Jonathan Haidt Debates Robby Soave on Social Media

are platforms like facebook twitter and instagram harming americans in ways that government regulation could help correct on thursday february 17th jonathan height and robbie suave had an oxford style debate over the role of social media before a capacity crowd at the sheen center in downtown manhattan it was hosted by the soho forum a monthly debate series sponsored by reason the soho forum director gene epstein served as moderator jonathan height professor of ethical leadership at new york university and co-founder of heterodox academy defended the resolution the federal government should increase its efforts to reduce the harms caused by social media robbie suave who took the negative is a senior editor at reason and author of the recently published book tech panic why we shouldn't fear facebook and the future he argued that widespread criticisms of social media stem from our innate and misguided distrust of new technology suave also contended that for all of its flaws social media confers huge net benefits and that the application of government force is likely to do more harm than good hait author of a recent article in the atlantic on the harm to mental health from social media pointed out that while the platforms were not initially designed for those under 18 they have arguably been its victims height likened the platforms to sugar best taken in moderation here's jonathan height versus robbie suave at the soho forum jonathan you have 15 minutes to defend the resolution come to the podium please take it away jonathan well thank you so much gene um well good evening everyone um i'm i'm currently hiding away to uh to write a book called um life after babble and the the subtitle of it actually could be the opposite of robbie's it could be why we should totally freak out about facebook and big tech and because i'm hiding a way to write this book i'm saying no to just about everything i'm really trying to find time to write but i said yes to this invitation for two reasons um the first is because i was being asked to be paired with robbie uh who has been an amazing reporter um since universities began to blow up around 2015 and greg luciano and i got into this robbie has been doing just essential work and he's a great fighter great a great writer uh and fighter great fun to fun to read and i consider him an ally in our common mission to save universities from themselves the second reason i said yes is because i thought about it and i said you know what i'm a million by which i mean a devotee of john stuart mill who said he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that and he said teachers and learners go to sleep at their posts when there is no enemy in the field meaning we need critics we need adversaries to keep us smart and worthy adversaries are the best kind so i figured i can't lose because even if most you vote against me that just means that i really had a lot of work to do to understand this and write a better book so thank you robbie may we learn together um i also want to thank uh thank gene and soho forum for providing this lovely venue and this setting in which it's actually fun to argue with people this illustrates an important point about the benefits of viewpoint diversity we don't get smart just from being exposed to other ideas if someone yells and screams at you on twitter and calls you names and attacks your ideas we tend not to get smarter we tend to just get more wary or gun shy learning is highly social much depends on the institutions and the norms within which it occurs and that's why i love universities um uh and it's because of what social media has done to universities and so many other institutions in the last seven years or so that i hate social media now um in fact i have come to believe uh that a free and open society cannot continue much longer if social media continues to damage three things that i really care about and those are young people universities and liberal democracy um i'm in my remaining time i'm going to make the case that social media has caused devastation in these three areas since 2012. and then i'll say what i think government should and should not do so i'll make three main points the first is the fragilization of gen z so in august 2017 gene twangy wrote an article in the atlantic with the provocative title i have smartphones destroyed a generation and when i read it i thought wow jean is taking a risk here because she showed these graphs with these hockey stick curves but it was just two or three years of data because in 2017 all we had was data up throughout 2015 and so we had two or three years showing up turns in all these things and i thought if that turns down she's going to look foolish but it didn't turn down it kept going up and up and up now when that article came out there were a lot of critics a lot of people said oh she's exaggerating she's cherry-picking oh the trend isn't real you know gen z they're just comfortable talking about it that's why the numbers are going up a little because it's a good thing they're willing to admit that they're depressed um so there are a lot of skeptics right after the article came out and robbie in his chapter on this on this uh uh uh area quotes a number of those skeptics but those are all from 2017 at least most of the citations were from 2017 that was a legitimate take in 2017 but in the in the years since then the numbers have gone up so far uh that the the surgeon general recently issued an advisory on on teen mental health because those numbers have gone up by 50 to 100 percent in many uh on many many measures in fact if you're still skeptical that there's a real epidemic of mental illness if you think it's just oh you know changes in self-report on surveys let's look at behavior i've been gene and i have been collecting all the studies we can find from the u.s and the uk and canada and so here are the numbers for self-harm and this is hospital admissions this is not self-report hospital records for teenagers brought in because they harmed themselves mostly cutting themselves if you graph it out the lines are pretty stable they don't move around very much up until about 2009-2010 and then suddenly in the next five years the numbers are up 62 percent for older teen girls the rate of hospital admission per 100 000 in the population is up 62 percent for girls age 10 to 14 these are little girls these are pre-pubescent or just entering puberty girls the rate is up 189 by 2015 nearly triples by 2015 and it's up more since then same thing in the uk same thing in canada and similar story for suicide there it's up for both boys and girls and again for the youngest kids the 10 to 14 the percentage increase is more than double in a few years the suicide rate has doubled and then it stayed either level or increasing now what caused it that's the key thing now robbie and the other skeptics point to studies there are a lot of studies out there and many of them find no relationship between the amount of time young people spend on their devices and their rates of depression now there's a one particularly influential study by andrew schabilski and amy orban 2019 they reported an overall correlation of around .03 between time on devices and various measures of depression in three large data sets and that study where they reported oh this is about as big as the correlation between mental illness and eating potatoes that finding got a lot of press all over the world and since then a lot of experts say oh well you know we looked at this and there's nothing there but here's the problem with those studies they lump all kids together that is boys and girls they lump all screen activities together including watching netflix texting with your friends facetime browsing the web oh and posting photos of yourself in a bikini for people to make comments about you just lump them all together and you find a 0.03 correlation but guess what if you take the same data sets and gene 20 and i did this take the same data sets use the same statistical techniques but you zoom in on girls and social media the correlation isn't 0.03 it's 0.2 which is a very large correlation in public health matters the correlation between exposure to lead in childhood and adult iq is 0.09 public health is all about effects around 0.05 to 0.15.2 at the most this is a as big as anything else we worry about now of course correlation is not causation robbie points out but we've collected we found about 15 experiments in the great majority of them also using random assignment find effects on mental health um you want more evidence ask the girls that's what facebook did in that study that was leaked last september and what do the girls say they say it loud and clear it's social media and especially instagram as one girl in the uk said the reason why our generation is so messed up and has higher anxiety and depression than our parents is because we have to deal with social media everyone feels like they have to be perfect point number two from curiosity to fear in universities so crucial part of my story is that social media was not toxic in its original formulation you put up links to your friends your favorite bands in 2004 2005 it was not toxic everything changed beginning in 2009 when facebook ads the like button and twitter copies it twitter adds the retweet button facebook copies at the share button and then other platforms copy them and now you have so much engagement data that you can use algorithms to feed stuff to people based on what will engage them which means emotions which means especially anger so everything changes between 2009 and 2012 we get a much more this is when facebook perfects that business model based on advertising and gluing people to the screen by having viral emotional content that's when everything changes 2009 to 2012. one of the engineers at twitter who worked on the retweet button was quoted a couple years ago as saying he regretted what he did because twitter became a nastier place immediately he said when he watched those first twitter mobs form he said we just gave a loaded gun to a four-year-old and that's where we are that's why call out culture and uh and victimhood culture but call it culture in particular emerges in the early 2010s that's what greg luciano began to see on campus in 2014 when gen z arrives on campus around 2013 2014 kids born in 1996 or seven or later greg begins to see this weird pattern this vindictiveness this fragility this attack mode it wasn't there in 2012 but by 2014 2015 it was intense and it was scary and it changed our behavior we've done a lot of research at heterodox academy on attitudes what we find is that students are afraid to speak on campus because they're afraid of not their professors other students and professors feel they're walking on eggshells not because of other professors because of students it's not most students most students are lovely they want to learn they want to be challenged but there are enough around that make it so that we all have to walk on eggshells as deb masik said i'm sorry is that five minutes left to in my okay okay um as deb masik said uh executive director of hedorax academy one of her students said my motto is silence is safer what a sad motto for a college student the third point very briefly is the achilles heel of democracy plato said that democracy is the second worst form of government because rule by the deimos the masses or the mob inevitably decays into tyranny so the founding fathers of this country gave us all kinds of mechanisms to slow down mob dynamics well needless to say it didn't work very well after 2009 so i'll skip ahead and we can talk about this later um but basically democracy has a known achilles heel a known spot like on the death star where you know if you get hit that spot it's going to blow apart and it is our the ease with which we are divided into factions that hate each other so much we don't care what happens to the country uh social media especially twitter but also facebook and others have really targeted that spot now what can we do the resolution here is not congress shall regulate i really enjoyed robbie's book i recommend it to you he's such a clear writer he goes through every possible issue that people talk about and you find out there's a lot of misunderstanding of what's going on he also points out just how terrible congress is at regulating and some of the ideas proposed you know by holly and others you know they're specifying micro specifying and you know after 30 minutes they should be kicked off i mean these are stupid stupid bills so if i was defending the motion congress shall regulate i would just say well it's hopeless and and i'm going to go jump in a lake um but what we're talking about here is do we have a national emergency do we have a gigantic problem facing our young people our democracy and our institutions and if so a lot of it is commons dilemmas like prisoners dilemmas things that are hard to resolve if you're one person for example many of your parents many of you have kids raise your hand if you want your your children to be on instagram raise your hand if you think that's a good thing for them okay raise your hand if your kids are on instagram okay not many parents here maybe not among libertarians but okay okay i can't see with the lights in my eyes take it from me all of us parents who who let our kids on instagram it's only because they say but everybody else is on and i'll be excluded if i'm not on it so we're caught in a trap and we need central leadership to break it in particular what kids most need is delay entry the copper bill that set the age of internet adulthood it was originally going to be 16 was the original bill from ed markey lobbyists got it down to 13 and back in 1996 that's at that age you're like an adult that was a terrible idea and now we know the age must be raised i think it should be 16 or 18. these are minors and we need to enforce it there needs to be some kind of age verification so there are a number of urgent things that have to be done the uk is making some progress perhaps they'll take the lead here but i think we need to do it in this country too protecting democracy is much harder i grant because the things the left wants to do and the things the right wants to do are often opposites uh so perhaps we'll talk about specifics later but i do think we need to look into ways to encourage the platforms to do identity verification um uh but especially here's the main thing changes to the architecture i don't want a government agency either making decisions about what you can say what you can't say that would be a disaster i have so many libertarian friends i've been semi-brainwashed just by osmosis i don't want the government making decisions about what people say but there are changes to the architecture and the virality that's where we can have big impacts that are content neutral politically neutral and language independent they work all over the world so in closing instagram and tick tock are raising our children our children are spending more time with them than they are talking to us and those platforms channel the enormous force of peer pressure and peer norms onto them facebook and twitter are running our public square and they are curating what passes for deliberation in our deliberative democracy how's that going well now in 2011 we had the height of techno-democratic optimism we thought these things would be a boon to democracy but now we know they were pandora's box and we unwittingly unleashed demons we can and we must find ways to tame them thank you robbie suavey 15 minutes for the nether [Applause] all righty hello everybody thank you gene so much for organizing this debate it is my great honor to have this conversation with jonathan height one of my my heroes one of my uh intellectual inspirations it's actually my great honor and sort of my great terror to be doing this uh when we originally envisioned this debate i won't say who but i was going to be debating someone else that i felt a little bit more confident against and then when when height got swapped in i was like you have to be kidding me the world's foremost expert on the narrow topic we're going to be discussing great thanks a lot gene nevertheless uh here i i will make my my best attempt so i'm going to be begin by reading to you three quotes that i think will capture the the concern and the criticism of social media so three quotes about social media this is from the dutch sociologist ernest vandenhag say and he says of social media it's taken everywhere from seashore to mountaintop and everywhere it isolates the bearer from his surroundings from each other from reality and from ourselves here's another quote from the charlotte news it's keeping children their parents up late at night wearing down their vitality for lack of sleep making laggards of them at school and then finally from the new york times our very small children will fear to express themselves who will be willing even to express any but the most innocuous and colorless views so you may have guessed by the language of these quotes these do not refer to social media the first was in reference to the radio in 1963 the second was also reference to the radio 1926 and then the final quote from the new york times that's actually from 1898 and it refers to the phonograph later in that editorial the new york times writes something ought to be done to mr edison and there's a growing conviction it ought to be done with a hemp rope this was the level of hostility to new forms of communication that uh have have been so common throughout our history often moral panics fostered by the existing media structure because who loses out who loses your attention if your attention is now taken up by radia by radio perhaps the new york times that same dynamic is underway today so much of the most righteous indignation and condemnation of social media actually comes to us from the traditional media the existing media from cable news from newspapers from magazines from other other things other communications platforms that are losing that fight for your attention they hate it they're against it they want to come up with all sorts of reasons why this is bad for society why why the flaws we see in them are actually worse on social media so i think that's always something to keep in mind when these arguments are being advanced often by stakeholders by the the losing out technologies or the technologies that are harmed by these emergencies that are not new that we've dealt with over and over again so i first became interested in this topic because i remember the the handwringing the the panic over uh video games violent video games when they appeared i was an active gamer as a teen and we were we were promised that there needed to be rules laws regulations to stop violent video games from getting into the hands of teenagers because we were told it would increase violence among young people we now know that is totally wrong that if anything i i i think i'm not saying anything wrong on uh social psychology grounds but i suspect the small amount of teenagers inclined to really horrific violence actually tend to find an outlet amongst violent video games it would discourage them from actually creating violence so that that was but there was a certainty that these this new technology was so harmful and so scary and so bad so i you know i take that all of that prior history we have of these platforms all of these inventions as we explore this topic so the the contention for for a while from uh from john and from gene twangy who's you know work i find very interesting and i encourage everyone to look at it and i've looked at these studies which john has compiled a whole document looking at exactly what these studies showed how many of them going through them fielding criticism about them responding to it and i you know the the broad claim is actually one that um twangy has i think retreated from somewhat the broad claim initially being that screen addiction was the concern that kids just on their phones on these new platforms all the time was maybe making them not sleep well at night increasing their depression for various ways now we've kind of stripped some of those some of those concerns away because now we see that well young boys aren't having nearly as much of the same negative experience perhaps the the ways they're using social media are not particularly unhealthy video games again can have an actually a healthy experience they're cooperative they're collaborative they're storytelling they do them with their friends they stay connected with people you know just streaming just watching videos and reading articles is not necessarily harmful for for young people so we start to get at a very very narrow problem which i i agree is a problem worth exploring and talking about how to solve which is that one platform specifically not screens in general not social media in general but one platform instagram seems to be having a negative effect on not the majority of teenage girls but some some a specific demographic some users were reporting that in survey data to facebook again it was not most of them it was it was less than half saying they were having a negative experience on the platform yes can you cause can you correlate this with um with the increasing mental negative mental health outcomes how young people are reporting i i see that correlation i it's certainly not ridiculous but now again we're just talking about one platform one group that is having some problem with it even the majority of people in this group not having a problem with it perhaps using it to stay connected with their friends staying having normal healthy amounts of use we this is something we tend to see in the in the data in the surveys that you know teenagers who are using social media a moderate amount are doing fine those who are using it all the time are having bad outcomes those are who are not using it at all also having bad outcomes because that tends to mean they don't have a lot of friends they don't have people to interact with and that can be depressing and sad being a teenager is sad and is hard it to kind of no matter what i i bet if you surveyed all of those 10 to 14 year old girls about like does school give you a positive experience you get like a 90 no rate uh my my suspicion is a lot of unhealthy kind of culture of difficulty of being a teen might be channeled into this one specific platform that is not so great sure uh the the good news is we don't really need the government to solve this problem because facebook which owns instagram is rapidly declining in popularity it is hemorrhaging users uh so facebook the main platform is dying of its own accord it cannot attract young people to it the kinds of uh people who do use it tend to be too old which is no good for advertisers it wants to be that new cool exciting thing that young people love and spend all their time on it just isn't anymore and this i think goes to the uh maybe a larger sort of ideological argument i have that you're gonna get the government in here to do something about it by the time they do like this will be over it'll be some new platform i think there's already considerable evidence that you know even instagram is not holding the youngest of the young people's attention anymore it's been a vast migration to tick tock tick tock is now has surpassed google i believe it's the number one like visited site i so we're still waiting i i think i correct me if i'm wrong john to get data specifically on how how tick-tock is influencing this age cohort i suspect it will be more positively tick-tock unlike instagram is a bit more creative and i mean there's i don't know how how old the average person in the audience is they're tick tock's a little too too young even for me but you people like do dance videos and they they you you create things with music and it's a little bit more uh creative than the just like you know i don't know attractive picture of yourself on instagram that can make you feel bad about yourself if you're doing social comparison to that sort of thing so i i i think we you know we might be passing the instagram moment kind of on our own without the government having to do anything about it so that's my sort of grand argument against that specific area in which john is very knowledgeable and has introduced a lot of things that i think you know people should be concerned about i also totally agree that parents should feel empowered to not have their kids on social media to take the phones away not have them in the in schools in in the in the bedroom at night um you know i was limited to one hours of video games on weeknights when i was a kid and that was a perfectly fine rule because i would have just done it all the time and yes parents should make that i'd love to hear from parents about how we can make that easier but i doesn't seem like it doesn't call out for a government solution in fact and this would be my argument against some of the age restriction type things john is talking about it seems to me that probably the best way to preserve interest in instagram would to me make it like sexy and dangerous and scary like you might die if you use it the government won't let you have it that could actually like drum up or increase interest in it why don't we just like let it kind of stop being cool on its own as i suspect it will be as all prior social media sites eventually do i was using myspace and aol instant messenger when i was a kid they are gone you can't and visit them i don't think um so that's the that's the harms to kids kind of category and then also if we if we're empowering the government to do something about social media which is the question here we have to think about so the government is going to stop the harms caused by social media well right now the government is doing that the government is trying to stop the harms that the government thinks are caused by social media and that is you posting on facebook questions about the efficacy of mass mandates and whether kovit actually emerged from a lab the federal government is actively trying to suppress those conversations by coordinating and communicating with the major tech platforms to have a vast crackdown in events of silencing on speech the tech ceos are hauled before congress every few weeks to answer ridiculous questions from democrats and republicans questions that betray a complete lack of understanding of these technologies uh that and called to account for both taking down too much content which is the republican criticism and not taking down enough content which is the democratic criticism uh the the solutions the proposed solutions often produced by these discussions and i'm talking about things like breaking up the tech companies or uh changing section 230 which is the liability protection enjoyed by these sites uh are are very bad solutions i suspect uh in fact changing the liability protection is a solution so bad that facebook has now come out in support of it as a way to prevent its nearest competitor twitter from from beating it facebook understands that if you raise the liability threshold for social media sites well facebook which hires an army of content moderators will be in a better position than twitter which has many fewer content moderators and twitter told me when i interviewed people from this book they said yes we are dead set against this this will kill us uh it you know it's reflective of the kind of industry capture that that can happen when powerful companies get involved with the government and and do you know practical uh things that they say are the best interest for everyone for the consumers these sites are so harmful we need the government then it ends up being something that just helps one company um over another so i i do not think it's a good idea and then we also have to worry about even if we're just concentrated on the harm to kids part of it maybe we'll get into you know some of the other stuff uh during q a or with each other we do have to like the first amendment exists i don't think the federal government should do things that violate the constitution we already know that attempting to ban uh or restrict violent video games the ability for for kids to purchase violent video games there was a law in california to stop that the supreme court struck it down much of what we're talking about is pure speech and i think the supreme court honestly frankly would have something to say about efforts to prevent even young people from having access to speech speech is the most protected thing the thing that is most protected by our by our bill of rights by our kind of american system i'm sure we'll get into some of the dysfunction the horror that we're live in the tribalization that we're living through and it is it can be ugly out there on social media i know that just as well not better than everyone in the audience um it can be bad i i don't know and i'm i'm skeptical that social media is the cause of this dysfunction of this anger of this just like hor our horrifying politics um i i suspect it is a outlet but the like the the anger and the wrath is mostly due to the actual like behavior of our political parties and how they treat each other like you see partisan screaming and lies and horror if you watch cable news i no matter which cable news you're you're a fan of you will see it on either side against the other team again that's not social media that's existing media the and the the biases and the misinformation peddled by traditional news outlets and cable news are really bad like it's funny when they're saying that well facebook is the reason mark zuckerberg you know uh mark zuckerberg is the reason donald trump gets elected because of you know facebook interference that kind of stuff thinking have you watched cnn or fox news these are 24-hour uh commercials for or against pure propaganda for or against one specific candidate uh there's evidence that people are you know despite our concerns about the bubbling effect the siloing effect people actually are more likely to encounter information they might disagree with more than we expected on social media there's again it can be very bad there's a lot like wrong in our society right now i don't think social media is the cause of it i think social media came along as these things were happening and there can be bad things we should think about how to improve how to improve our lives tune these things off if they're a problem for you keep them away from your kids it is not a is something for the government to do there is no evidence we should have no faith that the government can do anything and the government is a cause of much of this dysfunction in the first place thank you uh five minutes of rebuttal five minutes every battle jonathan height okay uh well thank you robbie um there's very little in what you said that i that i disagree with i mean again your book is wonderful and you go through the objections and it's always complicated and you've raised valid concerns about all the uh the problems that i've raised and the solutions that have been proposed um i i do want to start though by talking about your description of this as a moral panic you're absolutely right this is a moral panic amazingly similar to the previous ones you're absolutely right about that um i really enjoyed your description of what happened when bicycles came out um you know there's a moral panic about that but skeptics skeptics of the of of my position almost always point out the long history of moral panics but that argument to say that that's an argument against what i'm saying that relies on what's called the survivorship bias and that's where if you interview survivors of shipwrecks in ancient greece and you find that almost all of them prayed to god you would say wow you see praying to god works because of course you're not interviewing the ones who prayed to god and died okay so now robbie's right that these communication technologies almost all of them were objected to like this but those are the survivors those are the ones that we still have like the printing press the radio uh phone well phonographs but these you know these are technologies that we that survive that we love and in some cases we had to tame what else is there well how about things like leaded pipes like leaded pipes that was an amazing invention by the romans and it allowed it you know allowed them to build cities it was a great technology and we used it all the way into the 20th century even though some people kind of knew even the romans that this is actually making people sick we didn't get led out of pipes and paint and and gasoline until really the 1960s and it took federal legislation because there are all kinds of advantages to businesses for using it as a product it it increases the the power of gasoline so there are all kinds of technologies that we did object to they were causing real harm and i put it to you based on what i've seen based on the studies that i'm surveying here i think social media is leaded gas and leaded pipes for today's children causing i believe permanent changes in their level of mental illness how about the tommy gun that was a pretty great innovation it could shoot i think 600 rounds in a minute a really real marvel of technology and it was very useful to a lot of people but it had some external costs that it opposed on society and empowered mobs as it were it took federal legislation to say no we're not going to allow this technology for anyone and so i put it to you that you know twitter is the tommy gun of of today so that's the point there about the about the previous social panics um on robbie point made it sound as though the issue here is just instagram and that's going away but i think that's not that's not the case it's true instagram is uniquely bad for girls um tick tock i agree with you it's not as harmful pound for pound but it's also so much more powerful there are deep pockets of tick tock girls are actually getting tourette's syndrome because they watch videos about tourette's syndrome and then they develop tourette syndrome so i'm expecting tik tok to have a lot tick tock's funny and it's fun but also i think it's going to do a lot of damage the issue here is not a platform it's a business model the business model of advertising driven the user is not the customer get them on and keep them on i think we should protect kids from that i'm very loath to tell adults what they should do but i think there's now evidence that kids should be protected from platforms that use this particular business model um then finally i'll just make the point that robbie was talking about data that almost all of this debate here in the scientific literature is using a dose response model treating social media like sugar oh well you know but if you have more social media or non-social like you know if you have there's an optimum amount of sugar that you should eat that's just like you take it in it affects you but social media is a rewiring of society for everyone especially for all kids between 2009-2012 before then kids went to each other's houses they they looked at each other they spoke after that you go into any school now at recess or between classes no one looks at each other because they're all on their phones all the time i talk to cousins and nephews that are in college they can't meet anyone you can't talk to anyone because they're all on their everyone is hooked so um so think about network effects both for children and for democracy and finally robbie said um you know if you ask a 14 year old girl today does school make you feel good um well gene and i did a study on that we found a data set the pisa data set and um it turns out loneliness in school was stable from 2002 to 2012 it was stable and then all over the world in all regions of the world loneliness of school goes up after 2012. so it's a gigantic global network effect it's hard for kids to talk to other kids because they're too busy performing on social media platforms thank you [Applause] i guess the only thing i would add to that or push back on yes uh it it can be annoying to walk into a room and see everyone on their phone people should put down their phones more spend more human contact is good i'm all in favor of it this pandemic has reminded me how much i prefer it to social media although we should keep in mind that we are i think lucky that we did have social media as we went through this again it is no substitute for actual human socialization but because of massive external factors we were told by our government that for people's health you are not allowed to socialize you're not allowed to do the most fundamental healthy human thing imaginable you must you know not like breathe on people you have to stay away from them and i i i suspect that it's good or it was a positive that we at least had this to fall back on or i mean if we're defining social media broadly this includes the things that actually made our lives like literally possible during the pandemic zoom clubhouse netflix streaming et cetera also when you do walk into a room yes everybody on their phone it's annoying but it's not like everyone who's on social media is not communicating i mean much of what they're doing is in fact socializing it's socializing with other people it's not people in the room with them currently but there's other people it can be people all over the world i've met people because of social media because of forums and various things that i would have never had the opportunity to engage with these people uh if you know i was confined to just the my immediate vicinity i mean the social media is a very uh liberatory technology in in terms of its ability to connect people across vast distances i know that's like the starry-eyed uh vision of social media but still true to a to a large extent um finding a social media can be a way for teens to find sympathetic ears to find to find healthy communities sometimes they find unhealthy communities that can happen but they can they can find healthy ones uh as well so so we we it's not you know it's not literally like everyone on a social media site is just like a lost zombie human who is no longer engaged uh in the realities of life and also there's you know we can talk about um the the the mental health crisis the worsening of it i i'm certain we will find an even worse mental health crisis among young people you know when we're counting the most recent years for again totally exogenous factors the the pandemic and the shutting down of everything that like kids hold dear extracurricular activities school their hub of their social lives so so i i totally understand and and agree that there's a huge mental health crisis and and problems i think some of it john addressed that in his earlier comments you can't just say it's people being more willing to be open about uh mental health i think that i like we might disagree on how much of that it explains i'm a big fan of jonathan height and the coddling of the american mind where they predicted that when when you make it so that in in liberal activist circles the person who is the most oppressed and traumatized has the most power you will create a system where people compete to sound like they are oppressed and the easiest way to like fake oppression if you don't fall into like a category where you might have experienced negativity would be to say well i have a mental illness i've recovered from ptsd i'm traumatized for various reasons and i i do think that explains some not all not all at all uh by any stretch of the imagination explains some of the we've almost like destigmatized mental health a little too far where people want to see themselves as traumatized and victimized and i don't think that's a healthy thing but i don't think that's social media yeah i think that's the kind of cultural trend among among young people among young activists uh the last thing i i want to say before i return to my seat it is still important to keep in mind you know let's as we talked about instagram in those hearings right the wall street journal report instagram's so bad again newspaper very anti-social media uh we're liking instagram uh facebook to big tobacco this is the big tobacco moment you heard that over and over again big tobacco has killed millions of people how many corpses can we lay at facebook's door actually i accept that it's more than zero is it millions it's definitely not millions so and also unlike cigarettes which have no positive except i mean if it's positive if you like smoking them but like kids all sorts of vices have declined along this the rise of social media so so like drunk driving rates among teenagers have fallen off it's 54 decreased since the early 90s kids spend more time on their phone they they gather less there are good and good effects of that there are there are some like we so we have to stack up like all the lives saved by kids not getting into messy circumstances drug use alcohol abuse all down among the same age cohort along the same time frame that social media comes along so it's not always good when kids are only looking at their phones i agree but it is good if it stops them from like killing themselves in a car thanks to you both we now move to the question and answer part of the evening and we do have a mic over there and then for the people on the balcony we have a mic pointing approximately the direction where the mic is and so we're going to alternate that way the moderator i have the prerogative to ask questions but uh the rules are that either of you can lay a question on the other at any time uh do uh you either want to either if you want to do that or you want to wait for audience questions uh uh john i'm now please pick up the microphone jonathan you wanted to put a question to your opponent please go ahead yeah my partner um so just one question so we we have we have this big change in teen mental health it begins like in 2012 2013 uh you know something's a little early a little later but like it's like right there just as as as american teens move on to these platforms if it's not that what is it the critics the people i debate with they never give an alternative there's no plausible alternative i've heard for why suicide rates doubled a few years over the next few years i don't know i think the uh the 2010s are probably a just a more depressing horrible time than like the 1990s i'm being totally serious um kids are stressed out about some of the things they're stressed out about i don't think are maybe as legitimate or to be worried about but they're worried about climate change they're worried about you know the the promise of going to college and you know you could taking out loans and then you pay them back because you get a good job that like there's some instability in in the kind of economic uh situation for them that i i think things were more chill and relaxed in the 90s um like i think that's kind of true there's it's hard to put your finger on what exactly it is but like the last 10 years have been a worse time i think that crime is up uh it is actually up people used to be right misinformed about crime and now like their perception that crime is raising is finally correct uh which is not to discount that social media's had something to do with it i i can buy that a little bit but i don't i it seems to be happening at the same time rather than the direct cause to me here we're left like interrupt each other right like you know have like a normal conversation okay so yes in the last few years i think you can make the case that things are objectively worse on some measures but put yourself back in 2012 2013 2014 we had the global financial crisis in 2008 or so the bottom dropped out young people thought they had no future um and over the following years after about 2011 the economy gets better and better unemployment drops more and more the stock market goes up and up everything's looking up so how does it get better for this age group though does it get better for the people staring this down but why would but why would an improving economy affect why economic changes affect girls more than boys right why would i mean the timing just doesn't work for it to be economic factors and in terms of it being scary things in the world when big scary threats happen you know what happens generally to suicide rate it drops durkheim found that in the 1890s when you go to war people don't say oh my god where i'm going to kill myself no anything any sort of collective crisis brings people together and that protects against suicide suicide happens when people feel disconnected alone alienated not when there's a common threat and if young women in particular we should be clear about this you see the graphs it's not just young women it's young women on the left just in the last six months two data sets have come out all k all kids are getting more depressed but it starts first for young women who say they're on the left and it's steepest for them um and so uh i would suggest to you that it's because they all got on social media and it's the progressive girls who are all freaking each other out about as you said victimization global warming oppression rape culture all these things um so even if it's the external world it's brought into them by social media every day while they're awake but they could freak themselves out about that without social media not as much i mean when i was a kid we would get angry about things the republicans did and there was like one or two every week you know now it's like every hour well but it is this is a much more politically vicious time that is another major way in which this is just a worse time like our politics are so broken and so horrible you know choices that political actors have made like that didn't have to be made um that i mean like the inability to talk about anything other than donald trump for five straight years really sucked back for everyone's psyche no matter if you love him or hate him it's bad for your psyche uh but but i i mean like i'm not dissenting from the instagram part of it um so okay do you have a question for me we might do you want to put a question to johnny i'll let the audience okay yeah okay well uh please uh don't have to identify yourself uh please just uh ask your question as a question and if it's directed to either of the two debaters please state that as well go ahead take it away sir uh thank you sir um this is directed to jonathan i interested uh i was very interested in what you had to say i think at the heart of what you said was that anxiety in first among young girls said increase had tripled uh and that the analysis you had done had showed that there was a 20 correlation with involvement with social media yeah a 0.20 correlation yeah that's 20 well okay okay i'm a statistician so i do know that um i i'm not sure that you understand that what you were saying was that four fifths of that tripling was due to at a at least due to something else and that at best one-fifth of that tripling was due to involving social media if there was causation and i'll get to that in a moment so what you were saying was that one-fifth of the tripling which would be a little more than one-third increase so that depression anxiety among young girls increased by about a third during the period which is worrying but really i think if that's all it is it explodes your claim that this is some giant tripling of anxiety at best if there's causation it's only increased by one-third because of uh involving social media now now now now now let me just finish let me just finish because as you know and as you've heard many times correlation does not mean causation it could be that all those other things which you haven't attempted to identify that cause four-fifths of the increase are getting these young girls be anxious and first and by pure correlation they happen also to go on social media because they go on social media it doesn't mean that they're going on social media's cause of anxiety and depression it might be the other way around or it might be a correlation with these other things your concept is i think you made your argument and uh thank you very much so be seated and jonathan you have a right to respond yeah so certainly i certainly understand that correlation does not show causation and that's why in our giant google document we have a section on the correlational studies we have a section on the experimental studies and the studies that use random assignment also find effect so we're quite confident that it's not just reverse correlation or third factor if there is a causal effect um secondly secondly hold on let me answer sir hold on no excuse me excuse me sir sir so there's a lot of people who want to speak unfortunately unfortunately the protocol is you just get one shot and and yeah and uh come to the party afterwards and grab the guy by to talk to you and in terms of percent variance accounted for this is what i was saying about dose response versus emergent effects if all we had was dose response i would agree with you that the correlate the variance we can explain by the correlations is not adequate to explain this gigantic catastrophe that's happened i would agree with you on that and that's why a lot of what i've been doing in my writing and what i did in my atlantic article a couple months ago was to say stop looking just at dose response this is a network transformation this affects kids who don't use social media at all because before they could find other kids to play with and now they can't you that you don't pick that up in the correlations of the kid who doesn't use social media because it's a network transformation it's not just just response uh comment uh actually could you elaborate on that point a little bit i think it's the part of your analysis i was actually least persuaded about that you know what you're saying it's right it's not just affecting the kids who are heavy social media users but because there's so much heavy social media use there aren't enough dissenting kids to like find each other and it's so changing the the environment like is there enough scientific evidence of that yet though is that really just like a theory for how this is impacting yeah well so the other big piece that i haven't brought up here in terms of the depression uh explosion is the vast overprotection that we put on kids in the 1990s kids need to play they need to play unsupervised they learn how to work things out um and we largely stopped them from doing that in the 1990s we decreased the amount of free play this i believe made kids more vulnerable weaker and then those same kids get on social media and now i feel like i could do that great woody allen movement where he pulls out marshall mcluhan i happen to have lenore skinesia right here lenore can you stand up please hello hello [Applause] so this is what i mean by a network transformation um before 2009 there's data from a british studio so in 2009 it was something like 60 or 70 of english girls said they sometimes went over to their friends houses and in 2014 2015 it was like 12 yeah well that's i fully agree that that's bad i'm lenore's editor reason i edit all her things that but that doesn't get to the um i mean the government has criminalized doing this right the government should do less on this front agreed agrees government should make it legal to play at the park okay out of the playground and on to social media next question uh both focused on the impact for children i was wondering if you could focus a little bit on the impact for grown-ups naturally we know about our attention span getting mushed up but i was thinking if the definition of social media was something to do with an app in which we posted content so that we could uh share and connect would dating apps be connected within this and if the uh algorithms are playing with the date with the dating apps because naturally it's not their objective to get us paired up and live happily ever after but instead to spend enormous amounts of time constantly looking could the dating apps be considered the social media that could be actually generating a civilizational impact on how we procreate develop and have families and children i guess that's the question for jonathan as well yeah i guess we'll do yeah i'll um so i i agree with your premise i think you're probably right i just read an amazing book a wonderful book by cal newport called deep work and it really affected me in terms of the way that i try to work and it really helped me stay off twitter things like that so i suspect that these that adults are also very affected and i think the dating apps probably are affecting emerging sexuality uh among young men and women um i simply haven't studied it yet so i don't know what i'm basically i think it's affecting them in a negative way from um from uh i get yes overall um but there i'm not but i'm not confident i have not reviewed the research and there isn't a lot of research what i've been doing is looking where the light is best which is on children there are a lot of studies we have a lot of data large large studies i haven't seen any good studies other than like you know decreases in how much people are having sex they're things like that and stories but i just so i think you're probably right but i don't know comment from you robbie better again in so many of these things we're talking about i agree that a subset a minority of users can have negative experiences with these things i mean maybe this comes down to like a philosophical thing i like i am not going to have the government restrict access to these platforms on everyone's behalf because a small amount of users are having an issue just like i wouldn't make gambling illegal because some people go to the casino and they'll bet everything they have um most people can go and have a good experience that's just maybe it's just like a libertarian philosophical thing dating apps i would tend to think have tremendous ups i mean i don't use them but uh they have like made it easier for people to find more prospective partners um they've probably been very valuable to like the lgbt community and others who you it'd be hard to especially if you live not in a big city but it's hard to know like what your prospective dating pool is there are a lot of advantages so let's not you know as we focus on the harms in a couple categories which i agree there are harm like again let's not lose the tremendous upside of at the you know click of a button at your fingertips having an entire world of people to engage with date have conversations with and so on and so on moderators prerogative i would not have met my abstract artist downtown wife but for a dating app is there a balcony balcony balcony i was about to say the balcony thank you we're up here yeah yeah uh yes uh and are you up at the balcony yes indeed and uh that's i was about to recognize you so please ask a question go ahead um so as we're discussing the decline in girls mental health i think it's important to note that we've devalued girls and their contributions we've told them that their import impulses toward love and motherhood and relationships are wrong we've told them that sex is an emotionless enterprise designed for pleasure and that they should indulge in porn and porn culture we've reinforced reinforced gender stereotypes through gender identity ideology and don't you think that the intense pornification of girls and sex has something to do with the loneliness and isolation and feeling like trash not just social media that's the question uh let me ask you robbie uh just as a change of pace to be the first to answer that challenging question yeah look porn uh does present um specific challenges certainly maybe this would be an area where i think at least the the government may be doing some of the restrictions that you've mentioned for the other things certainly you could make a stronger or a case that would be less affected by the first amendment because the supreme court has been more open to regulation on this front i think the public pressure put on porn companies in the last two years was porn companies at porn platforms pornhub uh was positive actually i i agree i think them allowing is that pornhub would allow unverified users to post pornographic videos without any ch check like is allowing for a lot of um revenge porn like posting without people's permission which is actually i think the biggest problem in this category of issues uh and it may be an area where the liability protection actually i would like i would be okay with being tweaked but because of the pressure and the credit card companies saying this is you know we you can't we're not going to engage with these sites if they do this they did they changed it so you can no longer just like post at will without pornhub having any idea who you are the idea being then if you post without your permission they can like give your information to the cops and something so i'd like to add on to what robbie said by pointing out that in his book to your credit that is one of the place where you very clearly say here is a case where i think government regulation is actually necessary and good so really it's really just a difference of degree between us and i want to also emphasize when we're talking especially as the conversation moves to adults i'm really reluctant to tell adults what they can and can't do so like banning dating apps like i would never consider like no i would not think of that but for children it's very different children go through developmental periods development appropriate periods and so the concern there especially i think what what i'm learning recently as i listen to girls especially it's going through puberty while posting photos of yourself that's the most vulnerable spot that's why i think the most damage is done so i think their development appropriate periods and finally i think we both agree and i would really want to emphasize this as an academic my god do we need research if there are these big things happening we certainly don't want to just go off and legislate because people think it's a problem because that's how all the previous moral panics happened we need this to be a research priority the surgeon general just issued this advisory and the surgeon general reached out to me and and uh lenora is talking with him next week the surgeon general is very interested in the possibility that free play is beneficial and social media early is not but if we're going to legislate i mean that's part of the reason why we have the surgeon general not just to talk to the people but to be a kind of a science advisor all of this has to be based on research and right now we have very little uh i'm going to recognize the balcony a bit later as well uh back to the orchestra ask a question please thank you fascinating debate um this is kind of going back to the first couple of questions but isn't it really reductive and therefore incomplete to only be focusing on this one aspect rather than looking at the incredible complexity of young people's lives and that does include their awareness of climate change um uh financial issues for sure school shootings i mean this is the generation that grew up really genuinely fear fearing as unlikely as it actually is that they someone's going to come into their school and shoot them so i mean i i know we're kind of returning to the earlier points but i just feel like you know this is not factoring in just how incredibly complex and difficult people's lives are now yeah i mean i think we probably both agree with that i would just say i don't think that's a social media that is not a thing you can specifically blame on social media i mean fear about mass shootings is one of the is one of the mainstream media's like biggest uh biggest things that gets wrong frankly because like as you said they are uh blessedly extremely rich school shootings are especially extremely rare um kids are there's all sorts of statistics you can look at but like kids are safer at school than other environments generally so the the fear that kids have that they're going to die in school is to a large degree an un irrational fear compared to other ways they might harm themselves or come to harm but it is such a such a powerful fear that you could see how how that could be one factor contributing and i suspect it is one factor contributing to the greater anxiety of young people for for reasons that the mainstream media has pushed on them not social media yeah and i i would certainly be a fan of both complexifying uh and simplifying you want to go back and forth between perspectives and in in the cuddling american mind greg and i tried to do that to trace out multiple there's like six threads that we trace out i love stories about trends working together i would just point out people do not kill themselves because they're afraid they kill themselves because they feel alone and so school shootings is not it might make people afraid it's not going to make them kill themselves you kill yourself when you feel disconnected alone shamed but certainly factors into anxiety and depression if they are afraid um anxiety i suppose i'm not sure about depression yeah um next question gentlemen behind thank you uh sure um my questions for for jonathan uh so you were talking about earlier technologies and and how they induced a moral panic before they retained and then they got me thinking about the printing press and whether we never tamed the printing press because pretty much anyone can print a pamphlet or publish a book but then i thought of libel law how you can't just print sort of what oh libel yes libel law and how you can't just print anything and it shocked me that the power of anti-defamation law as applies to written text published text is that it places the onus on the aggrieved party to raise that cause of action and to sue the author the publisher who printed the untrue and defamatory statement about them and so that way rather than having a regulatory agency or congress trying to design a one fits-all solution the regulations can can sort of coalesce from the bottom up into based on a response to actual circumstances so my question for you is could you imagine a uh the creation of a new cause of action a private cause of action perhaps at the federal level so it fits with any resolution that would provide the persons who have been harmed by specific intentional actions of the the purveyors of social media the social media companies that would then realign incentives in order to address the uh the harms that social media causes well i i see what you're trying to do in sort of changing systemic pressures and changing systems that you get a better outcome um but the last thing i would want in our litigious culture is to say we're going to resolve this by individuals taking action against each other what i would much rather we do i think your example of the printing press is a very good one because it's an example of incredibly powerful technology that brought down old and decrepit power structures and part of that is happening a part of it is beneficially referred to that about the vested interests are the ones who are most threatened um but i but i think it's a good example as with so many of these technologies that yeah we did need a little bit of regulation and i think there does have to be some regulation here and especially as i said you know the british example where what they're doing with their online harms bill is they're positing a duty of care that if you're a platform that is having minors on you have a duty of care they're not like you're you know it's okay if you know if you want to just exploit your adults and for their data you know they're they're adults where they make their own decisions but with children you have a duty of care so i would rather that we have uh like not the heavy-handed kind of regulation if philip howard was here many of you know philip howard and his his books and his analysis of of how terrible and stupid most regulation is but when you lay out a general principle and you let the companies figure out how to meet it don't try to micromanage so yes i think that the printing press is instructive in many ways but i would not want to see just mass action i mean we're already attacking each other all the time to put penalties and fines on it too would just make it unbearable i think coming from you robbie no no okay yeah uh balcony question hi thank you thank you both for a really engaging debate um the big tobacco question seems very relevant because we're framing social media as essentially an addictive substance that hijacks our biology and so we need federal government to step in and save our brains and our bodies essentially especially those of our kids um if i have a history right though and forgive me if this is really hopelessly libertarian um the federal government response to big tobacco only came after there was a really strong social science consensus that tobacco was harmful and it seems that we're still cobbling together some sort of consensus exact consensus about social media so i guess my question is is there a reason to believe that once a really strong consensus emerges that there won't be more of a grassroots response from parents and even from kids themselves um about how they're going to change how they relate to social media which will then change how platforms appeal to them um and is there a reason to believe that won't happen or the federal government could do this more efficiently than parents or the kids themselves yeah you're right that there's no consensus in fact if you took all the people who say that they're social media researchers i would say the majority of them are skeptical that social media is a cause and gene twenge and i are the main people who are in a debate there are a few others who are on our side but we are actually right now the minority position i believe that's because they're all focused just on the dose response data that's all and there's so much more going on now if there was and so if there was to be a consensus would this suddenly galvanize the nation like no i don't think galvanization and data tend to go together very well um or i wish they did but they don't um so that's why i'm hoping you know let's take small steps based on uh oh and one of the main things that lenore and i are talking with the surgeon general about is here are the experiments that would learn that would not settle but here are the experiments that would tell us because what we need to do is school by school don't just like tell one kid to use more or less have an entire school district have a phone locker policy and have the next school district not have it and we'll know in two years whether it was beneficial so um so i'm very reluctant again to tell adults what to do but yeah when it's kids we really need to do research on what on what's harming them and if it's not harming them then i wouldn't want bands and and just to add i really do expect it'll be something new the k like there is i have very little faith that kids will continue to be interested in the social media sites that are popular right now there's such turnover in this space the the ones that have have been around now for a while are you know declining in popularity i mean i this is even true for me i and i'm a very active i was a very active social media user i realized the other day that i use twitter a lot less all of a sudden um i i'm using instagram less i don't use facebook at all i'm not going to get into tick-tock so it some some of these things will have a natural lifespan and either the next thing that comes along could be healthier even for kids for the population we're talking about then instagram is this could be a this could be a one-off because again the problem even based on what you're saying it's not really social media it's this platform for these people which i agree but i would never make government policy at that i mean it's very hard and then even among that population you'd have still the majority of girls in that age group using instagram responsibly and not having a negative you you know you have i think it was like two out of five right in that in the facebook internal data or something yeah but again that's the dose response thing yeah well yeah they'd all be better off if they didn't have it as my argument i don't yeah i don't think so um another question is about today okay thank you uh my question is to jonathan on instagram specifically at the same time that there are young girls incentivizing a certain type of body or a lifestyle they are that make girls uh feel bad about themselves or trying to fit into a world that they will never fit at the same time however we have many profile accounts telling them accept yourself it is okay to be whatever you want to be so you don't think in this regard social media can auto regulate themselves and you don't think it must be a choice for the users to follow what make they feel better or in the case of minors you don't think the parents should be responsible for helping them like parents cannot see what the kids are doing all the time so the government will never be able to do this so that's my question okay yes thank you if we just look at content if we thought that you know all that matters here is content just like what the kids see and then we say well you know maybe if we can get maybe there's a lot of good content and maybe if the good content is ten times the amount of bad content maybe that'll be okay but my argument as a social psychologist is that it's not primarily about the content it's about going through middle school which is already the worst time of life for most people it's always been worse for girls going through middle school where most of your consciousness even when you're in class most of your consciousness is about the drama going on and it's about the photo that you posted and it's kids are learning to be brand managers and performers when they should be out playing and so i don't focus very much on the content and that's why i'm not very interested in content moderation it's a whack-a-mole game it's a hopeless errand i'm focused on the dynamics especially the social dynamics and i think these platforms are unsafe at any speed for young kids especially around 12 13 14. anything photo based and the girls go for the photo based platforms the boys went for video games and also for youtube um back in the early 2010s um the second part of your question was um oh shoot what was it uh what are we people choosing uh the parents yes can't the parents do it um so you know if it's if it's like how much candy well a parent can control how much candy you eat in your own house but it's hard to control outside of course instagram and these platforms are a little different because um it's like you imagine that a candy company contracted with your daughter to hook up a pipeline of candy into her bedroom and no permission is needed for your parent parents don't even know they just do it and they do it all over the world and you can't stop it because yeah if you're really vigilant you could you could catch it at the window but then as long as you can get to a web browser she'll get it so these companies are going around our backs they're putting us in a trap none of us very few of us want our kids to be on but they're in a it's a it's a classic economic social dilemma where we each give in because we don't want our kids to be isolated so i think this really calls out for some central force to break the trap especially when we're talking about underage kids i've had two conversations with mark zuckerberg two conversations with adam oseri i bring this up every time and they always say oh but we don't allow kids under 13. well after my second after my first conversation with mark zuckerberg for the second i just created a fake account for my daughter and i lied about her age i said oh yeah mark really i just made an account for her so you know it's a trap it's illegal well i understand especially for under 13 there's no excuse for this i think um i'm afraid uh we're running out of time uh and uh robbie make a brief comment if you want yeah it just it will be very hard no matter how interested the government is doing this from stopping from like this is a genie that cannot be put back into the bottle uh like kids will find ways to access these sites we should actu absolutely empower parents local decision maker you know school counselors should talk to people about responses talk to the vulnerable group the the young women i i think they should talk to young men as well about uh porn addiction again we're not totally clear on what the research tells us these are absolute conversations that you should be having in the school but the level of banning and prohibiting they're going to get around it and we could we could make these these platforms seem more seductive and more tempting because now they're part of the forbidden ah thank you for excellent questions we're running out of time in the q a uh we're going to move to the summary portion of the evening jonathan height speaking for the affirmative please take the uh okay well thank you gene thank you robbie thank you to the audience i'm extremely interested in the power and importance of viewpoint diversity and especially as we saw tonight you have two people we agree on a lot we disagree on a lot and this was fun and we both come out with more refined more nuanced views of a very complicated very very important topic in my closing remarks i just want to um let's see i want to make a couple of points um let's see okay i'll so suppose here's a thought experiment i've been playing with i want to i'll try to work it out here um suppose we're back in 1993 uh before most people had really seen seeing the internet and imagine that a genie appeared and he he put in front of us three magical boxes just floating in the air in front of you and and he said you can open none one two you can open as many as you want or none of them and on the first one the label said internet the second one it said iphone and the third it said social media now knowing what we know now which ones do you think we should have opened or which ones would you choose to open or which ones do you think were good for society to open so let's do let's let's do a little poll so suppose so the internet uh so you know obviously enormous benefits and yeah there are some downsides i mean lots of things can happen on the internet that are bad um raise your hand if you think we'd be better off if we didn't have the internet raise your hand high okay one and now raise your hand if you think no it's a really good thing that we have the intent raise your hand okay it's like an insane question especially in room full of libertarians so the internet i mean the cost-benefit ratio the transformative effects of the internet the things it made possible the things it brought outside of wealthy countries and made available to people all over the world it's transformative in a good way like electricity or like fire so the internet boy are we glad we opened that one and remember for some of you if you're old enough like me it's like you know the first time you see it in a web browser like it was it was inconceivable it's like all the information like there for free amazing all right next one the iphone now smartphones it's a little more complicated because there are claims that smartphones have damaged a generation smartphones are addictive things like that but this is the most amazing swiss army knife ever created and i sleep with mine under my pillow because it's useful as a flashlight and useful as a clock and i go everywhere with it um and you know as steve jobs originally intended it was going to be like a swiss army knife with these like five or six things that are tools that you can use now in some ways now it uses us but we'll get to that as a swiss army knife i think this is an incredible thing now do you think that the world would be better off if we never had smartphones if we all were just on flip phones raise your hand if you think we should not open that box okay so now we get about about 10 people saying yeah we'd be better off if we didn't have smartphones just flip phones raise your hand if you think no it's a good thing we have smartphones raise your hand okay so about 90 all right okay now we come to the third box and remember each box you open is going to take 10 to 20 hours a week from you okay now what do you get for the internet you get a lot you learn a lot what do you get from from your iphone it solves a lot of problems finding you taxis all sorts of things so each each time you open a box it's an extra 10 to 20 hours okay so now we're up to 20 to 30 hours a week from internet and smartphones okay now there's a third box it says social media it says facebook or instagram social media now if you open it what do you get you get constant updates about what someone had for lunch and why someone hates somebody and why somebody is a fascist or a racist and and what are the downsides well i've been making a case that there are many many downsides so what i'd like you to do is imagine imagine a world without without social media imagine uh imagine a world in which the only way you could communicate with other people was by phone email texting whatsapp skype zoom facetime blogging fortnite roblox minecraft a thousand other video games multiplayer games u.s mail and walking over to someone's house ringing the doorbell and using your vocal cords imagine such a world robbie said we should be grateful that we had social media during the pandemic no we should be grateful that we had these 50 other platforms that could connect us our kids would have been so much better off if they had to actually zoom each other rather than posting posting posting company oh you look great love it like no that was stupid that was a wait that was not connecting that was performing we would have been so much better off if we did not have social media of that business model if we just had everything else that at least is my claim um so um uh so if in conclusion um if you're happy that we open that third box and you think everything's going fine and you think we shouldn't exert some some kind of of a centralized effort to try to clean things up uh research based of course but if you're happy with the way things are going you should vote after after these statements you should vote no on the resolution but if you join me in imagining a better world healthier kids and a more admirable democracy i urge you to vote yes thank you [Applause] someone said once maybe they didn't maybe i said it all debates eventually become debates over definition so i would like to go over those lists of things you just mentioned that we're good and like is that doesn't count as social media again if we confine social media to just the experience teenage girls have on instagram yes it's not great right uh but so many people are using things we just would describe social media i would describe aol instant messenger and myspace the things i used when i was a teenager to great enjoyment to have much better uh friend much larger friend groups to make friends i was a shy kid i didn't make a lot of friends in school i made them after school on in what is clearly described as social media i think i i bet that's the experience i anecdotally i hear this from young people that is the experience still of a lot of kids that school school the people the class they're sorted into that they would have been lucky to be sorted into in normal times but have not been sorted into because they've not actually even been in school for two years is not as enjoyable as the networks they can curate and create for themselves because of this amazing technology that i would not that i would absolutely open that box and unleash on the world because you don't have to use it the choice is still yours you can unplug some people can unplug we hear i think a lot from the loudest angriest and most addicted people which warps this conversation the social dilemma movie which you were were you the only person in my view giving like saying saying normal saying things in that netflix documentary which is mostly about all these former tech people bragging about how they think they've hacked your brain and that your decisions are no longer your own and they control you and isn't it bad but also kind of cool what they were able to do like they're bragging that they did this i'm listening to these people and like you know you're tech addicts like you you you people who worked for these companies and were involved i get that you're a little bit too addicted and too in love and obsessed in an unhealthy way with this product is this most people's experience i don't think it is uh we didn't talk about this as much jonathan sort of started to suggest that it the quasi-nefarious thing these these these platforms are doing in that they cut they're collecting data about you and then seller selling a curated your user experience and providing you with advertisements i'm so i'm pro-capitalism so i don't think this is necessarily as malicious as it's made out to be i can watch television all day and be bombarded by advertisements for products that are irrelevant to my interest that i have no interest in buying but when i visit social media i am shown things that might actually improve my life that i might want to buy i'm not forced to buy them the kind of like it's hypnotism is like i don't believe that maybe it's their social psychologist again bragging about their own achievements trying to say that this is something they've created i don't believe it i i think it's it's it largely can be can be a benefit so we've concentrated a lot in these remarks because jonathan is such an expert on it and and it's an important topic you know the harms to kids element of it but i you know i just want to remind you that that's probably like 25 of the conversation right now about why the government needs to do something about social media most of the energy attention to this issue is focused either on um the spread limiting the spread of misinformation that's the major liberal concern and then on right something we didn't even touch here tonight is the concern that that these uh that the platforms are are censoring too much information um so those are the and my my book if you're interested in it gets into those a lot a lot more because they really are the things we're talking about so you know i just wanted to say 30 seconds again on those before we wrap that i think uh the the whatever legitimate beefs there are uh do not lend themselves whatsoever to a government solution which is the the question on the table and in fact the interest that the government has in regulating social media along these lines and not this not the stuff where there maybe is some cause for concern uh is is illustrative and should give us pause about pursuing any inviting in any capacity the government uh to do more about this and and on the misinformation question specifically because really this is the the i would i don't i'm not sure what your take would be i think this is the major reason people want to regulate social media these days at least the one i come into contact with the most here the research is is very favorable i i think to my position a lot of the the panic about how much people being inundated with so many lies and et cetera et cetera is has not been borne out uh by the data actually it's it's like a tiny number of social media users who are sharing the most like alarming social media misinformation it's a tiny number of users who are seeing it it pales in comparison to the misinformation they're inundated with in the on the media platforms that existed before it uh but this is the animating concern of the biden administration and the ftc and the fcc of the government figures who actually will do the regulating who are going to do something on social media this is what they care about and it will have very bad consequences for free speech thank you [Applause] uh conor please open the voting please take out your smart phones and please vote yes no or undecided you could still be undecided on the resolution if you were undecided uh before or if you voted yes or no again the federal government should increase its efforts to reduce the harms caused by social media uh yes no or undecided on the resolution drum roll please [Applause] now um the resolution um the uh the resolution uh got initially 28 of the vote it rose to 37.7 percent it picked up 9.8 percentage points 9.8 percentage points is what you picked up jonathan and that's the number to beat the no votes also picked up but picked up 1.8 percentage votes therefore the tootsie roll goes to jonathan height congratulations john congratulations [Music]

Channel: ReasonTV

Views: 72,541

Keywords: libertarian, Reason magazine, reason.com, reason.tv, reasontv

Id: -4AAST_AdSg

Length: 84min 14sec (5054 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 24 2022