Jonathan Haidt says Zuckerberg’s lawsuit could finally hold Big Tech accountable for the harm it causes young users

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has been sounding the alarm for years.

He is a best selling author anxious generationA blockbuster book that argues Gen Z – those born after 1995 and given access to smartphones and social media in a way that no generation before them had – have experienced a deep mental health crisis as a result.

On Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg appeared in court for the first time Before a jury, defending Meta Platform from allegations that it deliberately targeted young users and intentionally designed its platforms to engage them.

Haidt speak to front burner Host Jayme Poisson last week before the test About why he believes this moment is a turning point. Here is an excerpt from their conversation.

I just want to know why it’s so important that we take action. What research led you to that conclusion?

when i wrote anxious generationI had critics on my shoulder. I have been involved in a debate with about five or seven other psychologists who think there is no evidence of harm. Yes, it is true that social media use is related to poor mental health; Heavy users are more depressed and anxious, everyone agrees. But they claim (that it’s) just a correlation, it’s not causation.

She was on my mind when I wrote the book, and so everything I said in the book has a footnote, every claim I made has a justification, a citation. And so I focused on the decline in mental health. I focused on the rise of depression, anxiety, self-harm, suicide.

There is no consumer product that harms so many children, but it turns out that I greatly underestimated the harm because I focused on mental illness. And what I’ve come to see now, what I’ve been seeing since the book came out, is that the biggest damage is the destruction of the human capacity to pay attention.

Test scores are really falling…IQ is really falling. If we talk to the youth, they find it very difficult to read books; Now he says that he finds it very difficult to watch films. So I’m angry about it, and I see that it’s not just about 10 or 20 percent of kids. It’s about the majority of human beings born in the developed world, at least, since 1995, most of them have diminished, their human capital has diminished, their chances for life satisfaction, their social skills, their likelihood of getting married, their likelihood of being a good employee, all of it has diminished.

So yes, we have to stop it now.

I know you’ve met people like Mark Zuckerberg and the team at Snap. When you present all this to them, what do they say to you?

Denial, complete denial.

I’ve had this same conversation with Mark Zuckerberg two or three times – the guy’s very smart. He knows… there are some researchers who keep finding null effects. He knows those studies, and then he and I argue about it, and that’s it.

It’s perfectly civilized, perfectly pleasant, but he doesn’t acknowledge that his product is harming children on a very large scale.

When I raised my concerns to Snap’s leadership, and I said, “What about this report of 10,000 reports of sextortion (a month)?) from 2022?” They were getting so many reports from their own users, from people who were being sexually abused.

When I put this to him he said, “What are you talking about?”

And I said, “It was in the Wall Street Journal.”

And one of them said, “Oh, yes, that one.”

Look, of course they knew.

I wanted to ask you about this lawsuit in California. This is one of several court cases that will be brought against social media companies this year. It will be the first to use a different logic for Meta to go after Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Snap. How vulnerable does this make the entire social media business model?

The key to understanding is that the US Congress passed a law – it’s called Section 230, the Communications Decency Act – (which) states that no one can sue these companies for what they post, (that) companies can’t be responsible for what everyone posts, and the initial idea there was quite reasonable.

But the courts have interpreted (it) so broadly, (so much) that if TikTok showed videos inciting your daughter to commit suicide, (and) then she killed herself, you can’t sue them in any way. They have extensive security.

This time, the lawyers have made the obvious common sense argument that the company is not liable for what Joe Schmoe posted, but they are certainly liable for the design features of their product. If they designed it to be addictive, if they knew it was addictive, if they knew that kids were going down rabbit holes and then sometimes killing themselves, then certainly they are liable for it.

And did they know this? Of course, they knew this.

If listeners go to Metainternalresearch.org, my team has collected 31 studies done by meta… so there’s a Huge amount of evidence from meta itselfFrom the experiments they conducted, from the surveys they conducted of users, and from their discussions about these surveys, they knew it was addictive. They took steps to maximize engagement. They were at war with TikTok. They had to have babies faster than TikTok.

They knew what they were doing, and they did it anyway. I’m not a lawyer, but I think it sounds to me like a criminal mind – they did this knowingly and intentionally.

What do you think a verdict in favor of the plaintiff might do here?

So far, these companies have been completely immune to public pressure, public embarrassment, all of that. The only thing he has ever reacted to is the threat of the law.

If I am right, that they have harmed or reduced the numbers of literally millions of children, the majority of the world’s children born since 1995, then the liability here is beyond imagination.

Unfortunately, these can’t all be combined into one giant class action suit, because each one is different, so there will be thousands and thousands of suits. But these preliminary cases are called “bellwether cases,” meaning they will go before a jury for a child, a family, a forum, and then the jury will decide questions of fact.

And if these initial cases go the plaintiffs’ way, if the jury says “yes, the companies are liable,” then thousands and thousands of other cases will be settled out of court because Meta will know that…if they take these to court they’re going to keep losing.

I would imagine (the liability) would be hundreds of billions of dollars.