did they say? Turn it off.

7:27You know, ration your time. Oh, yeah. Be more logical about how you use it. It's a great machine. You just have to, you know. I have to say, I'm pretty blasé about it. That's right. As a social psychologist, my rule is if one person is doing something bad or stupid, that person might be bad or stupid. But if all of us are doing something that seems bad or stupid, it's probably a bad situation that's making us all behave this way. We have a lot of experience with addictive products. We know a lot about gambling, how it ruins people's lives. Not everyone's susceptible, but a lot are. Same with alcohol, same with cigarettes.

8:02So we have a lot of experience with addictive substances. And the rule number one of addictive substances is we don't let companies give them to kids. You know, we say, adults, you can, you know, we're going to trust you to regulate. And, you know, 10 % of you can be severely damaged, but that's your choice. My God, we don't say that about kids. Do you think your subject, your obsession of late, is related to something that concerns me very much, which is the decline of reading? We see all this information, these statistics about the number of people who have or have not read one book in the past year.

8:39Yes, this actually I now believe is the biggest damage. So when I was writing The Anxious Generation, I focused on the mental health damage because that's where the evidence is best. Certainly it was three years ago. And I mention attention fragmentation. I mention addiction, but I don't have a lot on it. Okay, the book comes out, and now everyone begins talking about they can't pay attention anymore. And it's not just kids. It's adults are beginning to say that they can't pay attention. And then we start hearing as you say. I'm telling you, it's hard for me. Everyone I talk to. I'm a professional reader.

9:11And as I told you before we went on the air, I have to take my phone and put it in the kitchen so that I can, in the other room, read manuscripts, read a book, God forbid. And it strikes me as this – the rise of the phone and all it implies is the greatest experiment in human consciousness in a sense. Absolutely. That hasn't been thought through. Absolutely. It's just speeding 60 miles an hour into our lives and carrying us along. With effects far beyond what we can imagine. Let's talk about a few of them. So first to understand why this is. So the key neurotransmitter here is dopamine. Everyone's heard of dopamine.

9:54Dopamine is not exactly a reward neurotransmitter. It's better thought of as the neurotransmitter of motivation. And so if you eat a potato chip, it tastes really good. And then that makes you want another. Another potato chip. Want another. Okay. And so keep your eye on. So dopamine is wonderful. And we want our kids to experience a lot of slow dopamine. Slow dopamine is your kid is trying to build a treehouse. And at first he fails. And he makes some progress, which feels really good. And so he's motivated to work harder than he fails again. And then eventually he finishes. And boy, what satisfaction that is.

10:29So that's how you raise an adult is you give them a lot of experiences of slow dopamine. They learn to set goals and pursue them. Here's how you undermine that. make available to every child from the age of two, hand them an iPad, and what the child will quickly learn unconsciously is they're looking at something, and within eight seconds, they will know, hmm, this is kind of interesting, but it's not, it's not a swipe. Oh, oh, wow, this is so funny. Oh, this is great. This is great. So quick dopamine, quick dopamine. They go someplace else. So, okay, so this is the experience that young people have had since birth now.

11:03Kids are given iPads routinely when they're in their strollers. So what happens? I had a conversation about this with my students at NYU. This is not just crabby college professors whining about their students not reading Middlemarch in a week. No, this is the subversion of the ability to pay attention on a species-wide level. And as one of my students said, because I showed her that Atlantic article about kids aren't reading, students aren't reading books anymore. And she said, yeah, it's true. She said, I pick up a book, I read a sentence, I get bored, I go to TikTok. because, again, you've been on this book for eight seconds, and it's not that interesting.

11:38But the thing in my pocket is a lot more interesting. Ah, quick dopamine, quick dopamine. So this is what we've done, and this is even worse for the boys because for the boys it's video games, it's porn, it's vaping, it's gambling, it's sports betting. So for boys it's open season on their dopamine systems, and this is going to make it very hard for them to develop executive function, follow goals, be useful as employees or spouses. So you came in today and you put in front of me a paper that you've said is the most important research you've done. It's called Social Media is Harming Young People at a Scale Large Enough to Cause Changes at the Population Level.

12:13At The New Yorker, we wouldn't call that a good print title, a good SEO title. But tell me what this report is all about. You and your co-author, Zachary Rausch, have published this year. Okay, sure. So the defenders of social media, especially Mark Zuckerberg, will say whenever they're questioned, they say, actually, well, here's a quote from Mark Zuckerberg when he was questioned under oath in the U.S. Senate, January 31st, 2024. He says, quote, mental health is a complex issue and the existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health outcomes.

12:54His claim in multiple places is it's just a correlation and you can't prove that it's causation. But what Zach and I have done is we have laid out seven different lines of evidence. We're trying to reframe the argument as one that can actually be solved. So what Zach and I have done is we have reconceptualized this in a way that I think will make a lot of sense to people. We do have ways of knowing if A caused B in the law and in social science. So we have lots and lots of studies, surveys of young people. What do they say? Do the young people think that social media is great for their mental health?

13:31Absolutely not. So what we do, so this is line one, what the victims say. And in exhibit A, we present a bunch of surveys of young people. For example. And these are surveys done by whom? So Pew, Gallup, Common Sense Media, many international outlets as well. We cover international research as well. So Pew, which is probably the main source of evidence here, 2024, they found one-third of girls say it makes them feel worse about their lives. 50 % say it harms their sleep. It all comes back to this question of correlation versus causation. So I laid out line one is what the victims say, and they say he did it.

14:07Line two is what the witnesses say, and that's the parents, the teachers, the psychologists, the psychiatrists. They all say they have very negative views of this. They see it up close. They say, this is causing anxiety disorders. This is harming my patients. And then the third line is what the perpetrators say. So we have quote after quote from inside the company. I'll just read a couple very briefly. From TikTok, an internal research report. Compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skill, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and it correlates with increased anxiety.

14:44And it goes on and on. So they know that they are hurting kids. Meta. There are reasons to worry about self-control and use of our products. Who's speaking here? A member of Meta's core data science team and a senior data scientist at Meta having a conversation. So let me see. Without providing much more value, how to keep someone returning over and over to the same behavior each day? Intermittent rewards are most effective think slot machines. They are trying to hook children.

15:17I'm speaking with Jonathan Haidt, the author of the bestseller, The Anxious Generation, and we'll continue in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

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18:49This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I've been speaking today with Jonathan Haidt, the author of The Anxious Generation. Now, Jonathan Haidt wasn't the first social scientist to look at how the advent of smartphones as a near-universal technology was affecting all of us, and affecting us profoundly. But his conclusions in The Anxious Generation really touched a nerve. And he told me that he's essentially taking a break from new projects in order to devote himself to advocating for change. I'll continue my conversation now with Jonathan Haidt. Let's talk about another country where something has been done about this.

19:31Late last year, Australia enacted a new law requiring age verification for social media users. I think that's the first national law of its kind. Yes, it was. What does this verification look like and how is it working? So the Australia bill was very carefully drafted. They commissioned a former chief justice of the Supreme Court, Robert French, to figure out how it would be done. And it specifically says it's up to the companies to do it. It's their responsibility. And it specifically says the companies cannot only ask for a government ID. They have to offer an alternate way. And there already were dozens of companies that offer alternate ways.

20:15Wait, wait, how does it work? So the law tells the companies, you guys figure it out, and you can't just say, show me your driver's license. You have to offer something else. And there are dozens of companies that offer that service. So the idea is you want to open an account on Instagram. Let's say you go to Instagram, you put in your birthday, it then kicks you over to a page which says, here are four ways that you can validate that you're old enough. So it's just not an honor system. Yes, I'm 18. On we go. That's right. From until December 10th, which is when it went into effect, the world was on the honor system.

20:45Porn, are you 18? Yes, you're in. So that ended, that began to end on December 10th. Why did this happen first in Australia? So in Australia, it just so happens that the wife of the premier of South Australia read The Anxious Generation soon after it came out. And she said to her husband, Peter, Peter Malinowskis, you've got to read this book and you've got to effing do something about it. Right. And he did. And he called up Robert French and said, how could we do this? And they did it. How is it coming along in Australia? So here's what we know. So Julie Inman Granth, their eSafety Commissioner, put out a press release three or four weeks ago.

21:21She said all 10 of the covered platforms have complied. They took down 4.7 million accounts from the 2.4 million Australian kids in that age range. And of course, some are getting around it with VPNs. Although I heard from someone who's studying it, VPN usage went way up at first, but it came way back down. Because the kids, they want to check their social media use. You know, they want to check it 30 times a day. And if you have to load up a VPN, it's a bit of friction. So, of course, kids are still getting around it. But as Julie pointed out, we're trying to change the norms of a nation, the norms of childhood.

21:54We won't really know the full effect for 10 or 20 years. How does it affect schools and phones? So there's two things. One is locking up the phones in the morning, a phone-free school policy. And that has magical effects, transformative effects. Some schools don't implement it well. They don't enforce it well. And then there's cheating. But in schools that enforce it reasonably well, the results are always spectacular. the thing that you always hear is we hear laughter in the hallways again. The lunchroom is so loud. Kids are laughing. I spoke to— That sounds too good to be true. Do we know this to be the case?

22:29So there's—first of all, it's very hard to find an account anywhere of one that backfired. And that would be newsworthy. So there are a lot of efforts to measure going on. Angela Duckworth at Penn is doing a major assessment, and she showed me some preliminary data in which the schools that used lockers that really took the phones away for the day, that use special phone lockers, they got the best results, teacher reports, academic outcomes. And the ones that used yonder pouches got good results, not as good. And the ones that use a backpack policy, which a lot of schools do, unfortunately, say, keep it in your backpack, don't take it out.

23:04Which, of course, look, if you're a cocaine addict and you're told you can keep your cocaine with you all day long, so yeah. So it does seem to be working incredibly well. The biggest argument against the Australian policy or bringing the Australian policy to the United States is a First Amendment argument. Explain the First Amendment argument and obviously why you disagree with it. So, of course, the First Amendment is that Congress shall make no law restricting the freedom of speech. And the companies argue that any kind of regulation – they have a lot of organizations with nice-sounding names, Internet freedom or whatever.