In conversation with Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation

Hey y'all, it's Ava. So I have a lot to catch you up on. In late March, New Mexico's Attorney General Raul Torres won his state's lawsuit against Meta. A jury found that Meta had engaged in unconscionable trade practices that took advantage of children. And they found tens of thousands of violations, which added up to a $375 million penalty against Meta. The first time in American history that a case against a big social media company has gotten all the way to a jury, and they delivered a resounding message. They think this is a dangerous product. They think that Meta's executives lied and missed it. And then just a few days later, a jury in a very different case in California determined that Meta and YouTube had addicted a young girl to their platforms. Regardless of whether the children are getting sent pornographic pictures, regardless of whether they're being sex-poitated, regardless of those types of issues, just because of the features alone that drive addiction, these companies can be held accountable. The lawyer behind that suit was my friend, Laura Marquez-Garrett. If you haven't heard it yet, we profiled both Raul and Laura in our seventh episode, See You in Court. Now, the tech companies have already said they're going to appeal these decisions. So this is far from over. But the fact that two different juries in two different states stood up to big tech like this is a massive first step. But maybe the most important bit of news is that Australia is now four months into their social media ban. And Canada and the US are thinking about following suit. I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that the person behind these bans is Jonathan Haidt. Restricting social media access for kids under 16 is something he explicitly called for in his best-selling book, The Anxious Generation. And governments all around the world are clearly listening. I have mixed feelings about John's work. On the one hand, I don't think anyone has done more for the kids' online safety movement than he has. And for that, I'm so beyond grateful. But I think this movement, as it continues to grow, needs laws that address the problem at the root and that make these platforms safer for everyone. I never got a chance to talk to John about this on the podcast. But a couple of weeks ago, he agreed to chat. So in front of a packed house at the Bollinger Forum at Columbia University, filled with parents, kids, and online safety groups, I sat down with John to talk about whether a better version of social media might be possible. Thank you so much for coming, John. I'm so excited to be here with you, especially in this moment. You've always proposed solutions in your books, specifically a restriction for kids who are under 16 on social media. When we have Australia, who is implementing the ban, France implementing the ban, and now the United States and Canada, who are considering it, what does this feel like for you to be here, having those ideas you explicitly outlined in The Anxious Generation come to fruition? Thanks, Ava. Well, let me start by saying how it feels to be here in this room. I didn't understand what this event was until five minutes ago when it was made clear to me that this isn't just like, oh, people can come here as talk. How many of you are actually members of a group that is working to reclaim attention childhood to anything else? Raise your hand if you're a member of any. So this is amazing. This is basically the Woodstock for the reform movement, for the reclaim movement. And so now I understand, my team was like, they kept wanting to prep me. I was like, what's the big deal? I met Ava, we're going to talk. No, this is really, really important because this is the movement of a generation coming to change what I think is the biggest threat to the generation. And when I wrote The Anxious Generation, I was thinking of having a chapter addressed to Gen Z, but I just felt I couldn't pull it off in the right voice. And I realized this is so urgent. I just have to reach the teachers, the parents, the legislators, I have to reach the adults because we got to get policy change quick. And I was focused on kids, especially through puberty. And I wasn't thinking that much about people in their 20s. And so that's why this is so exciting for me because you're them. Like you're the most credible people in the whole space because otherwise it's like 62 year old guys saying, kids these days, we need to reform them. So anyway, so that's what it feels like to be sitting here in this room. As for what it feels like to be sitting here in this moment, it is beyond thrilling. It is, I've done a lot of social change work in my life. When I was in college, I ran a gun control group in the state of Connecticut, which was completely hopeless. We didn't get anything done. And then to be part of this movement, where we have changed the world in the last couple of years and especially in the last three months. So it's like, we're right there. It is taking off. So I walk around thinking like, wow, we did it, but there's so much more to go. Yeah, it's amazing. And you had a little Freudian slip there where you said, the righteous mind, I told you yesterday that that was the book that actually got me into your work. You haven't always been a social media guy. You used to study democracy, but now you say, this is what you're gonna spend the rest of your life doing. Why is that? Yeah, so first my original research is in moral development and moral psychology and then political psychology. So my dissertation was actually on moral development of adolescence. So I actually have been studying adolescent development for my whole career, but then I shifted over to democracy. We've got so many problems this country and social media is a big cause of them. And I wrote this Atlantic article in a book called The Coddling the American Mind. It was about overprotection. That's a big part of the story is just the fact that if you were born after 1995 in the United States, you probably didn't get the freedom that previous generations got. So that's a big piece of this, is reclaiming life in the real world. So I wrote that book with Greg Lukianoff about overprotection. And at the time we didn't have the data in 2016, 20s, we did not have the data to say it's the phones as a big part of it. But I kept working on it with Gene Twenge and we kept getting data and we kept saying, you know what, so many different kinds of evidence. So once it became clear, it was kind of like, if you were like the first person on earth to diagnose this killer virus that was gonna spread and you're like, hey people, this thing is coming and everyone's like, nah, it's just a correlation. Like, nah, we're not gonna pay attention. So Gene and I and a few others really just, we just would have geared up for battle in a sense. I mean, research isn't to battle, but the debates. And the more I got into it, the more I saw what it was doing, the more I talked to parents, survivor parents and young people, the more I realized, of course democracy is important, I wish I could help make that better, but I don't really know what to do there. But on this issue, we actually have pretty good ideas of what to do and people are doing it, we're doing it. So this is where I can make the most difference in my remaining years on this planet. And I really appreciate that urgency. I feel the same necessity with this work. I came into it, I spent a lot of my teenage years with an eating disorder that I largely contribute to Instagram. And I definitely wanna come back to what you're talking about with overprotection of kids online, but just to catch everyone up who might has not read The Anciest Generation. Can you outline your core argument for me? Yeah, the core argument is that there's been a great rewiring of childhood. Childhood for millions of years was unsupervised play and activity and kids doing things independently. That's how you learn to be self-governing, self-supervising, how you learn to work out conflicts. And that all ended in the 1990s for interesting sociological reasons. And so we began overprotecting our kids in the real world as though if we let them out of our sight, they will be kidnapped. And at the same time in the 90s, the internet was coming in, personal computers were coming in, kids loved them. And we all looked at them and said, oh, well, okay, she's spending her afternoon on a computer. Maybe she'll be the next Bill Gates. Well, maybe she shouldn't say that anymore, but I'm sorry. I shouldn't, oh, this is all being recorded. I need to be more careful. My point is, my point is, we all thought, well, this is okay. Computers are good for them. And back in the 90s, Steve Jobs phrased, a bicycle for the mind. A computer was something a lot of kids spent time on. They learned a lot, they developed skills. But we didn't realize gradually, it became not programming a computer, it became apps that were designed to put you in a soporific hypnotized state and just keep you scrolling through images of other girls with perfect lives and all the sorts of things that are just so bad for teenagers, for anyone. Yeah, I absolutely agree with your diagnosis there. I mean, I'm anxious. We were talking earlier about how we're anxious. So we can't really say we're not the anxious generation. But while we were investigating for Left With Our Own Devices, we talked to a lot of people who didn't necessarily agree. And I wanna name two examples for you. Ethan Zuckerman at UMass said, quote, for the vast majority of people, social media has had no effect on their overall happiness and mental health, end quote. And Sarah Coyne at BYU said, after doing an eight year longitudinal study, that quote, time spent on social media was not related to either depression or anxiety, end quote. I just wanna know why you think there isn't more consensus in the research community, given how evident it is. Yeah, so a big part of it is that when you use correlation coefficients, and you look at the overall relationship, you usually find correlations around R equals 0.1 to 0.2. And some people learned in a statistics class, that's called a small effect. But it turns out it totally depends on the area of research. If you can measure things precisely, then 0.1, 0.2 is small. But we have terrible data, just people saying, how many hours do you spend a day? How many hours do you mental health? This is very, very weak data. So the fact that we get a correlation of 0.1 is in itself remarkable. Now the other thing that they miss is, in epidemiology, they use odds ratios. People are heavy users, how mentally ill are they compared to light users? And there it's 50 to 150% more generally. So Sarah Coyne's point, she might be saying the correlation is low, but I guarantee you, if you look at the heavy users, they're doing much worse than other people. And the World Happiness Report just came out, they found this in every single country. So I don't accept the claim that, oh, time online doesn't matter. Obviously what you're doing is more important than the total time. But if you're, look, the average kid spent in America, teens, spends five hours a day on social media, a lot are spending seven. That's gonna push out everything that matters in life. So I just don't, I think that's wrong. Yeah, I felt bad today when I was talking to probably a 13 year old on the street and he said he used his phone four hours a day and I was like, oh, two months. He was like, what? I said, I'm sorry, I had to drop that on you. Anyway, how has your research evolved over the past couple of years? I mean, the book came out two years ago. Yeah, actually, so here's the major change. So when I started the book, it was all about social media causing internalizing disorders that is anxiety and depression and eating disorders for teenage girls, because that was the first real clear evidence that we found. And so I'm very confident that that was at the heart of the book was social media is bad for girls' mental health. Now, there's things to boys and challenges and all kinds of things, but that's what we were focusing on. And the majority of people, their mental health is not worse, that's true. So if it's only ruining 20 or 30% of our kids' lives, that's not a big deal, right? Okay, but what I've learned since the book came out is that the mental health damage is not the biggest damage. I have a little section in chapter five on attention fragmentation and addiction and sleep deprivation. Attention fragmentation, which is also related to addiction, that I believe is the biggest damage because this, I believe, is literally affecting the majority of all of us to some degree. And it's especially the TikTok generation. So you're part of the Instagram, how old are you if I may ask? 25. 25, okay, so you, okay. Okay, so you were shaped by Instagram, as you said. You were shaped primarily by Instagram because in middle school you were not on TikTok. No. In middle school, okay. Thank God. Younger Gen Z, they went through puberty on TikTok. Now TikTok is not as depressogenic as Instagram, but it is much more attentionally destructive. I believe, and now we're getting a lot more studies just in the last year or two, showing that short form video damages the development of executive function, makes it harder to pay attention, which means you won't be able to think well, which means you won't be able to create value for future employers, which means you won't be able to pay full attention to another person when you're talking or courting or flirting. So it's the attentional destruction, I believe, is bigger than all industrial accidents in all of history combined. Nothing has ever affected hundreds of millions of people. Right, and they showed that the other week in LA, literally less than a week ago, we had a crazy verdict. How was that informed to your research that Meta was found not only negligent, but also having acted in malice, Meta and Google to addict young people? Well, we knew that all along because, you know, all of those of us who are active in this and who were doing the research and supported, you know, thank God for Francis Hogan. What I learned, I was on a call today, a Zoom call with Laura Marquez Garrett, who was the main attorney who really drove this forward with the Social Media Victims Law Center. And, you know, I'd heard that, okay, this was the first time they'd faced a jury. What I didn't fully understand is when you have a trial and there's gonna be a jury, then the lawyers can request documents that's called discovery. And Meta in particular, but all of them, Meta has been doing its own research and they know it's addictive and they've tuned it for addiction. They've been doing this for decades. And we've never gotten a look until Francis Hogan brought out some screenshots. And that's what really got the ball rolling. That allowed us to see, oh, those bastards, they knew it all along, they did it deliberately. And then that got the first case through the door. I forget which one it was, but it was the first case where a judge said, yes, you can bring them to court. Section 230 covers what people post, but it doesn't cover their design decisions. And so once a case was allowed in, then the lawyers can request documents. And what we're seeing is a flood of stuff you cannot believe. You cannot believe what they did knowingly because the incentives were all wrong. The incentives that they put on their engineers were you maximize engagement, we pay you more. And we don't have to worry about getting sued. We got a complete shield from section 230. We can do whatever the hell we want to kids. You can't touch us. And not surprisingly, their behavior was monstrous. Absolutely. Your book has two arguments, as you mentioned earlier. We're over protecting kids in the real world, under protecting them online. For better or for worse, a lot of the conversation right now is about that online thing. That's where a lot of this attention is. What happens if we don't address the core real life problem? So because I was focused on kids, and all the way through puberty, the real world was most pressing. Now obviously older Gen Z, you're out in the world. It's not like your parents are saying you can't go out anymore. So for younger Gen Z, they've got to be unsupervised. They've got to be responsible for each other. So I really pushed on that. But as we were saying in our discussion yesterday, I've been so focused on the younger kids because that's the low hanging fruit. That's where we can add a huge effect very quickly. And I haven't thought as much about how to help older, older kids, young adults thrive in the real world. Now I do teach a course at NYU called Flourishing, and my students are generally sophomore. So they are 19 years old. And one of the themes, a lot of us use device regulation. But one of the themes is go out and have experiences. You've been deprived of experiences. Put yourself in difficult situations. You're going to school in New York City. Go explore, go out with a friend, go to some new neighborhood that you've never been to. Go to a rave, go to a museum. So young people, there's a quest, there's a hunger to experience the world. But yet in your generation, there's a fear of going out into the world. And so I think we need to address that fear and turn it into more of a desire and then I think you will flourish. If you agree that your generation is anxious, what's the cure for anxiety? We know this in psychology. It's not protecting you from the things that make you anxious. It's the exact opposite. It's exposure. That is the cure for anxiety. Right now, so much of the conversation, as I mentioned, that we're having is about the online part. So seemingly the easier solution to the problem is to focus on regulating the digital technologies. Can you tell me the moment you realized this problem is so bad, the only way to solve it is to restrict those kids understated to the digital technologies? So I think that's the best way to do it. And I think that's the best way to do it. The only way to solve it is to restrict those kids under 16 from being on these platforms. Well, so there are several moments. One was when Zach Rausch made the graphs for other countries. I said, Zach, we hear different things about what's happening elsewhere. We know what's happened in the US. We've got very good data. Go find out what's happening in other countries. And he came back with graphs, especially in English-speaking countries in Western Europe. And it's the same thing everywhere. And once I saw that, it's like, oh my God, this is not caused by anything we're doing just in the US. This is happening to human children. This is happening certainly in the Western Europe. So that was one, like this is, there's like a scene in Jurassic Park where they first see the dinosaurs. It's like, I can't believe this is happening. So that was one. But early on, I thought it was just social media. I wasn't paying attention to all the other stuff. And it was once I just kept hearing stories from parents of how their kids are just lost. And especially from mothers of boys who have a porn addiction and they're so ashamed. And they don't know what to do. The kid is just completely hooked to his device. It's not just porn. He's doing all sorts of things, but he's always on his device. And they don't, they're at their wit's end. And once I realized, it's like, this is like a trap that's luring kids in. And yes, they don't all get caught, but 10 to 20% of them are. That, again, is to lose 10 to 20% of our kids is unthinkable. And so as I began to talk to more parents and especially survivor parents about what their kids went through, that's when I think I was really faced with the full horror of it. Right. And earlier, I really appreciated what you said about the anxious generation leaning in to what makes them anxious offline. Do you think that there's any way for us to lean in to what is making us anxious online? Yeah, I'm sure there is, but the thing I wanna stress is there's a really important concept called anti-fragility where you need to have stressors and challenges and setbacks in order to grow. And 10 years ago, when I started doing this work, people said, well, why can't you just take risks online? You know, say something stupid, you'll learn your lesson. But it turns out, it turns out that, if you fall on a bicycle or you fall out of a tree or you say something dumb to a friend and they're offended, like we evolved to learn from those experiences, but something happens when you make a mistake online, which is the entire world turns against you and jokes about you and laughs at you. It is unlike anything that we can experience offline. I mean, there are cases of severe bullying, but this is a common thing that happens to a lot of young people. And I've talked to a lot of people about that and I asked by the way I asked my students. So, you know, when you're publicly shamed and humiliated and everyone's against you, does that toughen you? Does that make you feel like, you know what? I've been shamed before. I don't care what people say. It makes people feel like they're living in a minefield and they're careful about what they say. And that's a shame. Right, so it's a scale issue here. Well, it's, so let's talk, so you tell me, what do you mean by leaning in online? Let's work through that, because as we talked about yesterday, I haven't been thinking, I've been thinking, we've just got to have age limits, keep the young kids off, let them get through puberty. And I haven't really thought as much about how to make it better for young adults. What would leaning in look like for you? I think that's a really interesting question. And it's something I really wanted to talk to you about when we're looking at the design features that are currently on social media. And I think that we can lean in at some point if those design features were gone, right? So we have a lot of design feature legislation out there right now, age-appropriate design codes, you know, let's take away light counts, let's take away the infinite scroll. Let's make sure that algorithms aren't wired for engagement, but rather to show you real things. Do you think if we had the design legislation of our dreams, you would still push for the restriction of kids under 16? Oh my God, absolutely, yes. Because you have to get through puberty, you have to develop executive function, you have to develop attentional capacities. And as long as you have a multifunction device, as long as there's always gonna be quick dopamine to be had, yes, you'll bring it down, it won't be a million quarts of quick dopamine, it'll be a thousand or whatever, that's the wrong units. But you can bring it down, but kids before 16 are still gonna get hooked. There is no way to make scrolling through stuff and touching and getting re-influenced, there is no way to make hours of that okay for a developing brain. So I don't care what you offer me, there is just no way it's gonna work for under 16s. Now, the question is what about 16 to 19 year olds, let's say. So 16 and 17 year olds are still minors. And so they still need all kinds of legal protections because there are a lot of men out there who are looking for them. There are a lot of predatory men online. And so we still need all kinds of protection because these are still minors. So okay, let's imagine a world, okay, let's go back, let's go back to say 2005 or 2006. So everyone has a phone, texting, email. I forget when Zoom came out but there was Skype. So we have all kinds of ways to communicate. It's amazing. You can find anything you want instantly. I mean, I cannot convey to you what it was like in the 90s to discover the internet. It was magical. And so we come into this period really optimistic. Now, back then Facebook was just, here's my page, here's what I like, my space before then. Here's me, oh, there's you, okay, let me learn about you. That was all great. So if we could go back to that, I think that would be pretty good. Now you tell me, does that sound good to you or was there anything else you would long for? That's a really good question. And I have an answer for you at the very end of the conversation. But for now I wanna dig into what you're saying on a philosophical level to make sure that I understand you. So for 14 year olds, for 15 year olds, having the ability to put something out into the world that can be received by everyone, that is too dangerous for them. Are you saying that that is something that can happen? The internet is great. They can post things on a blog, they can write, there's all kinds of ways to get to the world. What we're talking about here is a special innovation in the attention economy, which is rather than just letting everyone connect with everyone, that was the idea of the early internet, that was my space, that was early Facebook. Social media said, instead of that, we're going to centralize things, we're gonna give you a feed because it's the, when Facebook adds the news feed and the like button and the share button, and now you have all kinds of data for the algorithm, and now you can deliver all this stuff, it's that which allows predatory people to get to you, it's that which puts every kid in the attention economy. When we throw our 11 year olds into Instagram and they're all aware, she has 50 followers, she got 50 like, I only got seven, and they're all anxious because they're not rising. There is no way to make this safe. Even if you hide the like count, even if you hide the, you're still gonna know, some people are getting noticed and I'm not. Now that's part of adolescent life, but it has to be on a local level. So this is why, there is a savagery to life online that was not there in the 90s. Yes, there were corners, but people's overall experience was really humane, and now it's savage. I mean, the number of young people who have seen the heading videos, in fact, let me ask you in this audience, young men in the audience, how many of you have, you see the moment of a person's death, like the heading or being run over by car, you see it like at least several times a year, you see that, raise your hand, men in the room. Okay, and men in the room, raise your hand, if you don't see that, you almost never see it. Okay, so the men are kind of split, more of you do see it, but there are some who don't see it every year. But my point is, younger people, the numbers are higher, it's very common now. And so there's just a savagery to what happens when you put people into these dynamics. And again, my argument is, puberty is the most sensitive period of brain development. Let people get through puberty, stop throwing all this stuff at them. They still have the rest of the internet. They can call, they can text, they can phone, they can go over to friends' houses, they're not disconnected. Sorry, I kind of worked up about this. Me too, you're not alone. I totally understand, it's so urgent. I mean, there are people out here that are losing years and years of their lives, that are losing their lives to this. So okay, but I do want to press though, what feature of Instagram would you want, if we had the world I described, which is the internet circa 2005, and in all kinds of ways to communicate, you can find anything, what would you still want from Instagram or TikTok? Right, so I come from a generation that feels pretty voiceless overall. I think to set the scene here, we were the generation that was in middle school, high school, elementary school, growing up while school shootings seemed to skyrocket in America. And so we grew up watching our peers get shot online. And we took to the streets, and we protested about it, and we were upset about it, and nothing happened. And still to this day, absolutely nothing has happened. The only place where we can feel really, truly validated and understood, I think for a lot of people is online. I'll let you know, but is it Instagram? Right, but Instagram is- You said really, truly understood and validated. Is that your experience on Instagram? It's not my experience on Instagram. It's a lot of people in Gen Z's experience on Instagram to have a universal inside joke, to put something out there and have it be understood, that's the platform that we have right now, in the world that we exist in, to communicate with one another. I mean, I'm from Tennessee, right? Hope Lab did excellent research that found, by a 10% margin, young people from Tennessee, young people from the Southeast, are going to find that social media is crucial to their mental health, because they're not around- What does that mean? That it's, what do you mean it's crucial to their mental health? They find a community on social media that they haven't found anywhere else. Okay, so let's go through this, because I think the way that I find many people are thinking about this is, here's my life, everything is on these three platforms, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, here's my life. Now let me imagine my life if I took all those away and didn't replace it with anything. That would be a lonely life, I wouldn't have a community. But there's no such world like that, because the world before these platforms came in was I have so many ways to connect with my friends, even my friends were far apart. You know how people feel understood and validated? By a long conversation with a real friend. And when people had real friends, they didn't have as many mental health problems. People used to have a lot of real friends, and after 2012 they have many fewer real friends. They have thousands and thousands of friends. So when young people say it's how I find community, inside I'm like, that is so tragic, because this is not real community. This is me putting stuff out for strangers and the world and people I barely know or never met. And then I will feel validated if I get a lot of likes. No, that is not, that is fake understanding and validation. And if you're LGBTQ, and we talked about this in our essay, if you're LGBTQ, yes, you were isolated before the internet. The internet was a godsend for LGBTQ kids, and they found all kinds of ways in the 90s to use it. Okay, and then, and I don't doubt that early Facebook would help, because you could have interest groups. That's good to have interest groups, that's fine. But it morphed into a system of maximizing attentional pull, channeling, so again, when young people say it's how we find community, we should not be saying, oh, well, therefore we need to let you have it. We need to be saying, let's think about what real community is. People need real friends, and if you have, that quantity pushes out quality, and it's not quantity that makes you happy, it's quality. This version of community is the only version of community that Gen Z has ever known. What does it do to the mental health of the generation to tell them that the social norms they grew up experiencing are flawed, incredibly dangerous, and wrong? How might that affect them? Yeah, well, what I found in my conversations, and we have a lot of survey evidence, is when you talk to older Gen Z, and you ask them, was this good for you or bad for you? It's much more like this, say bad, when you say, do you wish you'd gotten your phone social media earlier or later, overwhelmingly later, almost nobody says they wish they got it earlier. So I don't agree that they love it, it's the only thing they know, so they're afraid to lose it, and that's why you get this really interesting finding in multiple studies. When you say, how much would we have to pay you to get off Instagram or TikTok for a month? People say some number, $50, 100, you have to pay me to get off, because now I'm separated, now I'm deprived. But when they change it, so they say, we're gonna do a thing at your school, and we're gonna try to get everybody off for a month, how much would we have to pay you to take part? Now suddenly everyone's saying, oh, I'd pay you, I would pay you to have everybody off. So this is a trap, and the thing I've always said about Gen Z is that they are not in denial, they see what's happening, I've seen no defensiveness, I have not seen any members of Gen Z saying, oh no, this is great for us, and you're trying to take it away from us. So now if you have, or if people in the room, if you feel that way, or if this is a common sentiment, please tell me, I wanna know where I'm wrong, or where I've made assumptions. But I don't think, I don't see Gen Z people like taking offense and saying, how dare you say that? This has been so good for us. They recognize that it was bad, but they feel they have to be on it anyway. But do you agree with that, or do you think I'm misunderstanding? I think there's a slight misunderstanding. I think there's two things I wanna bring up here. I think one of the things that Gen Z thinks is this is impacting everyone. This is bad for parents, it's addictive to parents. Why can the parent have a smartphone? I can't have a smartphone. Why can the parent be on social media? I can't be on social media. And also a lot of us as Gen Z growing up in this, we've aged out. None of this legislation would impact me anymore. So I think a lot of us are saying, why not do something that could include us? And that's where the business model conversation comes back in, which is, why aren't we making our number one priority, design-based legislation, a safety by design? So I guess that would be my two questions for you, is why not prioritize safety by design, and then also why not prioritize having safer platforms for older people too? Yeah. I certainly agree that it would be great to have those. Legislatively, it's very, very difficult. There are some techniques that have been done to try to make algorithms less predatory, but we do live in a country which is very pro-free market. It's very hard to, you can't say this business model is illegal. There's no constitutional justification for that. You can't use this business model. So there's always gonna be that pressure, that competition. So I'll give a couple of suggestions, and I wanna hear yours for what that would look like. Here are the only two thoughts I've had. You know, I teach in a business school, I'm very aware of the pressures on these companies that are mostly full of good people who don't wanna hurt children, and they are having a terrible moral bind because the company kind of like, to be successful, they have to hurt children. They have to addick children. And so I've had two thoughts that I think would really help, and these don't require legislation. One is what if someone invented a platform that had know your customer rules? That is, there are, so there's an important word in shitification. All these programs, all these platforms were amazing at first, and they all get, they all turn to shit. And there's a very clear reason. The nature, this industry is different from anything previous. It's all about scale. If you're the value of a network increases, according to the cube of the number of people on it. So it's a race to get as many as you can. You have to be really nice, appealing. It's just girls dancing for strangers. What could go wrong with that? And so everyone rushes on, but now you've raised $20 million from investors. You gotta pay that back. So now you gotta start squeezing them, putting them more advertising. You gotta monetize things. So that's why everything starts off good, but everything turns to shit on the internet. That uses this model. So here's two ways around that model. One, the platforms that don't get inshidified are those that have know your customer laws. So Airbnb or eBay was the original one. You don't know the name of the person you're transacting with, but the company does. The company was exactly who everyone is. So if someone sex-storts someone else, or sells drugs, or threatens violence, they can lose their account, and they can't open another. Whereas all the platforms you're on are full of strangers, bots, Russian agents, perverts. So, and there's no way to get them off. I mean, I'm sorry, that's not true. Of course, Meta could get 95% of them off. They easily could do that. They just choose not to. So that's the first thing is, imagine there was a platform that said, we have a new business model. This is about actually connecting you to real people. And people who behave badly will be kicked off. So that's the first thing, know your customer laws. That removes most of the really horrible stuff that happens. Second is because the economics don't work, you wouldn't be able to scale compared to the others. So what I'm hoping for is a philanthropic, a part philanthropic model. There is so much philanthropic money that wants to address this problem. And so I keep suggesting this to my students at Stern, I hope one will take me up someday. Come up with a model in which you raise, you raise a lot of philanthropic money, you commit to never doing the attention economy stuff. And this is just about real connection and validation. And so if you start from that basis, I think you could build a humane platform. But without those two, I don't know that it's possible. Okay, what are your ideas? What would you do? So I'll paint you, here's my ideal version. We're both postman people, which I absolutely love. And something that postman talks about is the tool that has a lot of jobs is not a very good tool at all. It doesn't do any of those jobs very, very well. So in my ideal world, we have a network of hundreds of social media platforms that each have little jobs. If you want to consume content, you can go consume content. If you want to connect with your local community, you can go connect with your local community. If you want to find an influencer who's going to teach you how to do a meditation, you can do it. But there's a lot of incentive structures that need to change in order for us to get there. And I definitely think that can be done through safety by design, passing data privacy, which would make their entire business model, which we've been talking about this entire time, that's causing all of these problems virtually obsolete. I'm curious if you could work with me, then on a version of the internet that isn't necessarily based around restricting social media access, but reclaiming that word social media and coming over here and focusing on how we're going to build that and understanding the narrative moment we're at right now where so much of that a narrative is this is about free speech. And when we talk about restrictions, people immediately go free speech. So what I'm thinking is how can we adjust our language and how can we adjust our policies to not buy into that narrative, but rather to come over here and paint a more positive picture for people and allow them to see that end goal of a social media that does work for them. Yeah, yeah. So there's a lot in what you just said. I'll just, first I'll adjust the free speech point because that's what seems to be emerging as the main criticism. And anytime a country passes laws that say what can and can't be said, there are risks there. And because hate speech is a complicated thing and I wish there wasn't any online, but once you start defying saying, our regulations say you can say this, you can't say that, then there's going to be political maneuvering, one side's going to feel. So content-based stuff is a real challenge. Now, of course, we have laws against child sexual abuse. Like there is some stuff we all agree, this must not be online. And then how much further do you go? That's an interesting question. That's a good question to discuss. But my view is if a state or a country wants to say that these companies can't collect data from nine-year-olds, that is already the law. What's wrong with enforcing it? That's not free speech. That's a design decision based on contract law. You can't sign a contract with 12-year-olds. Insisting on policies, Meta had a 17 strikes in your out policy for sexual trafficking. So if you're reported 17 times, then they would close your account and then you have to open another one. What's wrong with a state or a government saying, no, you have to close their accounts? Is that a free speech issue? So I think that what we're all talking about in the movement are design decisions. And that's what's so important about the case in LA. That's why it is transformative. Because until last week, the legal system treated any question of regulation is gonna be a violation. It'll have the free speech thing in section 230. And that's why these companies have free reign for 20 years to do what they wanted to children. So that is ending now. So again, the free speech thing is a lot to be said, but I think design choices are not free speech issues in almost all cases. Yeah, I think it would be really ironic if we ended up striking down certain design based legislation because companies have commercial spree traits to exploit us. And then also going and restricting minors from social media because they don't have the same expression, right? So does those companies even do? So I'm curious now, what would success look like for you? Oh, success is the photos that I get sent now on a weekly basis of a group of kids on bicycles. That's success. It's kids living in the real world. It's kids having a childhood. That's success. Again, I'm focused on the younger kids. Okay, the other thing about success is my class at NYU. And it's the most gratifying class because the task is you have to improve yourself in the course of the semester and you have to take measurements, you have to show what you did. And I used to let them make up anything they wanted, but it became clear. Most people have a device addiction. Most people are struggling with that. And now I say, if you're on social media for three hours a day or more, you have to start there because there is no point in trying to improve yourself if you're on for three hours a day or more. So you gotta start there. And especially when they go from like five to seven hours, which some of them are on, down to one or two or zero, it's the most amazing thing because it's this whole cascade. They discover that now they have so much time to do their homework and they can focus. And so they can do their homework in two hours a night. And now they're not at all stressed and they have no time pressure. Whereas before it was always, I have too much work and I can't because I'm on social media and I'm in terror. So they get their attention back. And that's why I was so glad that you're focused on attention. I didn't finish the thought before. Mental illness is affecting 20, 30%, let's say, but the attentional destruction is affecting everyone. So when you get your attention back, then they say, and then I was able to focus on what I wanted. I began exercising. I approached a girl that I liked and I said hello to her and now we're dating. Like it's just like amazing stuff happens when you get your attention back and reclaim your life. So for the older, for the older, for young adults, I think we have the exact same vision here in that it's reclaiming your attention without your attention, you can't do anything. Well, John, your work has changed my life in so many ways. It's changed a lot of the lives of people in here and millions of children across the entire world. And you should feel a lot of pride in that. And I really, really look forward to continuing this conversation and to working with you to take that attention for everybody and give them online spaces where they can use it with agency and to go after these companies that have taken this idea and this word of social media from us and take it back from them. Thank you. Well, thank you, Ava. And this has been a thrilling conversation. And again, I didn't know what I was getting into here, but now I see you guys are, you know, this is like, you know, as you exchange ideas and I was gonna say business cards, but obviously you don't do that anymore. We tap phones. This is, bring them back, bring them back. So yeah, so I'm really excited to work with you. Let's invent the humane social media platform. I think there will be a market for it. And then we handed the mic around the room for audience questions. I'm Helen Hayes and I'm the Associate Director of Policy at the Center for Media, Technology and Democracy. So today, some research came out about Australia's social media ban. And it indicated that about seven of 10 under 16s are still accessing social media platforms, which to me obviously speaks to difficulties in age verification and social media bans generally. So my question is how you make sense of this and how you make sense of age verification technologies that clearly aren't doing the work that we might want them to be doing. So Australia did the world a giant favor. They took a gamble. They just said enough is enough. We're just going to do it. And age verification that preserves privacy is difficult. Until now, the industry has had really no incentive to pursue it. But this industry, once they have an incentive, they can do anything. They already know how old everybody is. So I don't think it's going to be very hard for them to actually do it, but they don't want to. So seven out of 10 are still on. That means that in just three months, 30% are off. A lot of people used a VPN to get around. But Jeff Hancock, the professor at Stanford who's studying it, he said VPN uses shot up at first and then it went way back down because it's a little bit of friction. It's a little bit annoying to have to load the VPN every time. So use is going down. So the rollout was incredibly successful in that almost nobody was blocked who was old enough. They erred on the side of letting more people through. And now the companies are in danger of being fined. It's not much of a fine, but it'll look bad for PR, especially when they're all facing a lot of lawsuits. So this is going to be a several year process as the industry figures out how to do this difficult thing. Until, here we are, 20 years into the social media year, they've had no incentive to do it. Now for three months now they've had an incentive. Are they done? No. But let's talk again in a year or two and I think it's going to be a lot better. So John, you talked about community and the available, like having an online community and how that wasn't real. I've been in a number of different online communities with my work, with this community. I mean, I struggled to see how this community would be around if it wasn't for the kind of tech that we had available. I'm curious, like you had mentioned around not hearing feedback from Gen Z, like resistance around that. I have. So I'm curious, like, how do you take to that this idea that this community wouldn't be able to be here if it wasn't for this platform? Okay, so first let's just look at this. Part of your first point was that you actually can develop a deep friendship online. Yeah. And I'm sure that that is true and people have done it for hundreds of years with letters. And so it is possible, but it takes round after round of private communication. Agreed. Or was this all done in front of an audience? Like you put it out there and they liked your tweet, and then you commented, was it? No, not at all. So tech, when tech helps us connect and form enduring relationships in which we open up and we come to trust, that's wonderful. And that's not what kids' lives are like now. I guess the question then is, how do we make that connection? Like the person I've been dating for three years, she lived in Portland and I was in North Carolina and I was in DC when I heard of Ava. So I was able to use the internet and social media and these other platforms like news and YouTube and these kinds of things to hear about your work, to hear about you on YouTube, for example, that's how I heard about you. Then we connected. So how can we, if we remove this ability to have feeds in these kinds of things, how do people find one another? Okay, so I think what's going on here, so I just wanna point out, Ben was one of the super editors of the anxious generation. He's an incredible writer, editor, thinker. And this is the thing, I want the pushback and you're good at pushing back. So this is great. Okay, so I think what's going on here is something which I really see in Gen Z, which is you're really, really sensitive to missing out on something. And you don't wanna miss out on something you could have. That's normal, that's a human thing, but you gotta get the balance because as you know from chapter five, there's the concept of opportunity cost. And so like, you want lots of things, but if you buy one thing, that means you don't have the money to buy everything. And so we make choices, okay? So now we all want relationships and you could develop a relationship on TikTok. You could develop one on Tumblr. And I don't wanna miss any of those. So I'm gonna be on all of them. What's the opportunity cost? You have no time for anyone or anything, especially the people physically near you. So yes, you're saying, several you're saying, but good things could happen and good things do sometimes happen. Yes, but at what opportunity cost? Hi, so I'm a mother and as a mother, I know that when you bend things, it creates more craving. So the question is where the component that I'm missing is the conversation with the children. And how do we make this conversation? Cause otherwise, you know, we're banning alcohol until the 21 and then they get fake IDs. How do we have a conversation with them? And how is this conversation not only on the parents? So it's equitable. Okay, so what you're talking about is what's called the forbidden fruit phenomenon. If you forbid a fruit, there's more interest in it. I think that goes back a long way, I'd say, to the Bible. Um, and so that's a real psychological phenomenon. But why do kids traditionally pursue things that are banned? It's to show that they're cool. They don't care about these rules. And there's a lot to be gained by flouting rules and getting away with it. The re if you ban social media for your child, they desperately want to be on because you've given them a social death sentence because that's the way the kids connect. But if you ban it for everyone, I don't think there's a forbidden fruit phenomenon. If everyone was off, no one's gonna be desperate to be on. And as we saw, according to the surveys and according to these experiments about willingness to pay, they would love to all be off. So I don't think it's really forbidden fruit. I think it's an age limit on an addictive product that the kids themselves wish they could get off, but they can't because they're trapped because that's how it was designed. I love that question a lot. And I think that it brings me back to my main point of this conversation, which is, it's cool to do things that aren't allowed. And I think my biggest fear right now is that while pushing restrictions, the counterculture is not going to be reclaiming your attention. The cool rebellious thing to do is going to be to stay on social media. And that we might have this moment where Gen Z is carrying text water for them. And Gen Z is pushing to stay on social media instead of doing the cool rebellious thing of being offline. So is Gen Z pushing to stay on social media? So one thing that I've always wondered about is when there was the TikTok band, it was looming, I was waiting to see Gen Z groups rising up saying, no, don't do this. Now I know TikTok did organize some people, but I haven't seen a lot of Gen Z groups opposing the bands. What I'm saying is we didn't get, the way, look, all of you have come together, not out of self-interest, you've all come together because you think the world is hurting young people and you want to do something about it. I'm not seeing a lot of Gen Z opposition to what you're doing, are you? I don't want to wait and see if we bring this conversation to the US. Who is next? Right here, hi. So there seems to be a lot of focus just on social media, but I'm wondering about phones in general, because if it's the attention that's being divided, I'm sorry, my cell phone just rang a few minutes ago, sorry. But it's the text messages and then it's interfering with that attention. And then in addition to that, this generation, my daughter's right here, she always says to me, well, if you don't know something, just look it up. And it's that instant gratification, I can't imagine is necessarily a good thing. And how does this integrate into the fact that even though the cultural norms have changed, our physiology and our biology has not. Yes, we've talked mostly about social media because that's where the focus is right now. And that was my focus four years ago when I started working on the book. But what's become clear is it's a hydra. The technology is a hydra, and it just keeps growing new snakes. And I cannot believe, I mean, what gambling has done, I mean, the facts that our young men, they used to enjoy talking about sports, that's not gonna happen anymore. It's now all about the betting. And the house takes 7% and we're condemning a lot of young, as Scott Galloway says, as soon as gambling is legalized in his state, bankruptcies go up, a lot of young men are gonna be ruined. They will have no resources. They're not gonna be eligible for marriage, practically they have no resources. So it's the gambling, it's the porn, it's the online shopping, it's everything. And so that's why, you know, my theory is not about like smartphones and social media, it's about the phone-based childhood, the phone-based adulthood. Once you move it onto these devices that allow every company to get to us and a lot of them use the same business model, it's not just social media, you're right. And again, that's why the first norm is no smartphone till high school, ideally it should be 16, but I'd need to just, what's a minimum, what's a floor, high school? Hi, Ava Jonathan, thanks so much for having us. I think the person who just asked our question, this is like a natural progression, because I heard you all speak a lot about addressing these challenges within the smartphone itself. But I'd love to hear a little bit more about your thoughts around addressing these challenges by pivoting away from the smartphone and towards dumber devices. Towards what? Dumber devices, different devices that are not smartphones and dumber devices. I got a dumb phone five days ago and my life is exponentially better. That's where I'll leave that and I'll let you take it, John, I promise, way better. So once we're in the realm of self-control strategies, then there are lots of things you can do. And with junk food, we all face this, we have to have degrees of self-control, we have methods of dealing with it. What I can maybe contribute here is that I actually have no problem at all with my phones. I have no addiction issues, my phone is a tool, I use it for all sorts of things. And the reason is because I never put any slot machine apps on my phone. So I understand the dynamic, but because I never put it on my phone, for me my phone is just, it's still a Swiss Army knife. And that's what the original iPhone was, just a Swiss Army knife. There was no app store, no push notifications, maps, music, phone, flashlight. So multi-function, a Swiss Army knife is a good thing. And if you can turn your iPhone into a Swiss Army knife with no addictive apps, no quick dopamine apps, then it's actually a pretty good tool. But since most of us can't do that, I think we need to then go to a self-control strategy of making your phone black and white, we're certainly getting a dumb phone. So yeah, I think that is an important part of the self-control strategy. But keep your eye on the key psychology, which is the quick dopamine. And somebody asked why in the front, I said that my life got a lot better when I got a dumb phone. It's because now when I pick up my phone to do something, because for me, it's not necessarily the apps on the phone, but I have a slot machine, but it's the phone itself. Who's gonna email me? Who's gonna text me? Do I have any missed calls? And when I have the dumb phone and I open my phone, first of all, notifications are off. So I have control over where I'm going and looking. Am I checking my text messages? Am I checking my missed calls? And second of all, when I pick up my phone and start a task, there's nothing else to distract me. I'm not getting a drop-down notification. Nobody's calling me. I'm not seeing the icon of D-POP. I'm addicted to online shopping. Look at this dress, like, let's be honest. But it's just, for me, it's focus on what I'm doing and not getting distracted. The amount of times I picked up my smartphone and went to accomplish a task and put my smartphone down before I even opened the app that that task was on, there's none of that anymore. It's focus. Hi, thank you so much. My name is Emily. I'm actually a student at NYU studying politics. So it's super amazing to be here. And I wanna say thank you for this thoughtful conversation. I do have a question about restricting device access to children under 16. So owing to structural and socioeconomic inequities, which Ava briefly raised, I'm curious about your ideas for younger children with less access to structured outlets like sports clubs and supervised or safe communal spaces. How can we support their wellbeing while restricting device access, considering how we oftentimes turn to our phones to compensate for our lack of outside resources? Mm-hmm, sure. So first, part of the reason that we put computers on every kid's desk is we thought it was an equity issue. We thought the rich kids have computers, so we need to give computers to the poor kids. It turns out that when you put computers on kids' desks, it's those who have less executive function, less they're more likely to be harmed by it. When we look at social class differences in phone time, social media time, it's huge. Rich kids have parents who are trying to restrict their device use. There are limits. The Silicon Valley, they make their nanny sign a contract that they won't let the kids see a screen. So you're absolutely right that in working class and poor families, they don't have the resources, and therefore it's almost universal that every kid has their own device because it's an incredibly effective pacifier and babysitter. Mom is busy, she's got two jobs, she doesn't have time. So if every kid has a device, they're quiet. And that's why I think what's happening is the biggest counter-equity move ever, which is that everything we're talking about here is hurting poor kids more than everybody else. Time on device, I saw that the average is five hours a day on social media for black kids, especially black girls, it's way higher. They're the heaviest users of social media. So if you're concerned about structural inequalities, the current environment as I think the biggest magnifier of social class differences, I can't say ever, but it certainly is up there. Now, but part of your question was about other opportunities and that's a very good point. Kids who live in a gated community, yeah, the parents will say, yeah, go free range, run around. Whereas kids in dangerous neighborhoods, they don't say that. Now, I should point out, we're all still affected by a period where there were very high crime rates and crime rates are way down. So there are still some neighborhoods, it's true, but the vast majority, even of urban neighborhoods, are not dangerous for kids to be out on the sidewalk or playing a game outside. This conversation took place at the Bollinger Forum at Columbia University and was organized by Paradigms, the Center for Media, Technology and Democracy and the Attention Sphere. It was sponsored by the Walton's Trust and Hope Lab. For Paradigms, our executive producers are Mitchell Stewart, Helen Hayes, James Millward and Taylor Owen. The executive producer for the Toronto Star is JP Foso.