 Just a couple of weeks ago, the Senate Judiciary Committee dragged the heads of meta-tiktok in X to Washington to charge them with exploiting children by allegedly addicting them to social media that sexually harms them, drives them to eating disorders, and even kills them. The Spanish Inquisition Vibe of the proceedings reached a crescendo when Republican Senator Josh Hawley demanded that Mark Zuckerberg apologize to the families of children for the harm supposedly caused by Facebook and pay compensation to them out of his personal fortune. Would you like to apologize for what you've done to these good people? But is social media really that bad for kids? And is the solution being pushed by Democrats and Republicans alike? Universal age verification for all users of the internet? Even technically feasible without shredding the First Amendment, destroying privacy, and creating major security issues? The answer is a resounding no. According to Shoshana Weissman, director of digital media at R Street, a free market think tank, and author of The Fundamental Problems with Social Media Age Verification Legislation. Here is the reason interview. Wish, Shoshana Weissman. Shoshana Weissman, thanks for talking to me. Thank you so much for having me. So we're talking right at the start of February. And two interesting things related to this question of social media and its effects on kids and the need to verify the ages of who's using social media, et cetera, just happened. One is that the state of Utah, which had passed a law mandating age verification, pulled it after being challenged or threatened with lawsuits from a couple of groups. And the other is there was just a spectacular Senate hearing about trying to protect kids from online exploitation and things like that that ended up at one point in a series of shouting matches, including Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg arguing with Josh Hawley, a senator. What was your sense of that Senate hearing and does it encapsulate something important about the way this general debate happens? For people who watch a lot of Senate hearings in general, you'll know that they're getting a little bit less professional. They'll ask them yes or no questions that are impossible to answer if you understand that nuance as a part of law. It's really disappointing, and I've watched a lot, but this was the worst I've seen. It was just so wildly unprofessional and about a serious issue, so it should have been professional. I don't blame the audience for tearing, but I blame the senators and Senate staff for not stopping that from happening. Hawley is often unprofessional, and he was extremely unprofessional, demanding that Zuckerberg pay for the people who have face harm here. It was just so bizarre. And then he said after that, like he said, apologize, he got him to apologize, and then he's like, well, did you compensate them? Yeah, he's like, he had Zuckerberg apologize, and he's like, oh, did you compensate them? How about you compensate them from your own money? It was just weird, really, and that doesn't solve anything. He's not solving any problems. He's not approaching the issue with any seriousness. I mean, people say this a lot, that it's all about sound bites, but you could really, really see that's all this was. Zuckerberg did not come off well in that either, did he? No, I didn't care for how he came off. I think he could have done better in the hearing at a lot of points. I mean, I don't think that companies are perfect by any means, but Zuckerberg, I think, came off kind of strange at some point. I feel like he should just always appear in the geisha makeup, the sunscreen, you remember from a couple of years ago, he was surfing or paddle boarding or something, and he just had like white sunscreen on, and that was a good look for him. I think it's good sunscreen. There's passed a certain point, you get the diminishing returns I found out, so SPF 70 is a lie, so he did the right thing with the sunscreen. Okay, well, that's good to hear that. He's got his priorities straight. What about the Utah law? What does it say that Utah, and this was touted widely, and I'm old enough to have flashbacks to the 90s constantly, but this is not a right or left issue. Both Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals and progressives are talking about stopping the internet from exploiting children in all sorts of ways, including giving them material that they really like so much, that they go on the internet rather than do their homework, but Utah was applauded for this law. And then it got challenged, or kind of, it was going to be challenged, and they yank an age verification law. It's really, really bad. Everyone, everyone warned them, the senators, the governor. I love the governor. I adore Spencer Cox, but it's crazy to me that he's behind, like he's getting behind this stuff because it's so unconstitutional. I mean, you can have your policy disagreements, but this is objectively very, very unconstitutional. How was it unconstitutional? Oh, man, so many ways. So First Amendment, right to anonymous speech. If you have age verification, you have face scans, you have to show your government ID. I actually just submitted seven pages of comments. I have a really fun life on the new proposed rules to accompany the law before I found out that it was going to be pulled. So I'm like, oh, I have this already. I'll submit it basically. And if not to Utah, it'll come up again. Yeah, so it'll be useful. And they said, oh, you can use the last four digits of your social. You can require people to scan their faces and get their government IDs, just really invasive stuff. I mean, America is in a really bad cybersecurity position. Everyone is hacked all the time. But even if it wasn't, if you're submitting that stuff online, you have reason to believe your speech is no longer anonymous because it's the government forcing that that harms our right to anonymous free speech, which has been upheld many, many times at the Supreme Court. It's understood that's one right. Also, there's a compelled speech issue that's a little bit smaller. But if you're going to go online and say, hey, I'm not happy in my marriage, I want to see what people know about divorce, marriage counseling. And then you think your spouse might realize who you are posting about that. You're not going to want to do that. You think you have a rare disease or HIV or something. You might not want to have your name. So that is part of the larger question is that in trying to childproof the internet, we end up shutting down all kinds of speech that adults, very few people would challenge that. But again, to go back to the 90s, there was the Simpsons had a running gag about in almost every conversation, somebody would shout, will someone please think of the children? And we've kind of come back to that in internet kind of discussions because people are sour about social media. Everybody's down on Facebook and Instagram and whatever, Twitter. These are hellscapes that are killing kids, exploiting kids and making the rest of us miserable. So it seems like the scope for regulating them and the speech and the content and the business models have really changed. And this is really where the social media age verification push is coming from. And people like Brian Schatz, the Senator from Hawaii has joined and a bunch of other people in the Democratic Party or even going to the Progressive Left have joined with Republican conservatives to say this is a good thing. And let me, before we go into your work on it, Schatz is a big fan of the, and I'm just trying to get the actual name of it, the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act. And this is kind of similar to all of this stuff going on. It would set a minimum age of 13 to use social media apps and would require parental consent for 13 through 17 year olds. It would also prevent social media companies from feeding content using algorithms to users under the age of 18. So that's kind of the legal landscape that's playing out at the federal level and at the local level. You have written a series of pieces over the past year that are grouped at R Street's website, the fundamental problems with social media age verification legislation. I wanna ask you as a starting point, a lot of this legislation is premised on the idea that children, people under 18, are suffering vast obvious measurable harms from being online. Is that really incontrovertible or is that a question? It's definitely a question, especially because the evidence is mixed. And just, I mean, kids are individual. Some kids use tools while some kids don't. And it depends on the tool too. You always have to work with your kids to figure out what's healthy for them and what's not. Some kids, they're doing unhealthy things on social media and that's parenting. The government can't solve that. Someone using social media for five hours might be building a business and showing local businesses here's how to put yourself out on social media or they might just be depressed and something else might be going on. But so much of the stuff going on right now resembles the video game debates, the TV debates. Kids should be probably behind screens less but that comes down to parenting and getting them engaged in other things. But there's definitely a mix. I mean, as a kid, I used social media to find out I had fibromyalgia. I only know that because I found an online forum where someone said, hey, you're getting sick all the time and you have endometriosis. You might have fibromyalgia. And I also started my career online like adding elected officials on Facebook which sounds funny now but that's actually how I started my career. And I'm terrified of closing the door behind me of saying to the next generation you can't make what you want out of life because elected officials want to treat you all the same. And that's just, that's really wrong to me. Yeah, and let's assume, you know, a number of major kind of psychological groups and whatnot have said that it is not clear that being on social media is harmful to young people. But let's pretend that it is. Okay, for the remainder of our conversation because you have written pretty powerfully about the fundamental problems with social media age verification legislation. And let's just start with part one of your series. The headline of the article is the technology to verify your age without violating your privacy does not exist. What are the, what do you mean? How do you know that? And what are the implications of that? Yeah, so I looked through it. I even had age verifiers reach out to me because they didn't like what I was saying. So I'm like, okay, tell me about your software. Tell me how it's different. They're like, oh, we'll just scan your face. What? So every time you want to post free speech online, you have to have your face scanned. And that's for everybody because this is kind of, it reminds me of when people say, well, you know what? If immigrants just carried their work papers with them, then we could, you know, we wouldn't have to worry about illegal immigration. And it's like when you require anybody to carry papers, everybody has to carry papers. Right, the way they find out if you're underage is by checking your age and your credentials. And basically the way that age verifier seemed to want to do this is some sort of government ID plus face scans. And it can't be a static picture. It has to be like a live picture. So every time you want to post free speech, criticizing the government, asking about marital problems, asking about disease, whatever it is, you're gonna have to have your government ID and the internet's gonna have to scan your face, which is really, really, really invasive because obviously a checkbox, people lie. Everyone lies with a checkbox. I don't lie. You're right. Yeah, everyone but me. Everyone but you. With government IDs or credit cards alone, you could just take your parents. Like there's a great Simpsons line where Bart's like, hey, Lees, is this dad's credit card number? And she's like, you know it is. You know, like kids memorize that stuff. And they would with government IDs if that was all that's required. Social security numbers, which are also not secure. Like they're leaked everywhere. So this, it just creates massive cyber risk. Like this isn't, none of these are safe. None of these protect your privacy. And this massive, massive risk all to verify age of children where parents could just not give them phones or give them phones with very, very limited access or block stuff on their computer. There's ways around this that put the parents in charge. One of the related issues, I mean, you also, in a different section, you write that if you are requiring this type of data to be put together and then it's gonna be in a database somewhere that foreign governments or enemies of America can get it because we're in a panic over TikTok, right? That every new dance craze goes directly to the Beijing basement of the Communist Party in China. So this obviously presents a massive risk because you're pooling data, which then is hackable. There's a related concept that you've written about called data minimization. How does that factor into this? I love data minimization. This is the kind of person I am now where like this excites me. Just less of your stuff online, less stuff you share the safer it is. So I don't always like that platforms require as much information as they do but sometimes they're doing it in pursuit of something like giving you a better product or whatever it is but forcing them to acquire this is nuts. And like you were saying with TikTok, in Utah, Governor Cox had said that he thought TikTok was a real security threat but his law would have required them to collect face scans and IDs and social security numbers. And whether you think other governments are an issue or our own is an issue, you should be like, hey, maybe we don't create this massive risk for other people to get our data. And that's part of data minimization. The less that you put out there that you share around, the less worry you have to have. It's a simple principle but it's a really important one when everyone is hacked constantly. Like I've been in so many data breaches, we all have. So what does that mean? Like when, and every once in a while, Google, which does a pretty good job of this but you know, you get notified that, okay, these passwords were involved in a data breach and things like that. What does it mean that we're being hacked all the time but it doesn't really seem to change what we do? Which is kind of bad. I think the society needs to figure it out a little bit more. But basically, people can log into your stuff so you should have two factor authentication. It's not perfect but if you have one of those code generators that's the best method and it stops people from logging into stuff. I know that people keep trying to log into my Instagram and then they'll email me saying, hey, if you wanna change your password, here's the link and they don't have access to my email so that's good. So I can handle it there. Yeah, American, I mean, world cybersecurity isn't a great place and all this stuff puts it in a worse place but you wanna try to make things safer in the environment we live in and that's good for two factor authentication, putting less of your information out there, especially sensitive stuff about your location. IDs are super sensitive, social security numbers. You really don't wanna share that with everyone. Although social security numbers, it's kind of amazing, this used to be, if you go back in the 50s and 60s, people mostly on the right, paranoid people who turned out to be kind of correct was that the social security number was gonna become effectively a national ID, et cetera, it's required everywhere and it's just, you can buy them by the boat load, right? Oh yeah, I think mine was leaked in the D.C. health like breach, so I'm screwed there like that's nothing for me and you can find databases of them online, unfortunately, pretty easily. Right, you have some of the articles that you've written talk about how age verification methods in their current forms threaten our First Amendment right to anonymity. You mentioned this a little bit, but go a little bit deeper on, I think on some level, those of us who remember our history classes from grammar school or read something about the Federalist papers, we understand that in a profound way, America was founded on anonymous speech. Yeah. But nobody likes anonymous speech now, right? Anonymous speech is bad, right? So why should we care about our right to anonymity? It terrifies me that there's so many lawmakers saying, oh, even Nikki Haley has said this. Oh, you know, every user should have to verify their identity online. Okay, cool, so we don't get whistleblowers anymore. No more whistleblowers, we're opposed to that. The Federalist papers like you're saying are anonymous. The NAACP, that their members were anonymous back when everyone hated black people and that was a really, really dark part of history, but thankfully the First Amendment protected them and they had a right to anonymous association and it's important for the same reason today, the government doesn't like when people disagree with it and sometimes you have to do so anonymously in order to avoid certain levels of scrutiny there and not to say you shouldn't be held accountable for your opinions or whatever, but anonymous speech has always been an important part of American history. And there's, I mean, like centuries basically of precedent saying, yes, we have the right to anonymous speech under the First Amendment, so if you infringe upon it, it's not saying you can never infringe upon it, but you have to have a really, really good reason, it has to be narrowly tailored and these means just aren't. It's fascinating to me, again, thinking back to the 90s, because I'm just seeing a lot, you know, the parallels are ominous and disturbing and ubiquitous, but AOL was popular, America Online, when it was on its move to becoming the largest ISP, its whole selling point was that, I mean, you could come up with a handle that was kind of your name or you could make something up and they really pushed back against attempts to crack the anonymity of their users and that was like, oh, you know, unlike CompuServe and Prodigy and a bunch of other places, which required your name on some level to be on every email you sent. AOL was great because it was anonymous. The history there is so interesting. I love Jeff Kossoff's book on anonymity. I learned so much through that. I did not realize the extent to which we have precedent here and also the way it worked with AOL trying to not unmask users or trying to protect users. I mean, the internet, I don't want to get too nerdy, but the internet history around the stuff is really, really fascinating about how big a deal it was back then and I think we're all, we all have maybe, we shirk a bit about like anonymous speech, but it is really important. Sure, some people use it wrong, but there are studies that show that some people actually use it better and they're using anonymity in actually really healthy ways. So our gut assumptions on it aren't always right. And again, there's this weird kind of hop skip and a jump from we have to protect children to adults can't engage in anonymous speech, right? Or that because your friend has a kid, you know, it's, and I wrote a piece for a reason about this in the late nineties called Child Proofing the World and one of the metaphors I use and I had young kids at the time was, you know, just because I have to child proof my house doesn't mean the world has to change everything because I have kids and that may sound callous, but it really isn't, you know? You also have talked about how the age verification methods threaten our First Amendment rights beyond anonymity. So how do they cut down on our free expression rights? So a big thing is chilling speech because you have the pure anonymity issue where you're actually not anonymous. And then even if you think you might not be anonymous, like, oh man, they took my ID, they took my face scan. Let's say their cybersecurity is immaculate. If you don't believe that, you're still not gonna wanna post the stuff that you would otherwise anonymously. So there's a chilling speech issue. Kids have First Amendment rights and most content on social media is like First Amendment protected in a way that would apply to kids too. Like it's not narrowly tailored just for the stuff that we kind of say kids maybe can't look at. It's really, really, really broadly tailored. There's also the First Amendment right for content to be seen by users. So people might think it's silly. Oh, Twitter doesn't have a right to be seen by people who wanna access it. Okay, well, what about someone criticizing the government? The government could just say, oh, well, they don't have the First Amendment right to be seen by people. And then you kind of see why that's a dangerous perspective and why it's not supported by First Amendment jurisprudence. There's a First Amendment right of parents who don't care about what their kids are doing online or are okay with what their kids are doing online to not have to deal with those barriers to speech. So it's just like up and down. It violates the First Amendment. One of the most powerful parts of your work in this series is simply the headline is age verification legislation doesn't do what legislators say it will. Yeah, I love it. Summarize that. It's exciting. So when I talk to people about age verification law, there's a lot of different issues they bring up. One is exploitation. Like they're worried about predators reaching out to children and that's very reasonable. There's also people worried about- Can I ask, how big is that though? Because this is also something, this is an old thing and if you grew up Catholic like I did my parents were always saying like, don't go into certain situations. They were mindful of threats to children within a kind of Catholic setting which later came to large public understanding or publicity but is the internet mostly a child exploitation racket or something? Definitely not mostly but it's there. There's definitely people who wanna try to do that stuff. And that's one, I mean, it's not to say the government doesn't have a role there but parents really do need to work with kids to make sure they understand the risk and what to say, what not to say. It's silly but when I was on Neopets and chatting with people, my dad was like, never tell them where you live. And I was like, ha ha, I'm saying I'm in Texas. They'll never know where I am which maybe that wasn't the most ingenious thing but it was still a good perspective to have to just be a little bit more careful about that stuff. But is the child exploitation or we hear a lot about sex trafficking and about child sex trafficking and it obviously happens and that is horrible and we need to figure out ways to minimize that or get rid of it completely but is there a reason to believe that child exploitation, however you define it is large and growing on the internet? I'm not sure exactly, the reports are up but I know that a lot of it is duplicative which is good though that there's more reports of the same thing. That's not an issue. It's just hard to measure with a lot of unlawful content in general. I also think I'm not sure about how sexting like for kids rose or where it's at but I think that that did make it harder especially when like online girlfriends became a thing that you really didn't know who was behind the screen. So I think it is something to come obviously to come back and I'm not sure exactly how it's growing but there does seem to be somewhat of an increase on it from especially from kids who don't know what to predict who never lived through the Nigerian Prince era like that kind of stuff. So but you say age verification legislation want to what legislators say it well? What do legislators say it well and how does it fall short? So what I was saying was that there's the big reasons that legislators and other people just wanna stop kids from using social media is exploitation. Another issue is that they just don't want kids posting and they think that they'll become addicted like there's the addiction side of things and then the last piece is they don't want them to access content that they don't want them to whether it's liberal content or too conservative content but here's the thing. None of these laws prevent kids from viewing anything they just prevent kids from posting. So even for underage users when they're like oh no kids under 13 or you have to have age verification in either case it doesn't stop them from viewing the content. So if you think they're addicted to scrolling that's not gonna solve anything and if you think that they shouldn't be viewing the content there it also doesn't solve anything. So they think it's key or they'll say it's kicking kids offline. But really you don't have to log into a lot of these platforms to see stuff. I don't ever log into Reddit and I read constantly on Reddit. TikTok you don't need to log in. It makes it a little easier for you. And if we may, and I, the camera men are the ones who gave me this information. Not myself but on Pornhub you don't have to log in to view information. Oh yeah, yeah that's funny. That's a good point but it's true. Like when you don't have to log in and they're not blocking you from access to these sites in the homepage way or in the clicking through way. Tons of these sites you don't have to log into and you're still viewing the content from any sites you'd like to ones you don't. So they're saying it's gonna stop kids from using these social media without parental approval but it really doesn't. One of the other things that you take issue with which is kind of stunning because a lot of regulation it's supposed to be about content but then it ends up moving into business models and this was certainly true of attacks or proponents of net neutrality. Ultimately we're trying to say that phone companies and ISPs had to do business a particular way. So it's really kind of a business issue. A lot of this legislation says, okay kids under 13 can't use social media we're gonna ban them somehow but then it will say kids under 18 sites can't serve up content to them using algorithms. And algorithms are kind of like they've replaced Satan as like the vague sinister ubiquitous spirit that is threatening our world. What, why is it wrong to tell websites or service providers or whatever? Oh, you can't use algorithms in general and then why is it misguided for you can't use algorithms for kids under 18. So there have been a few less popular proposals that like completely banned algorithms. You can't do that. Time ordered is an algorithm. So it's like, hey guys, the only way to keep people safe is raw data. You must show them raw data. It's ridiculous. Be like looking at an RSS. Yeah, exactly. No, even an RSS is ordered. That's scary. That's gonna be harmful. I mean, that would just turn us all schizophrenic. We would be like in a beautiful mind where it would just be like an endless display of data floating around. And they don't understand how algorithms work. And then it's like, okay, well maybe time ordered is okay. And then you have to remind them, okay, what about reverse time ordered? Oh, I guess that's okay too. It gets really, really silly. Even if they don't wanna target kids with, you know, through algorithms for their interests. So if a kid likes soccer, you can't show him soccer stuff. That's stupid. That's really stupid. If a kid wants to learn more about math, you can't target based on their interests in math. That's, it's just ridiculous. I mean, I think people way overestimate the issues with algorithms. I know one issue is that if you're into unlawful stuff or bad stuff, that it'll show you more of that too. And I think it's good that platforms are working on mitigating that. Cause even oddly enough, on Tosh point, oh, there's a segment about that, about the series of videos that were like, like basically showing young girls doing cutesy things. And then you realize it wasn't made for other young girls and stuff. So of course YouTube should not show people those kinds of content when they realize what it's really about. Even just from a normative standpoint. But in most cases, the algorithm just knows I like marmots. So here are marmots, Shashana. And, you know, there was an earlier, this is going back maybe a decade, there was a fear of, you know, I started out watching puppy videos and then 15 minutes later I've signed up for ISIS, right? And most studies that looked into that did not actually bear out the idea that there's a quick or even long-term radicalization algorithm that is being widely applied or used or people are falling into. It's people seek out the stuff they want to seek out and the algorithm just helps them seek it out more. Yeah, it is fascinating to me the moment that the algorithm kind of became this villain that kind of divorced from the people, mostly end users who are demanding or wanting certain types of content. Yeah, and it's math. Algorithms are math. When you're mad at it, you're mad at math. And it's silly. Well then I'm anti-algorithm now. Yeah, I mean I don't like math either, so that's fine. I cashed out I think Algebra II in trigonometry like the Reagan era. So you write also that regimes that run age verification through the government would allow prosecutors to make children federal criminals if they lie about their age. Oh, this was fun. So I forgot about this one just because it was only in one bill and that was the Shats bill, the Protecting Kids online. And I do respect Shats a lot. I think he's trying to do the right thing. And I think he's, I don't think he's doing it right, but I think he's trying. And a lot of what I've seen that he's saying, I kind of respect more than I do from other elected officials, but it's really bad. I mean, when you run, when you lie to the government, like that can be a federal crime. So I looked into this and it's whether- So if you say I am not a robot and you are a robot when you're checking a- I wonder, I wonder if you can prosecute a robot. The robots, you know? Somebody's gotta take care of them, they're a problem. He thought maybe as a better way to protect data that it would be better for the government to handle age verification. But that means if kids lie to that entity, whether it's to run through a government contractor or an agency, you can be a federal criminal because you're lying to the government. And sure, we don't prosecute kids a lot, but like government sometimes starts enforcing stuff that it didn't use to enforce. And you don't wanna add a new law to the books that makes it possible for kids to become federal criminals for trying to log into YouTube. That's not wise policy. Right. At the same time, services should be free to kind of demand whatever they want. Sure, yeah. All right. Yeah, no, I agree with it. I don't like when they want a lot of my information, but if that's what they want, they can suffer the business consequences. I was, you know, for people watching this on video, they may have seen I was drinking out of a 7-Eleven cup and I went to 7-Eleven to get coffee this morning and they asked for my phone number. And I was like, no, I don't wanna give your phone number. And I was going to walk away, like if they were like, you can't buy coffee unless you give your phone number. And they were like, okay. So, yeah, it's interesting though, like what, you know, and I understand why they're doing that. And I also understand the power of getting more personal information, you know, it does allow the internet. I mean, one of the things that sites can do more than regular businesses, it's tailor more stuff directly to you. But, you know, that's a negotiation. Totally, yeah, and you have some say there and it's not mandatory. And some companies realize that users don't want that so they try to step away. With age verification systems, you mentioned Neopets. My younger son, I guess, was really big into Club Penguin, which was- Oh, that's fun, yeah. Yeah, and it no longer exists. I believe it was, it ultimately was owned by Disney or something like that, but it was kind of a social media, you know, a walled garden, you know, a very walled garden for kids just to do stuff and interact and have, you know, online adventures. Were there services that did or do a really good job, you know, that are directed towards kids that protect that? And, you know, are there examples to be learned there from how we might change the way kids interact with the internet? Yeah, I like Neopets a lot. I actually made a few internet friends and my friends were into it and like I forget the names of them and they're dead now, they're all dead. I like haven't fed them in so long. They're like, I have, I haven't even dug their grave. You better hope they're dead. Yeah, oh my gosh, I hope they're dead. They're gonna be really angry, yeah. But I like the way Neopets operated. I always felt pretty safe on there. I'm sure they could have actually done some more nudges, like, hey, remember not to give up personal information to strangers or whatever, but overall they did good in Club Penguin is a really good example because I remember the big trend of trying to get banned from Club Penguin, but like they did a good job of banning people being inappropriate and then it became a meme. So it was a bit of a Barbara Streisand effect. I know Instagram wanted to do Instagram kids and then everyone flipped out over it so they couldn't, but I actually think that's a good idea. Some like safer areas where you still warn kids about stuff but maybe there's a little bit less risk for them. I think that's like still. And I guess Amazon has, you know, on Kindle fires and stuff like they have certain kinds of, you know, again, they're kind of like playgrounds, right and playgrounds are good because kids are safe in them but then they also can draw creeps, right? Because hey, there's only kids there but why is it, what's the role of the companies here? You know, broadly people who are offering goods and services, have they fallen down on their job to, you know, kind of proactively preempt this type of legislation? You know, or what do they need to be doing better? Yeah, I think the big thing is that they should be coordinating to make parental controls easier. Genuinely, I think that's the big lesson here. I'm not sure it would have stopped the legislation even but I know parents are sometimes overwhelmed by all the choices but it would be nice if parents had like one set of controls that made it a little bit easier because you can't have device level filters, platform level filters, app store filters but it would be nice to give something parents, to parents that's a little bit easier here just to manage, just to show them how stuff works because just like with any technology, it gets complex. Like I'm online way too much so I know how all this stuff works but make it easier for parents. I'm not sure that companies have exactly failed but they really could be doing better. And part of this is a kind of a public relations war because you know, I know in the, again going back to the 90s when cable TV didn't really become a fully national phenomenon until the late 80s and the early 90s and then under Bill Clinton, Janet Reno, the attorney general went on a Jihad against cable TV because it was showing too much sex and violence and it's like, you know, it obviously wasn't but you know, out of these sets of concerns came things like the V-chip which was a technology mandated into every new TV and then the idea was that we're gonna rate TV programs and then parents will set their TVs to certain levels so the kids can't plug it, nobody used it. And I guess my point is that there's nothing industry could have done. That was a tidal wave coming because but they could do, you know, it seems like companies now could do a better job of combating the negativity but they seem, they're part of the problem, aren't they? Excuse me, both in terms of not, you know, not seeming to care, maybe, maybe not but also colluding with the government. I mean, one of the things that is very different now than the 90s is in the wake of revelations about Twitter and Facebook and other companies really not just relying on the government or rolling over for the government but asking the government to say, hey, will you moderate our content? Yeah, it's disgusting. I mean, it's regulatory capture and they know what they're doing violates the First Amendment but it benefits their business. I do understand on a level like you're a business like your job isn't always to fight for freedom but at the very least you shouldn't be proactively fighting against freedom. I get if government pressures you too much you might have to roll over a bit but rolling over is different than what a lot of these companies are doing. I was very grossed out by like how Snapchat and Facebook were just like, oh please regulate us and put it sort of on other people, not exactly us and it's just silly. Snapchat, I also personally have never had a lot of respect for. They used to tell politicians to go on Snapchat and that's where the kids are. They knew that's not where you're gonna reach people for politics. That was just not ethical business. Although, you know, it's interesting Snapchat which is bigger than Twitter substantially it doesn't get drawn into these battles as much I think partly because seemingly nobody over 25 is on it. Right, right. So it's bizarre because who the hell knows there could be like, you know, World War III happening on Snapchat and everybody would be like, no, we have to look at TikTok. Yeah, I mean TikTok's even pretty recent for a while just like Twitter, Facebook, those were the, I mean it was really Twitter and Facebook. And then Instagram once, you know. Yeah. Do you buy into, you are a woman, right? Or you identify as a woman, you present as a woman. Instagram has gotten a lot of heat partly because of reports that were leaked from within Facebook saying, okay, yeah, we have a problem here with certain types of, you know, adolescent female image issues. Yeah. Do you buy that? Or what do you do with that? Is that a serious threat to the idea that free speech should dominate the internet? So what's wild to me is people flip out over this. Well, as a kid, all my friends are eating disorders, every friend, and it wasn't because of Instagram, it was because of models and magazines and TV. Like there were not attractive. And maybe we suggest parents. Yeah, yeah. Who have a lot to say about what their kids look like and how they eat. Oh, totally. Yeah, I mean like we were all always worried about being thin enough. And social media didn't exist then, it was all because of the images we were shown. Whereas now there's a lot of heavier women on like Instagram who look great and like they're showing, hey, you don't have to be perfect. It's not about weight and like cellulite's okay. And I have a bunch of them in my- Cellulite is aspirational. Yeah, exactly. Like stretch marks, acne, stuff like that. And it's actually really nice to see that there's girls showing, hey, if you look like I do, like here's how to dress, here's how to feel good about yourself. It's fascinating, I feel like I'm really just in a 90s loop in this conversation. And that's my problem because I'm approaching 90 as well as having lived through it. But one of the great celebrating celebratory points of the 90s was the end of the mainstream. And particularly there was a lot of discussion about ideals of female beauty. You know, ideals of male beauty don't get the same kind of attention. But in both cases, they expanded vastly. So instead of saying, okay, you can be Raquel Welsh or Twiggy, you know, it's like, no, there's an infinite gradient of beauty and of being comfortable with yourself. And we seem to be occupying that world in reality now. And people are like, we gotta shut this down. Something's gone terribly wrong. Yeah, I mean, Instagram's tried to get rid of a lot of like the eating disorder stuff. But there's a lot of like really good, healthy content. There's unhealthy content too. But the mix is way better than it was when I was a kid. When every, like if there was a heavy woman on TV, like everyone noted that she was heavy. And like that was like that. That's a joke, right? Yeah, that's something, yeah. And like, and it's also everyone at the same body shape. Like they didn't have many curves and the way they did had to be, like it had to be Britney Spears or nothing. You couldn't have too much of a waist and you couldn't have too much of a butt. But now on online, I mean, it's really proliferated all different kinds of women showing like, oh, look how I'm beautiful. I think that's really nice. Do you think perhaps that's the problem? Is that, it's not that certain new forms of hegemonic body types are shown, but it's like, no, that actually anybody can do anything. And that's what's freaking people out. Oh, I'm sure that there's a level of that of like, oh, it's not like I was when I was a kid. I think there's a real aspect of that in here. But in general, it just baffles me that everyone's worried about body positivity online when that wasn't a thing when I was growing up. Like every young girl was worried about being thin enough from the time we're like eight years old, all their friends talk about being thin. And I'm sure that there's still issues like that, but the people they have to look up to are a lot broader. I just have to think that a piece of this is people not understanding that or people thinking like, this is different from when I was a kid, so it's scary. Yeah. One of the other things you write about is age verification laws don't exempt VPN traffic. But that traffic can't always be detected. Explain what a VPN is and why these are important. So this took like a week of research. I don't, I'm not, I mean, I'm a nerd, but I'm not this kind of nerd. So people can use VPNs to make it. And that's a virtual private network. Yeah, thank you, which I will always forget what advanced, but I just think VPN, basically to make it seem like they're in a different place. So me and DC, I could be like, oh, I'm in Iceland or I'm in Utah. And this is used, you know, the criminal use case is like, I wanna watch Netflix, US Netflix, a US Netflix feed in Australia. So I use a VPN, Netflix thinks it's streaming to me in the US, but I'm actually where I'm in a country where that content might not be available. Yeah, or do evade various laws, stuff like that. And the positive thing that one of the things that we try, you know, everybody talked about when VPNs happen, it meant that if you're a political person in China or in Iran or whatever, you can use VPNs in order to actually kind of access the internet and speak freely. Totally, yeah, there's a lot of great use cases, like to evade bad government and oppressive government. Right, and then also just like hackers and advertisers and things like that, like where I get to open up like a little private space on the internet from which to work. Yeah, and right now it's not, the case isn't anonymity that the normal person uses it for, it's like Netflix, it's definitely Netflix. Or it's like just to try to avoid a little bit extra tracking, you're not trying to be anonymous, you're just trying to have less stuff. Right, you're more in control. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and I've noticed too, VPNs are something that went from being kind of celebrated, in my experience with it, it was celebrated because it was, oh, this is how we're gonna help people in authoritarian countries be able to find freedom in the internet and speak to evade what used to be called the Great Firewall of China, stuff like that. Then it became, okay, this is kind of cool because I can watch Netflix anywhere around the world, like from the US feed, and now it is VPNs. The only reason to do that is to engage in kind of criminal or sexually perverse behavior. Yeah, exactly. And meanwhile, like my friend's fiance is a normal guy, like he doesn't do politics and stuff, he's a trainer. And he likes VPNs because he's just like, I don't want stuff tracking me. So that's the normie use of it in America. Okay, so these age verification laws don't exempt VPNs. Why is that a problem? So you can detect a lot of VPNs, not all, but you can detect like a chunk of VPNs and realize, oh, okay, this is a VPN. So in those cases, if you're like, if you're in Utah and you're a social media company that operates there, what you would have to do to comply with the law is say, you're using a VPN, we need to verify your age. I know this is just a Utah law, but to be on the safe side, in case you're in Utah trying to get around the law, we have to verify your age. That would violate California law, because in California, if you treat VPN traffic differently, you're in violation of the law. So impossible compliance at that level. Let's say you really can't detect it, like you're using acceptable methods. And I talked to different VPN blockers and VPN providers, and they basically said, you're not gonna be able to detect all VPN traffic. So let's say I'm in Utah, they're supposed to verify my age, and they think I'm in Arkansas, or maybe some place without one of these laws. Maybe I'm in Maine. But so it appears that I'm in Maine, I'm really in Utah. I get around the law, they don't verify my age, and I'm a child. In that case, the social media company that failed to verify my age would be liable. That's nuts, it's impossible to comply with that. And there's just this sense of, oh, sure, you can figure it out or something. But no, even worse, the law applies to Utah residents. How the heck do you know someone's a Utah resident? You literally have to verify everyone's age, because if a child in Utah is in DC now, and logging on, well, the IP address is DC, or the DC area, because IPs aren't exact either. So they don't verify the age, and now they're liable. You create just absolutely impossible compliance. And to drive the point home, too, with Netflix, they fail to detect a lot of VPNs. Netflix has massive incentives, because they're licensing agreements with various companies and various shows and stuff. Basically, it's really bad for them if people can get around these. So that's why they blogged VPNs, to make sure that they're upholding their licensing agreement. So if even those guys can't do it, then how the heck are all these social media companies gonna be able to do it when the incentive is even higher to use VPNs to get around these laws? Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about R Street, and the place that you work, and your journey to what you do, and how you think. What is R Street? So R Street's a free market think tank. We were founded on insurance policy, which is fun. I actually really enjoy talking flood insurance now, but we do everything from energy to cybersecurity, tech policy, obviously, licensing reform, a lot of justice reform. I love my job. It's a lot of fun. What, when you say free market, what does that mean? So a lot of people think libertarian, but we're not always libertarian. We don't mind government if it solves a problem, narrowly tailored and all that, or if the government's already involved with something, we're not gonna let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We're fine with incremental reforms, and we're fine with turning a bad system into a better one. What's a place where, I also, by the way, I don't think all libertarians are necessarily, are anarchists or something. The government is illegitimate in any form, wherever it appears. I certainly don't feel that way. What's a place where government is working well, where the kind of government regulations or structures in place are delivering a good product or service? That's a very good question. And I don't mean that. This isn't a gotcha, I'm just like, yeah. No, I think that government really does have a role in things. I just don't think it often executes. Well, like with cybersecurity, I think there's legitimate roles for government. I just don't know that it's doing well. There's all different standards across different agencies. It doesn't help business know what it should be doing. It even sometimes creates adverse incentives not to report breaches. So we wanna fix that. We wanna make sure that people feel comfortable reporting breaches and that maybe even if they're penalized that we're not harming them for telling the truth there. In justice reform, I mean, we need police and we need that kind of stuff, but there's ways it could be working better. So we like justice reform, we like bail reform. And there are a lot of places experimenting with different models to figure out what works better, but we have important rights that are often violated by police. We wanna try to stop that and give police the tools they need. Does it seem when you think about the whole suite of what our street is talking about? And considering it's free market, not libertarian, but broadly the free market groups, in many ways issues that were not being talked about 20 years ago en masse or 30 years ago, things like occupational licensing reform, things like zoning reform, certain types of things like that. This seems to be like a kind of golden age because the older models of how things worked, that might in zoning, it's like about 100 years old and it's contemporary form in America, occupational licensing is really exploded after World War II. These are being seen as useless or whatever goods they might have provided, they're really choking down the economy as we live today. Is do you think that's accurate, that there's reasons to be very optimistic about a certain types of policy reform change? Oh yeah, it's been crazy to see the broad interest in licensing reform from everyone across the political spectrum and they're excited about it. Like when I go to Congress to talk about it, they're like, yeah, let's talk licensing reform. That's crazy, I love it. Or even energy permitting reform, it's really exciting that that's a thing and they might be messing it up a little bit in Congress. Well, and it's good too. I know like with occupational licensing, one of the things is always that like, oh, in Ohio, you have to do 2,400 hours of barber college, but you only have to get like six hours of training to be a cop. And nobody responds to that by saying, we should make the cops do 2,400 hours. Like it's more like, okay, we just need to rethink how we license and certify people and whether or not, in many cases, whether or not that's a role for the state or is it for private organizations and things? Yeah, I mean, I just love that there's so many elected officials interested in this. I mean, Governor Ducey and I in Arizona, we became friends because of this because he was really big into licensing reform and we hit it off and we've been friends for like seven years because of it, which is just such a funny thought to have that like there's elected officials like really, really interested in narrow regulatory reform. And when do you think you'll be able to get him into an only fans account? Oh, I'm working on it. Yeah, okay, that's the next step. I can't even get him to post pictures of his dog and he has a really cute dog. He's like, oh no, that's not my brand. And I'm like, do you have a golden one? It's not his brand. Oh, I thought you were like, he was afraid it was going to show up on a fetish side or something like that, but. Is there a generational component to the conversations that our street is involved in and things like tech policy and online policy? Because there are always many battle lines being drawn in society and in American society, but a big one now is kind of boomers versus millennials. And then Gen Z, which numerically is about the same size as millennials who are about the same size as boomers and even Gen X is pretty close. Gen Z obviously hates millennials more than they hate boomers because they're like sibling rivalry or something. But what are the generational aspects of these things? And at that tech hearing or the child expectation hearing we heard, there's always these moments when people like Lindsey Graham who clearly has never dialed a telephone or used a cell phone or been online or driven his own car for decades is railing about technology. And it's just kind of like, this is like an okay boomer moment where it's like just get lost. But it's not simply like, it's not that easy, right? It's not just old people are the problem and they got to get out of the way for young people. How do these issues of regulatory control of common use media play out? So it's actually really varied across issues. One actually interesting thing is that with licensing reform, it's very Gen X and younger are more interested in it. Anyone older than that, not that they're not, it's just not their thing. These like fun, in my word, fun, narrow regulatory reforms. But with tech policy, I mean the lines are all over. Like Ron Wyden is one of the best people on this and I adore Ron Wyden. Ron Wyden, the Oregon Senator is one of the authors of section 230 which you mentioned Jeff Kasev. He's obviously somebody that we know and whose work we respect in common. Write a book about section 230 as well as anonymous speech and I'm most recently defending misinformation. So he, you know, I may, I'm just very curious to see where he goes next. Oh, I know. He keeps ruining things though because when he writes about it, it becomes a thing. And I'm like, Jeff stop writing. But Ron Wyden, Ron Wyden is what in his 70s, I think. I think so, yeah. And he's older, but he's really smart and he knows what he's doing and he's thoughtful and I don't always agree with him but I get where he's coming from. But then you have younger members like Holly who is atrocious. I mean, he's not even trying. There's other younger members who just don't know what they're doing. I actually once had a meeting with a staffer for Madison Cawthorne on licensing and he's like, yeah, so we wanna force the states to do what we want on licensing. And I was like, hey, a lot of constitutional issues here, a lot of functional issues. He's like, yeah, but we just wanna force this. And I'm like, okay, this isn't gonna work out. But it's not a young or old thing. It's how deep are you gonna get into the issue thing? There's members who are more serious and less serious on this stuff. And it's really just not an age thing. Yeah. At Reason, we, again, in the 90s and beyond, we used to talk about the real axis being kind of control and choice. Are you more in favor of control and choice? And I guess that still exists somewhat. Related to that is the sense, I guess politically, politics are a lagging indicator of where we are as a society of, this is kind of axiomatic for me. And we've gotten to a point where neither the Republican nor the Democratic Party, they win a majority or a recent election because the other party had just been in control. And then people are like, oh, I don't want that. Here, we'll try this. And then I don't want that. And there's a real breakdown of consensus, it seems, in many aspects. And you see that in presidential elections that tend to be very close. You see that in control of different parts of Congress going back and forth and things like that. Is that what is really being expressed in these debates over how do we control, like nobody is saying, oh, we got to control network TV anymore because network TV doesn't seem to be the thing where the arguments are happening. That's not where the battles are. And they don't even really talk about cable that way anymore. Now it's social media. And is that really what is being talked about without being acknowledged as such is that my side can't control the conversation. And so we want to figure out ways to do that. I don't, you mean. One thing I'll actually, which I wouldn't have thought a few years ago, but I'll push back on the control versus choice thing because some of the best regulatory reformers in general are some of the worst people on social media regulation, which I don't fully understand, but I think it gets to this point too, where I think the bigger dynamic is just moral panic, that people are freaking out and then they lose their principles and their sense on certain things, which is why some of the people I adore the most, like I love Governor Spencer Cox in Utah. He's done great, great things, but he's really, really wrong here. What is he good at when you say he's done great, great things? What are those things? Just every little thing. He's a very good governance guy. He pushed for a lot of Utah State government people to be able to work from home to save money and to make it easier on families, and that's some nice comments and stuff, and he does a lot like that. He's great on licensing reform. His first executive order was, we're gonna do licensing reform, and now the Utah Department of Commerce has a guy whose whole job is figuring out the best way to make licensing work, where it's working, where it's not. If we need more licensing, but it's very objective and very thorough and very thoughtful, and it's, I mean, it's incredible, and this isn't due to Cox, but there's a Utah regulatory sandbox for lawyer licensing reform, and Cox is in on all this stuff. He's really, really good at what he does, but man, when he comes to social media regulation, and I love the guy, but I'm like, I don't know where his brain is going on this. I don't understand, except if it's moral panic, and he thinks that the freak out and what he's feeling and what he's thinking here is just more important than all the other principles. What do you think about, I'm thinking of somebody like Taylor Lorenz, who's now at the Washington Post, who's been at the Atlantic, she was before that, I'm forgetting she's been all over the place, the New York Times, et cetera, and she recently wrote a book that's really interesting, and generally she's very pro-social media or new forms of media that allow younger people to express what they're thinking. I interviewed her for a reason years ago, and it was great. It's like a great message that, and that people who don't get it want to clamp down because they don't understand the liberating aspects of it. But she and other people have been talking, this is something on the right and the left, are talking about how the problem is that big corporations or big internet companies are able to manipulate your feeds, are able to make you want certain things or only to see certain things that they have become this vast reality distortion machine so that when you're online and we're increasingly online, you're not seeing the real world. And again, this goes back to certain debates in the 90s and even in the 50s where there was a critique, broadly speaking of unregulated capitalism that it allowed Madison Avenue and the hidden persuaders, the ad men, the mad men of Madison Avenue who were using psychology and science to make you buy appliances every year, even though you didn't need them to buy this car rather than that car. That seems to be kind of flourishing again. Is that, how does one engage that or combat that idea that we are not in control of our social media feeds? In fact, we are blank screens that are being projected on, we're not actually autonomous users. It's funny, I just think it's one of the most toxic ideas out there. I think understanding and empowering autonomy is probably the most important thing in life. If you don't believe you're in control of your own destiny, then what do morals matter? If everyone else is controlling you, then nothing you do matters and you have full license to be as awful a person and do as bad things as you want. I have almost 70,000 followers and they love regulatory reform. They love sloths and marmots and regulatory reform. How do we even live in an age where that's possible? I spend so much time on all trails and so much time offline hiking and it's only possible because of our current age because one, I have enough treatments for all my diseases and I'm up to 11, which is fantastic. And are you collecting them like Pokemon or something? I wanted a world record, but it turns out Guinness doesn't track it because they're worried about people acquiring diseases, but I'm gonna try to convince them to track it so I can win. I think there's some hepatitis B floating around the reason office that you might be able to pick up. I'll have to go let's go get out a blacklight filled in. Yeah, that's right, okay. And with hiking, even like women traveling alone is kind of a recent thing in a lot of ways, like a century ago that wasn't much of a thing. Knowing where the trails are, having people review and tell you, oh, there's a bear here, there's a wolf here, stuff like that. Being able to create community with the people I meet. I meet people on trails, then we follow each other on Instagram and meet up next time we're in the same place. I mean, the stuff that's possible, the levels of autonomy that are possible and the power to choose your own life that are possible are often because of social media. Like I said before, finding out I had fibromyalgia not through the almost 30 doctors I had seen by that time but by one internet forum after Googling. That's incredible. And I just think it's the most empowering thing, all these different mediums we have all this information. Sure, some of it's wrong, but you can research. Like I went to a doctor to figure out if I had fibro. I mean, I've been led down rabbit holes that solve just problems that I didn't even realize I had and I just think that's the proper way to see this. Sure, there's problems and sure you can just kind of get lazy but I have, like I know people who are lazy and just play video games all day, like we're not railing against those that screen time. For some reason a dumb dance, I know no one dances on TikTok, but it was the dumb dances on TikTok that freak everyone out. Yeah, it is, and as you're saying, like, well, I found one Google group and now I'm cured or I know what I have and then people are like, yeah, but what if you had wandered into an ISIS recruitment camp? So I mean, what you're saying is that the world that we live in is a mix of online and off. We have much more information now and that doesn't alleviate our need to be critical thinkers and critical leaders and things like that, but it gives us many more opportunities to find out what we are, who we are, how we wanna live. It empowers autonomy in just incredible ways. Not everyone will embrace it, but I have a lot, actually my close group of friends, almost everyone is insane about exercise. We love exercising. We wanna, they wanna run. I'm not much of a runner yet, but I wanna hike farther than everyone. They wanna run faster than they ever have before and I don't think that was as big a thing. People went to the gym, but the competition, the excitement, the empowerment for each other online, the level of community you can find. Even the people I stay in touch with all over the world because we have hobbies in common, like I know that I can be a little bit more extroverted than a lot of people, but there's really this way to find community that's never existed before. So people can get together and come up with ideas and like you're saying, find out who they are and what they are, but it's about finding out who you are and what you are, not letting things shape you and everything shapes you to a degree, but now way more positive things can than could before. I think we're gonna leave it there. Shashana Weissman of R Street, thanks for talking. Thank you so much.