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Hope for the best, expect the worst Some preach and pain Some die of thirst the way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best Expect the worst, hope for the best. Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Thursday, March 26, 2026. I am Jon Podhoritz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
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B
Hi John.
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A
And Social Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
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C
Hi, John.
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One of Christine's primary topics as a writer, a scholar, a polemicist is the scourge of the Internet, social media. Your book, the Extinction of Experience is about the effort to remove us from the real world and place us in this virtual world in which we don't have the proper set of emotional tools to cope with the fact that we are now spending so much time away from real things and actual things. And a very important. Two very important things happened this week in courtrooms relating to the social media companies that have really created this new reality for Americans and people across the world since the introduction of the iPhone and Facebook in the mid-2000s. Lawsuit finding Meta and YouTube, which is Google liable for the harms done to an individual 20 year old who claims that she's harmed by her addiction to social media, which according to the suit and which is not contested, began at the age of nine when she began to go on. Is it Instagram? I'm not, I don't know which service she went on as a nine year old. She's now 20. She claims all these harms, body dysmorphic disorder, depression, social anxiety, stuff like that. And then there's another suit that involves someone who committed suicide and whose parents claim that that suicide was directly related to consumption of social media. So Christine, this is a landmark moment. Jonathan Haidt, who was one of the people who has been screaming from the rooftops like Jeremiah about the incredible dangers of these, of this technology, these phones and everything like that said yesterday. This is like a turning point in American society. I don't know whether that's true or not, but why don't you tell us how you feel about these suits and where they are, because they do represent a conflict in conservative thinking about how we are to approach the world. Commerce, free enterprise, and yet our social role and the obligation that we have both individually and collectively to the proper raising of the young to become self governing citizens as adults.
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C
Yeah, it does kind of scratch a lot of my itches, these two cases. Although we should also acknowledge a third interesting moment in the online world, which was the end of Meta, the Metaverse that Facebook has now shut down the Metaverse, which. Which was great news for all of us who thought it was always a strange enterprise. So these things.
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Oh, and one more. And one more, which is that OpenAI killed its program, Sora.
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C
Yes.
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A
Which was.
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C
We can't make weird videos anymore either.
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Right. SORA was effectively. What's interesting about this, and then we can move on to this, is that SORA was an almost deliberate effort to create an addictive use of AI. If we're talking here about whether or not the social media companies figured out ways to addict kids to AI, SORA was an effort to do that with the making of memes or little films or something like that, that it was supposed to be so alluring, so fun, so easy, that people would just spend all day and night making SORA AI videos. And indeed, we've seen a lot of them. And for reasons that have not been properly explained, particularly given that SORA got a billion dollar guarantee of capital infusion from Disney to start fooling around with Disney characters on Sora. Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, killed Sora on Monday. So something interesting is going on there and we'll have to find out what it is over the next couple of weeks. But it's not been a good couple of weeks. For the future is living inside this computer screen that a lot of you are now watching us on right now.
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C
Well, it's interesting though, because Meta's stock prices didn't take a huge hit from the loss in both of these cases, which they've obviously already announced that they're going to appeal. But I. But I think understanding these cases is bigger than just some of the questions that I think free market and free enterprise people ask, which is you should let the market decide. Parents should make their own. Parents are really the responsible party here. If you're letting your nine year old go on Instagram, that's your fault. That's true. I agree with that argument. And I think parents have a huge and very important crucial role to play in guiding their children about the use of these platforms and ideally delaying their. Their entrance into those virtual worlds until they are old enough to understand and navigate them safely. That is not the world we live in. That is the world that I think a cultural shift is happening. Thanks in part to Jonathan Haidt's book. Also, I want to give a shout out to Claire Morel at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. She had a great book come out last year, really helpful for parents called the Tech Exit. Sort of lots of Strategies for parents who are struggling with this. But if you're a parent and, and you have children who you're trying to raise in the right way and keep off of the dangerous aspects of the Internet or social media, you are conducting asymmetric warfare, and you have been for a very long time. So what these cases show, I think for the first time, instead of going after the content itself, some of which is very valuable, I've learned a lot from YouTube. I'm sure many of our listeners have too, and many kids have also. It's going after the architecture and design choices that these platforms are built on. Not just the algorithm, but the infinite scroll, the like button, all the things that actually are like machine gambling, slot machines designed to keep you on the platform. That is one huge point that this, that they won on, arguing that that's something that the companies are responsible for. And in the case of this child, they were negligent about that. The second thing is that is the age limits which we have. You're not supposed to go on these platforms till you're 13. And yes, parents have a role. However, the companies themselves have always shrugged and knowingly allowed very young children, 6 year olds, 7 year olds, 8 year olds, on platforms that are designed to be used only by older children and adults. So that's another thing that we should talk about, because there's state and federal legislation, hundreds of bills, several federal pieces of legislation designed to put some teeth into age restrictions. And this is the shift that I think is happening because culture and norms change slowly. Lawsuits are one part of that. Awareness is another part. And what these companies did, the hubris of Mark Zuckerberg, head of Meta, to go on the stand and say, you know, this is not addictive, it's not clinically addictive, it's up to parents. We have all these tools that they can use. He was eliding the important part, which is he knows that children have been on these platforms for years. They want children on these platforms. They raise revenue, ad revenue off of the children on these platforms. And, and the culture has now shifted to say, wait a minute, that's irresponsible. And whether you talk about it as a safety measure for children or as a public health measure, which is, I think, some of the ways that we see these lawyers arguing it, just like they argued Big Tobacco cases in each of that. The reason these are important, whether or not they lose on appeal or win on appeal, is that it has forced to the front of the public discussion these design and architecture choices. And we are Starting to look at these platforms like we look at alcohol, tobacco, license, getting a license to drive for cars, things that look, there's a 15 year old in my neighborhood who definitely has better hand eye coordination than I do as a 52 year old. But she's not allowed to drive a car. You know why? Because she doesn't have the judgment to make choices in the moment to thoughtfully drive that handle that car. That's a decision we made as a society. We have to do the same thing with these social media platforms. And these lawsuits are just one piece of this broader effort to do that for the conservatives. Look, I'm a free market person who believes it's incumbent on parents to raise their children with virtue and good character. And I think a lot of parents are doing that. The struggle here is that the design choices and the lack of age gatekeeping makes that almost impossible even for the most conscientious parents.
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C
Was it the Communications Decency Act?
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A
Yeah. Was the Update of the 1934 Federal Communications Act Section 230 properly, I believe, shielded from very specific liability. Companies that stood as platforms where individuals could place content and said that rather than treating them as publishers, like Commentary, where if we publish something knowingly false or libelous or something like that, we are therefore guilty of committing an offense and can be sued in court and we can also be criminally liable depending on how severe the failure is. That these companies were to be treated more the way the post office is treated, that they were their transmission vectors and that the people who post the content are the ones who are liable for it, not the delivery system. Since newspapers and publications, which were the only way that anybody could get information out en masse, had boards and sold stock and had editors and, you know, and had a limited funnel, were constantly choosing what it was and we still do what we highlight and what we don't. That that discretion, that selection process thus created a higher standard according to which we could be, we needed to take responsibility for what it was that we published. Decision was made that these platforms would were not to be considered publishers. So as a result, they've spent 30 years being kind of in a total free for all about how they acquire market share. Because some of the restraining aspects of what happens if you are a magazine or a newspaper or any media institution, there are institutional restraints that are partially bound by law. Like maybe the greatest thing that you could possibly do is to have photographs of naked women or pictures of people being murdered or something like that in your pages. But that would run afoul of decency laws, pornography laws, child pornography laws and other such things. But that is not quite the case here. So they focused on how to increase their market. And increasing their market, as you say, Christine, is not just finding more customers, but making sure that the customer that you get stays there for as many hours in the day as you can possibly have it. So that they're served ads and served ads and served ads and served ads well.
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C
And the interesting thing about both this case in LA and the case in New Mexico that was also decided today or this week is that they didn't even touch Section 230 protections. They're like, yeah, sure, you're a platform. We're not going to judge you by this. What they went after and this was smart. And I think, well, there's many, many more cases in the pipeline for this is to say you are, you are knowingly and with negligence allowing children to experience harm on this platform because of its design. And the New Mexico case was Interesting. They had people pose as very young children on Instagram and, and predators, sexual predators. People who wanted to meet these kids and do terrible things to them found them. And it was very easy for those connections to be made. And that was to prove that these platforms know that, you know, a 9 or 10 year old on Instagram is easy pickings for a sexual predator. Now that is, those are the extreme cases that were often used in the early days of the Internet to argue for all kinds of restrictions. And I think that was a lot of that was hyperbole. But the reason it was important in that particular case is that it showed that the platforms know that this happens on their platforms. But because they're looking to revenue, increase their revenue and their bottom line, they aren't putting in careful things that are pretty easily done. There's a million new technologies for age gating, for example, all kinds of ways to make sure that people verify their identity. It doesn't involve privacy violations. There's a million new technological tools for this. They don't use them because they don't have to. And that's where the Section 230 shield has become so all encompassing for them that I think it was. That's why I think Mark Zuckerberg thought they shouldn't settle this case and he could go on the stand and convince a jury of his peers that what they're doing is really an oopsy daisy because the parents didn't use their parental controls. That shift in culture again, even if they lose on appeal in this case, the people filing it shows that no one's believing them anymore. The Trust But Verify doesn't exist anymore for these platforms. I personally think that's a huge and necessary shift because they are so embedded in the daily lives, not just of children, but of their parents and in schools and in a lot of our formative institutions. So if you're a parent again, you're not just trying to raise your kid in your home with the right values. All these formative institutions are now completely inundated with this stuff. And it's very difficult to escape. If your kid's given a Chromebook in kindergarten and access to the Internet and they spend eight hours a day in school, what you do at home starts to matter less and less.
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B
Yeah, it's like I was talking to a friend about this who has kids. You know, it's bad enough that adults who were, let's say my generation, who grew up entirely without all of this stuff, end up getting addicted in their adulthood. But if you are born in this, into this world. It is like sitting your toddler in front of a slot machine the moment that they could pull the handle, you know. So I'm wondering because, Christine, as you say, it is addictive for and harmful for adults as well as children. Children obviously is the way in to sort of tackling the issue. But it's like if you go with John's analogy, like smoking causes cancer in adults and kids. And so what do you think is going to happen in terms of these platforms dismantling the addictive features and aspects going forward?
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C
Well, that is the ultimate question. I become very libertarian when we start talking about adults making choices for themselves. If you want to smoke yourself into a lung cancer treatment down the line, go for it. That's your choice. You're, you're an adult. I think what they're going to probably have to do as part of a both marketing tool, because remember, these companies only started boasting and advertising about their parental controls when federal legislation started looking like it was going to move to actually really put some teeth behind the age restriction. That's when suddenly you see meta advertising on everywhere about their parental controls. So I think these cases are going to give them a sense of how they might have different architecture that's age appropriate. And we do this in so many aspects of life. Talking to someone the other day who pointed out, look, scissors are basically a weapon of mass destruction in a school. Like it's two blades and you can go slash around with them, which is why kindergartners have safety scissors and they learn to cut. And then older kids are allowed to use regular scissors. And then an art and design student in college can use these razor blade x acto knives. So we have ways of age gating all of our tools. Why aren't we doing that with social media? So for adults, I think let them rip. And you know what, if we look at how, for example, online betting markets and some of the stuff that's become very addictive for adults is also getting a second look, those again, culture, norms, those are going to do a lot more to shift people's understanding of the dangers of these tools than any piece of legislation will. And I, you know, I'm a free speech person of fire, an organization. I have a lot of foundation for individual rights, education, a lot of respect for them. I think they came down on the wrong side of these cases with regard to kids. They want to make this a first amendment issue. It is not. There are tons of ways that kids can have access to information online that isn't through a social media platform. So I think we're going to see them start to understand that they need to market themselves as thoughtful designers in a way. Or we need to see a world where competitive platforms, competitive social media platforms are able to rise up and say, actually we're responsible. Here's total transparency on what we gather for, what age limits and how we do all this stuff. There's a big market right now of parents and of young adults who grew up with this stuff. As you say, that market should be tapped by thoughtful designers who understand that the hangover that people have right now from social media is going to last for a while
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in defending itself, meta arguing for the cases being thrown out, we should also point out that several social media platforms settled rather than go into a courtroom because they realized.
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C
Snapchat.
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Yeah. Realized that they really, they were playing with fire, believing somehow that they could convince ordinary people who know perfectly well, as we all do, that these platforms have addictive qualities and we are the age that we are, and therefore we are responsible for our addictions and breaking our addictions. But that, that is not something you can say, as in the case here of the young woman who was found to have been harmed. She started at nine years old. That fact is not in dispute. And so is she responsible for controlling her own addiction? You can say, no, she's not. But her parents are responsible for controlling her.
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C
Certainly her parents. Yeah. And that's actually. And that's where I like. That's a valid. It is valid to say her parents bear responsibility. And the design of the platform made it very difficult for her to step back from it as someone who's not.
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Yes. But you know, just as Dr. Johnson said that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, the. It's the parents. Responsibility is the last refuge of an irresponsible peddler of materials to children and young adults. It is a dodge. I mean, it may be an honest dodge, but it is still a dodge because of the question of whether or not if you are meta and you are a company that makes a profit of $60 billion a year and has a market value of I don't even know what. That you bear no social responsibility. We just had this huge fight 10 years ago about whether or not Facebook was responsible for changing the results of the election. And Mark Zuckerberg went before Congress in order to forestall worse things happening and kept apologizing and apologizing and apologizing. And then they all started censoring and censoring and censoring, which was a form of admission in some weird sense, by the way, to something I don't think they were responsible for, that they should be held responsible for their behavior. So if they're responsible for their behavior, the first order of business would be like, leave the kids out of it somehow. But when you realize that plastic young brains are really easy to influence and you have all this data, big data that says, you know, if you put a, like, button on, or you, you know, or you have the infinite scroll or you click to click, click, click, you create a dopamine rush in a young brain that is really, really hard for them to resist. You might say, and I understand in the world of capitalism you just want to get market share, but you might say, you know what, we're not going down that road. Like, okay, we've developed these tools and they can do this, you know, you also, you know, can develop your chemical company and then you can develop a gas, a poison gas that will kill everybody on Earth. Maybe you're not going to make vials of it, just, just, just to be sure.
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C
But the, you know, the, the man who invented Infinite scroll was called to the witness stand in the case in LA and he expressed his deep regret. He basically said, it keeps me up at night, what I made, this thing I made. And that is exactly the right response that he should have. The other thing for people who don't know the intricate details of some of these platforms. Look, Instagram was an independent platform, very creative in the beginning. Meta bought it and promised the original developers of it that they could keep that independence. Both of them left within, I think, a year or two of having been purchased by Meta, because it became very clear that this platform for creativity was going to be, you know, used to hoover up as much ad revenue as possible. And I think your point's really important, John, because these companies, when they talk about their civic responsibilities and everything they're doing for the world, and Zuckerberg is probably the most egregious about this sort of rhetoric, they can't have it both ways. They can't claim to be acting as some sort of new town, public town square where people can have interesting debates, but then design and architecture their platform so that mainly what people get is angry, anxious, depressed and infuriated and a lot of, you know, slop. So now that makes them a ton of money. And again, I'm a free market capitalist, so I can't say no to that. But I think when it comes to Kids, we do regulate a lot of things for children that we don't regulate for adults. And this is going to, I hope, in the next five to ten years become one of those things. And appropriately so. The fact that they're now on the witness stand saying things like, and in depositions, it's not clinically addictive. They used to say, there's no evidence it's addictive. You know, you can. And look, teens with mental health problems, young children with mental health problems from broken homes, as this young woman unfortunately was, she had a lot of issues. Those are the kids that are most likely to spend too much time online. That is. That's a fact. That doesn't negate the responsibility of the platform for designing something that allows young children on knowingly and then capitalizes on them. They make hundreds of millions of dollars off children every week. And that is another thing that is actually a violation of the law. They're not supposed to be advertising to kids that young. That's against the law. They're not supposed to have anyone under the age of 13 on their platform. That's against the law. So again, shifting that burden a little bit back to the companies that made this stuff while still acknowledging as conservatives that parents bear a huge amount of responsibility too, is, I think, where we want to see a lot of these kinds of cases settle out.
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A
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B
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A
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B
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A
Pre K pickup back home to meal prep.
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B
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- [27:19]
A
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B
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A
your local retailer or locate now@celsius.com. what was novel about this is that since they did not raise section 230, since the suits themselves did not raise the question of whether or not these platforms were, as you say, like the town hall, they were the social vector. You can't sue the building. You can only talk about what is said in the building. Like you can't you are responsible for what you say in the building. The building is not responsible for you saying it. That's, that's basically the theory of section 230. So don't involve it. Rather say you are letting people into the building who should not be in the building by common understanding and indeed, as you say, by law and by, I don't think they're really consent decrees, but like in an effort to forestall laws, them saying 13, 13 years old, you can't be on here until you're 13.
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C
And then the initial, and when that first act was being passed, it was initially set at 16. 13 became the compromise position. Most people wanted kids, you had to be 16 to advertise to these kids.
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A
And right.
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C
So yeah, 13, I think is still too young.
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A
So that's number so. And you do nothing to stop them. So it's like if you have a movie theater and you're not supposed to let kids in with an R rating, but you don't. But you let a 6 year old in to see a slasher movie, maybe you're not liable for, you know, the fact that that kid will have nightmares, but you are breaking a social contract. At the very least, you're breaking a social contract.
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C
Well, you're also, I'm sorry, but if you, if you sell alcohol to a minor, you'll lose your liquor license. I had an argument with a, with a friendly colleague at another institution who said, well, what are you going to do if the kids are breaking into the liquor cabinet at home and getting drunk all the time and hooked? Are you going to sue the liquor companies for alcohol addiction? And I said, no, but Social Child and Family Welfare Services is sure going to pay a visit to that household and make sure those kids aren't in danger. So when you say so, it's not just that they knowingly overlook the fact that kids are coming onto this platform. The metaphor I always think of is they're like, well, kids are going to drive illegally. And what can we do to stop that? Well, we still have a driver's license requirement for ages. These companies are basically like an ice cream truck bellowing, come get your free ice cream. And then when the kids run up to the truck, they hand them the keys to the truck, they're like, drive away in it. Isn't this fun? And that's the sort of level of allure for these children. That is, again, if you're nine or 10 years old, there have to be more barriers to entry for these kids. Even if they have parents who are thoughtfully regulating their screen time use.
- [30:13]
A
Also, I feel like Meta in particular lost the meta, which is Facebook, lost the thread because in their arguments to dismiss, they said that the design features that were the heart of the idea that harms were being caused, the introduction of features integrated into the platform as a common user experience, were responsible for the harms that they were claiming had been done both to the girl who committed suicide and the young woman who won this case. They said they're inescapably linked to the content shown to users. That was a phrase in the, in the filing that they did to seek to have the case dismissed and that it could cause a flood of litigation, according to the Wall Street Journal, causing the company to change how its products deliver information to avoid liability. They said this as though that was something that a court or a jury should find egregious, that they should be forced to change the design of their platform to avoid liability. That's a very strange form of logic if you think about it. Because it's like, you know, I had to put a brake. I have a car and it would cost me a lot less if I didn't have to have a braking system. But, you know, now they're making me put in a braking system to avoid liability if the car crashes into another car because it's really, really harder to slow down that way.
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C
They also. But yeah, the other reason that I think, because we say Meta and we say Facebook. No, Meta is also Instagram and WhatsApp. The other thing we need to understand about this, this company, I was only
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A
saying Facebook to try to get. Because Meta changed WhatsApp literally to confuse people about who it, what it was.
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C
I mean, look, Facebook is all angry boomers and kids aren't on Facebook anymore. They are all over Instagram. And here's the thing about WhatsApp. Meta is also facing an investigation that started the beginning of this year into the fact that it's. There's a whistleblower who came out and said they there is no real end to end encryption. Meta can read everything you put in a WhatsApp chat, despite what they claim about the architecture of their service. So that's being investigated. There will be lawsuits coming out of that if they in fact marketed this as end to end encryption. And they have what software designers call a God mode where they can actually read everything that people are saying. And again, it speaks to the power and hubris of a company that needs to be tamed, not just by law, because that is the bluntest tool, but by A cultural shift where people say that's enough, we've given you too much rope. No more.
- [33:17]
A
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- [34:16]
B
So something somewhat analogous is happening I think with X in terms of it's not prompted by any legal rulings, but this cultural tolerance has run up on bots foreign agents promoting content. So the first thing that X did was to show where every user account is based in what country, which that was a few months ago. And that exposed all these high follow accounts as being in Nigeria or Sri Lanka or wherever. And now they're limiting the ability of foreign users who are geographically far away from other users to from other users to promote content that is far away geographically. In other words, trying to crack down on this, these ops, these empty ways of promoting and hyping destructive content that is far from you. So the way they, the way the ex people talk about it is that we're interested in people promoting local content more.
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A
You make a very important point here about something else. Or we could like take it and sort of move it slightly over which is that part of the claim is that this would cause them to have to change the way they do business. Which is exactly the point of these suits. Now it's not because suits tort suits are supposed to be about individual harms done to individual people. They are not supposed to be. So legislation, like legislation is what's supposed to take care of that. Like that's what we have Congress or state legislatures for. But guess what? They're not working so they don't do the right thing.
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C
Although there, there are a lot of there, there's a lot more movement on that with social media in the last few years.
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A
But there's also this idea that it's somehow. And this is where you talk about the God programs and things like that gets into play. It's too hard. Like there are too many people involved. Like, this is a blunt instrument you're telling us to use. What are we supposed to do, like, eliminate everybody? It's too hard. It's too difficult. And we would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. You would be limiting people's speech who. Whose speech does not need to be limited because they would somehow be brought into a dragnet. Because this is like a. It's not a scalpel, it's a bludgeon. And all of this, I just want to point out here, that's the raw numbers. And the raw numbers are involve Meta's financial position in the world. In 2025, Meta earned $200 billion. Its gross profit was $164 billion. And after all expenses and everything, its net income was $60 billion with an operating margin of 41% with cash flow of 115 billion. And we know if they want to deplatform a person, if they want to d, if they want to silence a new story, if they want to make sure that you can't see X, Y or Z, that they can do that with the snap of a finger. So you tell me that they can't figure out how to make sure. Christine, you said there's all these agents they can age gate at 11am this morning. They have every tool in their toolbox.
- [38:34]
C
I would add to your point about their financial might. Most of Meta's users now are outside of the United States, and in many of those countries, the only portal to the Internet access to the Internet is through Facebook. And that is another kind of means of control that at a smaller scale. We saw when TikTok was under threat, how it could very quickly mobilize people to start calling and threatening suicide if TikTok was canceled. You know, calling their senators and their representatives. So as a tool of. Of. For propaganda, for any kind of sort of alarmist rhetoric, it is. It serves a social function in a weird way, even if it's not one recognized by law, but by custom it does. So we should think about its power in those terms as well.
- [39:19]
A
Okay, so now to provide balance,
- [39:25]
C
the
- [39:25]
A
Wall Street Journal's lead editorial today takes this on from what I would consider a classic conservative, libertarian economic perspective, which is to say that this is yet another example of the tort bar finding a new cash cow, that it is going to drain to the possible extent and seize money and like, you know, get settlements. And the tort bar gets 33% of every dollar that is paid out in a settlement. So you'll have lawyers just going crazy making these suits, trying to push and get settlements. And this is a terrible thing. And I agree that the tort bar has been an egregious player in American life over the last 40 years. But the editorial that it published I to my surprise found startlingly unconvincing. But here is what they say. They say trial lawyers are trying to copy the big tobacco playbook by arguing that company executives concealed knowledge that their sites are addictive and deleterious to kids. This case is as easy as ABC lead trial attorney Mark Lanier told the addicting brains children adding companies didn't just build apps, they built traps. Okay, so it's cutesy lawyer before a jury argumentation. The reality, writes the Wall Street Journal, is that the link between youth mental health and social media is complicated. Take the 20 year old plaintiff. She started using YouTube at 6 Instagram when she was 9. Both require users to be at least 13 years old. And here's the key phrase here. So she broke platform rules and bypassed controls, says the Wall Street Journal. And here is where the Wall Street Journal's case here starts to fray and shatter. We do not believe that six and nine year olds have free choice as a matter of law. It's not just that they can't drive
- [41:36]
C
a car, they cannot give legal consent too.
- [41:39]
A
That's, that is A, they can't give legal consent and B, if a 9 year old goes behind the wheel of a car and drives a car and crashes into somebody and kills them, that 9 year old will not be arrested for murder. That we do not, we do not believe that they are making free choices. The parents may end up getting arrested or you know, whatever, but we do not. They are not autonomous, free acting, self governing individuals. They are children. She did not break platform rules. Platform rules are not her obligation to abide by or break. It is the platform's responsibility to enforce its rules to protect her. It is not only her parents, otherwise why would those rules exist? Are they rules or are they guidelines? You know what, it really wouldn't be good for you to see this. So don't do it. That's a guideline.
- [42:49]
C
They've effectively been treated as suggestions right until now.
- [42:53]
A
Right. Okay. So to move on. So that's, that's problem number one. Because the tort here is that she was done damage. And the simple fact of the matter is she's six and nine years old, using a product that the products themselves acknowledge should not be used by people of her age, which has an implicit not, it's not a guilty plea, but there is an implicit acknowledgment that they are not healthy for her. Okay, moving on. She says her compulsive use of social media made her, quote, feel very depressed and that unrealistic images she saw on the platforms made her feel insecure about her appearance. But, writes the Journal, and here's another place where the argument starts to fray. Are platforms supposed to prohibit users from posting photos that might make someone feel depressed or insecure? Sorry, Californians, no posting beach photos in December.
- [43:53]
C
Yeah, I'm sorry. That is the most ethical dodge. Yeah, that, that, that, that right there really was a disappointment to read because this isn't, again, it's not about what she saw, it's about what kept her looking. And those are two distinct things. And what kept her looking was a design and architecture of a platform that's designed for use by adults and, but that hooks kids and profits from them. So that's where. No, actually you can put whatever you want on Facebook. That's. And people do believe me. But that, that, it's again, that's the dodge. It's like, oh, well, I guess you can't now you want to censor content. No, that's not what these cases. That's not about that. If it was, I would be on the other side of this argument right now, because I don't.
- [44:33]
A
So would we. All platforms are supposed to prohibit users who are 13 and younger by their own description of what it is they do to Gatekeep. Right. So it doesn't matter what the content is that they see. In this liability case, she was describing the harm that was done to her. But that harm, and maybe that's nonsense and she should like buck up or something like that. But that harm was done because she
- [45:05]
C
was there and a jury didn't think it was nonsense. A jury presented with the evidence believed it had, had contributed. It didn't even have to cause it directly, didn't have to be the only cause. It just had to contribute substantially to her. Well, to the lack of well being. And they believed that it did. Other juries will decide it isn't. I mean, this is how our system works. But this is where, this is where the tactic of the argument that I agree with you about tort lawyers, this is where the reason we're at this point, the reason I'm praising a tort case like this is that we haven't done the legislative work and we're only now waking up to the cultural and sort of character formative work that all has to be done retrospectively after decades of use of these platforms by children. And we're getting there. I mean, I'm actually quite optimistic about the direction we're headed. And because we have free speech rights and because people care a lot about that, we're not going to go in the direction of Europe of overregulating speech and a lot of this sort of censorship that goes on there. However, we're a decade behind where we should have been. I mean, obviously I've been screaming into the void about this for a long time, but it did take a cultural shift, took a mindset shift. And law is a very blunt instrument, but a very useful one for knocking these companies over the head sometimes, even if it will, and it absolutely will lead to excess lawsuits.
- [46:24]
B
You know what just made me think of. Because there's something about Internet technology, especially when this boom happened and tech utopianism and everything, that left everyone so unprepared for the downsides and the effects. And I'm thinking about how YouTube, but before YouTube, Napster, these things just illegally or there was no law, wrecked the recording industry, right? Like, talk about being too late and not being able to stop it even 10 years too late and go from there. Everyone just violated intellectual property rights law and they completely destroyed an industry and legitimate pathways for building capital and promoting works of art and so on.
- [47:26]
A
Look, Napster was illegal and Napster was shut down because it was illegal. But it did run for three years and created this world in which hundreds of billions of hours of copyrighted material was basically put in the public square in a way that it could not be removed. And now YouTube doesn't.
- [47:50]
B
Yes, constantly.
- [47:52]
A
But that techno utopianism. By the way, YouTube doesn't do it that much because again, when you start saying, oh, you can't police it, YouTube does police it.
- [48:03]
C
YouTube, they don't want a copyright lawsuit.
- [48:05]
A
Incredibly active copyright violation department that removes tens of thousands of. I remember when my kids were very little, there was a fantastic YouTube channel called Disney Classics and somebody would take a Disney movie and cut the songs out and put them up so you could play Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo or something like that and what's more, in foreign languages. So I remember playing Bibbidi bobbidi Boo in Hebrew for my like two year old daughter. And it was great, it was so wonderful. And then it was gone one day because of course it was a massive violation of copyright. But YouTube was very young, right? It was like 2008, it had just started and it was the Wild west and so it was reigned in. But Abe, you are absolutely right that the role of techno utopianism and this bizarre world of the 1990s, 90s and 2000s, that seemed to suggest that we were moving into an era that was virtuous.
- [49:13]
C
Information wants to be free. John.
- [49:14]
A
Yeah, John Perry Barlow, right. The sort of Grateful Dead philosopher said information wants to be free, but also that it was all going to be better. Right. And that they were all committed to what we now understand as this theory of effective altruism that basically is just a cover for the really evil impulses. But you pretend they're good. They thought that what they were doing was inherently virtuous. And when people think that they are liberated from conventional morality, like, well, we can't do that, it's gonna hurt kids. That's like an accident. Yeah.
- [49:56]
C
Okay, I want to add to that two things. One, that's a long standing joke about Silicon Valley, right, that they read a, they read a dystopian science fiction book and which, which ends with a warning like don't build Kran. And then they read it and they go, let's build Kran. And then they do and they celebrate their building of Cron, which destroys civilization. But the second point is that we, we are still having these battles. The new iteration is the fact that all the AI training models are training on copyrighted material, including things that we've all published. Anthropic is now trying to settle with writers who, they have hoovered up all their copyrighted works and used them for training data to train their AI without compensating the work of the writers. And this is going to be, this is the new battle for anyone who works in a creative field. It's much worse for visual artists actually and musicians than it is for writers. But it's going to be a battle that has to be won, I think, case by case. And it's tough because it's difficult. As you said, these systems are so complicated. It's very easy for the companies to say, well, it's not clear, we just use this system snippet. And that's, you know, public use or fair use. And they are very good at arguing that what they're doing, which is a, which is a mass act of, you know, host parasite transfer, is, is good, going to be good for the world because it's going to solve all these problems for us with AI. And this, it's to me, it's such a repeat of what we heard in those early techno utopian days, where hopefully we'll be a little bit more skeptical of what these companies are doing and whose work they're harvesting for their own profit.
- [51:30]
A
To go back to the Journal, just to complete the circle on the Journal editorial, which is called the Social Media shakedown, begins, the trial lawyer's best argument, the Journal writes, is that platforms should have done more to limit compulsive teen use, but companies aren't required to design products to prevent abuse or excessive consumption. Now, again, this is a very interesting perspective because I suppose it is true that a company is not required to design a product with keeping its abuse, the possibility of its abuse in mind, because it does not know whether it will be abused as it's developing it or something like that, or that it will be consumed excessively in that way. However, these designs are introduced after the company's creation and to further the company's mission. And in this case, they were designed to create excessive consumption. Now, maybe the word excessive is the eye of the beholder. And so you who's to say what's excessive consumption? My consumption could be excessive if it's 45 minutes. Maybe your consumption is excessive if it's eight hours. I can have five martinis and not get drunk. You can have half a martini and get drunk and smash your car. These terms are impossible to deal with. But what we know from the Facebook file, releases from the whistleblower testimony and stuff like that, which I'm always skeptical of, is that these designs existed to make people dependent on and overly committed to the constant monitoring of TikTok, of Facebook, of Instagram and all of that. So to say companies aren't obliged to consider this in the design of their products. What if the design of their products is intended to do that? Not that it would. Not that it's an unfortunate happenstance that you're a bourbon maker and that 10% of your clientele has an addictive, an addiction to their outlier to your product that might lead them to crash cars or die of cirrhosis, but that you're doing it in order to addict people to your product. You're creating bourbon in order to addict people to your product, and then you're heightening the way that they can. You add something to the bourbon to make it even more addictive or something like that. Then you're altering the formula that was originally Facebook to enhance the addictive quality. So you can't then say I'm not. That's not my responsibility. It's why you did it. Well, I think you didn't do it for your health.
- [54:42]
C
There's also one of the. There is a line of argument about big tech that I am averse to and this is where I would be on the side of the Wall Street Journal, not this particular editorial, but some of their sensibility in general, which is free market. And that's where big tech companies are making too much profit and they're bad and we should tear them down in any way possible. I don't agree with that. I mean, look, they've built something extraordinary and they're profiting from it. That's how our system works. But our system also does use the law in that very blunt but particular way when some one individual is harmed. But what these cases open up is the question of, well, is the harm something that is more widespread than we realize? That's why we have seatbelts in the back seats of cars now. It's why we have the third brake light in the back window. Safety. Thinking about this more in terms of safety and use and age appropriate use helps me understand that it doesn't really matter how big Meta is going to going to be as long as they're not meddling in how democracy functions. Although there's a whole argument about that. It's whether they are encouraged, compelled or pressured or forced through law, through regulation, through cultural norms and shifts to think of themselves as having to be more responsible for the use of their product. Car manufacturers figured that out, but it took a lot of kind of wild, wild expose and you know, all kinds of stuff and lots of people aren't happy with the, with the amount of safety features in cars. Now I, I don't like my car nanny stating me while I drive, but it happens. So these are the way things.
- [56:09]
A
My car says watch the road. Like it watches where my eyes are. Yeah, it's great.
- [56:17]
C
I mean I, I have an old, I have an old Honda, I have like a 12 year old Honda. So it's not. So when I rented a car recently and it was literally buzzing and telling me what to do and trying to take over the street steering wheel, it freaked me out. I go to my friend Matt Crawford's book about driving and how we need to like not do overkill with the automation, but that's how, that's how cultural shifts happen. And if you're a conservative, you, you want to step back and see it as it's not actually about big tech being a bunch of oligarchs, although they are. It's not just about the tort lawyers wanting to make money, which they do. There's a whole bunch of ways to, to shift the culture. And we should try to exploit all of them because if we really care about what's happening to kids, we, we can't rely on any single one of those things. And we certainly can't just do the easy escape hatch of saying it's the parents fault.
- [57:03]
A
Look, when the Surgeon General from between 1964 and 1972, when it was finally the case that the US Surgeon General reported that cigarette smoking was unhealthy and led to cancer, huge obviously backdoor lobbying by the tobacco companies and growers and everybody like that not to have this happen on the grounds. And their grounds were very interesting at the time because it was everybody. First of all, you can't prove it because correlation is not causation. And everybody knows. How did everybody know? Because cigarettes were called cancer sticks. Someone say, give me a Camel cigarette was a cancer stick. That was a common nickname for a cigarette. Therefore everybody knew. So therefore you should know if you don't want to risk this, not to smoke at all. But that didn't mean whether or not that was true or not. Finally it was determined. And you could say that maybe this was the nanny state over at. If you are very libertarian, you don't like the Surgeon General's report, you don't like seatbelt laws, you don't like helmet laws on motorcycles and things like that, you don't like all these things. And I understand it, that's where libertarianism starts breaking down in terms of rational common sense, which is, okay, so you're going to sell tobacco and we're going to have this market and it's going to exist. You don't get a free pass. The world is not designed to make it as easy as possible for you to sell tobacco with no consequences. Like that's not. That's now in a real Adam, like totally invisible hand market, maybe it would. But we don't live in that world and we never have and we never will. That's a perfect model. And so here we have this situation which is everybody knows that this world is addictive. We are all addicted to it. I'm 65 years old, almost, I'm addicted to it. My kids got addicted to it though. Like for example, again, example for the Wall Street Journal. One of my kids at the age of 14 was on Instagram, was getting Depressed by the world of, you know, FOMO or like she wasn't included in a I love you birthday message thing or something like that. And she took it off her phone because she said, it's making me feel bad. I'm very proud of her. I was proud of her then, I'm proud of her now. It was like a form of like wisdom or social wisdom or something. That's really remarkable. We cannot depend on 14 year olds being able to achieve that level of self knowledge and self restraint and self control and an understanding of what is and is not good for them by definition. We do not by law accept that it is their obligation. And so you can't have it both ways. You can't. This is where they do make. They should make as much money as possible and then they need to ensure that their product isn't harming people. They're not allowed to harm people.
- [60:31]
C
And the age gating, the one thing I, the one caution I would give about saying, you know, just having the age requirement have more teeth is that'll solve all the problems because actually the platforms themselves are moving towards that because they see which way the wind is blowing. Is that just saying to kids that they consent to use? It should also be something that we treat with a bit of skepticism because we're allowing children. Again, if you're 14 or 15, legally you can't sign a contract. Why can you give consent, which is a form of contract between you and Facebook?
- [61:02]
A
It is a contract.
- [61:03]
C
It is a contract. Why are we giving.
- [61:05]
A
We have to scroll through terms and conditions.
- [61:09]
C
It's the kind of thing where I think even as we're moving in the right direction, we need to be very careful about the kinds of adult responsibilities we're placing. Even on the older teens who might be able to navigate social media more healthfully than a 9 or 10 year old, but who nevertheless still are not able to give full legal consent to what they're doing. So there's just a lot of cautions along the way. But this shift, I think Jonathan Haidt was absolutely right to say it is a shift. We'll look back on this year and the last year as really changing the cultural conversation and the expectations that people have for these platforms, it's great, it's good news.
- [61:46]
A
I just think in the end, when you walk around New York City, where I live, or get on a bus or something like that, or you go anywhere, you're hanging right, you're in a world with kids or you're in a restaurant where there are Parents with kids or something like that. The argument that the companies are making, which is that it's not addiction. First of all, we don't even know what addiction is really, to be fair, we don't know what it means because, for example, like, I was addicted to cigarettes, and then I quit, quit smoking. And after four days, I had no more cravings. I gained 30 pounds, but I had no more cravings. I found it very easy. Some people found it incredibly difficult. What does it mean? I smoked for seven years and then I just stopped one day. It happens. So how do we define addiction? Well, it's like what Potter Stewart said about pornography. I can't define addiction, but I know what it is when I see it. And I can see that we are a society addicted to our phones.
- [62:46]
C
We shouldn't call it addiction. We should call it enthrallment or some other word. There's a different word that I think is quite. Which allows for the. For the variations you suggest. But I don't know quite what it is. We use addiction.
- [62:58]
A
Fair enough. But we use the word addiction because it does precisely simulate the experience of the anxiety that people feel when it's like, where's my phone? That was like when I was a smoker and I needed a cigarette and I run out of cigarettes, and then I'm like, oh, my God, what do I do? Like, and then I would dig through a garbage can to see if I had a butt that I could light. That's addiction. Right? That's. And so that's the same thing with where's my phone? I don't have my phone. I need my phone. Because what if there's an emergency and someone's calling me? That's not why you want your phone. You want your phone because having your phone is now a form. It's a security blank. Whatever it is, whatever addiction is, it's pretty close if it's not really addiction. But again, we don't really know what addiction is. So that when they say, well, you can't say it's addiction, can't say that smoking isn't. I mean, again, like, these are. These are words that are descriptions of human states and conditions and beings. Is your body addicted to nicotine? Sure, I guess it is. But like, if you just stop feeding it, if you're my. In my case, for four days, like, you're. You can beat it. Like some people. As I say, that's. That's not true.
- [64:15]
B
For this is a game.
- [64:17]
A
Of course.
- [64:17]
B
They played with weed, too.
- [64:20]
A
Yeah. Oh, and I Mean, that's a whole.
- [64:22]
C
Yeah.
- [64:22]
A
You know, now we're, now we're opening the Pandora's box of a society that is.
- [64:27]
C
Now it's the All Vice podcast.
- [64:29]
A
Exactly. So. But that's where, that's, that's where we, that's where we stand here in, like, don't tell me it's not raining when I know it's raining. Mark Zuckerberg can be worth a trillion dollars, but if he tells me that the thing that I'm seeing right in front of my eyes is not happening and I'm on a jury, I'm going to be like, oh, come on. What, are you kidding me? And that's where this is, this is where the rubber is going to meet the road. You can buy off legislators, but I'm not sure you can buy off jurors. I mean, I don't know how you, how you do that over, over time,
- [65:15]
C
especially for jury consultation services.
- [65:16]
A
Fair enough.
- [65:17]
C
Many juries I can tell you.
- [65:19]
A
Yes, Christine, yet last night you went to the, one of the final events at the Kennedy center, whose name, long name, I will not recite at this moment for a pretty remarkable event involving Commentary's second longest lived or longest contributing writer. Our longest contributing writer is Joseph Epstein. But tell us about your experience last night.
- [65:51]
C
Yes, it was such a pleasure to go hear Ruth Weiss give the 52nd annual Jefferson Lecture through the National Endowment of the Humanities. She is an absolute amazing speaker. I will not delve into everything she said because my recommendation is that our listeners go both to the NEH's YouTube channel where they've got the recording from the event. I think it was also published this morning in the Free Press, a transcript of her speech. Just remarkable. I mean, she, she has Rabbi Volpe from Los Angeles, David Wolpe, another commentary, David Wolpe. He was great. He introduced her. And one of the points he made was that she sort of resurrected things that were dying. And by this, she's a professor of Yiddish literature. And her knowledge of her work, of not just resurrecting writers who had been forgotten, but of preserving the argument that they still matter and why. And she begins the lecture with a discussion, kind of a deep dive into a particular poem and what it means, and she brought it in the end to this wonderful conclusion that was a clarion call about patriotism and about the duty we each have to teach each new generation of Americans what is a value in our country, why we are special. She's an immigrant herself. She talks about that a little bit in the speech. But the final line, and also where she weaves into this story of Yiddish and the people who came from different parts of the world to survive, and some of them ended up here in the US Some of them ended up in other parts of the world. And she talks about Israel. And the final line is she wants to put a little blue and white in the red, white and blue. And that'll make sense when you read or listen to the speech. And it was just wonderful. She is almost 90 years old and she is a total rock star. I mean, she just stood up there and if you've ever heard her speak, you know, she starts very quietly and you think, okay, this, this might. This might take some endurance. But she is absolutely just riveting as a speaker because she tells a story and there's a common thread all the way through it. And she did this so beautifully in this lecture. So highly recommend you either listen to the speech on YouTube, on the Nehemiah YouTube channel, or you can go to the Free Press and read the transcript. But it's really just wonderful.
- [68:20]
A
Ruth's last name is spelled Wysse just to be helpful. Unusual spelling of the name Weiss. And just on a personal note, aside from being the greatest Yiddishist of her age and the most important preserver and advocate for this tradition, she was a professor at McGill who then went to Harvard and was at Harvard for 30 years, where she. Or 25 years or something like that, where she fought the incredibly important fight to maintain standards and fight increasing anti Jewish and anti Semitic rhetoric and behavior on the campus and to talk about the importance of Harvard as a steward of Western culture rather than as a critic of Western culture. And then has. Now you can also sample her wares by going to the Tikvah Fund, where she. There are numerous lecture series, online lecture series that she. That she delivers. She's also one of the most wonderful people on earth. And I should say that she is
- [69:32]
C
such a nice person.
- [69:34]
A
She's just a gloriously nice person and a. Like a dear person.
- [69:42]
C
A remarkable teacher, actually. She has students all over the world. I mean, she. She was such a. She's one of those professors who really kept in touch with. And in fact, in the audience were. I was talking to people around me before it started, like half of them were former students of hers in some capacity. It was amazing. Amazing.
- [69:58]
A
Yeah. So she's just a. Just an extraordinary scholar, an extraordinarily good writer, an extraordinarily brilliant polemicist on matters relating to Judaism, antisemitism and Israel, much of which is published in Commentary and just, you know, a kind of just a sort of a golden soul. So it's wonderful that she was asked to deliver this lecture, the most important, you know, one of the few remaining events in our national culture that is genuinely elevating at a national level that the National Endowment for Humanities should every year put on this lecture by a major scholar or academic or thinker, as has been going on, as you say, I think, for 52 years. And I used to go every year when I lived in Washington and saw Sidney Hook and the various other people deliver this. And she's very much in that tradition, but but also just a wonderful tribute to her as a person. And we are delighted to join in that celebration of Ruth Weiss. So we'll be back tomorrow. For Abe and Christine, I'm John Pothor. It's Keep the Camel Burning. Sam.