Jonathan Haidt: The Case Against Social Media | Lex Fridman Podcast #291

the following is a conversation with jonathan height social psychologist at nyu and critic of the negative effects of social media on the human mind and human civilization he gives a respectful but hard hitting response to my conversation with mark zuckerberg and together him and i try to figure out how we can do better how we can lessen the amount of depression and division in the world he has brilliantly discussed these topics in his writing including in his book the coddling of the american mind and in his recent long article in the atlantic titled why the past 10 years of american life have been uniquely stupid when teddy roosevelt said in his famous speech that it is not the critical counts he has not yet read the brilliant writing of jonathan height i disagree with john on some of the details of his analysis and ideas but both his criticism and our disagreement is essential if we are to build better and better technologies that connect us social media has both the power to destroy our society and to help it flourish it's up to us to figure out how we take the letter path this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now to your friends here's jonathan height so you've been thinking about the human mind for quite a long time you wrote the happiness hypothesis the righteous mind the coddling of the american mind and today you're thinking you're writing a lot about social media and about democracy so perhaps so if it's okay let's go through the thread that connects all of that work how do we get from the very beginning to today with the the good the bad and the ugly of social media so i'm a social psychologist which means i study how we think about other people and how people affect our thinking and in graduate school at the university of pennsylvania i picked the topic of moral psychology and i studied how morality varied across countries i studied in brazil and india and in the 90s i began this was like i got my phd in 1992 and in that decade was really when the american culture war kind of really began to blow up and i began to notice that left and right in this country were becoming like separate countries and you could use the tools of cultural psychology to study this split this moral battle between left and right so i started doing that um and i began growing alarmed in the in the early 2000s about how bad polarization was getting and i began studying um the causes of polarization you know bringing moral psychology to bear on our political problems and i was originally going to write a book to basically help the democrats stop screwing up because i could see that some of my my research showed people on the right understand people on the left they know what they think you can't grow up in america without knowing what progressives think but here i grew up generally on the left and i had no idea what conservatives thought until i went and sought it out and started reading conservative things like national review so originally i wanted to actually help the democrats to understand moral psychology so they could stop losing to george w bush and i got a contract to write the righteous mind and once i started writing i committed to understanding conservatives by reading the best writings not the worst and i discovered you know what you don't understand anything until you look from multiple perspectives and i discovered there are a lot of great social science ideas in the conservative intellectual tradition and so and i also began to see you know what america's actually in real trouble and this is like two thousand eight two thousand like things are really we're coming apart here so i began to really focus my research on helping left and right understand each other and helping our democratic institutions to work better okay so all this is before i had any interest in social media you know i was on twitter i guess like 2009 and you know not much didn't think about it much and then so i'm going along as a social psychologist studying this and then everything seems to kind of blow up in 2014-2015 at universities and that's when greg lucianov came to me in may of 2014 and said john weird stuff is happening students are freaking out about a speaker coming to campus that they don't have to go see and they're saying it's dangerous it's violence like what is going on and so anyway greg's ideas about how we were teaching students to think in distorted ways that led us to write the coding the american mind which wasn't primarily about social media either it was about you know this sort of a rise of of depression anxiety but after that things got so much worse everywhere and that's when i began to think like whoa something systemically has changed something has changed about the fabric of the social universe and so ever since then i've been focused on social media so we're going to try to sneak up to the problems and the solutions at hand from different directions i have a lot of questions whether it's fundamentally the nature of social media that's the problem it's the decisions of various human beings that lead the social media companies that's the problem is there still some component that's highlighted in the cuddling of the american mind that's the individual psychology at play or the the way parenting and education works to make uh sort of emphasize anti-fragility of the human mind uh as it interacts with the social media platforms and the other humans through the social so all that beautiful message that should take us an hour or two to to cover or maybe a couple of years yes but so let's start if it's okay uh you said you wanted to challenge some of the things that mark zuckerberg has said in a conversation with me uh what are some of the ideas he expressed that you disagree with okay there are two major areas that i study uh one is what is happening with teen mental health it fell off a cliff in 2013 it was very sudden um and then the other is what is happening to our democratic and epistemic institutions that means knowledge generating like the universities journalism so so my main areas of research where i'm collecting the empirical research and trying to make sense of it is what's happened to mental health and what's the evidence that social media is a contributor and then the other areas what's happening to democracies not just america and what's the evidence that social media is a contributor to the dysfunction so well i'm sure we'll get to that because that's what the atlantic article is about but if we focus first on what's happened to teen mental health so before i read the quotes from mark i i'd like to just give the overview um uh and it is this there's a lot of data tracking adolescents there's self-reports of how depressed anxious lonely there's data on hospital admissions for self-harm there's data on suicide and all of these things they bounce around somewhat um but they're relatively level in the early 2000s and then all of a sudden around you know around 2010 to 2013 depending on which statistic you're looking at all of a sudden they begin to shoot upwards um more so for girls in some cases but on the whole it's like up for both sexes it's just that boys have lower levels of anxiety and depression so the curve is not quite as dramatic but what we see is not small increase it's not like oh 10 20 no the increases are between 50 and 150 um depending on which group you're looking at um you know suicide for pre-teen girls think thankfully it's not very common um but it's two to three times more common now or by 2015 it had doubled between 2010 and 2015 it doubled so something is going radically wrong in the world of american preteens and what we so as i've been studying it i found first of all it's not just america it's identical in canada and the uk um australia new zealand are very similar they're just after a little delay so whatever we're looking for here but but yet it's not it's not as clear uh in the germanic countries it's in continental europe it's a little different and we can get into that when we talk about childhood but something's happening in many countries um that and it started right around 2012 2013 it wasn't gradual um it hit girls hardest and it hit pre-teen girls the hardest so what could it be nobody has come up with another explanation nobody it wasn't the financial crisis that wouldn't have hit pre-teen girls the hardest um there is no other explanation the complexity here and the data is of course as everyone knows correlation doesn't prove causation the fact that television viewing was going up in the 50s and 60 in the 60s and 70s doesn't mean that that was the cause of the crime so what i've done and this has worked with gene twenge uh who wrote the book igen is um because i was challenged you know when i when greg and i put out the book the the coddling of the american mind some researchers challenged us and said oh you don't know what you're talking about you know the correlations between social media use and and mental health they exist but they're tiny it's it's you know like a correlation coefficient of 0.03 or you know a beta of 0.05 you know tiny little things and one famous article said it's no bigger than the correlation of mental bad mental health and eating potatoes which exists but it's like it's so tiny it's zero essentially and that that claim that social media is no more harmful than eating potatoes or wearing eye glasses it was a very catchy claim and it's caught on and i keep hearing that um but let me unpack why that's not true and then we'll get to what mark said because what mark basically said here actually i'll read it by the way just to pause real quick uh is you you implied but just make it explicit that the best explanation we have now as you're proposing is that a very particular aspect of social media is there is a cause which is not just social media but the the like button and the retweet a certain mechanism of virality that that was invented or perhaps yeah some aspect of social media is the cause good idea let's be clear connecting people is good i mean overall the more you connect people the better giving people the telephone was an amazing step forward giving them free telephone you know free long distance is even better videos i mean so connecting people is good i'm not a luddite um and social media at least the idea of users posting things like that happens on linkedin and it's great it can serve all kinds of needs what i'm talking about here is not the internet it's not technology it's not smartphones and it's not even all social media it's a particular business model in which people are incentivized to create content and that content is what brings other people on and the people on there are the product which is sold to advertisers it's that particular business model which facebook pioneered which seems to be incredibly harmful for teenagers especially for young girls 10 to 14 years old is where they're most vulnerable and it seems to be particularly harmful for democratic institutions because it leads to all kinds of anger conflict and the destruction of any shared narrative so that's what we're talking about we're talking about facebook twitter i don't have any data on tick tock i suspect it's going to end up being having a lot of really bad effects uh because the teens are on it so much and to be really clear since we're doing the nuance now in this section lots of good stuff happens you know a lot of there's a lot of funny things on on twitter i use twitter because it's an amazing way to put out news to put out when i write something you know you know you and i you know use it to to promote things we we learn things quickly um well this could be now this is harder to measure and we'll probably i'll try to mention it because so much of our conversation will be about rigorous criticism i'll try to sometimes mention what are the possible positive effects of social media in different ways so for example in the way i've been using twitter not the promotion or any of that kind of stuff it makes me feel less lonely to connect with people to make me smile a little bit of humor here and there it and that at scale is a very interesting effect being connected across the globe especially during times of covert and so on it's very difficult to measure that so we kind of have to consider that and be honest that there is a trade-off uh we have to be honest about the positive and the negative and sometimes we're not sufficiently positive or in a rigorous scientific way about the uh we're not rigorous in a scientific way about the negative and that's what we're trying to do here um and so that brings us to the mark zuckerberg okay but wait let me just pick up on the issue of trade-offs because um people might think like well like how much of this do we need if we have too much it's bad no that's a one-dimensional conceptualization this is a multi-dimensional issue and a lot of people seem to think like oh what we have done without social media and covered like we would have been sitting there alone in our homes yeah if all we had was uh you know texting telephone zoom skype multiplayer video games whatsapp um all sorts of ways of communicating with each other oh and there's blogs and the rest of the internet yeah we would have been fine did we really need the hyper-viral platforms of facebook and twitter now those did help certain things get out faster and that did help science twitter sometimes but it also led to huge explosions of misinformation and the polarization of our politics to such an extent that a third of the country you know didn't believe what the medical establishment was saying and we'll get into this the medical establishment sometimes was playing political games that made them less credible yeah so on net it's not clear to me if you've got the internet smartphones blogs all of the you know all of that stuff it's not clear to me that adding in this particular business model of facebook twitter tick tock that that that that really adds a lot more and one interesting one we'll also talk about is youtube i think it's easier to talk about twitter and facebook youtube is another complex piece that's very hard to because youtube has many things it's a content platform but also has a recommendation system that's let's let's focus our discussion on perhaps twitter and facebook but you do in uh in this large document that you're putting together uh on social media uh called social media and political dysfunction collaborative review with the chris bale that includes i believe papers on youtube as well it does but yeah again just to finish up with the nuance yeah um uh youtube is really complicated because i can't imagine life without youtube it's incredibly useful it does a lot of good things um it also obviously helps to radicalize terrorist groups and and murderers so um i you know i think about youtube the way i think about the internet in general and i don't know enough to really comment on youtube so i have been focused um and it's also interesting one thing we know is teen social life change radically between about 2010 and 2012. before 2010 they weren't mostly on every day because they didn't have smartphones yet by 2012 to 14 that's the area in which they almost all get smart phones and they become daily users of the girl so the girls go to instagram and tumblr they go to the visual ones the boys go to youtube and video games those don't seem to be as harmful to mental health or even harmful at all it's really um tumblr instagram particularly that seem to really have done in girls mental health um so now okay so let's look at the quote from from mark zuckerberg so uh at uh at 64 uh minutes and 31 seconds on the video i did i'm coded this guy this is the this is excellent this is the very helpful youtube transcript youtube's an amazing program um you ask him about francis haugen you give him a chance to respond uh and here's the key thing um uh so he talks about what francis haugen said he said no but that's mischaracterized actually on most measures the kids are doing better when they're on instagram it's just on one out of the 18. and then he says um i think an accurate characterization would have been the kids using instagram uh or not kids but teens is generally positive for their mental health that's his claim that youtube that uh instagram is overall taken as a whole instagram is positive for their mental health that's what he says okay now is it really is it really uh so first just a simple okay now here what i'd like to do is turn my attention to another document that we'll make available so i was invited to give testimony before a senate subcommittee two weeks ago where they were considering the platform accountability act should we force the platforms to actually tell us what our kids are doing like we have no idea other than self-report we have no idea you know they're the only ones who know like the kid does this and then over the next hours the kids depressed are happy we can't know that but but facebook knows it um so should they be compelled to uh to reveal the data we need that so you raise just uh uh to give people a little bit of context in this document is brilliantly structured with questions studies that indicate that the answer to a question is yes indicate that the answer to question is no and then mix results and questions include things like does social media make people more angry or effectively polarized right that's the one that we're going to get to that's the one for democracy yes that's democracy so i've got three different google docs here because i found this is an amazing way and thank god for google docs it's an amazing way to organize the research literature and it's a collaborative review meaning that so on this one gene twenge and i put up the first draft and we say please you know comment add studies tell us what we missed and it evolves in real time in any direction the yes or the oh yeah we specifically encourage because i look my the center of my research is that our gut feelings drive our reasoning that's that was my dissertation that was my early research and so if gene twenge and i are committed to but we're going to obviously preferentially believe that these platforms are bad for kids because we said so in our books so we have confirmation bias and i'm a devotee of john stuart mill the only cure for confirmation bias is other people who have a different confirmation bias so these documents evolve because critics then say no you missed this or they say you don't know what you're talking about said great say so tell us um so i put together this document and i'm gonna i'm gonna put links to everything on my website if users if you're sorry if listeners viewers go to jonathanheight.com socialmedia it's a new page i just created i'll put everything together in one place there and we'll put those in the show notes like links to this document and and other things like it though that's right exactly right so yeah so the thing i want to call attention now is this document this document here with the title teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause um so ben sasse and chris coons are on the judiciary committee they had a subcommittee hearing on uh nate priscilli's bill uh platform accountability transparency act so they asked me to testify on what do we know what's going on with teen mental health and so what i did was i put together everything i know with plenty of graphs to make these points that first what do we know about the crisis well uh that the crisis is specific to mood disorders not everything else it's it's not just self-report it's also behavioral data because suicide and self-harm go skyrocketing after 2010. um the increases are very large and the crisis is gendered and it's hit many countries so i go through the data on that so we have a pretty clear characterization and nobody's disputed me on this on this part so can we just pause real quick just so for people who are not aware so self-report just how you kind of collect data on this kind of thing sure you have a self-reported survey you ask people uh how yeah how anxious are you these days yeah how many hours a week do you social media that kind of stuff and then you do it's maybe you can collect large amounts of data that way because you can ask a large number of people that kind of question and but then there's uh i forget the term you use but more uh so non-self-report data behavioral data behavioral data that's right where you actually have self-harm and uh suicide numbers exactly so there are a lot of graphs like this so this is from the national survey on drug use and health so the so the federal government and also pew and gallup there are a lot of organizations that have been collecting survey data for decades so this is a gold mine and what you see on these graphs over and over again is relatively straight lines up until around 2010 or 2012. and on the x-axis we have time years going from 2004 to 2020 on the y-axis is the percent of u.s teens who had a major depression in the last year that's right so when this data started coming out around so gene twang's book igen 2017 a lot of people say oh she you know she doesn't know what she's talking about this is just self-report like gen z they're just really comfortable talking about this this is a good thing this isn't a real epidemic and literally the day before my book with greg was published the day before there was a psychiatrist in new york times who had an op-ed saying relax cell phones smartphones are not ruining your kid's brain and he said it's just self-report it's just that they're they're they're giving higher rates there's more diagnosis but underlying there's no change no because these gra these it's theoretically possible but all we have to do is look at the hospitalization data for self-harm and suicide and we see the exact same trends we see also a very sudden big rise um around between 2009 and 2012 you have an elbow and then it goes up up up so that is not self-report those are actual kids admitted to hospitals for cutting themselves so we have a catastrophe and this was all true before kovid covet made things worse but we have to realize um you know covet's going away kids are back in school or back in school but we're not going to go back to where we were because this problem is not caused by covid what is it caused by um well uh just again to just go through the point then i'll stop i i just feel like i'm i just really don't want to get out the data to show that market is wrong so first point correlational studies consistently show a link they almost all do but it's not big equivalent to a correlation coefficient around point one typically um that's the first point the second point um is that um this the correlation is actually much larger than for eating potatoes so that famous line wasn't about social media use that was about digital media use that included watching netflix doing homework on everything and so what they did is they they looked at all screen use and then they said this is correlated with self-reports of depression anxiety at like you know 0.03 it's tiny and well but they said that clearly in the paper but the media has reported as social media is 0.03 or tiny and that's just not true what i found digging into it you don't know this until you look at the there's more than 100 studies in the google doc once you dig in what you see is okay you see a tiny correlation what happens if we zoom in on just social media it always gets bigger often a lot bigger two or three times bigger what happens if we zoom in on girls and social media it always gets bigger often a lot bigger and so what i think we can conclude in fact what one of the authors of the potato studies herself concludes amy orban says i think i have a quote from here she reviewed a lot of studies and she herself said that quote the associations between social media use and well-being therefore range from about r equals 0.15 to r equals 0.10 um so that's the range we're talking about and that's for boys and girls together um and a lot of research including hers and mine show that girls it's higher so for girls we're talking about correlations around point one five to point two i believe gene twangy and i found it's about point two or 0.22 now this might sound like an arcane social science debate but people have to understand public health correlations are almost never above 0.2 so the correlation of childhood exposure to lead and adult iq very serious problem that's 0.09 like the world's messy and our measurements are messy and so if you find a consistent correlation of 0.15 like you would never let your kid do that thing that actually is dangerous and it can explain when you multiply it over tens of millions of kids spending you know years of their lives you actually can explain the mental health epidemic just from social media use well and then there's questions by the way uh this is really good to learn because i quit potatoes and it had no [Laughter] uh and it's a russian that was a big sacrifice um they're quite literal actually because i'm mostly eating keto these days but that's that's that's funny that they're actually literally called the potato studies okay uh but given this and there's a lot of fascinating data here there's also a discussion of how to how to fix it what are the aspects that if fixed would start to reverse some of these trends so if we just linger on the sort of the mark zuckerberg statements so first of all do you think mark is aware of some of these studies so if we if you put yourself in the shoes of mark zuckerberg and the executives that facebook and twitter how can you try to understand the studies like the google docs you put together to try to make decisions that fix things is is is there a stable science now that you can start to investigate and and also maybe uh if you can comment on the depth of data that's available because ultimately this is something you argue that the data should be more transparent should be provided but currently if it's not all you have is maybe some leaks of internal data that's right and we could talk about the potential you have to be very sort of objective about the potential bias in those kinds of leaks you want to it would be nice to have a non-leak data like like yeah it'd be nice to be able to actually have academic researchers able to access in de-individuated de-identified form um the actual data on what kids are doing and how their mood changes and and you know when people commit suicide what was happening before and it'd be great to know that we have no idea so what how do we begin to fix social media would you say okay so here's the most important thing to understand in the social sciences you know we say is social media harmful to kids that's a broad question you can't answer that directly you have to have much more specific questions you have to operationalize it and have a theory of how it's harming kids and so almost all of the research is done on what's called the dose response model that is everybody including the researchers are thinking about this like let's they treated this like sugar you know because the data usually shows a little bit of social media uses and correlated with harm but a lot is so you know think of it like sugar and if kids have a lot of sugar then it's bad so how much is okay um but social media is not like sugar at all it's not a dose response thing it's a complete rewiring of childhood so we evolved as a species in which kids play in mixed age groups they learn the skills of adulthood they're always playing and working and learning and doing errands that's normal childhood that's how you develop your brain that's you become a mature adult until the 1990s in the 1990s we dropped all that we said it's too dangerous if we let you outside you'll be kidnapped so we completely we began rewiring childhood in the 90s before social media and that's a big part of the story i'm a big fan of leonardo skinnezy who wrote the book free range kids if there are any parents listening to this please buy lenora's book free range kids and then go to letgrow.org it's a nonprofit that lenora and i started with peter gray and daniel shukman to help change the laws and the norms around letting kids out to play they need free play so that's the the big picture they need free play and we started stopping that in the 90s that we reduced it and then gen z kids born in 1996 they're the first people in history to get on social media before puberty millennials didn't get it until they were in college but gen z they get it because you can lie you just lie about your age they so they really begin to get on around 2009-2010 and boom two years later they're depressed it's not because they ate too much sugar necessarily it's because even normal social interactions that kids had in the early 2000s largely well they decline because now everything's through the phone and that's what i'm trying to get across that it's not just a dose response thing it's imagine imagine one middle school where everyone has an instagram account and it's constant drama everyone's constantly checking and posting and worrying and imagine going through puberty that way versus imagine there was a policy no phones in school you have to check them in a locker no one can have an instagram account all the parents are on board parents only let their kids have instagram because the kid says everyone else has it we're and that's we're stuck in a social dilemma we're stuck in a trap so what's the solution keep kids off until they're done with puberty there's a new study actually by amy orban and andy schabilski showing that the damage is greatest for girls between 11 and 13. so there is no way to make it safe for pre-teens or even 13 14 year olds we've gotta kids should simply not be allowed on these business models where you're the product they should not be allowed until you're 16. we need to raise the agent and force it that's the biggest thing so i think that's a really powerful solution but it's a it makes me wonder if there's other solutions like controlling the virality of bullying so sort of if there's a way that's more productive to childhood to use social media so of course one thing is putting your phone down but first of all from the perspective of social media companies i it might be difficult to convince them to do so uh and also for me as an adult who grew up without social media it's so social media is a source of joy so i wonder if it's possible to design the mechanisms both the challenge the ad driven model but actually just technically the recommender system and how viral how virality works on these platforms if it's possible to design a platform that leads to growth anti-fragility but does not lead to depression self-harm and suicide that like finding that balance and making that is the objective function not not engagement yeah or i don't think i don't think that can be done for kids so i am very reluctant to tell adults what to do i have a lot of libertarian friends and i would lose their friendship if i started saying oh it's bad for adults and we should stop adults from using it yeah but by the same token i'm very reluctant to have facebook and instagram tell my kids what to do without me even knowing or without me having any ability to control it right as a parent it's very hard to stop your kid i have stopped my kids from getting on instagram um and that's caused some difficulties but um but they also have thanked me because they see that it's stupid they see that what the kids are really on it what they post they see that the culture of it is is stupid as they say so um i don't think there's a way to make it healthy for kids i think there's one thing which is healthy for kids which is free play we already robbed them of most of it in the 90s the more time they spend on their devices the less they have free play video games is a kind of play i'm not saying that these things are all bad but you know 12 hours of video game play means you don't get any physical play um so and ultimately physical play is the way uh to to develop physical to fragility and especially social skills kids need huge amounts of conflict with no adult to meet to supervise or mediate and that's what we robbed them of so anyway that we should move on because i you know i get really into the evidence here because i think the story is actually quite clear now there was a lot of ambiguity there are conflicting studies but when you look at it all together the correlational studies are pretty clear and the effect sizes are coming in around 0.1 to 0.15 whether you call that a correlation coefficient or a beta it's all in the standardized beta it's all in that sort of sort of range there's also experimental evidence we collect uh true experiments with random assignment and they mostly show an effect and there's um eyewitness testimony you know with the kids themselves you talk to girls and you pull them do you think overall instagram is good for your mental health or bad for you're not going to find a group saying oh it's wonderful oh yeah yeah mark you're right it's mostly good no the girls themselves say this is the major reason and i've got studies in the google doc where there's been surveys what do you think is causing the is causing depression anxiety and the number one thing they say is social media so there's multiple strands of evidence do you think the recommendation is as a parent that teens should not use instagram yes twitter yes that's ultimately maybe in the long term that there's no way there's no way to make it safe there it's unsafe at any speed look i mean it might be very difficult to make it safe and in the short term while we don't know how to make it safe put down the phone well now hold on a second play with other kids via a platform like roblox or multiplayer video games that's great i have no beef with that you focus on bullying before that's one of five or seven different avenues of harm the main one i think which does in the girls is not being bullied um it's living a life where you're thinking all the time about posting because once a girl starts posting so it's bad enough that they're scrolling through and this is everyone comments on this you're scrolling through and everyone's life looks better than yours because it's fake and all that you see are the ones the algorithm picked that were the night anyway so the scrolling i think is bad for the girls but i'm beginning to see i can't prove this but i'm beginning to see from talking to girls from seeing how it's used is once you start posting that takes over your mind and now you're basically you're no longer present because even if you're only spending five or six hours a day on instagram you're always thinking about it and when you're in class you're thinking about who how are people responding to the post that i made between period you know between classes um i mean i do it you know i tried to stay off twitter for a while but now i've got this big article i'm i'm tweeting about it and i can't help it like i check you know 20 times a day i'll check like what are people saying what are people saying this is terrible and i'm a you know 58 year old man imagine being a 12 year old girl going through puberty you're self-conscious about how you look and i see some young women i see some professional young women women in their 20s and 30s who are putting up sexy photos of themselves like and this is so sad so sad don't be doing this yeah see i the the thing where i disagree a little bit is i agree with you in in the short term but in the long term i feel it's the responsibility of social media not in some kind of ethical way not just in an ethical way but it'll actually be good for the product for the company to maximize the long-term happiness and well-being of the person so not just engagement so consider but the person is not the customer so the thing is not to make them happy it's to keep them on that's the way it is currently right that driven if we can get a business model as you're saying i'd be all for it and and i think that's the way to make much more money so like a subscription model where the money comes from paying it's it's not that would work wouldn't it that would help so subscription definitely would help but i'm not sure it's so much i mean a lot of people say it's about the source of money but i just think it's about the fundamental mission of the product if you want people to really love a thing i think that thing should uh maximize your long-term well-being in theory in morality land it should i don't think it's just more than land i think in business land too but that's maybe a discussion for another day we're we're studying the reality of the way things currently are and they are as they are as the studies are highlighting so let us go then in from the land of mental health for young people to the land of democracy by the way in these big umbrella areas is there a connection is there a correlation between the mental health of a human mind and the division of our political discipline oh yes oh yes so our brains are structured to be uh really good at approach and avoid so we have circuits the front left circle isn't over simplification but there's some truth to it there's what's called the behavioral activation system front left cortex it's all about approach opportunity you know kid in a candy store and then the front right cortex has circuits specialized for withdrawal fear threat and of course students you know i'm a college professor and most of us think about our college days like you know yeah we were anxious at times but it was fun and it was like i can take all these courses i can do all these clubs all these people now imagine if in 2013 all of a sudden students are coming in with their front right cortex hyper-activated everything's a threat uh everything is dangerous there's not enough to go around so the front right cortex puts us into what's called defend mode as opposed to discover mode now let's move up to adults imagine a large diverse secular liberal democracy in which people are most of the time in discover mode and you know we have a problem let's think how to solve it and this is what de tocqueville said about americans like there's a problem we get together we figure out how to solve it and he said whereas in england and france people would wait for the king to do it but here like let you know the role person do it that's the can do mindset that's front left cortex discover mode if you have a national shift of people spending more time in defend mode now you so everything that comes up whatever anyone says you're not looking like oh is there something good about you thinking you know how is this dangerous how is this a threat how is this violence how can i attack this how can i you know so so if you imagine you know god up there with a little lever like okay let's let's push everyone over into you know more into discover mode and it's like joy breaks out age of aquarius all right let's shift them back into let's put everyone in defend mode and i can't think of a better way to put people in defend mode than to have them spend some time on partisan or political twitter where it's just a stream of horror stories including videos about how horrible the other side is and it's not just that they're bad people it's that if they win this election then we lose our country or then it's catastrophe so twitter and again we're not saying all of twitter you know most people aren't on twitter and people that are mostly not talking about politics but the ones that are on talking about politics are flooding us with stuff all the journalists see it all the major mainstream media is hugely influenced by twitter so if we put everyone if there's more sort of anxiety sense of threat this colors everything and then you're not you know the great thing about about a democracy and especially a you know or a legislature that has some diversity in it is that the art of politics is that you can grow the pie and then divide it you don't just fight zero sum you you find ways that we can all get sixty percent of what we want uh and that that ends when everyone's anxious and angry so let's try to start to figure out who's to blame here is it the nature of social media is it the decision of of the people at the heads of social media companies that they're making in the detailed engineering designs of the algorithm is it the users of social media that drive narratives like you mentioned journalists that want to maximize drama in order to uh uh drive clicks to their off-site uh articles is it just human nature that loves drama can't look away from an accident when you're driving by it is there is there something to be said about the reason i ask these questions is to see can we start to figure out what the solution would be uh for to to uh to alleviate to de-escalate not yet not yet let's first we have to understand um you know as as we did on the teen mental health thing okay now let's lay out what is the problem what's messing up our country and then we'll we can talk about solutions so it's all the things you said interacting in an interesting way um so human nature is tribal we evolve for intergroup conflict um we love war um we we uh the first time my buddies and i played paintball i was 29 um and we were divided into teams with strangers to shoot guns at each other and kill each other and we all afterwards it was like oh my god that was incredible like it really felt like we'd opened a room in our hearts that had never been opened but as men you know testosterone changes our brains and our bodies and activates the war stuff like we've got more stuff and that's why boys like certain team sports it's play war so that's who we are it doesn't mean we're always tribal it doesn't mean we're always wanting to fight we're also really good at making peace and cooperation and finding deals we're good at trade and exchange so you know you want your country to you want a society that has room for conflict ideally over sports like that's great that's totally it's not just harmless it's actually good um but otherwise you want cooperation to generally prevail in the society that's how you create prosperity and peace and if you're gonna have a diverse democracy you really better focus on cooperation not on tribalism and division uh and there's a wonderful book by yasha monk called the great experiment that talks about the difficulty of diversity in democracy and and and what we need to do to get this right and to get the benefits of diversity so that's human nature um now let's imagine that the technological environment makes it really easy for us to cooperate let's give everyone telephones and the postal service let's give them email like wow you know we can do all these things together with people far away it's amazing um now instead of that let's give them a technology that encourages them to fight so early facebook and twitter were generally lovely places um you know people old enough to remember like they were fun there's a lot of humor um you didn't feel like you're going to get your head blown off no matter what you said um 2007 2008 2009 it was still fun these were nice places mostly and like almost all the platforms started off as nice places um but and this is the key thing in the in the article in the atlantic article on babel on after babel the atlantic article by the way is why the past 10 years of american life have been uniquely stupid yeah my title in the magazine was after babel uh adapting to a world we can no longer share that's what i proposed but they they a b tested what's the title it gets the most clicks and it was why the past 10 years have been using the bible the tower of babel is is a um is a driving metaphor in the piece so what first of all what is it what's the top of babel what's what's babel what are we talking about okay so the tower babel is a story in early in genesis where the descendants of noah are spreading out and repopulating the world and they're on the plane of shinar and they say let us build us a city with a tower to make a name for ourselves lest we be scattered again and so it's a very short story there's not a lot in it but it looks like they're saying you know we don't want god to flood us again let's build a city and a tower and to reach the heavens and god is offended by the hubris of these people um acting again like gods um and he says here's the key line he says let us go down and confuse their language so that they may not understand one another so in the story he doesn't literally knock the tower over but you know many of us have seen images or you know movie drama dramatizations where a great wind comes and the tower is knocked over and the people are left wandering amid the rubble unable to talk to each other so i've been grappling i've been trying to say what the hell happened to our society beginning in 2014 what the hell is happening to universities and then it spread out from universities it hit journalism the arts and now it's all over companies um what the hell happened to us and it wasn't until i reread the babel story a couple of years ago that i thought whoa this is it this is the metaphor because you know i've been thinking about tribalism and left right battles and war and you know that's easy to think about but babel isn't like you know and god said let half of the people hate the other half no it wasn't that it's god said let us confuse their language that they none of them can understand each other ever again or at least for a while um so it's a story about fragmentation and that's what's unique about our time so so meta or facebook wrote a rebuttal um to my article they disputed what i said uh and one of their arguments was oh but you know polarization goes back way before social media and you know and it was happening in the 90s and they're right it does and i should i did say that but i should have said it more clearly with more examples but here's the new thing even though left and right we're beginning to hate each other more we weren't afraid of the person next to us we weren't afraid of each other cable tv you know fox news whatever you want to point to about increasing polarization it didn't make me afraid of my students and that was new in around 2014 2015. we started hearing getting articles you know i'm a liberal professor and my liberal students frightened me it was in vox in 2015. and that was after greg and i had turned in the draft of our of our first draft of our coddling article and surveys show over and over again students are not as afraid of their professors they're actually afraid of other students most students are lovely it's not like the whole generation has lost their minds what happens is a small number a small number are adept at using social media to destroy anyone that they think they can get credit for destroying and the bizarre thing is it's never it's rarely about what ideas you express it's usually about a word like he used this word um or this you know this was insensitive or you know i can link this word to that so it's it's a it's they don't really engage with ideas and arguments it's a real sort of gotcha um prosecutor i'm sort of like oh you know it's like a like a witch trial mindset um so so the unique thing here is there's something about social media in those years that a small number of people can sort of be catalysts for this division they can start the viral wave that leads to a division that's different than the other division we saw before it's a little different than viral wave once you get some people who can who can use social media to intimidate you get a you get a sudden phase shift you get a big change in the dynamics of groups and that's the heart of the article this isn't just another article about how social media is polarizing us and destroying democracy the heart of the article is an analysis of what makes groups smart and what makes them stupid and so because as we said earlier you know my own research is on post-hoc reasoning just postdoc justification rationalization the only cure for that is other people who don't share your biases and so if you have an academic debate as like the one i'm having with you know with these other researchers over social media you know i write something they write something i have to take account of their arguments and they have to take account of mine when the academic world works it's because it puts us together in ways that things cancel out that's what makes universities smart what makes them generators of knowledge unless we stop dissent what if we say on these topics there can be no dissent and if anyone says otherwise if any academic comes up with research that says otherwise we're going to destroy them and if any academic even tweets a study contradicting what is the official word we're going to destroy them and that was the famous case of david shore who in the days after george floyd was killed and there were protests and the question is are these protests going to be productive or they're going to backfire now most of them were peaceful but some were violent and he tweeted a study he just simply tweeted a study done by an action african-american i think sociologist at princeton omar wasau and wasa's study showed that when you look back at the 60s you see that where there were violent protests it tended to backfire peaceful protests tend to work and so he simply tweeted that study and there was a twitter mob after him this was insensitive this was anti-black it i think he was accused of and he was fired within a day or two so this is the kind of dynamic this is not caused by cable tv this is not cause this is something new okay just on a small tangent there uh in that situation because it happens time and time again you highlight in your current work but also in the coddling of the american mind is the blame on the mob the mechanisms that enables the mob or the people that do the firing the administration does the firing yeah it's all of them well can i i sometimes feel that we don't put enough blame on the people that do the firing which is that feels like in the long arc of human history that is the place for courage and for ideals right that's where it stops that's where the buck stops like is so if there's going to be new mechanisms for mobs and all that kind of stuff there's going to be tribalism yeah but at the end of the day that's what it means to be a leader is to stop stop the mob at the door but i'm a social psychologist which means i look at the social forces at work on people and if and if you show me a situation in which 95 of the people behave one way and it's a way that we find surprising and shameful i'm not going to say wow 95 of the people are shameful i'm going to say wow what a powerful situation we've got to change that situation so that's what i think is happening here because there are hardly any in the first few years you know it begins around 2018 2019 it really enters the corporate world there are hardly any leaders who stood up against it but i've talked to a lot and it's it's always the same thing you have these you know you know people in their usually their 50s or 60s generally they're progressive or on the left they're accused of things by their young employees they don't have the vocabulary to stand up to it and they give in very quickly and because it happens over and over again and there's only a few examples of university presidents who said like no we're not going to stop this talk just because you're freaking out no you know we're not going to fire this professor because he wrote a paper that you that you you don't like there are so few examples i have to include that the situational forces are so strong now i think we are seeing we are seeing a reversal in the last few weeks or months a clear sign of that is that the new york times actually came out with an editorial from the editorial board saying that free speech is important now that's amazing that the times had the guts to stand up for free speech because you know they're the the people well what's been happening with the times is that they've allowed twitter to become the editorial board twitter as control over the new york times and the new york times literally will change papers i have an essay in politico uh with with nadine strauss and steve pinker and pamela pereski on how um the new york times retracted and changed uh an editorial by brett stevens and they did it in a sneaky way and they lied about it and they did this out of fear because he mentioned iq he mentioned iq and jews and then he went on to say it probably isn't a genetic thing it's probably culture but he mentioned it and the new york times i mean they were really cowardly now i think they from what i hear they know that they were cowardly they know that they should not have fired james bennett they know that they gave in to the mob and that's why they're now poking their head up above the parapet and they're saying oh we think that free speech is important and then of course they got their heads blown off because you know twitter reacted like how dare you say this are you saying racist speech is okay but they didn't back down they they didn't retract it they didn't apologize for defending free speech so i think uh i think the times might be coming back can i ask your opinion on something here what in terms of the times coming back in terms of twitter being the editorial board for the prestigious journalistic organizations um what's the importance of the role of mr elon musk in this so um you know it's all fun and games but here's a human who tweets about the importance of freedom of speech and buys twitter what are your thoughts on on the influence the positive and the negative possible consequences of this particular action so you know if he is going to succeed in if he's going to be one of the major reasons why we decarbonize quickly and why we get to mars then i'm willing to cut him a lot of slack so i have an overall positive view of him now where i'm concerned and where i'm critical is where in the middle of a raging culture war and this culture war is making our institutions stupid it's making them fail um this culture i think could destroy our country and by destroy i mean we could descend into constant constitutional crises a lot more violence you know not that we're going to disappear not that we're going to kill each other but i think there will be a lot more violence so we're in the middle of this raging culture war it's possibly turning to violence you need to not add fuel to the fire and the fact that he declared that he's going to be a republican and the democrats are the bad party and you know as an individual citizen he's entitled to his opinion of course but as an influential citizen he should at least be thoughtful and more importantly companies need companies need and i think would benefit from a geneva convention for the culture war in which because they're all being they're all being damaged by the culture we're coming to the companies what we need to get to i hope is a place where um companies do they have they have strong ethical obligations about the effects that they cause about how they treat their employees about their supply chain they have strong ethical obligations but they should not be weighing in on cultural issues well if i can read the exact tweak because part of the tweet i like he said in the past i voted democrat because they were mostly the kind the kindness party but they have become the party of division and hate so i can no longer support them and will vote republican and then he finishes with now watch their dirty tricks campaigning against me unfold okay uh what do you make of that like what do you think he was thinking that he came out so blatantly as a partisan because he's probably communicating with the board with the people inside twitter and he's clearly seeing the lien and he's responding to that lien he's he's also opening the door to the to the potential bringing back um the former president onto the platform and also bringing back which he's probably looking at the numbers of the people who are behind truth social saying that okay it seems that there's a strong lien in twitter uh in terms of the left um and in fact from what i see it seems like um the current operation of twitter is the the the the extremes of the left get outraged by something and the extremes of the right point out how the left is ridiculous like that seems to be the mechanism and and but and then it's it's uh that's the source of the drama and then the left gets very mad at the right that points out the ridiculousness and there's this vicious kind of psychology that's the polarization cycle that's what that's what we're in there's something that happened here that's there's a shift where there's a decline i would say in both parties towards being shitty okay but look what everything with the parties that's not the issue yeah the issue is should the most important ceo in america the ceo of some of our biggest and most important companies so yeah so let's imagine let's imagine five years from now that two different worlds in one world the the ceo of every fortune 500 company has said i'm a republican because i hate those douchebags or i'm a democrat because i hate those nazi racists that's one world where everybody declares everybody puts up a thing in their window everybody is it's cultural everywhere all the time 24 hours a day you pick a doctor based on whether he's red or blue everything is culture war that's one possible future which we're headed towards the other is we say you know what political conflict should be confined to political spaces there is a room for protests but you don't go protesting at people's private homes you don't go threatening their children you don't go doxing them we have to have channels that are not culture war all the time when you go shopping when you go to a restaurant you shouldn't be yelled and screamed at um when you buy a product you should be able to buy products from an excellent company you shouldn't have to always think what's the ceo what is it i mean what an insane world but that's where we're heading so i think that elon did a really bad thing in in in launching that tweet that was i think really throwing fuel on a fire and setting a norm in which businesses are going to get even more politicized than they are and you're saying specifically the problem was that he picked the side as the head of yes as the ceo as the head of several major companies you know of course we can find out what his views are you know it's not like it's just i mean actually with him it's maybe hard to know but you know it's not that a ceo can't be a partisan or have views but to publicly declare it in that way in such a really insulting way um this is throwing fuel on the fire and it's setting a precedent that corporations are major players in the cultural world i'm trying to reverse that we've got to pull back from that let me play devil's advocate here so because i've gotten a chance to interact with quite a few ceos um there is also a value for authenticity so i'm guessing this was written while sitting on the toilet and i could see in a day from now saying lol just kidding there's a there's a humor there's a lightness there's a chaos element and that's chaos is not yeah that's not what we need right now we don't need more well so yes there's a balance here the chaos isn't engineered chaos it's really authentically who he is and i would like to say that there's i agree with that that's a trade-off because if you become a politician so there's a trade-off between in this case maybe authenticity and civility maybe like being calculating about the impact you have with your words versus just being yourself and i'm not sure calculating is also a slippery slope both are slippery slopes you have to be careful so when we have conversations in a vacuum and we just say like what should a person do those are very hard but our world is actually structured into domains and institutions and if it's just like oh you know talking here among our friends like we should be authentic sure but the ceo of a company has fiduciary duties legal fiduciary duties to the company he owes loyalty to the company and if he is using the company for his own political gain or other purposes or social standing that's a violation of his fiduciary duty to the company now there's debate among scholars whether your fiduciary duties the shareholders i i don't think it's the shareholders i think many legal experts say um it's the company is a legal person you have duties to the company employees owe a duty to the company um so he's got those duties and i think he you know you can say he's being authentic but he's also violating those duties so that's it's those it's not necessarily he's filing a law by doing it but he certainly is shredding any notion of professional ethics around leadership of a company in the modern age i think you have to take it in the full context because you see that the he's not being a political player he's just saying quit being douchey suppose the ceo of ford says you know what um let's pick a group well i i shouldn't do a racial group because that would be different let's just say uh you know what um left-handed people are douchebags i hate them like why would you say that like left-handed people what you said now is not not either funny or like-hearted because i hate them it wasn't funny i'm not picking you i'm saying that statement words matter there's a lightness to the statement in the full context if you look at the at the timeline of the man there's ridiculous memes and there's non-stop jokes that my big problem with the ceo of ford is there's never any of that not only is there any of that there's not a celebration of the beauty of the engineering of the different products it's all political speak channeled through multiple meetings of pr there's a there's there's levels upon levels upon levels where you think that there it's it's really not authentic and there you're actually by being polite by being civil you're actually playing politics because all all of your actual political decision making is done in the back channels that's that's obvious here here's a human being being authentic and actually struggling with some of the ideas and having fun with it i i think this lightness represents the kind of positivity that we should be striving for it's f it's funny to say that because you're looking at these statements and they seem negative but in the full context of social media i don't know if they are so but look at what you just said in the full context you're taking his tweets in context you know who doesn't do that twitter like that's the twitter everything is taken in the maximum possible way there is no context oh yeah so this is not like you know yes i wish we did take people in context i wish we lived in that world but now that we have twitter and facebook we don't live in that world anymore so you're saying it is a bit of a responsibility for people with a large platform to consider the fact that there is the fundamental mechanism of twitter where people don't give you the benefit of the doubt well i don't want to hang it on a large platform because then that's what a lot of people say like well you know she shouldn't say that because she has a large platform and she should say things that agree with my politics i don't want to hang it on large platform i want to hang it on ceo of a company ceos of a company have duties and responsibilities and and you know scott gallery i think is very clear about this you know he criticizes elon a lot as being a really bad role model for young men young men need role models and he is a very appealing attractive role model so i agree with you but in terms of being a role model i think uh okay they don't want to put a responsibility on people but yes he could be a much much better role model there yeah i mean to insult sitting centers by calling them old i mean that's you know yeah i won't do both sideism of like well those senators can be assholes too yeah but yes that's fair enough respond intelligently as i tweeted to unintelligent treatment yes yes um so the reason i like it he's now a friend the reason i like elon is because of the engineering because of the work he does no i admire him enormously for that but what i admire on the twitter side is the authenticity because i've been a little bit jaded and worn out by people who have built up walls people in the position of power the ceos and the politicians who built up walls and you don't see the real person that's one of the reasons i love long-form podcasting is it especially if you talk more than 10 minutes it's hard to have a wall up yeah it all kind of crumbles away so i don't know but yes yes you're right that that that um is a step backwards to say at least to me the biggest problem is to pick sides to say i'm not going to vote this way or that way that's um be that like leave that to the politicians um you have you have much like the importance of social media is far bigger than um the bickering the short-term big of any one political party it's a platform where we make progress where we um develop ideas through sort of rigorous discourse all those kinds of things so okay so here's an idea about social media developed through social media from elon which is um you know everyone freaks out because they think either you know oh he's going to do less content moderations the left is freaking out because they want more content moderation the right is celebrating because they think the people doing the content moderation are on the left but there was a there was a one i think was a tweet um where he said like three things he was going to do to make it better and was i would defeat the bots or something but he said authenticate all humans yeah and this is a hugely important statement and it's pretty powerful that this guy can put three words in a tweet and actually i think this could change the world even if the bid fails the fact that elon said that that he thinks we need to authenticate all humans is huge because now we're talking about solutions here what can we do to make social media a better place for democracy a place that actually makes democracy better as tristan harris has pointed out social media and digital technology the chinese are using it really skillfully to make a better authoritarian nation and by better i don't mean morally better i mean like more stable successful whereas we're using it to make ourselves weaker more fragmented and more insane so we're on the way down we're in big trouble and um all the argument is about content moderation and what we learned from francis haugen is that what five or ten percent of what what she what they might call hate speech gets caught one percent of violence intimidation content moderation even if we do a lot more of it isn't going to make a big difference all the all the powers in the dynamics changes to the architecture and as i said in my atlantic article uh what are the reforms that would matter for social media and the number one thing i said the number one thing i believe is um user authentication or user verification and people freak out and they say like you know oh but we need anonymous like yeah fine you can be anonymous but um what i think needs to be done is anyone can open an account on you know twitter facebook whatever as long as you're over 16 and that's another piece once you're 16 or 18 um at a certain age you can be treated like an adult you can open an account and you can look you can read and you can make up whatever fake name you want but if you want to post if you want the viral amplification on a company that has section 230 protection from lawsuits which is a very special privilege i understand the need for it but it's an incredibly powerful privilege to protect them from lawsuits if you want to be able to post um on platforms that as we'll get to in the google doc there's a lot of evidence that they are undermining and damaging democracy um then the company has this this minimal minimal responsibility has to meet banks have know your customer laws you can't just walk up to a bank with a bag of money that you stole and say here deposit this for me my name's john smith you have to actually show who you are and the bank isn't going to announce who you are publicly but you have to if they're going to do business with you they need to know you're a real person uh um not a criminal and so there's a lot of schemes for how to do this there's multiple levels people don't seem to understand this level zero of authentication is nothing that's what we have now level one this might be what elon meant authenticate all humans meaning you have to at least pass a capture or some test to show you're not a bot there's no identity there's nothing just something that you know it's a constant cat and mouse struggle between bots and human you know so we try to just filter out pure bonds the next level up there are a variety of schemes that allow you to authenticate identity in ways that are not traceable or kept so some whether you show an id whether you use biometric whether you have something something on the blockchain that establishes identity whether it's linked to a phone whatever it is there are multiple schemes now that companies have figured out um for how to do this and so if you did that then in order to get an account where you have posting privileges on facebook or twitter or tick tock or whatever you have to at least do that and if you do that you know um now um now the other people are real humans too and suddenly our public square is a lot nicer because you don't have bots swarming around this would also cut down on trolls you still have trolls who use their real name but this would just make it a little scarier for trolls um some men turn into complete assholes they can be very polite in real life uh but some men as soon as they have the anonymity they start using racial slurs they're they're horrible one troll can ruin thousands of people's day you know i'm somebody who believes in free speech and so there's been a lot of discussions about this and we'll ask you some questions about this too but there's the tension there is the power of a troll to ruin the party yes that's right so like this idea of free speech boy do you have to also consider if you want to have a private party and enjoy your time challenging lots of disagreement debate all that kind of stuff but fun no like annoying person screaming just not disagreeing but just like spilling like the the drinks all over the place um yeah all that kind of stuff so um see you're saying it's a step in the right direction to at least verify the humanness of of a person while maintaining anonymity but the so that's one step but the further step that's maybe doesn't go all the way because you can still figure out ways to create multiple accounts and you can but it's a lot harder so actually there's a lot of ways to do this there's a lot of creativity out there about solving this problem so if you go to the social media and political dysfunction google doc that i created uh with chris bale and then you go to section 11 proposals for improving social media so we're collecting there now some of the ideas for how to do user authentication and so one is world coin there's one human-id.org this is a new organization created by an nyu stern student who just came into my office last week uh working with some other people and what they do here is they have a method of identity verification um that is keyed to your phone so you do have to have a phone number um and of course you can buy seven different phone numbers if you want but it's going to be about 20 or 30 dollars a month so nobody's gonna buy a thousand phones um so yeah you know you can uh um you don't have just one unique id but most people do and nobody has a thousand so just there just things like this that would make an enormous difference so here's the way that i think about it imagine a public square in which the incentives are to be an asshole that the more you kick people in the shins and spit on them and throw things at them the more people applaud you um okay so that's the public square we have now not for most people but as you said just you know one troll can ruin it for everybody if there's a thousand of us in the public square and ten are incentivized to you know kick us and throw shit at us like it's no fun to be in that public square so right now i think twitter in particular is making our public square much worse it's making our democracy much weaker much more divided much it's it's bringing us down imagine if we change the incentives imagine if the incentive was to be constructive um and so this is an idea that i've been kicking around i talked about with reid hoffman last week and he seemed to think it's a good idea and it is uh it would be very easy to um rather than trying to focus on posts what post is fake or whatever focus on users what users are incredibly aggressive and so people just use a lot of obstetry and explanation exclamation points ai could easily code nastiness or just aggression hostility and imagine if every user is rated on a one to five scale for that and the default when you open an account on twitter or facebook the default is four you will see everybody who's a four and below but you won't even see the people who are fives and they don't get to see you so they can say what they want free speech we're not censoring them they can say what they want um but if but now there's actually an incentive to not be an asshole because the more of an asshole you are the more people block you out so imagine our country goes in two directions in one things continue to deteriorate and we have no way to have a public square in which we could actually talk about things and in the other we actually try to disincentivize being an asshole and encourage being constructive what do you think i i well this is because i'm an ai person and i've very much ever since i talked to jack about the health of conversation but look at a lot of the machine learning models involved and i believe that the nastiness classification is a difficult problem automatically i'm sure it is so i personally believe in uh crowdsourced nastiness labeling but in an objective way where it doesn't become viral mob cancellation type of dynamics um but more sort of objectively is is this a shitty almost out of context with only local context is this a shitty thing to say at this moment because here's the thing no but we don't care about individual posts no no but it's all that matters is the average the posts make the man they do but but the point is as long as we're talking about averages here if one person has a misclassified post it doesn't matter right yeah yeah so but you need to classify posts in order to build up the average that's that's what i mean and so i i really like that idea whatev the high level idea of incentivizing people to be less shitty yeah because that's what we have that incentive in real life yeah that's right it's actually really painful to be in a full-time asshole i think in physical reality right and it's shut off it should be it should be also a pain to be an asshole on on the internet and there could be different mechanisms for that i wish ai was there machine learning models were there i did they just aren't yet but how about how about we have so one track is we have ai machine learning models and they render a verdict another class is crowdsourcing you get correct and then and then whenever the two disagree you have you know staff at twitter or whatever you know they look at it and they say what's going on here and that way you can refine both the ai and you can refine whatever the algorithms are for the crowd source and because of course that can be gamed and people can only hey let's all rate this guy as really aggressive you know so so you wouldn't want just to rely on one single track but if you have two tracks i think you could do it what do you think about this word misinformation that maybe connects to our two discussions now so one is a discussion of social media and uh democracy and then the other is the coddling of the american mind i've seen the word misinformation misused or used as a bullying word like racism and so on which are important concepts to identify but they're nevertheless instead overused yes um does that worry you because that seems to be the mechanism from inside twitter from inside facebook to label information you don't like versus information that's actually fundamentally harmful to society yeah so i think there is um there is a meaning of disinformation that is very useful and and helpful um which is when you have a concerted campaign by russian agents to plant a story and spread it and they've been doing that since the 50s or 40s even that's what this podcast actually is but it's a disinformation yeah you seem really soviet to me buddy um it's subtle it's between the lines okay i'm sorry but uh um so i think it went to the extent that there are campaigns uh by either foreign agents uh or you know just by the republican or democratic parties there have been examples of that um there are all kinds of concerted campaigns that are intending to uh to confuse or spread lies uh this is the the soviet the fire hose of falsehood tactic so it's very useful for that all the companies need to have pretty large staffs i think to deal with that because that will always be there and that um is really bad for our country so rene deresta um is is just brilliant on this reading her work has really frightened me and opened my eyes about how easy it is to manipulate um to manipulate and spread misinformation and especially um polarization the russians have been trying for the since the 50s they would come to america and they would do hate crimes they would spray you know swastikas and synagogues to make you know in this very anti-black slurs they try to make americans feel that they're as divided as possible most of the debate nowadays however is not that it seems to be people are talking about what the other side is saying so um you know if you're on the right then you're very conscious of the times when well you know the left wouldn't let us even say could covet be from a lab like they would like you literally would get shut down for saying that and it turns out well we don't know if it's true but there's at least a real likelihood that it isn't it certainly is something that should have been talked about so i tend to stay away from any such discussions and the reason is twofold one is because they're almost entirely partisan it generally is each side thinks that what the other side is saying is fate is is his misinformation or disinformation and they can prove certain examples um so we're not going to get anywhere on that we certainly are never going to get 60 votes in the senate for anything about that i don't think content moderation is nearly as important as people think it has to be done and it can be improved almost all the action is in the dynamics the architecture the virality uh and then the nature of who who is on the platform you know unverified people and how much amplification they get that's what we should be looking at rather than wasting so much of our breath on whether we're going to do a little more or little less content moderation so the true harm to society on average and over the long term is in the dynamics is it it's fundamentally in the dynamics of social media not in the subtle choices of content moderation aka censorship exactly they've always been conspiracy theories you know the turner diaries is this book written in 1978 it it introduced the the replacement theory to a lot of people um timothy mcveigh had it on him when he was captured in 1995 after the oklahoma city bombing it's a kind of a bible of that that fringe violent racist uh white supremacist group and that um so you know the the the killer in buffalo was well acquainted with these ideas they you know they've been around but you know this guy's from a small town i forget where he's from uh you know but he was and he says in a manifesto he was entirely influenced by things he found online he was not influenced by anyone he met in person ideas spread and communities can form these like micro communities can form with bizarre and twisted beliefs um and this is again back to the the atlantic article i've got this amazing quote from martin guri let me just find it but he uh martin guri he was a former cia analyst wrote this brilliant book uh called the revolt of the public or um and he has this um great quote he says he talks about how in the age of mass media we were all in a sense looking at a mirror looking back at us and it might have been a distorted mirror but we had stories in common we had facts in common um it was mass media and he describes how the flood of information with the internet uh is like a tsunami washing over it has all kinds of effects and he says this isn't a comment in an interview in vox he says the digital revolution has shattered that mirror and now the public inhabits those broken pieces of glass so the public isn't one thing it's highly fragmented and it's basically mutually hostile it's mostly people yelling each other and living in bubbles of one sort or another and so you know we now see clearly there's there this little bubble of of just bizarre you know nastiness in which you know the killer in christ church and the killer in norway and now in buffalo you know they're all put into a community and posts flow up within that community by a certain dynamic so we can never stamp those words or ideas out the question is not can we stop them from existing the question is what platforms what are the platforms by which they spread all over the world and into every little town so that the one percent of whatever whatever percentage of young men are vulnerable to this that they they get exposed to it it's in the dynamics in the architecture it's a fascinating point to think about because we often debate and think about the the content moderation the censorship the ideas of free speech but you're saying yes that's important to talk about but much more important is fixing the dynamics that's right because everyone thinks if there's regulation it means censorship at least people on the right think regulation equals censorship and i'm trying to say no no that's only if all we talk about is content moderation well then yes that is the framework you know how much or how little do we you know but i don't want to talk about that because all the action is in the dynamics that's the point of my article it's the architecture changed and our social world went insane so can you try to steal man the other side so the people that might say that social media is good for society overall both in the dimension of mental health as as mark said for teenagers teenage girls and for our democracy yes there's a lot of negative things but that's slices of data if you look at the whole which is difficult to measure it's actually good for society and it to the degree that it's not good it's getting better and better is it possible to steal another point yeah it's it's hard but i should be able to do it um i need to put my money where my mouth is and that's a good question so on the mental health front um you know the argument is usually what the the what they say is well you know for communities that are cut off especially lgbtq kids they can find each other so it's it's it it connects kids especially kids who wouldn't find connection otherwise it exposes you to a range of ideas and content and it's fun is there in the studies you looked at is there inklings of of data that's maybe early data that shows that there is positive effects in terms of self-report data or how would you measure behavioral positive uh it's difficult right so um so if you look at how do you feel when you're on the platform you get a mix of positive and negative uh and people say they feel supported and this is what mark was referring to when he said you know there was like 18 criteria and on most it was positive and on some was negative so if you look at how do you feel while you're using the platform a lot you know look most kids enjoy it they're having fun but some kids are feeling inferior cut off bullied so if we're saying what's the average experience on the platform that might actually be positive if we just measure the hedonics like how much fun versus fear is there it could well be positive but what i'm trying to okay so is that enough steel manning can i use pretty that's pretty good okay you held your breath but what i'm trying to point out is this isn't a dose response sugar thing like how do you feel while you're consuming heroin like while i'm consuming heroin i feel great um but am i glad that heroin came into my life am i glad that everyone in my seventh grade class is on heroin like no i'm not like i wish that people weren't on heroin and they could play on the playground but instead they're just you know sitting on the bench shooting up during recess so when you look at it as an emergent phenomenon that changed childhood now it doesn't matter what are the feelings while you're actually using it we need to zoom out and say how has this changed childhood can you try to do the same for democracy yeah um so we can go back to uh you know what mark said in 2012 um when he was taking facebook public and you know this is the wake of the arab spring i think people really have to remember what an extraordinary year 2011 was it starts with the arab spring um dictators are pulled down now people say you know facebook took them down i mean of course it was the citizens the people themselves took down dictators aided by facebook and twitter and tell i don't know if it was or texting there were some other platforms they used so the argument that mark makes in this letter to potential shareholders investors is you know we're at a turning point in history and um you know social media is rewiring we're giving people the tools to rewire their institutions so this all sounds great like this is the democratic dream and what i write about in the essay is the period of techno-democratic optimism which began in the early 90s with the fall of the of the iron curtain and the soviet union and then the internet comes in and you know people i mean people my age remember how extraordinary it was how much fun it was i mean the sense that this was the dawning of a new age and there was so much optimism and so this optimism runs all the way from the early 90s all the way through 2011. with the arab spring and of course that year ends with occupy wall street and there were also big protest movements in israel and spain and in a lot of areas martin guri talks about this so there certainly was a case to be made that facebook in particular but all these platforms these were god's gift democracy what dictator could possibly keep out the internet what dictator could stand up to people connected on these digital media platforms so that's the strong case that this is gonna be good for democracy and then we can see what happened in the years after now first of all um so in uh in mark's response to you so here let me read from what he said when you interviewed him he says uh i think it's worth grounding this conversation in the actual research that has been done on this which by and large finds that social media is not a large driver of polarization he says that then he says most academic studies that i've seen actually show that social media use is correlated with lower polarization that's the factual claim that he makes which is not true but he asserts that um study well actually wait it's tricky because he says the studies he has seen so i can't so it might be that studies he has seen say that but if you go to the google doc with chris bale you see there's seven different questions that can be addressed and on one of them which is filter bubbles the evidence is very mixed and you might be right that facebook overall doesn't contribute to filter bubbles but on the other six the evidence is pretty strongly on the yes side it is a cause he also draws a line between the united states versus the rest of the world right and there's one thing true about that which is that polarization has been rising much faster in the us than in any other major country so he's right about that so we're talking about an article by uh matt matthew against cow uh and a few other researchers a very important article we've got it in the in the political dysfunction um database and we should say that in this study there's um like i started to say there's a lot of fascinating questions that are it's organized by whether studies indicate yes or no question one is does social media make people more angry or effectively polarized question two is does social media create echo chamber these are fascinating really important questions question three is the social media amplified posts that are more emotional inflammatory or false question four is the social media increase the probability of violence question five is the social media enable foreign governments to increase political dysfunction in the us and other democracies question six the social media decrease trust seven is the social media strengthen populist movements and then there's other uh sections as you mentioned yeah that's right but if you once you once you operationalize it as seven different questions um you know like so one is about polarization and there are measures of that the degree to which people say they hate the other side and so in this study by uh by boxell against cow and shapiro 2021 um they looked at all the measures of polarization they could find going back to the 1970s for about 20 different countries and they show plots you have these nice plots with red lines showing that in some countries it's going up like the united states especially in some countries it's going down and in some countries it's pretty flat and so mark says well you know if if polarization's going up a lot in the us but not in most other countries well maybe facebook isn't responsible but so much depends on how you operationalize things are we interested in the straight line regression line going back to the 70s and if so well then he's right in what he says but that's not the argument the argument isn't that you know it's been rising or falling since the 70s the argument is it's been rising and falling since 2012 or so and for that now i just spoke with i just i've been emailing with the authors of the study and they say there's not really enough data to do it statistically reliably because there's only a few observations after 2012. but if you look at the graphs in their study and they actually do provide as they pointed out to me they do provide a statistical test if you break the data at the year 2000 so actually a polarization is going up pretty widely if you just look after 2000 which is when the internet would be influential and if you look just after 2012 you have to just do it by eye but if you do it on their graphs by eye you see that actually a number of countries do see a sudden sharp upturn not all not all by any means but my point is mark asserts he points to one study and he points this over and over again i have had two conversations with him he pointed this study both times he asserts that this study shows that polarization is up some places down other places there's no association but actually we have another section in the google doc where we review all the data on the decline of democracy and the high point of democracy of course it was rising in the 90s but if you look around the world by some measures it begins to drop in the late 2000s around 20 2007 2008 by others it's in the early to mid uh 2010s the point is there is a by many measures there's a drop in the quality and the number of democracies on this planet that began in the 2010s and so um yes mark can point to one study but if you look in the google doc there are a lot of other studies that point the other way and especially about whether things are getting more polarized or less more polarized not in all countries but in a lot so you've provided the problem several proposals for solutions do you think mark do you think elon or whoever is at the head of twitter uh would be able to implement these changes or does there need to be a competitor social network system step up if you were to predict the future uh now this is you giving sort of financial advice to me no no no i i can give you advice do the opposite of whatever i've done okay excellent but what do you think uh when when we talk again in ten years uh what do you think would be looking at if it's a better world yeah so you have to look at each the dynamics of each change that needs to be made and you have to look at it systemically and so the biggest change for teen mental health i think is to raise the age from 13 it was set to 13 in kappa in like 1997 or six or whatever that eight whatever it was it was set to 13 with no enforcement i think it needs to go to 16 or 18 with enforcement now there's no way that facebook can say um actually so look at instagram the age is 13 but they don't enforce it and and they're under pressure to not enforce it because if they did enforce it then all the kids would just go to tick-tock which they're doing anyway but if we go back a couple years when they they were talking about rolling out facebook for kids because they need to get those kids they need to get kids under 13. there's a business imperative to hook them early and keep them so i don't expect facebook to act on its own accord and do the right thing because exactly when you have a social dilemma you know like what economists call like a prisoner's dilemma or a social dilemma is you know generalized to multiple people and when you have a social dilemma each player can't opt out because they're going to lose you have to have central regulation so i think we have to raise the age um the uk parliament is way ahead of us i think they're actually functional the us congress is not functional so the parliament is implementing the age-appropriate design code that may put pressure on the platforms globally to change certain so anyway my point is we have to have regulation to force them to be transparent and share what they're doing there are some good bills out there so i think that if the companies and the and the users if we're all stuck in a social dilemma um in which the incentives to the incentives against doing the right thing are strong we do need we do need regulation on certain matters and again it's not about content moderation who gets to say what but it's things like the platform accountability and transparency act uh which is from senators coons portman and klobuchar this would force the platforms to just share information about what they're doing like we can't even study what's happening without the information so that i think is just common sense um senator michael bennett introduced the uh the digital platforms commission act of 2022 which would create a body tasked with actually regulating and having oversight right now the us government doesn't have a body i mean the ftc can do certain things we have things about antitrust but we don't have a body that can oversee or understand these things that are transforming everything and possibly severely damaging our political life so i think there's a lot of oh and then the the um uh the state of california is actually currently considering a version of the uk's um the age-appropriate design code which would force the companies to do some simple things like not be sending alerts and notifications to children at 10 or 11 o'clock at night just things like that to make make platforms just less damaging so i think there's an essential role for regulation and i think if the us congress is too paralyzed by politics if the uk and the eu and the state of california and the state a few other states if they enact legislation the platforms don't want to have different versions in different states or countries so i think there actually is some hope even if the us congress is dysfunctional so there is because i've been interacting with certain regulations hitting uh designed to hit amazon but it's hitting youtube youtube folks have been talking to me which is recommender systems the algorithm has to be has to be public i think versus pro private which completely breaks it's uh it's way too clumsy of regulation that where the unintended consequences break recommender systems not for amazon but for other um for other platforms that's just to say that government can sometimes be clumsy with the regulation he usually is and so my preference is the threat of regulation uh in a friendly way encourages you really should need it you really shouldn't need it my preference is great leaders lead the way in doing the right thing and i actually honestly this to our earlier kind of maybe my naive disagreement that i think it's good business to do the right thing in the in these spaces sometimes it is sometimes it sometimes it loses you most of your users well i think it's important because i've been thinking a lot about world war three recently yeah and uh i it might be silly to say but i think social media has a role in either creating world war iii or avoiding world war three it seems like so much of wars throughout history have been started through very fast escalation and it feels like just looking at our recent history social media is the mechanism for escalation and so it's really important to get this right not just for the mental health of young people not just for the polarization of bickering over over small scale political issues but literally um the survival of human civilization so there's a lot at stake here yeah i certainly agree with that i would just say that i'm less concerned about world war iii than i am about civil war two i think that's a more likely prospect yeah yeah can i ask for your why sage advice to young people so advice number one is put down the phone uh don't use instagram and and social media but uh to young people in high school in college how to have a career or how to have a life they can be proud of yeah i'd be happy to because i i teach a course at nyu um in the business school uh called work wisdom and happiness and the course is you know it's advice on how to have a happy you know a successful career as a human being but the course has evolved that it's now about three things how to get stronger smarter and more sociable if you can do those three things then you will be more successful at work and in love and friendships and if you are more successful in work love and friendships then you will be happier you will be as happy as you can be in fact so the question is how do you become smarter stronger and happier um and the answer to all three is it's a number of things but it's you have to see yourself as this like complex adaptive system you've got this complicated mind that needs a lot of experience to wire itself up and the most important part of that experience is that you don't grow when you are with your attachment figure you don't grow when you're safe you have an attachment figure to make you feel confident to go out and explore the world in that world you will face threats you will face fear and sometimes you'll come running back but you have to keep doing it because over time you then develop the strength to stay out there and to conquer it that's normal human childhood that's what we blocked in the 1990s in this country so young people have to get themselves the childhood and this is all the way through adolescence and young adulthood they have to get themselves the experience that older generations are blocking them from out of fear and that their phones are blocking them from out of just you know hijacking almost all the inputs into their life in almost all the minutes of their day so go out there put yourself out in experiences you are anti-fragile and you're not going to get strong unless you actually have setbacks and criticisms and and fights so that's how you get stronger and then there's an analogy in how you get smarter which is you have to expose yourself to other ideas to ideas that people that criticize you people that disagree with you and this is why i co-founded heterodox academy because we believe that that faculty need to be in communities that have political diversity and viewpoint diversity but so do students and it turns out students want this the surveys show very clearly gen z has not turned against viewpoint diversity most of them want it but they're just afraid of the small number that will sort of shoot darts at them if they you know if they say something wrong so anyway the point is um you're anti-fragile and so you have to realize that to get stronger you have to realize to get smarter and then the key to becoming more sociable is very simple it's just always looking it through the other person's point of view don't be so focused on what you want and what you're afraid of put yourself in the other person's shoes what's interesting to them what do they want and if you develop the skill of looking at it from their point of view you'll be a better conversation partner you'll be a better life partner so there there's a lot that you can do i mean i could say you know go read the calling in american mind i could say go read dale carnegie how to win friends and influence people but take charge of your life and your development because if you don't do it then the the older older protective generation and your phone are going to take charge of you so on anti-fragility and coddling the american mind if i may read just a few lines from chief justice john roberts which i find this is really beautiful so it's not just about viewpoint diversity but it's real struggle absurd unfair struggle that seems to be formative to the human mind he says from time to time in the years to come i hope you will be treated unfairly so that you will come to know the value of justice i hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty sorry to say but i hope you will be lonely from time time so that you don't take friends for granted i wish you bad luck again from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either and when you lose as you will from time to time i hope every now and then your opponent will gloat over your failure it is a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship i hope you'll be ignored so you know the importance of listening to others and i hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion whether i wish these things are not they're going to happen and whether you benefit from them or not will depend upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes he read that in a middle school graduation yes for his sons his son's middle school graduation that's what i was trying to say only that's much more beautiful yeah and uh i think your work is really important and it is beautiful and uh it's bold and fearless and it's a huge honor to sit with me i'm a big fan thank you for spending your valuable time with me today john thank you so much thanks so much lex what a pleasure thanks for listening to this conversation with jonathan height to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from carl jung everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you