 Are platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram harming Americans in ways that government regulation could help correct? On Thursday, February 17, Jonathan Haidt and Robbie Suave had an Oxford-style debate over the role of social media before a capacity crowd at the Sheen Center in downtown Manhattan. It was hosted by the Soho Forum, a monthly debate series sponsored by Reason. The Soho Forum director Gene Epstein served as moderator. Jonathan Haidt, professor of ethical leadership at New York University and co-founder of Heterodox Academy, defended the resolution the federal government should increase its efforts to reduce the harms caused by social media. Robbie Suave, who took the negative, is a senior editor at Reason and author of the recently published book Tech Panic, why we shouldn't fear Facebook and the future. He argued that widespread criticisms of social media stem from our innate and misguided distrust of new technology. Suave also contended that for all of its flaws, social media confers huge net benefits and that the application of government force is likely to do more harm than good. Haidt, author of a recent article in The Atlantic on the harm to mental health from social media, pointed out that while the platforms were not initially designed for those under 18, they have arguably been its victims. Haidt likened the platforms to sugar best taken in moderation. Here's Jonathan Haidt versus Robbie Suave at the Soho Forum. Jonathan, you have 15 minutes to defend the resolution. Come to the podium. Please take it away, Jonathan. All right. Well, thank you so much, Gene. Well, good evening, everyone. I'm currently hiding a way to write a book called Life After Babble. And the subtitle of it actually could be the opposite of Robbie's. It could be why we should totally freak out about Facebook and big tech. And because I'm hiding a way to write this book, I'm saying no to just about everything. I'm really trying to find time to write. But I said yes to this invitation for two reasons. The first is because I was being asked to be paired with Robbie, who has been an amazing reporter. Since universities began to blow up around 2015, and Greg Lukianoff and I got into this, Robbie has been doing just essential work. And he's a great writer and fighter, great fun to read. And I consider him an ally in our common mission to save universities from themselves. The second reason I said yes is because I thought about it. And I said, you know what? I'm a million, by which I mean a devotee of John Stuart Mill, who said, he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. And he said, teachers and learners go to sleep at their posts when there is no enemy in the field. Meaning we need critics. We need adversaries to keep us smart. And worthy adversaries are the best kind. So I figured I can't lose. Because even if most of you vote against me, that just means that I really had a lot of work to do to understand this and write a better book. So thank you, Robbie. May we learn together. I also want to thank Gene and Soho Forum for providing this lovely venue and this setting in which it's actually fun to argue with people. So this illustrates an important point about the benefits of viewpoint diversity. We don't get smart just from being exposed to other ideas. If someone yells and screams at you on Twitter and calls you names and attacks your ideas, we tend not to get smarter. We tend to just get more wary or gun shy. Learning is highly social. Much depends on the institutions and the norms within which it occurs. And that's why I love universities. And it's because of what social media has done to universities and so many other institutions in the last seven years or so that I hate social media. Now, in fact, I have come to believe that a free and open society cannot continue much longer if social media continues to damage three things that I really care about. And those are young people, universities, and liberal democracy. In my remaining time, I'm going to make the case that social media has caused devastation in these three areas since 2012. And then I'll say what I think government should and should not do. So I'll make three main points. The first is the fragilization of Gen Z. So in August 2017, Jean Twenge wrote an article in The Atlantic with the provocative title, have smartphones destroyed a generation. And when I read it, I thought, wow, Jean is taking a risk here because she showed these graphs with these hockey stick curves, but it was just two or three years of data because in 2017 all we had was data up throughout 2015. And so we had two or three years showing up turns in all these things. And I thought, if that turns down, she's going to look foolish. But it didn't turn down. It kept going up and up and up. Now, when that article came out, there were a lot of critics. A lot of people said, oh, she's exaggerating. She's cherry picking. Oh, the trend isn't real. You know, Gen Z, they're just comfortable talking about it. That's why the numbers are going up a little because it's a good thing. They're willing to admit that they're depressed. So there were a lot of skeptics right after the article came out. And Robbie, in his chapter on this area, quotes a number of those skeptics, but those are all from 2017. At least most of the citations were from 2017. That was a legitimate take in 2017. But in the year since then, the numbers have gone up so far that the Surgeon General recently issued an advisory on teen mental health because those numbers have gone up by 50% to 100% on many, many measures. In fact, if you're still skeptical that there's a real epidemic of mental illness, if you think it's just changes in self-report on surveys, let's look at behavior. I've been, Gene and I have been collecting all the studies we can find from the U.S. and the U.K. and Canada. And so here are the numbers for self-harm. And this is hospital admissions. This is not self-report. Hospital records for teenagers brought in because they harmed themselves, mostly cutting themselves. If you graph it out, the lines are pretty stable. They don't move around very much up until about 2009, 2010. And then suddenly in the next five years, the numbers are up 62% for older teen girls. The rate of hospital admission per 100,000 in the population is up 62%. For girls age 10 to 14, these are little girls. These are prepubescent or just entering puberty girls. The rate is up 189% by 2015, nearly triples by 2015. And it's up more since then. Same thing in the U.K., same thing in Canada, and similar story for suicide. There it's up for both boys and girls. And again, for the youngest kids, the 10 to 14s, the percentage increase is more than double. In a few years, the suicide rate has doubled, and then it stayed either level or increasing. Now, what caused it? That's the key thing. Now, Robbie and the other skeptics point to studies. There are a lot of studies out there, and many of them find no relationship between the amount of time young people spend on their devices and their rates of depression. Now, there's one particularly influential study by Andrew Shibilski and Amy Orbin, 2019. They reported an overall correlation of around .03 between time on devices and various measures of depression in three large data sets. And that study where they reported, oh, this is about as big as the correlation between mental illness and eating potatoes. That finding got a lot of press all over the world. And since then, a lot of experts say, oh, well, you know, we looked at this and there's nothing there. But here's the problem with those studies. They lump all kids together. That is boys and girls. They lump all screen activities together, including watching Netflix, texting with your friends, FaceTime, browsing the web, oh, and posting photos of yourself in a bikini for people to make comments about. You just lump them all together and you find a .03 correlation. But guess what? If you take the same data sets, and Gene Tweng and I did this, take the same data sets, use the same statistical techniques, but you zoom in on girls and social media, the correlation isn't .03. It's .2, which is a very large correlation in public health matters. The correlation between exposure to lead and childhood and adult IQ is .09. Public health is all about effects around .05 to .15, .2 at the most. This is as big as anything else we worry about. Now, of course, correlation is not causation, Robbie points out, but we've collected, we found about 15 experiments and the great majority of them also using random assignment find effects on mental health. You want more evidence? Ask the girls. That's what Facebook did in that study that was leaked last September. And what do the girls say? They say it loud and clear. It's social media and especially Instagram. As one girl in the UK said, the reason why our generation is so messed up and has higher anxiety and depression than our parents is because we have to deal with social media. Everyone feels like they have to be perfect. Point number two, from curiosity to fear in universities. So a crucial part of my story is that social media was not toxic in its original formulation. You put up links to your friends, your favorite bands. In 2004, 2005, it was not toxic. Everything changed beginning in 2009 when Facebook adds the like button and Twitter copies it. Twitter adds the retweet button. Facebook copies it, the share button. And then other platforms copy them. And now you have so much engagement data that you can use algorithms to feed stuff to people based on what will engage them, which means emotions, which means especially anger. So everything changes between 2009 and 2012. We get much more. This is when Facebook perfects that business model based on advertising and gluing people to the screen by having viral emotional content. That's when everything changes. 2009 to 2012. One of the engineers at Twitter who worked on the retweet button was quoted a couple of years ago as saying he regretted what he did because Twitter became a nastier place immediately. He said, when he watched those first Twitter mobs form, he said, we just gave a loaded gun to a four-year-old. And that's where we are. That's why call out culture and victimhood culture, but call out culture in particular emerges in the early 2010s. That's what Greg Lukianoff began to see on campus in 2014. When Gen Z arrives on campus around 2013-2014, kids born 1996 or 2007 or later, Greg begins to see this weird pattern, this vindictiveness, this fragility, this attack mode. It wasn't there in 2012, but by 2014-2015 it was intense and it was scary and it changed our behavior. We've done a lot of research at heterodox academy on attitudes and what we find is that students are afraid to speak on campus because they're afraid of, not their professors, other students. And professors feel they're walking on eggshells not because of other professors because of students. And it's not most students. Most students are lovely. They want to learn. They want to be challenged. But there are enough around that make it so that we all have to walk on eggshells. As Deb Mashick said, I'm sorry, is that five minutes left in my... Okay, okay. As Deb Mashick said, former executive director of heterodox academy, one of our students said, my motto is silence is safer. What a sad motto for a college student. The third point very briefly is the Achilles heel of democracy. Plato said that democracy is the second worst form of government because rule by the demos, the masses or the mob, inevitably decays into tyranny. So the founding fathers of this country gave us all kinds of mechanisms to slow down mob dynamics. Well, needless to say, it didn't work very well after 2009. So I'll skip ahead and we can talk about this later. But basically, democracy has a known Achilles heel, a known spot like on the Death Star where if you hit that spot, it's going to blow apart. And it is the ease with which we are divided into factions that hate each other so much, we don't care what happens to the country. Social media, especially Twitter, but also Facebook and others have really targeted that spot. Now, what can we do? The resolution here is not Congress shall regulate. I really enjoyed Robbie's book. I recommend it to you. He's such a clear writer. He goes through every possible issue that people talk about. And you find out there's a lot of misunderstanding of what's going on. He also points out just how terrible Congress is at regulating. And some of the ideas proposed by Hawley and others, they're specifying, micro specifying and after 30 minutes, they should be kicked off. I mean, these are just stupid, stupid bills. So if I was defending the motion Congress shall regulate, I would just say, well, it's hopeless and I'm going to go jump in a lake. But what we're talking about here is, do we have a national emergency? Do we have a gigantic problem facing our young people, our democracy and our institutions? And if so, a lot of it is commons dilemmas, like prisoners dilemmas, things that are hard to resolve if you're one person. For example, many of you are parents, many of you have kids. Raise your hand if you want your children to be on Instagram. Raise your hand if you think that's a good thing for them. Raise your hand if your kids are on Instagram. Okay, not many parents here, maybe not among libertarians, but okay. Okay, I can't see with the lights in my eyes. Take it from me. All of us parents who let our kids on Instagram, it's only because they say, but everybody else is on and I'll be excluded if I'm not on it. So we're caught in a trap and we need central leadership to break it. In particular, what kids most need is delay entry. The COPPA bill that set the age of internet adulthood, it was originally going to be 16, was the original bill from Ed Markey. Lobbyists got it down to 13 and back in 1996. That's at that age, you're like an adult. That was a terrible idea. And now we know the age must be raised. I think it should be 16 or 18. These are minors and we need to enforce it. There needs to be some kind of age verification. So there are a number of urgent things that have to be done. The UK is making some progress. Perhaps they'll take the lead here, but I think we need to do it in this country too. Protecting democracy is much harder. I grant because the things the left wants to do and the things the right wants to do are often opposites. So perhaps we'll talk about specifics later, but I do think we need to look into ways to encourage the platforms to do identity verification. But especially, here's the main thing, changes to the architecture. I don't want a government agency either making decisions about what you can say, what you can't say. That would be a disaster. I have so many libertarian friends. I've been semi brainwashed just by osmosis. I don't want the government making decisions about what people say. But there are changes to the architecture and the virality. That's where we can have big impacts that are content neutral, politically neutral, and language independent. They work all over the world. So in closing, Instagram and TikTok are raising our children. Our children are spending more time with them than they are talking to us. And those platforms channel the enormous force of peer pressure and peer norms onto them. Facebook and Twitter are running our public square, and they are curating what passes for deliberation in our deliberative democracy. How's that going? Well, now in 2011, we had the height of technodemocratic optimism. We thought these things would be a boon to democracy. But now we know they were Pandora's box, and we unwittingly unleashed demons. We can and we must find ways to tame them. Thank you. Robbie Swabby, 15 minutes for the Netherlands. Alrighty. Hello, everybody. Thank you, Gene, so much for organizing this debate. It is my great honor to have this conversation with Jonathan Haidt, one of my heroes, one of my intellectual inspirations. It's actually my great honor and sort of my great terror to be doing this when we originally envisioned this debate. I won't say who, but I was going to be debating someone else that I felt a little bit more confident against. And then when Haidt got swapped in, I was like, you have to be kidding me. The world's foremost expert on the narrow topic we're going to be discussing. Great, thanks a lot, Gene. Nevertheless, here I will make my best attempt. So I'm going to begin by reading to you three quotes that I think well capture the concern and the criticism of social media. So three quotes about social media. This is from the Dutch sociologist Ernest Vandenhaag, say, and he says of social media, it's taken everywhere from seashore to mountaintop and everywhere it isolates the bearer from his surroundings, from each other, from reality, and from ourselves. Here's another quote from the Charlotte News. It's keeping children, their parents, up late at night, wearing down their vitality for lack of sleep, making laggards of them at school. And then finally, from the New York Times, our very small children will fear to express themselves, who will be willing even to express any but the most innocuous and colorless views. So you may have guessed by the language of these quotes, these do not refer to social media. The first was in reference to the radio in 1963. The second was also reference to the radio in 1926. And then the final quote from the New York Times, that's actually from 1898 and it refers to the phonograph. Later in that editorial, The New York Times writes, something ought to be done to Mr. Edison. And there's a growing conviction it ought to be done with a hemp rope. This was the level of hostility to new forms of communication that have been so common throughout our history, often moral panics fostered by the existing media structure, because who loses out, who loses your attention, if your attention is now taken up by radio, by radio, perhaps the New York Times. That same dynamic is underway today. So much of the most righteous indignation and condemnation of social media actually comes to us from the traditional media, the existing media, from cable news, from newspapers, from magazines, from other things, other communications platforms that are losing that fight for your attention. They hate it, they're against it, they want to come up with all sorts of reasons why this is bad for society, why the flaws we see in them are actually worse on social media. So I think that's always something to keep in mind when these arguments are being advanced, often, by stakeholders, by the losing out technologies, or the technologies that are harmed by these emergencies that are not new, that we've dealt with over and over again. So I first became interested in this topic because I remember the hand-wringing, the panic over video games, violent video games. When they appeared, I was an active gamer as a teen, and we were promised that there needed to be rules, laws, regulations to stop violent video games from getting into the hands of teenagers because we were told it would increase violence among young people. We now know that is totally wrong, that if anything, I think I'm not saying anything wrong on social psychology grounds, but I suspect the small amount of teenagers inclined to really horrific violence actually tend to find an outlet amongst violent video games and discourage them from actually creating violence. But there was a certainty that this new technology was so harmful and so scary and so bad. So I take that, all of that prior history we have of these platforms, of these inventions as we explore this topic. So the contention for a while from John and from Gene Twenge, whose work I find very interesting, and I encourage everyone to look at it, and I've looked at these studies, which John has compiled a whole document looking at exactly what these studies showed, how many of them, going through them, fielding criticism about them, responding to it. And the broad claim is actually one that Twenge has, I think, retreated from somewhat. The broad claim initially being that screen addiction was the concern that kids just on their phones, on these new platforms all the time, was maybe making them not sleep well at night, increasing their depression for various ways. Now we've kind of stripped some of those some of those concerns away because now we see that young boys aren't having nearly as much of the same negative experience. Perhaps the ways they're using social media are not particularly unhealthy. Video games, again, can have an actually healthy experience. They're cooperative, they're collaborative, they're storytelling, they do them with their friends, they stay connected with people. Just streaming, just watching videos and reading articles is not necessarily harmful for young people. So we start to get at a very, very narrow problem, which I agree is a problem worth exploring and talking about how to solve, which is that one platform specifically, not screens in general, not social media in general, but one platform, Instagram, seems to be having a negative effect on not the majority of teenage girls, but some a specific demographic, some users were reporting that in survey data to Facebook. Again, it was not most of them, it was less than half, saying they were having a negative experience on the platform. Yes, can you correlate this with the increasing negative mental health outcomes, how young people are reporting? I see that correlation, it's certainly not ridiculous. But now, again, we're just talking about one platform, one group that is having some problem with it, even the majority of people in this group not having a problem with it, perhaps using it to stay connected with their friends, staying, having normal healthy amounts of use. This is something we tend to see in the data, in the surveys that teenagers who are using social media a moderate amount are doing fine, those who are using it all the time are having bad outcomes. Those who are not using it at all, also having bad outcomes because that tends to mean they don't have a lot of friends, they don't have people to interact with, and that can be depressing and sad. Being a teenager is sad and is hard. No matter what, I bet if you surveyed all of those 10 to 14-year-old girls about, does school give you a positive experience? You get a 90% no rate. My suspicion is a lot of unhealthy kind of culture of difficulty of being a teen might be channeled into this one specific platform that is not so great. Sure. The good news is we don't really need the government to solve this problem because Facebook, which owns Instagram, is rapidly declining in popularity. It is hemorrhaging users. Facebook, the main platform, is dying of its own accord. It cannot attract young people to it. The kinds of people who do use it tend to be old, which is no good for advertisers. It wants to be that new, cool, exciting thing that young people love and spend all their time on. It just isn't anymore. This, I think, goes to maybe a larger sort of ideological argument I have that you're going to get the government in here to do something about it. By the time they do, this will be over. It will be some new platform. I think there's already considerable evidence that even Instagram is not holding the youngest of the young people's attention anymore. It's been a vast migration to TikTok. TikTok is now, it surpassed Google, I believe. It's the number one visited site. We're still waiting. I think, correct me if I'm wrong, Jon, to get data specifically on how TikTok is influencing this age cohort. I suspect it will be more positively. TikTok, unlike Instagram, is a bit more creative. I don't know how old the average person in the audience is. TikTok is a little too young even for me. But if people do dance videos and you create things with music, and it's a little bit more creative than the just attractive picture of yourself on Instagram that can make you feel bad about yourself if you're doing social comparison or that sort of thing. I think we might be passing the Instagram moment kind of on our own without the government having to do anything about it. That's my grand argument against that specific area in which Jon is very knowledgeable and has introduced a lot of things that I think people should be concerned about. I also totally agree that parents should feel empowered to not have their kids on social media, to take the phones away, not have them in schools, in the bedroom at night. I was limited to one hours of video games on weeknights when I was a kid, and that was a perfectly fine rule because I would have just done it all the time, and yes, parents should make that. I'd love to hear from parents about how we can make that easier, but it doesn't call out for a government solution. In fact, and this would be my argument against some of the age restriction type things Jon is talking about, it seems to me that probably the best way to preserve interest in Instagram would to me make it sexy and dangerous and scary. You might die if you use it, the government won't let you have it. That could actually drum up or increase interest in it. Why don't we just let it kind of stop being cool on its own, as I suspect it will be, as all prior social media sites eventually do. I was using MySpace and AOL Instant Messenger when I was a kid. They are gone. You can't visit them, I don't think. That's the harms to kids kind of category. Also, if we're empowering the government to do something about social media, which is the question here, we have to think about the government is going to stop the harms caused by social media. Right now, the government is doing that. The government is trying to stop the harms that the government thinks are caused by social media. That is you posting on Facebook questions about the efficacy of mass mandates and whether COVID actually emerged from a lab. The federal government is actively trying to suppress those conversations by coordinating and communicating with the major tech platforms to have a vast crackdown and a vast silencing on speech. The tech CEOs are hauled before Congress every few weeks to answer ridiculous questions from Democrats and Republicans, questions that betray a complete lack of understanding of these technologies and called to account for both taking down too much content, which is the Republican criticism, and not taking down enough content, which is the Democratic criticism. The solutions, the proposed solutions, often produced by these discussions, and I'm talking about things like breaking up the tech companies or changing Section 230, which is the liability protection enjoyed by these sites, are very bad solutions, I suspect. In fact, changing the liability protection is a solution so bad that Facebook has now come out in support of it as a way to prevent its nearest competitor, Twitter, from beating it. Facebook understands that if you raise the liability threshold for social media sites, Facebook, which hires an army of content moderators, will be in a better position than Twitter, which has many fewer content moderators. Twitter told me when I interviewed people from this book, they said, yes, we are dead set against this, this will kill us. It's reflective of the kind of industry capture that can happen when powerful companies get involved with the government and do practical things that they say are in the best interest for everyone, for the consumers, these sites are so harmful, we need the government, then it ends up being something that just helps one company over another. So I do not think it's a good idea. And then we also have to worry about, even if we're just concentrated on the harm to kids part of it, maybe we'll get into some of the other stuff during Q&A or with each other. The First Amendment exists. I don't think the federal government should do things that violate the Constitution. We already know that attempting to ban or restrict violent video games, the ability for kids to purchase violent video games, there was a law in California to stop that. The Supreme Court struck it down. Much of what we're talking about is pure speech. And I think the Supreme Court, honestly, frankly, would have something to say about efforts to prevent even young people from having access to speech. Speech is the most protected thing, the thing that is most protected by our Bill of Rights, by our kind of American system. I'm sure we'll get into some of the dysfunction, the horror in the tribalization that we're living through, and it can be ugly out there on social media. I know that just as well, not better than everyone in the audience, it can be bad. I don't know, and I'm skeptical, that social media is the cause of this dysfunction, of this anger, of this just horrifying politics. I suspect it is an outlet, but the anger and the wrath is mostly due to the actual behavior of our political parties and how they treat each other. You see partisan screaming and lies and horror if you watch cable news. No matter which cable news you're a fan of, you will see it on either side against the other team. Again, that's not social media, that's existing media. The biases and the misinformation peddled by traditional news outlets and cable news are really bad. It's funny when they're saying that, well, Facebook is the reason Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg is the reason Donald Trump gets elected because of Facebook interference, that kind of stuff. Have you watched CNN or Fox News? These are 24-hour commercials for or against, pure propaganda for or against one specific candidate. There's evidence that people are, despite our concerns about the bubbling effect, the siloing effect, people actually are more likely to encounter information they might disagree with more than we expected on social media. Again, it can be very bad. There's a lot like wrong in our society right now. I don't think social media is the cause of it. I think social media came along as these things were happening and there can be bad things. We should think about how to improve, how to improve our lives. Tune these things off if there are problems for you. Keep them away from your kids. It is not something for the government to do. There is no evidence. We should have no faith that the government can do anything and the government is a cause of much of this dysfunction in the first place. Thank you. Five minutes of rebuttal. Five minutes of rebuttal. Jonathan Haidt. Thank you, Robbie. There's very little in what you said that I disagree with. Again, your book is wonderful and you go through the objections and it's always complicated and you raised valid concerns about all the problems that I've raised and the solutions that have been proposed. I do want to start though by talking about your description of this as a moral panic. You're absolutely right. This is a moral panic amazingly similar to the previous ones. You're absolutely right about that. I really enjoyed your description of what happened when bicycles came out. There's a moral panic about that. But skeptics of my position almost always point out the long history of moral panics, but that argument, to say that that's an argument against what I'm saying, that relies on what's called the survivorship bias. And that's where if you interview survivors of shipwrecks in ancient Greece and you find that almost all of them prayed to God, you would say, wow, you see, praying to God works. Because of course you're not interviewing the ones who prayed to God and died. So now Robbie's right that these communication technologies almost all of them were objected to like this. But those are the survivors. Those are the ones that we still have like the printing press, the radio, well, phonographs. But these are technologies that survive, that we love. And in some cases we had to tame. What else is there? Well, how about things like leaded pipes? Like leaded pipes, that was an amazing invention by the Romans. And it allowed them to build cities. It was a great technology and we use it all the way into the 20th century, even though some people kind of knew even the Romans that this is actually making people sick. We didn't get lead out of pipes and paint and gasoline until really the 1960s. And it took federal legislation because they're all kinds of advantages to businesses for using it as a product. It increases the power of gasoline. So there are all kinds of technologies that we did object to. They were causing real harm. And I put it to you based on what I've seen based on the studies that I'm surveying here. I think social media is leaded gas and leaded pipes for today's children, causing I believe permanent changes in their level of mental illness. How about the Tommy Gun? That was a pretty great innovation. It could shoot, I think, 600 rounds in a minute. Really, real marvel of technology. And it was very useful to a lot of people. But it had some external costs that it imposed on society and empowered mobs, as it were. It took federal legislation to say, no, we're not going to allow this technology for anyone. And so I put it to you that Twitter is the Tommy Gun of today. So that's the point there about the previous social panics. On Robby Point Talk made it sound as though the issue here is just Instagram and that's going away. But I think that's not the case. It's true, Instagram is uniquely bad for girls. TikTok, I agree with you, it's not as harmful pound for pound. But it's also so much more powerful. There are deep pockets of TikTok. Girls are actually getting Tourette syndrome because they watch videos about Tourette syndrome and then they develop Tourette syndrome. So I'm expecting TikTok to have a lot, TikTok's funny and it's fun, but also I think it's going to do a lot of damage. The issue here is not a platform, it's a business model. The business model of advertising driven, the user is not the customer, get them on and keep them on. I think we should protect kids from that. I'm very low to tell adults what they should do, but I think there's now evidence that kids should be protected from platforms that use this particular business model. Then finally, I'll just make the point that Robby was talking about data that almost all of this debate here in the scientific literature is using a dose response model, treating social media like sugar. Oh, well, you know, but if you have more social media or non-social, like if you have, there's an optimum amount of sugar that you should eat, that's just like you take it and it affects you. But social media is a rewiring of society for everyone, especially for all kids between 2000 and 2012. Before then, kids went to each other's houses, they looked at each other, they spoke. After that, you go into any school now at recess or between classes, no one looks at each other because they're all on their phones all the time. I talk to cousins and nephews that are in college. They can't meet anyone. You can't talk to anyone because they're all on their phone. Everyone is hooked. So think about network effects, both for children and for democracy. And finally, Robby said, you know, if you ask a 14-year-old girl today, does school make you feel good? Well, Jean and I did a study on that. We found a data set, the PISA data set. It turns out loneliness in school was stable from 2002 to 2012. It was stable. And then all over the world and all regions of the world, loneliness in school goes up after 2012. So it's a gigantic global network effect. It's hard for kids to talk to other kids because they're too busy performing on social media platforms. Thank you. I guess the only thing I would add to that or push back on, yes, it can be annoying to walk into a room and see everyone on their phone. People should put down their phones more, spend more. Human contact is good. I'm all in favor of it. This pandemic has reminded me how much I prefer it to social media. Although we should keep in mind that we are, I think, lucky that we did have social media as we went through this. Again, it is no substitute for actual human socialization. But because of massive external factors, we were told by our government that for people's health, you are not allowed to socialize. You are not allowed to do the most fundamental healthy human thing imaginable. You must not breathe on people. You have to stay away from them. And I suspect that it's good or it was a positive that we at least had this to fall back on. As we're defining social media broadly, this includes the things that actually made our lives literally possible during the pandemic, Zoom, Clubhouse, Netflix, streaming, et cetera. Also, when you do walk into a room, yes, everybody on their phone, it's annoying. But it's not like everyone who's on social media is not communicating. I mean, much of what they're doing is in fact socializing. It's socializing with other people. It's not people in the room with them currently, but it is other people. It can be people all over the world. I've met people because of social media, because of forums and various things that I would have never had the opportunity to engage with these people. I was confined to just my immediate vicinity. Social media is a very liberatory technology in terms of its ability to connect people across vast distances. I know that's like the starry-eyed vision of social media, but still true to a large extent. Finding social media can be a way for teens to find sympathetic ears to find healthy communities. Sometimes they find unhealthy communities. That can happen, but they can find healthy ones as well. It's not literally like everyone on a social media site is just like a lost zombie human who is no longer engaged in the realities of life. And also, we can talk about the mental health crisis, the worsening of it. I'm certain we will find an even worse mental health crisis among young people when we're counting the most recent years for, again, totally exogenous factors, the pandemic and the shutting down of everything that kids hold dear, extracurricular activities, school, the hub of their social lives. I totally understand and agree that there's a huge mental health crisis and problems. I think some of it, John addressed that in his earlier comments, you can't just say it's people being more willing to be open about mental health. We might disagree on how much of that it explains. I'm a big fan of Jonathan Haidt and the cuddling of the American mind, where they predicted that when you make it so that in liberal activist circles, the person who is the most oppressed and traumatized has the most power, you will create a system where people compete to sound like they are oppressed. And the easiest way to fake oppression if you don't fall into a category where you might have experienced negativity would be to say, well, I have a mental illness, I've recovered from PTSD, I'm traumatized for various reasons. And I do think that explains some, not all, not all at all, by any stretch of the imagination, explains some of the, we've almost destigmatized mental health a little too far, where people want to see themselves as traumatized and victimized. And I don't think that's a healthy thing, but I don't think that's social media. I think that's the kind of cultural trend among young people, among young activists. The last thing I wanted to say before I return to my seat, it's still important to keep in mind, you know, let's, as we talked about Instagram in those hearings, right, the Wall Street Journal report, Instagram so bad, again, newspaper, very anti- social media. We're likening Instagram Facebook to big tobacco. This is the big tobacco moment. You heard that over and over again. Big tobacco has killed millions of people. How many corpses can we lay at Facebook's door, actually? I accept that it's more than zero. Is it millions? It's definitely not millions. So, and also, unlike cigarettes, which have no positive except, I mean, if it's positive, if you like smoking them, but like kids, all sorts of vices have declined along the rise of social media. So, like drunk driving rates among teenagers have fallen off. It's 54% decrease in the early 90s. Kids spend more time on their phone. They gather less. There are good effects of that. There are some, like, so we have to stack up, like, all the lives saved by kids not getting into messy circumstances, drug use, alcohol abuse, all down among the same age cohort along the same time frame that social media comes along. So, it's not always good when kids are only looking at their phones, I agree, but it is good if it stops them from, like, killing themselves in a car. Thanks to you both. We now move to the question and answer part of the evening. And we do have a mic over there. And then for the people on the balcony, we have a mic pointing approximately the direction where the mic is. And so we're going to alternate that way. The moderator, I have the prerogative to ask questions, but the rules are that either of you can lay a question on the other at any time. Do you either want to lay, either if you want to do that or you want to wait for audience questions? John, please pick up the microphone. John, you wanted to put a question to your opponent. Please go ahead. Yeah. My partner. So, just one question. So, we have this big change in teen mental health. It begins, like, in 2012, 2013. You know, some things a little earlier, a little later, but, like, it's, like, right there, just as American teens move on to these platforms. If it's not that, what is it? The critics, the people I debate with, they never give an alternative. There's no plausible alternative I've heard for why suicide rates doubled a few years over the next few years. I don't know. I think the 2010s are probably just a more depressing, horrible time than, like, the 1990s. No, I'm being totally serious. Kids are stressed out about, some of the things they're stressed out about I don't think are maybe as legitimate or to be worried about, but they're worried about climate change, they're worried about, you know, the promise of going to college and, you know, you could taking out loans and then you pay them back because you get a good job that, like, there's some instability in the kind of economic situation for them that I think things were more chill and relaxed in the 90s. Like, I think that's kind of true. It's hard to put your finger on what exactly it is, but, like, the last 10 years have been a worse time, I think, that crime is up. It is actually up. People used to be, like, misinformed about crime, and now, like, their perception that crime is raising is finally correct, which is not to discount the social media has had something to do with it. I can buy that a little bit, but I don't, it seems to be happening at the same time rather than a direct cause to me. Now here we're allowed to, like, interrupt each other, right? Well, you know, have like a normal conversation. Okay, so yes, in the last few years, I think you could make the case that things are objectively worse on some measures, but put yourself back in 2012, 2013, 2014, we had the global financial crisis in 2008 or so, the bottom dropped out, young people thought they had no future. And over the following years, after about 2011, the economy gets better and better, unemployment drops more and more, the stock market goes up and up, everything's looking up, so how does it get better for this age group though? Does it get better for the people staring this down? But why would an improving economy affect, why would economic changes affect girls more than boys? Right. Why would, I mean, the timing just doesn't work for it to be economic factors. And in terms of it being scary things in the world, when big scary threats happen, you know what happens generally to suicide rate? It drops. Durkheim found that in the 1890s. When you go to war, people don't say, oh my God, we're at war, I'm going to kill myself. No, anything, any sort of collective crisis brings people together and that protects against suicide. Suicide happens when people feel disconnected, alone, alienated, not when there's a common threat. And if young women, in particular, and we should be clear about this, you see the graphs, it's not just young women, it's young women on the left. Just in the last six months, two datasets have come out. All kids are getting more depressed, but it starts first for young women who say they're on the left and it's steepest for them. And so I would suggest to you that it's because they all got on social media and it's the progressive girls who are all freaking each other out about as use of victimization, global warming, oppression, rape culture, all these things. So even if it's the external world, it's brought into them by social media every day while they're awake. They could freak themselves out about that without social media. Not as much. I mean, when I was a kid, we would get angry about things the Republicans did and there was like one or two every week. And now it's like every hour. This is a much more politically vicious time. That is another major way in which this is just a worse time. Like our politics are so broken and so horrible, choices that political actors have made, like they didn't have to be made, that, I mean, like the inability to talk about anything other than Donald Trump for five straight years is bad for everyone's psyche, no matter if you love him or hate him, it's bad for your psyche. But I mean, like I'm not dissenting from the Instagram part of it. So, okay. Do you have a question for me? Do you want to put a question to Jonathan? I'll let the audience go. Well, please don't have to do identify yourself. Please just ask your question as a question. And if it's directed to either of the two debaters, please state that as well. Go ahead. Take it away, sir. Thank you, sir. This is directed to Jonathan. I was very interested in what you had to say. I think at the heart of what you said was that anxiety and depression among young girls had increased, had tripled, and that the analysis you had done had showed that there was a 20% correlation with involvement with social media. 0.20 correlation? Yeah, that's 20%. Well, okay. Okay, I'm a statistician, so I do know that. I'm not sure that you understand that what you were saying was that four-fifths of that tripling was due to, at least, due to something else, and that at best one-fifth of that tripling was due to involvement with social media if there was causation. And I'll get to that in a moment. So what you were saying was that one-fifth of the tripling, which would be a little more than one-third increase, so that depression and anxiety among young girls increased by about a third during the period, which is worrying. But really, I think if that's all it is, it explodes your claim that this is some giant tripling of anxiety. At best, if there's causation, it's only increased by one-third because of involvement with social media. Now, let me just finish. Because, as you know, and as you've heard many times, correlation does not mean causation. It could be that all those other things which you haven't attempted to identify that cause four-fifths of the increase are getting these young girls to be anxious and depressed, and by pure correlation, they happen also to go on social media. Because they go on social media, it doesn't mean that they're going on social media's cause of anxiety and depression. It might be the other way around, or it might be a correlation with these other things. Again, your concept is exploding. I think you made your argument, and thank you very much. So be seated, and Jonathan, you have a right to respond. So I certainly understand that correlation does not show causation, and that's why in our giant Google document, we have a section on the correlational studies. We have a section on the experimental studies. And the studies that use random assignment also find effect. So we're quite confident that it's not just reverse correlation or third factor. There is a causal effect. Secondly, hold on. Let me answer. Hold on. Excuse me. So there are a lot of people who want to speak. Unfortunately, the protocol is you just get one shot, and come to the party afterwards and grab the guy by the... Happy to talk to you afterwards. In terms of percent variance accounted for, this is what I was saying about dose response versus emergent effects. If all we had was dose response, I would agree with you that the variance we can explain by the correlations is not adequate to explain this gigantic catastrophe that's happened. I would agree with you on that. And that's why a lot of what I've been doing in my writing and what I did in my Atlantic article a couple of months ago was to say, stop looking just at dose response. This is a network transformation. This affects kids who don't use social media at all because before, they could find other kids to play with and now they can't. You don't pick that up in the correlations of the kid who doesn't use social media because it's a network transformation. It's not just dose response. Comment. Actually, could you elaborate on that point a little bit? I think it's the part of your analysis I was actually least persuaded about. You're saying it's right. It's not just affecting the kids who are heavy social media users but because there's so much heavy social media use that there aren't enough dissenting kids to find each other and it's so changing the environment. Is there enough scientific evidence of that yet though? Is that really just a theory for how this is impacting? Yeah. Well, so the other big piece that I haven't brought up here in terms of the depression explosion is the vast over-protection that we put on kids in the 1990s. Kids need to play. They need to play unsupervised stuff. They learn how to work things out and we largely stopped them from doing that in the 1990s. We decreased the amount of free play. This, I believe, made kids more vulnerable, weaker and then those same kids get on social media and now I feel like I could do that great Woody Allen moment where he pulls out Marshall McLuhan. I happen to have Lenore Scanesi right here. Lenore, could you stand up please? Hello, Lenore. So this is what I mean by a network transformation. Before 2009, there's data from a British study. So in 2009, it was something like 60 or 70 percent of English girls said they sometimes went over to their friends' houses and in 2014, 2015, it was like 12 percent. Yeah. Well, that's, I fully agree that that's bad. I'm Lenore's editor at Reason. I edited all her things. But that doesn't get to the, I mean, the government has criminalized doing this, right? The government should do less on this front. Agreed. Agreed. The government should make it legal to play at the park. Okay. Out of the playground and onto social media. The next question. Both focused on the impact for children. I was wondering if you could focus a little bit on the impact for grown-ups. Naturally, we know about our attention span getting mushed up. But I was thinking if the definition of social media was something to do with an app in which we posted content so that we could share and connect, would dating apps be connected within this? And if the algorithms are playing with the dating apps, because naturally, it's not their objective to get us paired up and live happily ever after, but instead to spend enormous amounts of time constantly looking, could the dating apps be considered a social media that could be actually generating a civilizational impact on how we procreate, develop, and have families and children? I guess that's a question for Jonathan as well. Yeah, I guess we'll do, yeah. So I agree with your premise. I think you're probably right. I just read an amazing book, a wonderful book by Cal Newport called Deep Work. And it really affected me in terms of the way that I try to work and it really helped me stay off Twitter, things like that. So I suspect that adults are also very affected and I think the dating apps probably are affecting emerging sexuality among young men and women. I simply haven't studied it yet, so I don't know what I'm basically doing. Do you think it's affecting them in a negative way? Yes, overall. But I'm not confident. I have not reviewed the research and there isn't a lot of research. What I've been doing is looking where the light is best, which is on children. There are a lot of studies. We have a lot of data, large studies. I haven't seen any good studies other than decreases in how much people are having sex. There are things like that and stories. So I think you're probably right, but I don't know. Comment from you, Robbie, better? Again, in so many of these things we're talking about, I agree that a subset, a minority of users, can have negative experiences with these things. I mean, maybe this comes down to a philosophical thing. I am not going to have the government restrict access to these platforms on everyone's behalf because a small amount of users are having an issue, just like I wouldn't make gambling illegal because some people go to the casino and they'll bet everything they have. Most people can go and have a good experience. Maybe it's just like a libertarian philosophical thing. Dating apps, I would tend to think, have tremendous ups. I mean, I don't use them, but they have made it easier for people to find more prospective partners. They've probably been very valuable to the LGBT community and others who it would be hard to, especially if you live not in a big city, but it's hard to know what your prospective dating pool is. There are a lot of advantages. So let's not, as we focus on the harms in a couple categories, which I agree there are harms. Again, let's not lose the tremendous upside at the click of a button at your fingertips, having an entire world of people to engage with, date, have conversations with, and so on and so forth. My moderator's prerogative, I would not have met my abstract artist's downtown wife, but for a dating app. Is there a... Balcony. Balcony. To me? Balcony. I was about to say the Balcony, thank you very much. We're up here, yes. Yes, yes. And are you up at the Balcony? Yes. Yes, indeed. And that's, I was about to recognize you. So please ask a question. Go ahead. So as we're discussing the decline in girls' mental health, I think it's important to note that we've devalued girls and their contributions. We've told them that their impulses toward love and motherhood and relationships are wrong. We've told them that sex is an emotionless enterprise designed for pleasure and that they should indulge in porn and porn culture. We've reinforced gender stereotypes through gender identity ideology. And don't you think that the intense pornification of girls and sex has something to do with the loneliness and isolation and feeling like trash, not just social media? That's a question. Let me ask you, Robbie, just a change of pace to be the first to answer that challenging question. Yeah, look, porn does present specific challenges. Certainly, maybe this would be an area where I think at least the the government may be doing some of the restrictions that you've mentioned for the other things. Certainly, you could make a stronger or a case that would be less affected by the First Amendment because the Supreme Court has been more open to regulation on this front. I think the public pressure put on porn companies in the last two years was porn companies, porn platforms, Pornhub was positive, actually. I think them allowing is that Pornhub would allow unverified users to post pornographic videos without any like allowing for a lot of revenge porn, like posting without people's permission, which is actually I think the biggest problem in this category of issues and maybe an area where the liability protection actually I would like I would be okay with being tweaked. But because of the pressure and the credit card company saying this is you know we can't we're not going to engage with these sites if they do this, they did they changed it so you can no longer just like post at will without Pornhub having any idea who you are. The idea being then if you post without your permission they can like give your information to the cops and something. So I'd like to add on to what Robbie said by pointing out that in his book to your credit that is one of the places where you very clearly say here is a case where I think government regulation is actually necessary and good. So really it's really just a difference of degree between us and I want to also emphasize when we're talking especially as the conversation moves to adults I'm really reluctant to tell adults what they can and can't do so like banning dating apps like I would never consider like no I would not think of that. But for children it's very different children go through developmental periods development appropriate periods and so the concern there especially I think what I'm learning recently as I listen to girls especially it's going through puberty while posting photos of yourself that's the most vulnerable spot that's what I think the most damage is done. So I think they're developed into appropriate periods and finally I think we both agree and I would really want to emphasize this as as an academic my god do we need research. If there are these big things happening we certainly don't want to just go off and legislate because people think it's a problem because that's how all the previous moral panics happened. We need this to be a research priority the Surgeon General just issued this advisory and the Surgeon General reached out to me and Lenore is talking with him next week. The Surgeon General is very interested in the possibility that free play is beneficial and social media early is not. But if we're going to legislate I mean that's part of the reason why we have the Surgeon General not just to talk to the people but to be a kind of a science advisor. All of this has to be based on our research and right now we have very little. I'm going to recognize the balcony a bit later as well. Back to the orchestra ask your question please. Thank you fascinating debate. This is kind of going back to the first couple of questions but isn't it really reductive and therefore incomplete to only be focusing on this one aspect rather than looking at the incredible complexity of young people's lives and that does include their awareness of climate change financial issues for sure. School shootings I mean this is the generation that grew up really genuinely fear fearing as unlikely as it actually is that they someone's going to come into their school and shoot them so I mean I know we're kind of returning to the earlier points but I just feel like you know this is not factoring in just how incredibly complex and difficult people's lives are now. Yeah I mean I think we probably both agree with that I would just say I don't think that's a social media or that is not a thing you can specifically blame on social media. I mean fear about mass shootings is one of the is one of the mainstream media's like biggest things that gets wrong frankly because like as you said they are blessedly extremely school shootings are especially extremely rare. Kids are there's all sorts of statistics you can look at but like kids are safer at school than other environments generally so the fear that kids have that they're going to die in school is to a large degree and irrational fear compared to other ways they might harm themselves or come to harm but it is such a such a powerful fear that you could see how that could be one factor contributing and I suspect it is one factor contributing to the greater anxiety of young people for reasons that the mainstream media has pushed on them not social media. Yeah and I would certainly be a fan of both complexifying and simplifying you want to go back and forth between perspectives and in the coddling of the American mind Greg and I tried to do that to trace out multiple there's like six threads that we trace out I love stories about trans working together I would just point out people do not kill themselves because they're afraid they kill themselves because they feel alone and so school shootings is not it might make people afraid it's not going to make them kill themselves you kill yourself when you feel disconnected alone shamed but it certainly factors into anxiety and depression if they are afraid anxiety I suppose I'm not sure about depression next question gentlemen behind thank you sure my questions for for Jonathan so you were talking about earlier technologies and how they induced a moral panic before they were tamed and then they got me thinking about the printing press and whether we'd ever tamed the printing press because pretty much anyone can print a pamphlet or publish a book but then I thought of libel law how you can't just print thought of what oh libel yes libel law and how you can't just print anything and it struck me that the power of of anti defamation law as applies to written texts published text is that it places the onus on the aggrieved party to raise that cause of action and to sue the author the publisher who printed the untrue and defamatory statement about them and so that way rather than having a regulatory agency or congress trying to design a one fits all solution the regulations can can sort of coalesce from the bottom up into based on a response to to actual circumstances so my question for you is could you imagine a the creation of a new cause of action a private cause of action perhaps at the federal level so it fits with any resolution that would provide the persons who have been harmed by specific intentional actions of the purveyors of social media the social media companies that would then realign incentives in order to address the the harms that social media causes well I I see what you're trying to do in sort of changing systemic pressures and changing systems that you get a better outcome but the last thing I would want in our litigious culture is to say we're going to resolve this by individuals taking action against each other what I would much rather we do I think your example of the printing press is a very good one because it's an example of an incredibly powerful technology that brought down old and decrepit power structures and part of that is happening and part of that is beneficially referred to that about the vested interests are the ones we're most threatened but I but I think it's a good example as with so many of these technologies that yeah we did need a little bit of regulation and I think there does have to be some regulation here and especially as I said you know the British example where what they're doing with their online harms bill is they're positing a duty of care that if you're a platform that is having minors on you have a duty of care they're not like you're you know it's okay you know if you want to just exploit your adults and for their data you know their their adults where they make their own decisions but with children you have a duty of care so I would rather that we have like not the heavy-handed kind of regulation if Philip Howard was here many of you know Philip Howard and his books and his analysis of how terrible and stupid most regulation is but where you lay out the general principle and you let the companies figure out how to meet it don't try to micromanage so yes I think that the printing press is instructive in many ways but I would not want to see just mass action I mean we're already attacking each other all the time to put penalties and fines on it too would just make it unbearable I think coming from you Robbie no no okay yeah about any question thank you thank you both for a really engaging debate the big tobacco question seems very relevant because we're framing social media as essentially an addictive substance that hijacks our biology and so we need federal government to step in and save our brains and our bodies essentially especially those of our kids if I have a history right though and forgive me this is really hopelessly libertarian the federal government response to big tobacco only came after there was a really strong social science consensus that tobacco is harmful and it seems I was still cobbling together some sort of consensus exact consensus about social media so I guess my question is is there reason to believe that once a really strong consensus emerges that there won't be more of a grassroots response from parents and even from kids themselves about how they're going to change how they relate to social media which will then change how platforms appeal to them and is the reason to believe that won't happen or the federal government could do this more efficiently than parents or the kids themselves you're right that there's no consensus in fact if you took all the people who say that they're social media researchers I would say the majority of them are skeptical that social media is a cause and Jean Twenge and I are the main people who are in a debate there are a few others who are on our side but we are actually right now the minority position I believe that's because they're all focused just on the dose response data that's all and there's so much more going on now if there was and so if there was to be a consensus would this suddenly galvanize the nation like no I don't think galvanization and data tend to go together very well or I wish they did but they don't so that's why I'm hoping you know let's take small steps based on oh and one of the main things that Lenore and I are talking with a surgeon general about is here are the experiments that would lord that would not settle it but here are the experiments that would tell us because what we need to do is school by school don't just like tell one kid to use more or less have an entire school district have a phone locker policy and have the next school district not have it and will know in two years whether it was beneficial so um so I'm very reluctant again to tell adults what to do but yeah when it's kids we really need to do research on what on what's harming them and if it's not harming them then I wouldn't want bands and just to add I really do expect it'll be something new the kid like there is I have very little faith that kids will continue to be interested in the social media sites that are popular right now there's such turnover in this space the the ones that have have been around now for a while are you know declining in popularity I mean I this is even true for me I and I'm a I'm a very active I was a very active social media user I realized the other day that I use Twitter a lot less all of a sudden I I'm using Instagram less I don't use Facebook at all I'm not going to get into TikTok so some some of these things will have a natural lifespan and the next thing that comes along could be healthier even for kids for the population we're talking about then Instagram is this could be a this could be a one-off because again the the problem even based on what you're saying is not really social media it's this platform for these people which I agree which I agree but I would never make government policy at that I mean it's very hard to and then even among that population you'd have still the majority of girls in that age group using Instagram responsibly and not having a negative you you know you have I think it was like two out of five right in that in the Facebook internal data or something yeah but again that's the dose response thing yeah well they'd all be better off if they didn't have it is my argument I don't yeah I don't think so another question to know about today okay thank you my question is to Jonathan on Instagram specifically at the same time that there are young girls incentivizing a certain type of body or lifestyle they are that make girls feel bad about themselves or trying to fit into a world that they will never fit at the same time however we have many profile accounts telling them accept yourself it is okay to be whatever you want to be so you don't think in this regard social media can auto regulate themselves and you don't think it must be a choice for the users to follow what make they feel better or in the case of minors you don't think the parents should be the responsible for helping them like parents cannot see what the kids are doing all the time so the government will never be able to do this so that's my question okay yes thank you if we just look at content if we thought that you know all that matters here is content just like what the kids see and then we can say well you know maybe if we can get maybe there's a lot of good content and maybe if the good content is 10 times the amount of bad content maybe that would be okay but my argument as a social psychologist is that it's not primarily about the content it's about going through middle school which is already the worst time of life for most people it's always been worse for girls going through middle school where most of your consciousness even when you're in class most of your consciousness is about the drama going on and it's about the photo that you posted and it's kids are learning to be brand managers and performers when they should be out playing and so I don't focus very much on the content that's why I'm not very interested in content moderation it's a whack-a-mole game it's a hopeless errand I'm focused on the dynamics especially the social dynamics and I think these platforms are unsafe at any speed for young kids especially around 12 13 14 anything photo-based and the girls go for the photo-based platforms the boys went for video games and also for youtube back in the early 2010s the second part of your question was oh shoot what was it oh the parents yes can't the parents do it so you know if it's if it's like how much candy you eat well a parent can control how much candy you eat in your own house but it's hard to control outside of course instagram and these platforms are a little different because it's like you know imagine that a candy company contracted with your daughter to hook up a pipeline of candy into her bedroom and no permission is needed from your parent parents don't even know they just do it and they do it all over the world and you can't stop it because yeah if you're really vigilant you could you could catch it at the window but then as long as she can get to a web browser she'll get it so these companies are going around our backs they're putting us in a trap none of us very few of us want our kids to be on but they're in a it's a it's a classic economic social dilemma where we each give in because we don't want our kids to be isolated so i think this really calls out for some central force to break the trap especially when we're talking about underage kids i've had two conversations with mark zuckerberg two conversations at a most area i bring this up every time and they always say oh but we don't allow kids under 13 well after my second after my first conversation with mark zuckerberg for the second i just created a fake account for my daughter and i lied about her age i said oh yeah mark really i just made an account for her so you know it's a trap it's illegal but well i don't know especially for under 13 there's no excuse for this i think i'm afraid we're running out of time and robbie make a brief comment if you want yeah it will be very hard no matter how interested the government is doing this from stopping from like this is a genie that cannot be put back into the bottle like kids will find ways to access these sites we should act absolutely empower parents local decision maker you know school counselors should talk to people about respond especially talk to the vulnerable group the the young women i think they should talk to young men as well about porn addiction again we're not totally clear on what the research tells us these are absolutely conversations that should be having the school but the level of banning and prohibiting they're going to get around it and we could we could make these these platforms seem more seductive and more tempting because now they're part of the forbidden uh thank you for excellent questions we're running out of time in the q and a we're going to move to the summary portion of the evening jonathan height speaking for the affirmative please take the part okay well thank you gene thank you robbie thank you to the audience i'm extremely interested in the power and importance of viewpoint diversity and especially as we saw tonight you have two people we agree on a lot we disagree on a lot and this was fun and we both come out with more refined more nuanced views of a very complicated very very important topic in my closing remarks i just want to let's see i want to make a couple of points um let's see okay i'll i'll so suppose um here's a thought experiment i've been playing with i want to i'll try to work it out here um suppose we're back in 1993 before most people had really seen seen the internet and imagine that a genie appeared and he he put in front of us three magical boxes just floating in the air in front of you and and he said you can open none one two you can open as many as you want or none of them and on the first one the label said internet the second one it said iphone and the third it said social media now knowing what we know now which ones do you think we should have opened or which ones would you choose to open or which ones do you think were good for society to open so let's do let's let's do a little poll so supposed to show the internet um so you know obviously enormous benefits and yeah there are some downsides i mean lots of things can happen on the internet that are bad um raise your hand if you think we'd be better off if we didn't have the internet raise your hand high okay one and now raise your hand if you think no it's a really good thing that we have the internet raise your hand okay it's like an insane question especially in room full of libertarians um so the internet i mean the cost benefit ratio the transformative effects of the internet the things it made possible the things it brought uh outside of of wealthy countries and made available to people all over the world it's transformative in a good way like electricity or like fire uh so the internet boy are we glad we opened that one and remember for some of you if you're old enough like me it's like you know the first time you see it and a web browser like it was it was inconceivable it was like all the information like there for free amazing all right next one the iphone now smartphones it's a little more complicated because there are claims that smartphones have damaged a generation smartphones are addictive things like that but this is the most amazing swiss army knife ever created and i sleep with mine under my pillow because it's useful as a flashlight and useful as a clock and i go everywhere with it and you know as steve jobs originally intended it was going to be like a swiss army knife with these like five or six things that are tools that you can use now in some ways now it uses us but we'll get to that as a swiss army knife i think this is an incredible thing now do you think that the world would be better off if we never had smartphones if we all were just on flip phones raise your hand if you think we should not open that box okay so now we get about about 10 people saying yeah we'd be better off if we didn't have smartphones just flip phones raise your hand if you think no it's a good thing we have smartphones raise your hand okay so about 90 percent all right okay now we come to the third box and remember each box you open is going to take 10 to 20 hours a week from you okay now what do you get for the internet you get a lot you learn a lot what do you get from from your iphone it solves a lot of problems finding you taxis all sorts of things so each each time you open a box it's an extra 10 to 20 hours okay so now we're up to 20 to 30 hours a week from internet and smartphones okay now there's a third box it says social media it says facebook or social media now if you open it what do you get you get constant updates about what someone had for lunch and why someone hates somebody and why somebody is a fascist or a racist and and what are the downsides well i've been making a case that there are many many downsides so what i'd like you to do is imagine imagine a world without without social media imagine uh imagine a world in which the only way you could communicate with other people was by phone email texting whatsapp skype zoom facetime blogging fortnite roblox minecraft a thousand other video games multiplayer games the us mail and walking over to someone's house ringing the doorbell and using your vocal cords imagine such a world robby said we should be grateful that we had social media during the pandemic no we should be grateful that we had these 50 other platforms that could connect us our kids would have been so much better off if they had to actually zoom each other rather than posting posting posting coming oh you look great love it like no that was stupid that was a way that was not connecting that was performing we would have been so much better off if we did not have social media of that business model if we just had everything else uh that at least is my claim so um uh so if in conclusion um if you're happy that we open that third box and you think everything's going fine and you think we shouldn't exert some some kind of centralized effort to try to clean things up research based of course but if you're happy with the way things are going you should vote after after these statements you should vote no on the resolution but um if you join me in imagining a better world healthier kids and a more admirable democracy i urge you to vote yes thank you someone said once maybe they didn't maybe i said it all debates eventually become debates over definition so i would like to go over those lists of things you just mentioned that were good i mean like is that doesn't count as social media again if we confine social media to just the experience teenage girls have on instagram yes it's not great right uh but so many people are using things we just would describe as social media i would describe a well instant messenger and my space the things i used when i was a teenager to great enjoyment to have much better friend much larger friend groups to make friends i was a shy kid i didn't make a lot of friends in school i i made them after school on what is clearly described as social media i think i i bet that's the experience i anecdotally i hear this from young people that is the experience still of a lot of kids that the school the people the class they're sorted into that they would have been lucky to be sorted into in normal times but have not been sorted into because they've not actually even been in school for two years is not as enjoyable as the networks they can curate and create for themselves because of this amazing technology that i would not that i would absolutely open that box and unleash on the world because you don't have to use it the choice is still yours you can unplug some people can unplug we hear i think a lot from the loudest angriest and most addicted people which warps this conversation the social dilemma movie which you were or you the only person in my view giving like sane saying normal sane things in that Netflix documentary which is mostly about all these former tech people bragging about how they think they've hacked your brain and that your decisions are no longer your own and they control you and isn't it bad but also kind of cool what they were able to do like they're bragging that they did this i'm listening to these people and like you know your tech addicts like you you you people who worked for these companies and were involved i get that you're a little bit too addicted and too in love and obsessed in an unhealthy way with this product this most people's experience i don't think it is uh we didn't talk about this as much jonathan sort of started to suggest that it the quasi nefarious thing these these these platforms are doing in that they they're collecting data about you and then seller selling a curated your user experience and providing you with advertisements i'm so i'm pro capitalism so i don't think this is necessarily as malicious as it's made out to be i can watch television all day and be bombarded by advertisements for products that are irrelevant to my interest that i have no interest in buying but when i visit social media i am shown things that might actually improve my life that i might want to buy not forced to buy them the kind of like its hypnotism is like i don't believe that maybe there are social psychologists again bragging about their own achievements trying to say that this is something they've created i don't believe it i i think it's it's largely can be can be a benefit so we've concentrated a lot in these remarks because jonathan is such an expert on it and and it's an important topic you know the harms to kids element of it but i you know i just want to remind you that that's probably like 25 percent of the conversation right now about why the government needs to do something about social media most of the energy attention to this issue is focused either on um uh the the limiting the spread of misinformation that's the major liberal concern and then on right something we didn't even touch here tonight is the concern that that these uh that the platforms are censoring too much information um so we those are the and my my book if you're interested in it gets into those a lot a lot more because they really are the things we're talking about so i you know i just wanted to say 30 seconds again on on those before we wrap that i think the the whatever legitimate beefs there are do not lend themselves whatsoever to a government solution which is the the question on the table and in fact the interest that the government has in regulating social media along these lines and not this not the stuff where there maybe is some cause for concern is is illustrative and should give us pause about pursuing any inviting in any capacity the government to do more about this and and on the misinformation question specifically because really this is the the i would i don't i'm not sure what your take would be i think this is the major reason people want to regulate social media these days is least the one i come into contact with the most here the research is is is very favorable i i think to my position a lot of the the panic about how much people being inundated with so many lies and etc etc is has not been borne out by the data actually it's it's like a tiny number of social media users who are sharing the most like alarming social media misinformation it's a tiny number of users who are seeing it it pales in comparison to the misinformation they're inundated with in the on the media platforms that existed before it but this is the animating concern of the bided administration and the f t c and the f c c of the government figures who actually will do the regulating who are going to do something about social media this is what they care about and it will have very bad consequences for free speech thank you connor please open the voting please take out your smartphones and please vote yes no or undecided you could still be undecided on the resolution if you were undecided before or if you voted yes or no again the federal government should increase its efforts to reduce the harms caused by social media yes no or undecided on the resolution drumroll please now the resolution the the resolution got initially 28 percent of the vote it rose to 37.7 percent it picked up 9.8 percentage points 9.8 percentage points is what you picked up jonathan and that's the number to be the no votes also picked up but picked up 1.8 percentage votes therefore the tootsie roll goes to jonathan height congratulations jon congratulations