Lauren Greenfield
speaker
81 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Apr 2025
Lauren Greenfield’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Pivot · Hunter Biden Pardon, Kash Patel for FBI Director, and Guest Lauren Greenfield · 3 Dec 2024
podcast
Well, I think that when Jonathan says it's our lifeline, but it's a loaded gun, both are necessary. So I think that the current paradigm is not working. I think that basically we need regulation. We need the algorithms to be changed. We need the tech companies to be accountable. What social studies does is it kind of tells you how kids are being affected in the specifics.
And I think one of the things in the short term that parents can do is talk to their kids about it. I have heard parents say, I'm afraid to watch the show. Even in the show, Sydney's mom Sydney's a girl who posts very provocative pictures and sexy pictures of herself online and gets a lot of feedback by boys and men. And her mom in the show says, I don't know if I want to.
see what's on her TikTok. I think that's a common thing from parents that they don't want to fully know. And I think that's one important thing is that this is a kind of secretive world. And that's what the show is meant to do is kind of break that open. And I think kids want to have those conversations.
Anyway, it was really a problematic thing. And Scott asked, like, what's the thing that parents don't know? I think one of the things is how common this is. Like, in the... We have groups in the show and they do silent clapping when they identify with what other kids are saying. And that happens so often. I ask the kids, like, how many have been sent a nude or sent a nude?
Almost all the kids' hands goes up. How many have dealt with an eating disorder or disordered eating? So many of the kids' hands go up. When did you first see pornography? Third grade. You know, I think pornography as the new sex ed is one of the things that's addressed in the show. And I think parents just don't realize that
that their own kids are seeing all of this material and also how traumatic it is for them that they really want to both talk about it and also have a place to process it.
And I have not. I have not. I read the story about the teen who committed suicide after the AI-bought relationship, and that was just completely horrifying. But I haven't done any research on that. What I did find is that By the end of the year, what the kids articulated is they want to have face-to-face connection with each other.
In a way, that was the hope that came out of the series, is at the end, they're saying, we would like a place to interact, connect without phones. And I think, for me, it was shocking that that seemed like a novel idea. But I think that, I mean...
What I did find vis-a-vis pornography is that every kid was exposed to it, that it does create really unrealistic expectations and standards for both girls and boys. One of the scary things was seeing that the trend that everybody was talking about was BDSM for teenagers. And it was almost like almost like a comedy moment when one girl says, and teenagers don't even know how to choke properly.
Like they're just teenagers. And so I think, and that wasn't just pornography, that's on TikTok. So I think that, you know, and one girl talked about being in abusive relationship as her first relationship and not knowing that, that it was abusive because of what she had seen as normative on pornography.
And we hear stories about assault and violence against girls, and we can see this being mirrored in pornography. So I think that in a way, what I was looking at was more probably like common and mainstream than having a relationship with a bot, but you can see how dangerous the influences are. And also just how
how it kind of takes away from like the joy and romance and, you know, puppy love of being a kid. We also see relationships being about fame. Like one girl, Ellie, has a puppy love relationship in middle school with a child actor, and then she becomes famous accidentally. And we see kind of relationships be means to popularity.
I mean, I agree. A lot of them said they would have preferred to be in the generation of their parents before it exists. And yet it's a kind of necessary evil in their generation. Like Cooper and Stella are talking at the end and say, like, do we exist if we're not online? Like that's the current existential question for young people. I think it's very hard to to go off as an individual.
We see Ivy go off in the show and eventually get back on. It's a real statement of saying, I'm going to be outside of the social life. I think that being a teenager is about being in the social life, trying to find yourself socially, having friends, being accepted. I think that As a next step, like really we need collective action. It's very hard to do this individually.
When they are in our group without phones, when they talk about going to camp without phones, they love that. In the schools that have banned phones this year, it might have been a big shock in the beginning, but the kids love it. Ironically, a lot of the kind of phones coming back in schools in the past has come from parents. wanting to know where their kids are.
And I think parents being okay with not being in touch with your kids at every moment will be helpful. But having phones that are not smartphones, you know, is great. Like they can text, they can talk. but not being on the social media apps. It doesn't mean we can never have the social media apps.
Like you said, there are positive things about it, but the current algorithms are not made for kids' well-being. Actually, we know they're made for kids' harm or indifferent to kids' harm.
Absolutely. I really support what Australia is doing and I think it should be. I just want to say like for this generation, which Sydney in the film calls the guinea pig generation, they have already been exposed to trauma. So I hope that... Parents will watch the show with their kids. We have a parent guide and an educational curriculum at learner.org slash social studies. It's free for schools.
Schools should use the curriculum, develop media literacy. This is coming from the kids, but they can't do it on their own.
I'm a journalist. I totally believe in free speech. But I think what we have is a situation where capitalism is making it so that there's too much of a profit incentive for engagement, which often means the most prurient, the most outrageous, the most dangerous, especially when it comes to kids' brains. So I think that's exploitation of
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