 The forum is dedicated to what at times, sometimes seems at least today like a rather audacious proposition. And that proposition is simply this, that thoughtful, engaging, engaged, rigorous, and respectful debate remains possible even in this era of intense partisanship. In the face of discourse around us it sometimes seems to be anything but reasoned. The Janus forum maintains that reasoned discourse nevertheless does remain possible. The forum believes that the academy should preference deliberation over knee-jerk reactions, that engaging in opponents argument is always superior to and frankly more interesting than ad hominem attacks, and in fact that there is deep satisfaction and even joy to be found in debate. In short, the forum aims to model the kinds of diversity of thought that amplifying our impact, our strategic vision, commits itself. And to the proposition that healthy debate is fundamental between in the words of our amplifying our impact education and healthy democracy. We're fortunate to have two distinguished speakers to debate this year's resolution, and that resolution stated in full is social media should be more regulated. Jim Steyer from Common Sense Media on your right is going to argue for the resolution, and John Samples from the Cato Institute to your left is going to argue against the resolution. We're going to follow the A-B-B-A or ABBA format, this is not the Swedish pop group, but it simply refers to the order of argumentation. So Jim Steyer will offer remarks in favor of the resolution, Samples will then respond, he will offer his remarks, and to conclude Jim Steyer will respond to John Samples. So just a couple of words about our guests. Jim Steyer is the founder and chief executive of Common Sense Media, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to providing trustworthy information and education and families. Three of his books are especially relevant to our topic today. The first, Talking Back to Facebook, which was published in 2002, excuse me, published in 2012. Second, he's very prescient. Second, The Other Parent, the inside story of media's effect on our children published in 2002, and most recently published in 2020, which side of history, how technology is reshaping democracy in our lives. Jim is a consulting professor at the Stanford University School of Education. He began his career as a law clerk for Justin Allen Broussard of the California Supreme Court. You may have heard or seen him on the Oprah Winfrey Show, The Today Show, Good Morning America, Fresh Air, The CBS Morning Show, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. John Samples on your left is vice president at the Cato Institute. He founded and he now directs Cato Center for Representative Government, which studies First Amendment government institutional failure and public opinion. John serves on Facebook's advisory board, excuse me, Facebook's oversight board, which provides final and binding decisions on whether specific content should be allowed or removed from Facebook and Instagram. John is currently working on a book length manuscript. He tells me it's coming to a conclusion about social media and speech regulation. That manuscript extends the policy analysis that he proffered in an earlier publication titled Why the Government Should Not Regulate Content Moderation of Social Media. You may have heard or read John's commentary in USA Today, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, or seen or heard him on NPR, Fox News, and MSNBC. So welcome, Jim and John. So let's begin. I'm going to turn the podium over to Jim, who will open with observations in favor of the resolution, and then I'll invite John to respond. All right, thank you guys for coming. I have a rule that I do in my, I teach a class at Stanford with 1500 students and I have a rule, you are not allowed to have one of these outs while I'm speaking and I will literally go into the audience and take it away from you. So I'm going to, I'm going to have that role when I talk today, Joe, called Device Free Discussion. But thank you so much, Brent, for the introduction. Mr. President, Madam Provost, everybody else, it's great to be here in Vermont. And I hope we have a really fun discussion today. And I'm really looking forward to the question and answer period and also the hearing from John. I'm taking my watch off so I'll follow the rules on the time. So here's how I'd start. I would tell you this, social media is basically having a tobacco moment right now. And that's really what's going on in America today. I was spending a lot of time in the last week or so commenting on the hearings they had last week on social media in front of Congress since we're the biggest child advocacy group and tech advocacy group in the United States, if not the world. And if you watch the hearings, you really saw something that was sort of reminiscent of what we saw 30 years ago when the tobacco industry executives were hauled in front of Congress and where they hemmed and hawed and tried nuanced statements about how tobacco is not addictive and why it really wasn't that harmful to kids. But fundamentally led to a phenomenal change in public health in the United States and the way that we looked at both tobacco and cigarette smoking, particularly among young people, but in general. And the reason I mention that is because I think we're at exactly the same point when it comes to social media. And if you think about it, my friend, Vivek Murthy, who's the Surgeon General of the United States, he's the Surgeon General under President Obama and he's the current Surgeon General again, came out about six months ago and put out a warning that said that social media is unhealthy and has a deeply correlative relationship to the youth mental health crisis in the United States. And one of the things that I would start out by saying in the context of my remarks, and I think every young person in the audience knows this, is that we are actually going through a youth mental health crisis in the United States right now. And social media is one of the biggest factors in it. If you watched the Circus-like hearings last week on television, you could have seen some senators parading up there and referring to the CEOs of Instagram. I've actually ducked from Facebook was there, but Snapchat, Discord and others, Lindsey Graham said they have blood on their hands. And I would say in just in general, as the father of four kids and the head of the largest media tech advocacy group in the United States, that we've allowed technology companies to run amok for about the last 20 years. That's why I wrote talking back in Facebook in 2012, Brynn. But by that point, it was clear to me, I actually think the book was not that good a book, but prescient, which said, what's going on with young people in this country is not okay. And I think 12 years later, the chickens have come home to roost. And there are two reasons that I feel that social media has to be regulated and why we play a very big role in that. And I'm happy to talk about that in my remarks, but also in question. First, there is a huge body of research evidence from whistleblowers polls and most of all from academic researchers around the world that proves that social media is not simply safer is simply not safe for kids, but it is a broader public health issue for all of us. And I include the people in this room and adults as well as young people. Second, having worked with the leaders of the companies for well over 15 years, I would tell you that they have resisted every opportunity to take meaningful voluntary action to make their products safe and healthy for the broader public and particularly for kids and teens and the broader And the broader symmetry has suffered dramatically as a result. And my hope at the after we have this debate is that you won't just agree with me but you'll also be motivated to do something to change that for this state of Vermont for the community of Burlington and most of all for the kids and families of America. So why do I say that social media is a major public health issue and a major cause of damage and harm to young people in particular, but to all of us. Well, first of all, and I walked just through some of the research briefly. There is a growing body of evidence over the last decade or so that shows the impact of social media and the platforms in particular on the mental health of America and the people around the world and particularly young people on social emotional and behavioral well being of young people and quite frankly of many adults. It's a big contributor of physical harm which I'll talk about in a second. It's had an extraordinary impact on our democratic norms and institutions, and it's also in many cases eviscerated norms of personal privacy that when I was in college, I took for granted. And as a law professor at Stanford, I will tell you that privacy is a fundamental right under the US Constitution and that the examples are myriad. First of all, social media has been shown over and over again to be addictive. That's why I told you not to bring your phones out because you'll be looking down on them all the time because it leads to addictive and compulsive behavior, particularly among people with vulnerable underdeveloped brains. It also exposes people to dangerous content. It also exposes people to misleading and completely dishonest content in the context of elections and democratic discourse. And the lack of regulation in this country, which is lagged behind Europe and the rest of the world in terms of regulation, has basically led to a virtual lab experiment on our society and particularly on the social, emotional and cognitive well being of young people. So let me give you some examples. Teens who use social media regularly report feeling loneliness, depression and anxiety at far higher levels. So the CDC's biannual youth risk survey most recent one showed that 50%, 7% of teen girls now say that they experience persistent sadness or hopelessness, and that's up from 35% in 2011. 30% of teen girls now say they have considered suicide seriously up from 19% in 2011. Those who use social media for more than three hours a day face double the risk of depression and anxiety syndrome. And that's a big deal when you realize that the average teenager spends three and a half hours a day using social media. If kids are actually prone to depression, the impact of that media can be deadly. Among girls with depressive symptoms, 7 in 10 who use Instagram and TikTok regularly say they come across problematic suicide related content at least monthly. Introduction of Facebook likely is responsible for the increase of depression among students. As we saw the rollout of Facebook on college campuses for young people, Facebook used to be for kids. Now it is for adults as before my students at Stanford started Instagram and sold it to Zuckerberg. But you can see an absolute trend of correlation between the development of Facebook in particular but some of the other big social media platforms and suicides and anxiety and depression, etc. And there's a big issue around student health and I would argue that if the head of the UVM Medical Center were here today they would have a very lots to say about the impact of social media on the health and well being of young people here at UVM. So by the way, the other thing that you see all the time I see this in my students and my own four children is the teens who use social media also report problems with distraction and lack of focus. They pick up their phones on the average more than 100 times a day and typically receive over 237 notification daily. I'm sure that's true for a number of you in this room. 97% of students in America spend time on their phone during school hours scrolling. I know professors at UVM don't know that but I do and I'm kind of the students do too. 45% of teen girls who use TikTok say they feel addicted to it. Teen girls spend over two hours a day on average in the United States on YouTube and TikTok and 90 minutes a day on the other platforms. That's how you get the three and a half hours a day. They have also been strongly correlated with low self esteem, eating disorders, poor body image, anorexia, many other basic fundamental public health issues in this country. And we've seen 42% of school health workers in the United States who were surveyed last year said they'd seen an uptick and uptick in eating disorders since 2019, maybe related to the pandemic, but also clearly related to social media. Okay, let's talk about physical harm. Teens and all of us are sold drugs and weapons on social media platforms. That's where you buy fentanyl. That's why where you buy ghost guns. And I'm going to talk about California and the laws that we've written there in a minute. But according to the USDA, drug traffickers have turned smartphones into a one stop shop market to sell, buy and deliver deadly fake prescription pills and other dangerous drugs. As I said, the fentanyl crisis in my hometown of San Francisco is oftentimes played out on social media platforms. Criminal networks use those platforms. That includes, by the way, not just selling real fentanyl, but fake fentanyl, methamphetamine pills, often to unsuspecting young people who don't really know what they're buying. Investigations from the Washington Post and New York Times have shown the proliferation of ghost guns being bought online on platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, and most of all Instagram. And girls receive constant contact from unwanted strangers. According to a recent Pew Research study, one in four girls have reported contact from someone they did not know that made them feel scared or uncomfortable. In addition, CSAM, something that we just wrote a law about in California that we'll see if it passes in 24, child sexual abuse material. Instagram connects a vast pedophile network, and that has been brought out by whistleblowers at Facebook and Instagram. My friend Francis Haugen, who was the first big whistleblower at Facebook, exposed this as well as the evisceration of the content moderation teams at Facebook, leading to efforts to undermine democracy. But they also show now the impact of the platforms of Facebook and Instagram. Arturo Behar, who's the second new Facebook whistleblower in the last six months, showed that the algorithms were promoting illicit content with the knowledge of the guys who run Instagram were promoting illicit content, explicit hashtags which connect users to accounts with child sexual abuse materials, and that Instagram allows users to search for terms that its own algorithms well know contain harmful and illegal content. Okay, democracy? Oh, there's been no impact of social media on democracy, except for on the 2016 election in the United States and every single election since then. And there will be a massive impact on the 24 election, whether it's here in Vermont or at the national level. And with the advent of AI and the proliferation of AI, you will see that on steroids. A 2020 study from the NAS, the National Academy of Sciences, said that false information spread six times faster than true information on platforms like Twitter, also known as X. And now that Elon, the great Elon has eviscerated the content moderation team at Twitter X, just wait till you see what happens. It's a virtual sewer now of content, because they eliminated the content moderation team. Social media doesn't just connect people, it creates echo chambers, it creates filter bubbles. It allows you to just live in your little world and just hear your own little Fox News clips, or maybe your very liberal clips or whatever, but it is really undermined social and societal discourse. Foreign manipulation disinformation campaigns pose a direct threat to our democracy. The evidence about the impact of Russia during the 2016 election, the Trump-Hillary Clinton election has legions of evidence. And you now see in 24 is probably going to be the biggest year for elections, not just the momentous election in the United States, but elections all around the world. And misinformation and disinformation campaigns will be rife and they will largely be existing on social media platforms. And basically what that has done, trust in traditional media institutions and broader institutions including university erodes. So that's the bad stuff. But here's the second corollary to that. You cannot trust large technology companies to police themselves. That's like literally the Fox guarding the chicken coop. And I have spent 15 years running the biggest advocacy group in the country watching them get up in front of Congress or the California legislature or the EU legislature in Brussels talking about all the safety regulations and all the stuff they do. But the fact is that the basic business model of social media is to have use is an arms race for your attention, particularly for young people's attention. Social media apps make money by selling you, you are the product to advertisers. We actually ran a bill in California called you are the product so that you would understand that it's your information, your personal private information that's being sold. But that business model therefore leads to addiction, attention, distraction issues, like I mentioned, the evisceration of privacy norms that we used to take for granted. And basically the evisceration of social guardrails that used to exist. What do companies do now when we pass laws in California like the 2018 privacy law that's the law of the land of the United States, the CCPA, they file lawsuits immediately in court. They will get up and say nice things in front of the cameras, but they will do anything they can to prevent regulation of their products. Imagine if that was a car or Boeing or some of the other companies who have huge impacts on our public health. And we saw this as I said in my friend Arturo Bajar, the recent whistleblower from Facebook, who came out and documented in great detail the efforts of Facebook to undermine regulatory efforts across the board in the United States and in Europe. So proprietary safety practices and content that their companies claim are effective simply are a mirage. If you have spent a lot of time adjusting your kids safety standards and on Instagram or TikTok, please put up your hand because nobody does that. And so what I would tell you is, according to Arturo's testimony in front of Congress a couple months ago, one in eight users under the age of 16 on Instagram said they experienced sexual advances on the platform that Facebook and Instagram knew that but did nothing about it. As I said, my friend Francis Haugen showed the same kind of testimony in front of Congress in 2021. And so that's sort of the basic picture. Here's the here's sort of the bottom line for what needs to be done. If you may know Europe has regulated these platforms much more than the United States and I'll talk I'm I teach civil rights and civil liberties at Stanford so I'm happy to talk about First Amendment the the interplay between the First Amendment and some of these regulations. But Europe passed GDPR we passed the California Privacy Law Europe just passed the DSA, which is essentially regulating social media platforms for harmful content. We passed that in California we also passed the age appropriate design code. By the way, there is something I'm sure that we'll hear about it in the discussion today. There is a law written in 1996 the communications decency act written by Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, which put in a section 230 that gave basic immunity to social media platforms in the earliest days of the Internet so that it wouldn't stifle innovation. That law was written when Mark Zuckerberg was in diapers and a number of the students here weren't alive, and it has never been updated. And it is a basic get out of jail free card for the tech industry, and it's a disgrace, and it could be modified or abolished and what we can talk about that in the question and answer period. The other thing is age restrictions is all the young people in the audience know don't actually work. There's no age verification theme. You can go on a platform and say whatever age you are that even though they're trillion dollar companies, they've never actually built in an age verification system because they've never been held accountable. And I will tell you this, your kids, my kids, our society are never going to be safe until these large companies are regulated period full stop. Do not kid yourself. 80% of the public, again, I run the biggest advocacy group in the country on these issues, Republican, Democrat, conservative, liberal, rural, urban, doesn't matter. People want regulation of these platforms. Why aren't they regulated? Because they are so rich and powerful, and they spend hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying, on buying up public spokespeople from nonprofits that they create, and by putting out a false version of the products and the practices of their platforms. And so even despite the extraordinary public sentiment on our side, we've had nothing from Congress in the last 25 years. They've been missing in action. So the bottom line for me is pretty clear. Social media has undermined, one, our basic public health norms. Two, the social and emotional well being of millions of young people here in the United States, including a couple of my own children at different times. Three, many of the most treasured norms and democratic institutions of our society and across the world. Four, the fundamental right to privacy in the United States and globally. Fifth, and perhaps most important, the health and well being of our youngest citizens, the next generation of American leaders. The time has come for fundamental change, and I will tell you, we will win, and the biggest winners will be children and youth. I will go on, I can tell you stories about moms, dads, teachers, young people who are part of the 200 million people who use common sense media every year, who come in and talk about the depression of their 13 year old, the suicide of their 15 year old, the exposure to porn or CSAM of their 8 year old. All of them live those experiences on a regular basis. And by the way, all of us live the deterioration of our democratic norms in institutions. So it is time that we stop putting faith in a handful of irresponsible billionaire tech executives, many of whom have never thought through the products that they created and put onto the market, and start agreeing that we need to regulate the social media platforms, which while they provide value also cause tremendous harm to our citizenry and our kids in particular. Senator Klobuchar last week said in the hearing, when a Boeing plane lost a door in mid flight, nobody questioned the decision to ground a fleet of over 700 planes immediately. So why aren't we taking the same kind of decisive action when it comes to the harms and damage caused by social media platforms? At the end of the day, my message to you guys is clear. It's up to all of us to join this fight. We will win, but we will only win when all of you get involved. And you will win because we have truth, justice, and the American way on our side. And by the way, the biggest winners of all will be America's children and youth. Thank you very much. Take it away. Thank you. I was realizing I wasn't sure if this is like a symphony and we're allowed to applaud between movements, but apparently we are. So we will ask our next speaker to respond and to offer his thoughts. So the one thought I first thought is really try it. I find it odd to try to imagine Mark Zuckerberg as a 10 year old and diapers. The section 230 dates from 1996. He's about 10 years older than that. And I understand he's a figure. He went from a figure of, you know, general appellation prior to when. What date did the turn come on the social media companies? I can tell you exactly when the date came. Early November 2016. What happened in early November 2016? Donald Trump was elected president and part through his efforts on Facebook, which Facebook executive is generally recognized as credible said he had written the best marketing stuff that he'd ever seen. So it maybe it's not maybe the problem is the people on Facebook, and this is the 230 section 230 idea that people are responsible for their behavior on Facebook, rather than making Facebook into a semi government. So what I want to do is respond and give a general we have general kinds of disagreements here and I want to respond and try to get those general but what I want most of all to do today is to speak to the young people in this room. I would like to convey if you forget everything else besides what a great speaker Jim is that what you remember is about the things I'm about to say about how to think about politics how to think about public policy. And so I'm going to start with the public health issue and then come back to the democracy issue. Okay. And let me check the time so I don't go over. So let's begin with the public health issue I'm going to start in a odd sort of analogy that you might find. But keep in mind I'm coming back to what Jim said and the questions of public health that are with us right now, as he said in Washington. So let's begin with an issue that is also be devil in Washington at this moment, that is to say, one thing, one way to think about it immigration policy the other is the southern border. Okay, let me give you a stylized idea about the southern border that you probably recognize, and indeed about immigration. Some people say, and I think you know who these people are, say that the southern border is open, right, and that two kinds of people come over to do harms to America to Americans. One are terrorists. And the other are criminals. Right. And they are led into the country and they do what they want to do. Now, just to be straight up with you, the arguments much more complicated than this, although sometimes it does seem like it isn't. But my point is a different one. Imagine that you could actually seal the border. Think about that. You sealed it in such a way that whatever terrorists there were, and whatever criminals there were, people, you know, in a kind of bizarre way, people who are going to commit crimes, but say people who have a high tendency to commit crimes, where the border was sealed in a way that they could not get in. Okay, so those problems are avoided. What are the other consequences of sealing the border? If you believe as I do, and I think actually this is not really very argued against, most of the people coming into the United States, even if they say they're asylum seekers, most of those people are here to do what? They're seeking a better life for themselves and their family. They're attracted to the most dynamic economy on earth, one that actually offers them real opportunity, right? And people don't tell you, well, if we seal the border, we keep out those dynamic entrepreneurs and hardworking people that want to make a better life for themselves. You can see why they don't tell you, right? Now, here's my general point about public health, and it's a general point about public policy that I would like to leave you with if you forget everything else I say. It is that when you make public policy, you do more than one thing. You can do some things, and you can have true positives that prevent harms, but you also do other things that are false positives that have cost to the society. And in this particular case, we'll see exactly, this is an important point for this area, because what is actually being proposed in terms of regulation goes by another name. At Metta, it's called voice. In the United States in general, it's called speech or expression, right? And you have to keep in mind we live in a country in which the regulation of regulation, the regulation of laws, I think God knows Congress needs it, is governed by the First Amendment, which says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. Now, in detail in judicial doctrine, here's what that means. It means that anytime Congress regulates chills or suppresses censor's speech on the basis of its content, courts are going to make it subject to strict scrutiny. And this means that the government has to have a really strong interest, compelling interest, and it has to narrowly tailor the policy to achieving that interest, right? Now, Jim says that Congress has done nothing in this area. In fact, that's not true. Congress has already regulated the Internet in pursuit of child welfare before in the 1990s. In laws that were designed to prevent children from being harmed by the actual origins of it was online porn. Or really what in the First Amendment context is speech that has no protection under the First Amendment. There are certain categories of speech that aren't protected. One of them is obscenity. So Congress has moved in the area where its strongest case can be made that it can censor speech. Obscenity has no First Amendment protections under our Constitution. And yet those laws, two of which were passed in the mid-90s, were both struck down by the Supreme Court. And as Jim mentioned, part of it was also Section 230 and Section 230 survived. It turned out to be the only regulation that survived from that period. So here's the problem, I think, that's part of the issue. Now, let me go back to the question of harms. And Jim gave you a broad understanding of those. This goes to the question of social science and its ability to try to determine causality and whether treatments cause something or not. Which is hard to do across the board, right? And in this area, like many others, social science doesn't give one answer. I would give you a couple of other alternatives to what Jim discussed. There's a professor named Andrew Shibelsky who works in the field of psychology and technology. He's at Oxford University. And his general work has shown that the thesis that social media is inherently harmful to teenagers and children is too broad and too simple. There's a great complexity, he says, between digital technology and youth well-being. The effect is not uniformly harmful and it is influenced by a variety of factors. His research has found that a moderate use of digital technology is not intrinsically harmful and maybe beneficial in certain contexts, indicating that the relationship between string time and well-being is not linear but follows a more nuanced pattern. Go back to the idea of false positives. A nuanced pattern is going to be hard to deal with in public policy. He has also found that the amount of time, he has looked at the amount of time and how it's related to psychological well-being. The associations are often small. These factors such as sleep, family environment and bullying play a more significant role in youth well-being in string time alone. He argues that the narrative of widespread harm from social media overlooks the positive aspects of digital engagement such as social support, learning opportunities and community building. His emphasis is, yes, there are harms for some, but there's also things that digital technology offers that are good and that there's an importance to context here. I would also cite a literature review from 2020 by two leading professors, August and Jensen, who looked at all of the studies that had been done up to that time on this issue and concluded that there were a few effects of social media on adolescents one way or other. Many of them, and this is one of the develing things with social science, a few of them could distinguish cause and effect. What that means is, well, one thesis is that social media causes people to report feeling bad, but feeling bad can also cause people to use social media. And when you're doing a study, you have to distinguish those two. You've got the causality wrong. Research overview I've mentioned concluded that the results are of little, the results on these studies are of little clinical or practical use. So there's really strong reasons that, you know, it's not just John Hyde to follow John. I thought, yeah, maybe John's good guy, maybe it's right. It's actually much more nuanced that the Shibelsky's work involves studies of panel studies, which are not exactly the goal standard, but they're pretty good, of 84,000 people. And if you don't find significant effects with that kind of numbers, it means the effects are pretty small, which is also what you see in the... Now, I'm going to be true to our person who introduced us today by talking about another side of Shibelsky's work and some of his colleagues, which is this 84,000 person study. It was in nature. And the conclusion there is that they found that girls experience a negative link between social media use and life satisfaction when they are 11 to 13 years old and boys when they are 14 to 15. Now, I rushed to note this is too categorical. What they found in the data was that there was some significant effects for those two groups, not for all teens, not for everyone that was studied, but for these groups. So in terms of nuance, what I'm trying to again be nuanced in here is tell you that there are groups that this person I have cited about the general effects has found, in fact, do report. Basically, it's usually self-reporting that they are unhappy. But one of his colleagues says, our statistical modeling examines averages. And so some people, even in those groups, are going to experience negative effects, but others are going to have a positive impact. And what's overlooked in all of these discussions because of the way advocacy goes and because Congress has an issue where it wants to do something that they can agree on. And one of the few things they can agree on, I mean, who's for harming children? I'm not. And certainly it's an easy thing. By the way, the other thing they legislated and you said there's no regulation, what they did, the other regulation they did, which was done, like this is my thing. I really want procedures and stuff. I want you to follow your procedures and send stuff through committees if you're Congress and find out what the issue is. No, they found out that the online magazine was being used for that. Here we come to a language issue. It was used for either prostitution or sex workers. And I'll leave that to you to decide. So guess what? You've got legislation, very, very strong legislation regulating that to prevent it from being used. And of course, sex trafficking was brought into this too. The problem with that was, this is the regulation that doesn't exist, the problem was that sex workers were using the internet to be safer, right? That is, they could screen clients and they wouldn't be out on the street and dealing with people they don't know and getting themselves killed, frankly. Now, Congress was told this. And what do you think Congress did? Now, what is the analogy here? We have to look at the positive effects. The internet is also used for positive things. So I would also say, finally, because this is an issue with American Psychological Association has observed, quote, using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people. Some people, and there's a developmental issue here. And some people, some it's very good for them. They're both for stress or interaction itself can be good. But it does seem that in Shabelsky's work that really see some groups that are now. Why is that a problem? And I have to mention one other thing here. Addiction is not social media addiction is not a recognized syndrome. Right. It's a term of rhetorical art that people use in policy. The psychiatric associations that have charge of that. I do not the DSM does not recognize it. Okay. So if we want to go that way by the expertise that we're not going to be talking about addiction here. So I want to move on quickly here as always time somehow seems short to me. But so let's go to the issue. You have actually a very specific piece of legislation in front of us, which is the kids online. I forget these things. The kids are closer to kids online. Safety Act, of course, safety. How could I miss that? Which has a very broad duty of care for companies to prevent harm to teams. Now that means they have to find out who they have to find out who are the teams and protect them from and prevent them from hearing or seeing certain kinds of expression. Right. That's it's part of it. That's a vague requirement that's going to require them inevitably, I think, to be overly broad. They want to avoid the punishments that are in the bill. They were going to want to make sure that you don't know kids get lose to get see things. And what that means is that adults as well as kids are going to be blocked on what they can see online. Now that's a problem because I remember what I said about the First Amendment. That's an overly broad law that is going to actually affect the rights of adults as well as children. And by the way, and maybe I'm not sure about this, but maybe some of you in this room can appreciate this more. It turns out that people under 18 years of old have First Amendment rights. They have rights to see content also. And they have had such rights for 55 years under the Supreme Court. So again, you've got this promise. There is a real First Amendment problem. It has to be any kind of legislation has to be a compelling public interest, which you could say that maybe kids health is going to fit that, but then it has to be designed and well tailored. What we're seeing here is that the kids who actually are, this is what we go back to immigration, right? We're trying to, we're building a wall as it were metaphorically about expression online that reaches both the kids that 15 to 17, 13 to 15 that I've mentioned, and reaches everyone else. All kids will be affected by this and many adults. That's where the pornography, the bills, the earlier regulations went to die at the Supreme Court because of overreach. Right? And also questions about obscenity. So this question is, I think, well beyond that, the question of trying to have, find out whether people are minors or not. There's no, that's been, the verification part has been taken out because people worried about the loss of anonymous statements, right? An anonymous expression online. But here is another issue that I think is real. This is with Kids Online Safety Act. It's going to be enforced by state attorney generals. One of its sponsors, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, a senator, has said that providing information to trans kids about sexual development, about transsexuality, does harm to those children. So who do you think is going to be in some states, at some places, is going to actually find, that they can't find information online about being gay, about being trans or whatever, right? Who is the kind of, remember the immigration? Who is going to be kept out? Who is going to lose out from this? It's pretty evident that to me going into this, that that is going to be a serious problem. Now I'm running out of time and democracy is a big issue. I want, I notice we can continue this as we go. One thing I would say is, it's important to remember that Donald Trump's victory is not a sign that the world is coming to an end or that democracy is coming. It can be defeated in the normal ways, right? That's one thing. The other thing is, the problems that are mentioned here about false information online. I come from Washington, D.C. I have never met anyone in Washington, D.C. who had strong partisan views that thought the other side was, well, they're just disagreeing with me, but they're trying hard. No, the other side was always and everywhere lying. They were spreading falsehoods, right? So what do you think? You started looking out for misinformation, disinformation and so on. Where is that going to end? You have to tolerate a certain amount of misinformation for a lack of another word. And meta does that in a following way. This information does calm down in meta. And remember, they're not covered by the First Amendment, but it has to do other harms. It has to foster violence, for example, or it has to foster discrimination against minority groups, which is another example of, well, self-regulation has taken place, but it is. It's taking place now by the people who actually know something about the platform. So I think it's very dangerous and very undemocratic to start talking about false information per se. The censor is not supposed to be Mark Zuckerberg or Marsha Blackburn. The censor is supposed to be you. And what you see online, if you can't handle false information, then the whole undertaking is misplaced. Liberal democracy is misplaced, right? You have to realize that. It's unfortunate. It's also evident most of the time. It's stupid stuff. It's very clearly either satire or falsehood. And so there's that. There's many things here, Jim, which you talked about and you spread me why here. But I have to talk about one, which is the European Union. And democracy. So here's what likely will happen in the next, at least it's possible. I don't know how likely it is. United States is a country that has a series of political institutions. You may want to call them, as I do, liberal democracy, you may not. But it has these institutions. It has a speech policy that's governed by the First Amendment. European speech policies are much less protective, much more willing to see and to countenance restrictions on speech. Right? So it's different. That doesn't mean they're not, in some sense, a liberal democracy, but it's different. And they have these organizations and courts and European Union that have made these policies. Now, the problem is this. Once DSA goes into effect, they have something called systemic harms that will be banned from the platforms. The platforms, Metta and the others, too, pursue a policy of one rule for the entire platform, generally speaking, except for Germany, where the Germans passed a law that made them not do that. But generally, they do that. So what does that mean? It means the Europeans have passed a law about speech that is going to be applied to Americans online on Facebook. How is that democratic? American users of Facebook are going to find their speech rights are determined in Brussels, or one of those sort of big towns they have over there, and not here in the United States. How is that democratic? Why should we live under a European regime? Right? Three minutes. That's more than I thought. I just finished up. The other problem, the 230 has been much, Jim mentioned that in passing. 230 is simply the idea that it was also connected to free speech in the following way. What section 230 says is if I libel Jim, which I would never do, by the way, if I libel Jim by, I don't know how I would do that, but if I did do that online, it's up to me. It's on me. It's not on Facebook. The reason, this wasn't a concession to Facebook, that this was done by, after all, the senator in question, is very much a man of the left. It was done because the fear that if you, Facebook itself was governing that kind of thing, that you told Facebook, look, you're going to be liable unless you take down anything that could be libelous, right? If you did that, they were going to say, let's just take no chances. Let's take no chances and let's get speech that's libelous, that's speech that might be libelous, the gray zone speech, and you know what, pick up some of the speech that's clearly in the protected zone, too, because we don't want to have to deal with all the litigation and the liability. So section 230 is actually something to prevent overbreath by the companies themselves. Can the company out finish with this? Can the companies be trusted? And if you have a theory that companies are, you know, basically malevolent and the profit motive is pursued in a very marginal or very immediate way, then, and you could come up with theories about why they are to be trusted. And indeed, you have to also think about it from their point of view. They don't want to lose control of the company and give it over to either highly organized interest or to politicians in Congress, which, you know, have reached new lows of appalling speech, as we saw. So the question is, what does maximizing shareholder value, after all, the person that's forgotten is the people that own the damn company, right? What does that mean? What does it require the managers? And I think it means, first of all, you've got to manage the brand well. You've got to manage it over time so that you've created a company. We know from the... I hope I get support from this from some business professors here that investments themselves are done over time. That it's not just immediate investments or quarterly investments that matter. And so the brand matters a lot and the companies care. What happened in Washington, the demagoguery of last week was very harmful to the company. Facebook's brand has been harmed by being involved in politics and they are in the process of getting out of it now as much as they can. But that is what they are concerned about. They have every reason. When you ask about public policy and its consequences, this is my final point, always ask the question, what are the incentives? And if you know the incentives, what is the theory about what the likely consequences are going to be? Thank you. And thanks for Jim for not taking my iPad during... This is not a phone, this is something important. Thank you. Do I get two minutes? You do. I want to get to the audience. I want to get to you guys. So I'll be very quick. Okay, so I'm really interested in hearing what you all want to say. Any question you want, let me just make a few points. First of all, to John's point that tech and media have very beneficial impacts on society. That's obviously true. I run the biggest kids media group in the country. We totally, people love Common Sense because we tell you all the good stuff you can find on tech, on media, et cetera. So obviously we believe that's true. That being said, the demonstrable harms of social media, which is the point of the debate today, are so obvious and the evidence is so clear and convincing that I could spend three hours here listening all the studies. One thing I would say though, it's important. John brought up the issue of causation. No one is saying that for all the youth mental health crisis, just take that issue, or the decline of democracy, or any of the other really important harms we're talking about here today are completely caused solely by social media. Are they one of the biggest contributing factors, if not the most? Absolutely they are. But there is no question that you can't just put the onus only on a handful of trillion dollar social media platforms. Absolutely right about Congress's dysfunctionality. I think that was the point you were making about when you were talking about the board or everything else, because they haven't been able to do anything about it. But I will tell you that despite Congress's pathetic dysfunctionality over 30 years, there's been tremendous regulation that has occurred. And by the way, it's occurred largely in the state level. That's why we write the laws in Sacramento and we're writing them right now in Albany. We have never done it here in Vermont, but that was because you don't want 50 different laws. But we do regulate the companies at the state level in the United States. And Europe, when Europe passes laws, they pass laws that are not designed to restrict speech in America. They're designed to regulate the companies in Europe. And we have an office in Brussels, and those laws are very carefully thought through. There are differences between First Amendment standards in Europe than there are here. But I will tell you that every single law we've written at Common Sense to this date have been upheld. I'm a First Amendment law professor. I value free speech and free expression more than anything, and I teach a class to Stanford Undergrads for the last 28 years on it. And so we always balance First Amendment speech protections with the best interests of society. And that's what all the case law is. It's a balancing act. Look, at the end of the day, everybody in this room knows the fundamental transformation that has occurred in our society over the past 20 years, whether it's in terms of public health, our civil discourse, our democracy, and other things. The fact that social media has had such a negative impact on so many elements of that is indisputable. The question is, how do we find Common Sense, thoughtful, well-crafted regulation that reigns in the excesses and still permits the rest of us and all of us to have the free and good society we have. We've been doing that. The momentum is on our side. 90% of the public agrees with this approach. I've written off Congress and I will write them off in 2024, but I will not write off you and I will not write off the idea that we can find Common Sense, thoughtful, consistent ways to deal with public health concerns, to deal with the future of our democracy and deal with the best interests of young people. At the end of the day, this is about and that's why I strongly believe that if you look at the question and the question was yes or no should social media be regulated to protect and promote the best interests of democracy, public health and personal privacy, the answer is a no-brainer. Obviously it should be and it will be and the time has come. Thank you very much and I'd love to hear your question. Okay. How can we argue for the choice and discernment of social media users, young or old, when we see these decisions to the platform's algorithms? For example, it's hard to make the case that users can recognize the observed when the feed only provides the observed. That's a really good question and the truth is we've passed laws now in California that's been introduced here to regular algorithms. The truth is because it doesn't really give you the choice. I'm sure the young people in the audience understand basically how algorithm work and how your feed works. That's why we call the design that we passed along in California and in England and in Europe called the age-appropriate design code. Safety by design. The truth is you have to build it in to the algorithms because the algorithms, the way they were constructed by the big social media companies is designed to do one thing and one thing only. Monopolize your attention so they can monetize your attention and your information for their profit. Period, full stop. The question is an extremely important one which is until the algorithmic products are regulated and looked at, you'll never get some of this money. You are not capable of dealing with a 30-year-old or a 9-year-old or a 38-year-old sometimes of dealing with what the algorithms do to you. It's why the concept of safety by design is built into many of the coming regulations you're going to see of algorithms because we are not the same and it's going to be exacerbated in the age of AI. So it's a very good question and you will see that regulated in the next year in Europe and Australia and you'll also see it regulated in the United States. Oh, Europe. The origin of the democracy deficit the European Union. Google it folks. So algorithms put things in front of you and then allegedly I disagree with the premise you don't have any choice about it. You have to follow through and some people say they go down rabbit holes and become radicalized but there's also there's poor evidence for that. There's a question here that's kind of interesting I think in general which is if you say that about an adult someone over 18 would just say what does that mean? They're incapable of making that choice despite the ad or whatever or material it's just also material. So and again some of it's going to be good and some of it's maybe bad you don't have an incentive to give you bad stuff because you don't like it. So but for adults I think the choice is possible. Then there's a question about children and people below 18 and I think in reality reality is probably Jim I'd agree with this as a father is it's developmental kids become more and more capable of dealing with things and being rational the older they get. However that's not the law. The law is and so there would be a paternalistic interest there for the government or state or whatever to regulate if that were true right if in a sense we recognize that children don't have an adult capacity to make choices and to reason but in fact that's not the law of the United States under the First Amendment. It's the content that determines and these are content based regulations and they're weaker in many ways than the obscenity based regulations of the 1990s because that was speech that no one can always be regulated. These kinds of speech we're talking about is in fact content and has to have what is called I mentioned strict scrutiny. Now there's a term about strict scrutiny which is strict in theory fatal in fact. So we can have these discussions but this is going to like the other efforts is going to I think ultimately fall at the Supreme Court. In part it's going I mean the case is what is the case going to be some kid that was trying 15 year old that was trying to find out about get information about being trans is going to be the plaintiff ladies and gentlemen. Idealism has nothing to do with it. Has nothing to do with why members are so interested. They want to go to the electorate saying they did something to protect kids. Well of course they do. The question is not that the question is did they actually all things considered and within the constraints we have in this country do something to help kids. I was reminded that the recording does not pick us up unless I have a mic. Any questions here one directed to John and the other directed to Jim so I'll choose these two next. This is for John. It starts out by asking the question which I think is a well I'm not sure it says what is any money harmed is an easy question to answer unlike quantifying the impact of social media on society. Absent a randomized controlled trial for the actual. Is there any evidence of harm that would change your mind or influence your thinking about the regulation of social media. I just gave you the evidence right. I agree with that RCTs because causality is hard. The last two of the last three Nobel prizes in economics were given to people who had done fundamental work about causality because it's hard to understand social science. But I noted that a large study from England by Shabelsky and his colleagues had found that some subgroups of teams were in fact showed negative results. So I accept that as and there's other things too. You see now more and more survey experiments are being done and what you have to do. So I don't think that liberty beyond social media to offer that is and look that anyone believes anything you can do infinite harm to others and it shouldn't be regulated. The question is or in some way stopped because government does a lot of harm too. The question is what do we know how certain is it and how much over breath is my argument is an over breath here that ties directly into Supreme Court doctrine. I don't think I would like to we may think I mean we may agree that the law is what was it the law is a fool or something about this. It doesn't matter what we think about this over breath doctrine and first and laws about that is that strict scrutiny has to be applied here. It's going to be applied because that's what the court does and it already failed in an area where Congress clearly can legislate unprotected speech. So no I don't don't stay away from stereotypes. Yes I'm kind of a libertarian though the word libertarian is being used in ways that I make me want to repudiate. I'm a liberal just an older kind of liberal right. I'm rational. I'm not some maniac. So I believe that. What I'm pointing out to you is that real studies have shown that there's actually good and bad here and the problem with the law is that it sweeps everything up just as at the border everybody the people we don't want in and the people we want in are being kept out. That's the analogy. I'm not talking issues. I open borders open borders is an accusation it's not another one part of our Kato is supposedly open borders undertaking again these are words find out what the words mean find out what the methods are that's my appeal. And Jim this question is for you it asks you to consider a hypothetical if social media platforms were not by profit driven companies how do you think or do you think that would change the need for or type of government legislation. Well first of all they are and so you should really let's be honest about it these are the richest most powerful companies in the history of the United States and the world you should remember that it's actually one of the most interesting things and the work that I do is that somewhat of a David and Goliath situation given the scale of if you look at the sixth largest tech companies in the world now America's never had and the world never had companies with that level of power so the idea that they would become not for profit and not driven by profit motive is interesting and obviously very hypothetical and will not come to pass in our lifetimes but do I think that would change the nature of the platforms? I absolutely think it would change the nature of the platforms for sure because the fundamental business model particularly of the ad driven models that when I said to you you are the product remember that you are the product would dramatically change some of the balancing decisions that executives make but right now they make decisions that are based on one thing which is profit maximization for the companies and I deal with the people who run all of the big tech companies myself I would tell me that one of the most important things to understand about the behavior of the companies that's why I made certain references in my opening remarks about Elon for example or about Mark Zuckerberg or about Sundar at Google or Neil who just tug over from Susan Wojcicki at YouTube or Shosey who runs Tiktok is you have to look at the values and behavior of the people who run companies that's actually something I think is important to remember but the fundamental truth is these are the richest most powerful companies in the history of the world and the products that they build are not inherently safe and are not in the best interest of the public during the best interest of profit maximization in an antiquated advertising model so I think it's an interesting question it would change dramatically if the motive was something different and it's exactly why they need to be regulated because they're not going to do it on their own and if you think they're going to do it on their own then I'd look out at Lake Champlain and I'm going to tell you I'm going to sell you the Adirondack mountains after the show because it's likely I'll be able to do that as you're going to be able to run for a society a socially conscious social media platform where the profit motive is obviously what drives the business model How much do you want for it? I actually love the Adirondack mountain the first time I've seen him in a long time I don't think even he can I wanted to respond to just briefly we do have a model actually there are advocates that are making the case for that which is public utilities and what you will have is a company it'll be hard to say whether the company itself is still profit driven it will be regulated as a public utility is and the people argue for this are people that say it has all the characteristics of a public utility but the reason to have it as a public utility is because the content moderation the regulation of speech online is in fact done as biased against conservatives those are the people that want the public utility model so you can see if you go to a non-profit model angels aren't going to come down and run it it's going to be run by politicians and people, political people with incentives that are political in nature right this is the last question and I think it relates to John's remarks now if content regulation is necessary which entity or is any entity trustworthy enough to create this regulation that's an overly simple question guys by the way I am a con law professor so I'm resisting responding to strict scrutiny and John's sort of basic level of con law that you're talking about that's what I teach at Stanford I'm not going to get into the details of it because it's not a con undergraduate con law class here but the truth is this this is really not about content regulation this is about holding people liable for harm it's really a full stop it's really a tort issue if you're going to go to law school someday it's a tort issue it's a harm issue it's not about content regulation you hold people liable for the impact of their product in the same way that Boeing's being held liable in the same way that car manufacturers are held liable in the same way that that's how we balance harms and risks in society that's really going to go up in steroids now with the ad when I was at a conference last week with Sam Altman and Sacha Nadella and James Venyika from Google and Sacha Nadella runs Microsoft Sam's running open AI and James Venyika is that guy who oversees Google Google's AI this is fundamentally an issue of safety public health and how do we balance public health and safety with the best interests of society and a legitimate profit motive it's not a content regulation it's really a tort and harm experience and at the end of the day the best interest of the public are going to win out the fact that we have a dysfunctional congress in the United States and have had one for more than 20 years has made this much more complicated but at the end of the day we will prevail on this a common sense approach will prevail to social media and it will prevail with AI too with the benefits of this extraordinary technology and some of the extraordinary minds and human beings who built these remarkable companies but will have a far healthier and more prosperous society and we will also have a democracy preserved because when I look at some of the students in the audience who are the age of my kids what I'm worried about for you is not just your fears that you won't be able to buy a house and that you're worried about what the economy is going to look like in tenure you have a democracy that still operates in the way that I've had the privilege of living in for nearly six decades and so I would tell you that these issues are really really important in that level that's why this is such an important discussion to have and at the end of the day common sense will prevail I disagree with the idea that it doesn't involve content now on the future or content moderation on the face of it about public health and the effects of social media on teenagers however notice the actual way you regulate the way you regulate is you have to give a company a charge to prevent harm which means preventing them from seeing content at the government's behest not at the company's behest but at the government's behest you step in between people who are communicating with one another now that may be good, may be bad but it is certainly about the suppression of content or really censorship of content at the behest of government that's why the First Amendment is involved that's why the earlier attempts at regulation were also struck down it's just that you can't regulate any other way except I guess you could vaguely threaten the companies which might be the way you end up but doing it that's what happens that's my argument we disagree there have been no major cases this is what I teach there's been no case struck down in the last 30 years we wrote the video game law the video game law and so there's not been struck down what has not happened there's basically been blanket immunity given to the platforms the way they're going to be held responsible guys is once that immunity is removed they're going to be sued by the parents of people whose kids committed suicide or the people who bought fentanyl or ghost guns on those platforms once you remove that immunity which they got in 1996 that's like 30 years ago guys 30 years ago and that hasn't been updated they'll be liable for hundreds of millions of dollars per offense look at that way that the tort system works and that immunity is removed that's not a speech issue that's a tort issue that will be removed and when that is removed they will clean up their act because it will become too expensive for them to operate the way they're operating right now period full stop the only thing that has prevented that has been the complete dysfunction of congress and the incredible power and money of the lobbyists for six or seven giant companies will be doing that soon and that will be a very good day for everybody in this room for the state of Vermont and for the people of the United States of America so let me give an example of what I'm concerned about here with 230 it comes from my meta experience so somewhere there's a contract that probably prevents me from telling you this so don't tell anyone I told you this um my concern here is that once you get rid of 230 as I said you give the company remember incentives are very important about predicting what's going to happen rhetoric is not incentives are on the ground you give the companies if you get rid of 230 you give them every incentive to take down not only things that they can be said to do harm about presumably that might be doing harm now let me give you my example there was a case in the oversight board in which a young person had been taken down and it goes exactly to the drug cases where Jim will talk about fentanyl obviously this is a drug called ketamine which you may have heard of also the post that was taken down was from a young man who was not selling ketamine it was not even advocating its use what he was doing was talking about his own personal experience with it that he had used it that he had had lots of problems with depression in fact the depression had been debilitating and that he had taken some ketamine started to use it and he had gotten better and he said something like well I don't know if this is true or not but I just wanted to communicate my experience with it I guarantee you no 230 that post goes down and stays down look guys I run a platform with 200 million users on it I'm responsible for what's on that platform you run Facebook? no that's 2 billion users I run common sense media which has 200 million users on our platform I'm responsible for the content on that platform I'm actually liable too for the content on that platform and we try to moderate that platform you probably know it for movie, TV video game reviews etc etc people put stuff on there all the time because of the scale of the platform I'm actually happy to be responsible for the content on that platform and by the way we do have to moderate it we do have to hire we do spend a lot of money overseeing that but that's my duty even though it's a not for profit so this is not that complicated folks this is not complicated at all and I will tell you I'm going to end on a very optimistic note because the public thoughtfully balancing all the things that we've talked about today and as John has articulated really thoughtfully is on our side it's clear what's gone on it's clear what we've seen when you had a completely wild west environment for 20 years in social media the damages are very significant the benefits are also significant when you limit the damages as we are capable of doing and will do in the months and years ahead we will all be better off and so I actually think that we're moving in a very good direction I think we're going to have a very difficult election year in 2024 because it's going to be that we are not going to get most of this done in the United States or in countries around the world before the election plays out and we're going to see a lot of really scary stuff happen and if I were a young people I'd really be thinking of a young person like many of the students are worried about that but at the end of the day we will prevail on this and we will come up with a balanced approach to social media that will enhance the benefits and limit the massive harms that we're currently dealing with thank you very much and speaking of limits I think we'll end it there thank you all for coming