Jonathan, I really wanted to have you back.
We had a wonderful conversation a couple of years ago,
and you’ve done a lot of work since then
and I’ve done a lot of thinking about it too, I must admit.
And I think I’m not alone.
Since you published The Anxious Generation in 2024,
a lot of research has come out on the subject.
Your book has been cited as a part of the inspiration
for some new laws that are trying
to shield children from social media.
As we all know, there’s a major law passed in Australia,
which we’ll get to,
and a trial has just started. That’s right.
In the state of California against social media companies.
And that seems really significant.
Yes. Talk me through
what’s going on in California.
Yeah, that’s right.
So, these companies have,
they were given blanket immunity from,
for action back in the nineties.
Section 230, the Communications Decency Act said
we can’t sue Meta or TikTok
because of what someone else posted on Meta or TikTok.
Is it First Amendment?
It was this sort of this, it was actually done
to incentivize the companies to moderate.
‘Cause they were afraid if they moderate,
if they take anything down,
now they’re responsible for every single decision.
So Congress said, you know what?
And it, you know, you can 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.
And so it was a good idea originally.
But the courts have interpreted so widely
that 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.
Okay?
That wasn’t a correlation.
That was causation.
You have kids who they, you know, a happy 11-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, oh,
section 230, you can’t touch us.
Now, how insane is it that the makers
of the largest consumer product in the world,
that is the one that most children use,
that is, 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?
So, in terms of sextortion,
we know one number from Snap was
that they were getting 10,000 reports
of sextortion from their users in 2022.
And that wasn’t 10,000 a year, that was 10,000 a month.
A month.
And so a hundred thousand reports.
And as they said themselves, this is probably the tip
of the iceberg as most people don’t report.
Right. And also, again,
the kids, the boys who kill themselves,
they don’t report either.
And with AI, automating sextortion, it’s gonna go way up.
When we look at harms to mental health, we tend to find
20 to 30% of the girls are saying,
it harmed my mental health.
So that puts you up over 10 million right there.
And that’s just in the US.
So if we look at the harms to mental health,
what we try to argue in this paper is
the specific harms that we go through,
the direct harms and the indirect harms,
are at such a scale,
that this could plausibly have caused
those big increases in 2012 in mental illness.
So what’s happening in California,
What’s happening in California is that
of the thousands and thousands of case
of parents who are suing,
it 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.
Right.
And in this case, the stories are all a little different.
So what justice system is doing
is they’ve created what’s called
a multi-district litigation,
in which all, it’s a couple,
it’s 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.
There are so many members of Gen Z
and young people who are advocating for reform.
And so they’re sitting in the courtroom,
What’s the desirable outcome?
The desirable outcome is that a jury,
which decides questions of fact,
decides that, in fact,
social media is addictive.
And it was designed to maximize engagement.
They use various tricks to basically addict kids.
When you say tricks, Yeah.
What do you mean? Oh, you know,
you ever notice when you, you know, on an iPhone,
when you pull down, like you wanna check your email,
you pull down and then it kind
of bounces up and you get new ones.
Yeah.
That was literally copied from slot machines.
Literally.
I mean, these guys,
they took a course at Stanford called Persuasive Design
in the early 2000’s Right.
One of the founders of Instagram took the course
and they used, again, behaviorist principles.
I met with some leaders of Apple,
and I raised a couple of these just in conversation,
raised a couple of your main points.
What’d they say? Turn it off.
You know, ration your time.
Oh yeah.
Be more logical about how you use it.
Yeah.
It’s a great machine.
You just have to, you know.
Yeah. They were, I have to say,
pretty blase about it.
That’s right.
As a social psychologist
my rule is if one person is doing something bad or stupid,
that person might be bad or stupid.
But if all of us are doing something
that seems bad or stupid,
it’s probably a bad situation
that’s making us all behave this way.
We have a lot of experience with addictive products.
We know a lot about gambling, how it ruins people’s lives.
Not everyone’s susceptible, but a lot are.
Same with alcohol, same with cigarettes.
So we have a lot of experience with addictive substances.
And the rule number one
of addictive substances is we don’t let
companies give ’em to kids.
You know, we say adults, you can, you know,
we’re gonna trust you to regulate
and you know, 10% of you can be severely damaged,
but that’s your choice.
My God, we don’t say that about kids.
Do you think your subject, your obsession of late,
is related to something that concerns me very much,
which is the decline of reading.
We see all this. Oh yeah.
We see all this information,
these statistics about the number of people
who have or have not read one book in the past year.
Yes, this actually, I now believe is the biggest damage.
So when I was writing The Anxious Generation,
I focused on the mental health damage
because that’s where the evidence is best.
Certainly it was three years ago,
and I mentioned attention fragmentation,
I mentioned addiction, but I don’t have a lot on it.
Okay, the book comes out
and now everyone begins talking
about they can’t pay attention anymore.
And it’s not just kids, it’s adults are beginning
to say that they can’t pay attention.
And then we start hearing, as you said.
I’m telling you, it’s hard for me.
Everyone I talk to.
I’m a professional reader, and as I told you
before we went on the air,
I have to take my phone
and put it in the kitchen so that I can,
in the other room, read manuscripts, read a book.
God forbid.
And it strikes me as this,
the rise of the phone
and all it implies is the greatest experiment
in human consciousness in a sense.
Absolutely.
That hasn’t been thought through.
Absolutely.
It’s just speeding 60 miles an hour
into our lives and carrying us along.
With effects far beyond what we can imagine.
Let’s talk about a few of them.
So first, to understand why this is.
So, the key neurotransmitter here is dopamine.
Everyone’s heard of dopamine.
Dopamine is not exactly a reward neurotransmitter,
it’s better thought of
as the neurotransmitter of motivation.
And so, you know, if you eat a potato chip,
it tastes really good.
And then that makes you want.
[Jonathan] Another. Another.
Want another. Sure.
Okay, and so keep your eye on.
So dopamine is wonderful
and we want our kids
to experience a lot of slow dopamine.
Slow dopamine is your kid is trying to build a tree house.
And at first he fails
and he makes some progress, which feels really good.
And so he’s motivated to work hard and he fails again.
And over time, and then eventually he finishes.
And boy, what satisfaction that is.
So that’s how you raise an adult,
is you give them a lot of experiences of slow dopamine.
They learn to set goals and pursue them.
Here’s how you undermine that.
Make available to every child from the age of two,
hand them an iPad.
And what the child will quickly learn unconsciously is
they’re looking at something
and within eight seconds they will know,
this is kind of interesting.
But it’s not, it’s not, swipe.
Oh, oh wow, this is so funny.
Oh, this is great.
This is great, so quit dopamine, quick dopamine.
They go someplace else, sort of.
So, okay, so this is the experience
that young people have had, and since birth now.
Kids are given iPads routinely
when they’re in their strollers.
So what happens?
I had a conversation about this with my students at NYU.
So this is not just crabby College professors whining
about their students not reading middle March in a week.
No, this is the subversion of the ability
to pay attention on a species wide level.
As one of my students said,
’cause I showed her that Atlantic article
about kids aren’t reading,
students aren’t reading books anymore.
And she said, yeah, it’s true.
She said, I pick up a book, I read a sentence, I get bored.
I go to TikTok.
Because, again, you’ve been on this book for eight seconds
and it’s not that interesting.
But the thing in my pocket is a lot more,
it’s ah, quick dopamine.
Quick dopamine.
So this is what we’ve done.
And this is even worse for the boys,
because for the boys, it’s video games, it’s porn,
it’s vaping, it’s gambling, it’s sports betting.
So for boys, it’s open season on their dopamine systems.
And this is gonna make it very hard for them
to develop executive function, follow goals,
be useful as employees or spouses.
So you came in today
and you put in front of me a paper
that you’ve said is the most important research you’ve done.
It’s called Social Media, Is Harming Young People
at a Scale Large Enough
to Cause Changes at the Population Level.
The New Yorker, we wouldn’t call that a good print title,
it’d be a good SEO title.
Okay.
But tell me what this report is all about.
You and your co-authors, Zachary Rausch
have published this year, well in 2026.
Okay, sure.
So the defenders of social media,
and especially Mark Zuckerberg will say
whenever they’re questioned, they say, actually, well here,
here’s a quote from Mark Zuckerberg
when he was questioned under oath in the US Senate,
January 31st, 2024.
He says, Mental health is a complex issue.
And the existing body
of scientific work has not shown a causal link
between using social media
and young people having worse mental health outcomes.
His claim in multiple places is it’s just a correlation
and you can’t prove that it’s causation.
But what Zach and I have done is we have laid out
seven different lines of evidence.
We’re trying to reframe the argument
as one that can actually be solved.
So what Zach and I have done is we have reconceptualized
this in a way that I think will make
a lot of sense to people.
We do have ways of knowing if A caused B in the law
and in social science.
And so we have lots
and lots of studies, surveys of young people.
What do they say?
Do the young people think
that social media is great for their mental health?
Absolutely not.
So what we do, so this is line one, what the victims say.
And in Exhibit A we present a bunch of surveys
of young people, for example.
These are surveys done by whom?
So Pew, Gallup, Common Sense Media,
many international outlets as well.
We cover international research as well.
So Pew, which is probably the main source
of evidence here, 2024,
they found one third of girls say
that social media makes them feel worse about their lives.
50% say it harms their sleep.
It all comes back to this question
of correlation versus causation.
So I laid out line one is what the victims say,
and they say he did it.
Line two is what the witnesses say.
And that’s the parents, the teachers,
the psychologists, the psychiatrists,
they all say, they have a very negative views of this.
They see it up close.
They say, this is causing anxiety disorders,
this is harming my patients.
And then the third line is what the perpetrators say.
So we have quote after quote from inside the company.
I’ll just read a couple very briefly.
[David] Sure.
From TikTok, an internal research report,
Compulsive usage correlates with a slew
of negative mental health effects,
like loss of analytical skill, memory formation,
contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy,
and it correlates with increased anxiety.
And it goes on and on.
So they know that they are hurting kids.
Meta, There are reasons to worry about self-control
in use of our products.
Who’s speaking here.
So this is, let me find the end of the quote.
A member of META’s core data science team
and a senior data scientist at Meta having a conversation.
So let me see, Without providing much more value,
how to keep someone returning
over and over to the same behavior each day?
Intermittent rewards are most effective.
Think slot machine.
They are trying to hook children.
Let’s talk about another country
where something has been done about this.
Late last year,
Australia enacted a new law requiring age verification
for social media users.
I think that’s the first national law.
Yes.
[David] Of its kind. It was.
What does this verification look like
and how is it working?
So the Australia bill was very carefully drafted.
They commissioned a former Chief justice
of the Supreme Court, Robert French,
to figure out how it would be done.
And it specifically says it’s up to the companies to do it,
it’s their responsibility.
And it specifically says the companies cannot only
ask for a government ID,
they have to offer an alternate way.
And they’re already were dozens of companies
that offer alternate ways.
Wait, wait, how does it work?
So, the law tells the companies, you guys figure it out
and you can’t just say, show me your driver’s license,
you have to offer something else.
And there are dozens of companies that offer that service.
So the idea is you wanna open an account on Instagram.
Let’s say you go to Instagram, you put in your birthday,
it then kicks you over to a page which says,
here are four ways that you can
validate that you’re old enough.
So it’s just not, it’s not an honor system?
Yes, I’m 18, on we go.
That’s right, from until until December 10th,
which is when it went into effect,
the world was on the honor system.
Porn, are you 18?
Yes.
You’re in.
So that ended, that began to end on December 10th.
Why did this happen first in Australia?
So in Australia, it just so happens that the wife
of the premier of South Australia read
The Anxious Generation soon after it came out.
And she said to her husband, Peter Malinauskas,
you gotta read this book
and then you’ve gotta effing do something about it.
Right. And he did.
And he called up Robert French and said,
how could we do this?
And they did it.
How is it coming along in Australia?
So here’s what we know.
So Julie Inman Grant,
their eSafety commissioner put out a press
release three or four weeks ago.
She said all 10 of the covered platforms have complied.
They took down 4.7 million accounts
from the 2.4 million Australian kids in that age range.
And, of course, some are getting around it with VPNs,
although I heard from someone who’s studying it,
VPN usage went way up at first,
but it came way back down because the kids,
they wanna check their social media use,
you know, they wanna check it 30 times a day.
And if you have to load up a VPN, it’s a bit of friction.
So, of course kids are still getting around it,
but as Julie pointed out,
we’re trying to change the norms of a nation,
the norms of childhood.
We won’t really know the full effect for 10 or 20 years.
How does it affect schools and phones?
So there’s two things.
One is locking up the phones in the morning,
a phone free school policy.
And that has magical effects, transformative effects.
Some schools don’t implement it well,
they don’t enforce it well.
And then there’s cheating.
But in schools that enforce it reasonably well,
the results are always spectacular.
The thing that you always hear is,
we hear laughter in the hallways again,
the lunchroom is so loud,
kids are laughing.
I spoke to.
That sounds too good to be true.
Do we know this to be the case?
There’s, so there’s, first of all, it’s very hard
to find an account anywhere of a one that backfired
and that would be newsworthy.
So there are a lot of efforts to measure going on.
Angela Duckworth at Penn is doing a major assessment,
and she showed me some preliminary data
in which the schools that use lockers,
that really took the phones away for the day,
that use special phone lockers,
they got the best results.
Teacher reports, academic outcomes,
and the ones that used yonder pouches got good results.
Not as good.
And the ones that use a backpack policy,
which a lot of schools do unfortunately, say,
Keep it in your backpack.
Don’t take it out.
Which of course, look,
if you’re a cocaine addict and you’re told,
I don’t think.
You can keep your cocaine with you all day long.
So yeah.
So it does seem
to be working incredibly well.
And the biggest argument against the Australian policy
or bringing the Australian policy
to the United States is a First Amendment argument.
Explain the First Amendment argument
and obviously why you disagree with it.
So, of course, the First Amendment is
that Congress shall make no law
restricting the freedom of speech.
And the companies argue that any kind of regulation,
and they have a lot of organizations
with nice sounding names,
internet freedom or whatever,
they argue that any kind
of regulation is gonna stop somebody from speaking
and therefore violates the First Amendment.
But the law already says that you have to be 13,
because this isn’t about who can say what.
The laws are written about at what age
you can sign a contract.
It’s about contract law.
And right now the law says a company has to,
you have to be 13 before a company
can take your data
without your parents’ knowledge or consent.
And the Australian law says, first of all,
13 was too low.
For a child to sign a contract, they have to be 16.
Oh, and guess who has to enforce the age limit?
It’s not the child, it’s the company.
So I don’t see any First Amendment.
The way a liquor store
needs to see your driver’s license.
That’s right, it can’t be up to the parents
to keep their kids outta liquor stores
and strip clubs.
It has to be the person at the door.
How do we maintain some of the real connection
and community that young people do find online?
Thanks for asking that
because this is one of the main arguments is,
thank God for social media.
How could they ever connect
if they didn’t have social media?
How could they find information?
To which I say, yeah, kids need to connect
and the best way to connect is in person.
And the second best way is by telephone or Zoom or FaceTime.
And the worst way to connect is by posting something
and having it be public and having people comment on it.
That seems to be counterproductive.
That seems to cause anxiety.
That does not make people feel connected.
We’ve discussed what’s happening in Australia.
What’s it gonna take for anything like that
to come to the United States?
What’s the position of the administration?
So two things.
First, as soon as my book came out,
mothers jumped into action, pressed for political action.
We got huge amounts of reform in the states.
Most states have taken action on phone free schools,
on regulating social media.
Here in New York, our governor, Kathy Hochul
has been great on all these issues.
So huge amount of action at the state level.
Huge amount of action around the world.
There’s only one place that I know
of where nothing is happening.
And that’s the US Congress.
Now, what’s the role of the administration?
People, and many people assume
because the tech moguls have been buddying up
with President Trump,
many people assume, and I saw this all over Europe,
people are afraid to regulate social media
because they think that Trump will come after them
and put tariffs on them.
But here’s the thing that I want everyone
to notice about this.
Yes, Trump and Elon Musk will be very upset
if you try to do content moderation
and say what counts as hate speech and what?
But if you’re protecting kids,
they actually have shown a lot of signs of support.
So the only thing America has ever done
to protect kids is the Take It Down Act,
which was pushed by Melania
and the the Kids Online Safety Act,
the only act that ever almost made it to law
a year or two ago.
Donald Trump Junior tweeted support of it.
Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of X, tweeted support of it.
And Elon Musk amplified her tweet.
So the Trump administration,
I think the people in the Trump orbit.
Does seem like baby steps though.
Well, passing KOSA would be huge
because we’ve never done anything to protect kids ever.
And so if we could do something ever in the US Congress.
So you he see a potential of a coherent
Trump administration led piece of legislation
analogous to what’s going on in Australia.
Raising the age would be a bigger step.
And so that might take a while longer.
Have you ever talked to anybody in the administration?
I’ve talked with several, not directly with Trump,
but with people in the office of the vice president
and the, so we have some contacts
with people in the administration.
And what are those conversations like?
Well, they’re interested in it,
because again, everyone has kids, everyone sees the threat.
Parents everywhere see this as the biggest threat.
You have the same kind of conversations
on the Democratic side.
Largely yes.
Largely yes.
The Democrats are.
You’re saying largely.
Yeah, so there is, so what happens is Meta puts out a set
of talking points to inflame the right.
And that is censorship, censorship, censorship.
Right. And they a set of talking
points to inflame the left.
And that is that social media is a lifeline
for LGBTQ kids.
And that is not true.
The internet was a lifeline for them.
Kids who were isolated, often rural areas,
when the internet came in,
now they could find information, they could find others.
There were all kinds of ways they were not isolated.
The Internet’s amazing.
Social media is just a small part
of the internet and it’s an incredibly toxic part.
So it’s true, we have, so Zach Rausch
and I have an article in the Atlantic with Lennon Torres,
who’s a trans activist.
And Lennon talks about what happened
to her when she was transitioning.
And what we have data showing that LGBTQ kids,
they do use social media more than any other group.
They’re also much more likely
to report having been harmed by it.
So social media is not a lifeline
for LGBTQ kids.
The internet is.
Speaking of that.
You cite online predatory behavior
and bullying as major issues you’re trying to combat.
But statistics that have been around suggest
that the internet is not the only culprit
or even necessarily the main culprit.
For instance, the very large majority
of exploitation cases involve a culprit
the child knows in real life.
This is from Michael Hobbs.
Is there a risk of ascribing too much harm to the internet
and making it just the singular monster in our midst?
Well, it certainly is true that there
are other sources of harm.
And that’s always been true.
That it’s a man
who is somehow tangentially related to the family.
And so I wouldn’t say that this is everything,
but this is where the predators went.
When you and I were young people began
to talk about sex predators hanging around parks.
And there were those threats,
but they’ve all moved on to Instagram.
There’s an article in the New York Times
a number of years ago.
It’s really dangerous to hang out near a playground.
You could be arrested and put away for life,
but on social media you have complete anonymity.
You can do what you want.
And if your account is shut down,
you just open up 10 more with different names.
I sense another book coming from you, John.
I think things are moving too fast for another book.
I may not write another book.
I’ve gotta just.
[David] It sounds to me. Write articles.
Interestingly, you’ve gone from subject to subject
over in your adult and academic life.
But this seems like now the work of a lifetime.
Yeah, this is what I’m gonna do for the rest of my life
because this is the biggest.
What does that mean?
What it means is that I was supposed to,
I have a contract to write a book on democracy
called Life After Babel:
Adapting to a World We May Never Again Share,
about what social media is doing to liberal democracy,
how it may be incompatible with it.
I’d love to write that book and I might still write it,
but by the time I write it, everything could be
so radically different in our country.
How would you summarize it? I would summarize it
by saying that democracy is a conversation.
And when that conversation was in the agora in Greece,
they had one kind of democracy.
And when that conversation was during the Gutenberg era,
which took place in print and in places
like the New Yorker and CBS news,
it was a different kind of conversation.
And that was the glory period of liberal democracy
during the Gutenberg era,
the best societies humans have ever made.
And now we’re out of the Gutenberg era,
we’re into the network era.
We will never again know what’s true.
It’ll never be possible to have a shared reality.
So that’s not the fault of Donald Trump.
He’s a symptom of it, you’re saying
He is the first person who knew how
to navigate the new world and to predict his own reality.
And exploit it. That’s right.
If not for Twitter,
he could not have become president.
But he is, just as it is said that both John Kennedy
and Ronald Reagan were extremely adept
at the age of television.
Right. And Neil Postman
writes about this,
the great 20th century media theorist.
Amusing ourselves to death.
Exactly. Yeah.
And so in the same way,
when that conversation moves on to Twitter,
what happens to it?
Read Federalist 10
where the founding father’s worried about people’s ability
to get pulled off into nonsense and craziness
and the ability of a demagogue to inflame the passions.
They tried to design safeguards for it,
but in the social media age, those safeguards are gone.
So I’m extremely alarmed
about the future of American democracy,
unless we can get a handle on
on what the technology is doing to us.
Unless we can greatly strengthen
our democratic institutions.
That genie can’t go back in the bottle either.
Can’t go back in the bottle.
So the question is how,
and that’s why the subtitle of the book is
Adapting to a World We May Never Again Share.
Thanks so much, Jonathan. Thank you, David.
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