Casey Newton

I mean, in particular, talking to people who still work there and what they'll say is like, even if you buy the plaintiff's arguments here, fixing this is really tricky, right?

Because again, even if you believe that this individual teenager

or had like a horrible time looking at these platforms for too long and it made all of her problems worse.

Okay, which design feature of this platform are you going to remove?

And how is that going to fix her problem, right?

Like if Instagram and YouTube did not have autoplay video, if it didn't have infinite scroll, if it didn't have push notifications, would that have improved her mental health to a point where she no longer would have sued the company saying this is a defective product?

I don't know, right?

I think that the problem that we just have as like a society right now is we don't know what safe social media is.

We don't know what features are really the most dangerous.

I think we have instincts.

I think there are experiments that we should run, but it's not as simple as, well, just turn off the autoplay video and all the teenagers will go play outside again.

Here's the thing.

As somebody who writes more about social media than anything else, I have been shocked at the degree to which I am just throwing in my lot with Jonathan Haidt.

Because I also don't know.

I do not know which are the features that we should get rid of that are going to make all the teenagers safe.

What I can tell you is nobody who works at the platforms cares enough about any of your teenagers for me to trust your teenagers with them.

So I would rather say don't look at it until you turn 16 because I know that's going to be better for you than them looking at it.

No, truly, I have read so many of the interviews with the Republican policymakers when they get asked about this stuff, and none of them seem to understand that if they do, in fact, get rid of 230 platforms will over moderate content because they will be in terror that a wide variety of things that can now be linked back to them could potentially result in legal liability.

And they're going to hate it, right?

Like these are the guys that hate all content moderation.