As a First Amendment idea?
It was actually done to incentivize the companies to moderate. The companies were afraid that if they take anything down, they become responsible for every single [piece of content]. So Congress said, “Go ahead and take down porn, and don’t worry—no one can sue you if you leave something up.” They wanted to give them more freedom of action.
It was a good idea originally, but the courts have interpreted it so widely. So you have all these parents with dead kids, and, in many cases, it’s just crystal clear. I mean, the kid got sextorted on Snapchat and was dead that night. That wasn’t a correlation. That was causation. You have a happy eleven-year-old girl, she gets on Instagram, and a few weeks later she’s developing an eating disorder.
So you have all these parents whose kids have been killed or damaged, and not one has ever gotten justice. Not one has ever even been able to face Meta in court. Meta has never faced a jury. None of these companies have ever faced a jury, because they keep saying, “Section 230, you can’t touch us.”
Now, how insane is it that the makers of one of the largest consumer products in the world—that is the one that most children use, that seems to be harming and killing a lot of them—can never be held responsible for their actions?
Do you have any numbers for this?
We know from Snap that they were getting ten thousand reports of sextortion from their users in 2022. And that wasn’t ten thousand a year, that was ten thousand a month. And, as they said themselves, this is probably the tip of the iceberg, because most people don’t report. And the kids—the boys who kill themselves—they don’t report, either. And with A.I. automating sextortion it’s going to go way up.
When we look at harms to mental health, we tend to find twenty to thirty per cent of the girls are saying, “It harmed my mental health.” The direct harms and the indirect harms are at such a scale that this could plausibly have caused the big increases, in 2012, of mental illness.
So what’s happening in California?
The thousands of cases of parents who are suing can’t be combined into a class-action suit, because class-action suit requires that all the plaintiffs have been harmed in the same way. And in this case the stories are all a little different. So they’ve created what’s called multi-district litigation, in which several thousand cases will be heard by a single judge, a single court, in California.
Now, of course, that’s impossible. So the idea is the two sides argue about which cases to consider. They pick bellwether cases. Those cases go to trial in front of a jury. And then based on what those jury trials are it’ll kind of be clear which way everything has to go. So that’s where we are.
What’s the desirable outcome?
The desirable outcome is that a jury, which decides questions of fact, decides that social media is addictive and it was designed to maximize engagement. They use various tricks to, basically, addict kids.
When you say “tricks,” what do you mean?
Oh, you ever notice that on an iPhone, when you pull down, like, you want to check your e-mail, it kind of bounces up and you get new ones?
Yeah.
That was literally copied from slot machines. Literally.
I work with a lot of people in their twenties and thirties, and when I brought up your book a couple of years ago it seemed to some of them that it was rather censorious—yet another version of “kids these days with their loud rock-and-roll music,” or “it was all better before.” The same thing that you might’ve heard about television by people who had grown up on radio.
Yeah, the main argument that I get is, Oh, this is just another moral panic about whatever technology the kids are using. And as you and I talked about last time that’s a perfectly legitimate argument. I have to show why this time is different.
The big difference I’ve come to see is this. Screens have been around for a long time. Screens are good ways of presenting stories. Screens have a role in education. If you watch a movie with your kid, that’s great. A long story on a screen, across the room, that’s wonderful.
That’s not this.
That’s not this. The difference here is behaviorist conditioning. So, with the television, there’s no stimulus-response reinforcement loop. You watch, you’re entertained, you might get into the story. It’s a very pleasant state, to be into a great fictional story. That’s what art does—it takes us out of ourselves into an imaginary world. That’s great. But, when you give your child a touchscreen device, what the child quickly figures out is that if they touch something, they get something, and then they learn to touch to optimize the getting. And the getting is dopamine—quick dopamine.
So it’s not just the glow of the screen; it’s the reactivity of it.
That’s right. So if you just played thirty-minute videos on a video player, it would be pretty much like television was. But instead what you have is a Skinner box. B. F. Skinner was an important psychologist from about the nineteen-twenties or thirties through about the sixties. He would create these boxes—he would put a pigeon or a rat in it. By giving them reinforcement on a variable ratio reward schedule he could very quickly take control over their behavior and make them dance, make them learn to play Ping-Pong. I mean, he could do amazing things. And when you give your kid a smartphone it is a behaviorist-conditioning machine.
So anyone who says, “Oh, this is just like [the moral panic over] comic books”—no, this is really, really different from comic books. I just read you a bunch of surveys where the kids themselves say, “This is harming us.” They say, “We wish it never existed.” Half of them wish TikTok had never been invented. Nobody was saying that about comic books. So I understand people assuming that this is just another old man shaking his fist at the clouds, but this time’s really, really different.
I met with some leaders of Apple, and I raised a couple of your main points.
What’d they say?
“Turn it off.” You know, ration your time, be more logical about how you use it. It’s a great machine, you just have to, you know… They were, I have to say, pretty blasé about it.
