Jonathan Haidt

And we're trying to get a bill through Congress that does some fairly modest things about setting defaults and just begins to establish children are not adults.

You have to treat them differently.

If there was any other consumer product, let's imagine a new toy comes out on the market.

The kids love it.

And 90% of kids are using this toy five hours a day.

And hundreds of thousands are being hospitalized for depression, eating disorders, anxiety.

And some kids are killing themselves after using the toy.

So what I'm saying is we have a defective consumer product.

Do you think that that toy maybe would

be recalled, maybe regulated, like maybe you have to change it so that it doesn't wreak such damage.

So that's what the Surgeon General is saying.

The Surgeon General is saying, while the scientists fight about whether social media caused the increase of the population level, like the graphs I show in the book with the hockey sticks, did social media cause that increase at the population level?

That's an academic debate.

I can't be 100% certain I'm right.

But what the Surgeon General was saying was, regardless of that debate,

Here are hundreds of cases of kids who were sextorted, they were bullied, they were shamed, and then they killed themselves that day.

So the Surgeon General is saying, if this was any other consumer product, we'd regulate it and we'd put warning labels on it.

Why not this one?

Yeah, so we gave my son a phone, my old iPhone, as most people do, when he was in fourth grade, when he started walking to school.

This was back, you know, whatever, in the early 2010s.