Taylor Lorenz

We shouldn't punish them for making their products so good that people want to spend so much time on them.

But there are ways that we can curb the type of

negative business practices that Meta engages in that actually degrade our internet.

We have no data privacy laws.

And now, unfortunately, if we pass these social media addiction laws, they're going to have even more power and our internet's going to get even worse for everyone.

And that's going to suck.

We also have massive multi-billion dollar messaging, political propaganda campaigns aimed at pushing the idea that this is the fall.

There are these nonprofits and special interest groups and groups like the Heritage Foundation and ENCOs, or formerly known as Morality and Media.

These are a lot of organizations that are affiliated with the religious far right that are religious fundamentalists that have been pushing the idea that the internet is the downfall of society since the 90s.

They're responsible for this what was originally known as the Communications Decency Act, which was you know significantly overturned, but they've they've Put this idea forward forever, and I think it was after Donald Trump's election That a lot of the mainstream media got on board with that I worked at the New York Times at the time and it was this idea of like well Donald Trump is in office and everything is bad because of Facebook and

The media had been too, like they hadn't been critical of tech enough, but I think they flipped and they just started sort of feeding into this stuff.

And you have to also note that like the New York Times and a lot of these mainstream media companies also directly compete with Meta and Google.

These companies have obliterated their business models and they are also part of these political action groups that go out and intentionally kind of put forward the idea that the internet is bad and we need sort of mainstream media.

So I think there's just a lot of competing interests at play.

Yeah, so first of all, it was this poor 20-year-old girl who I feel horrible for.

This girl had a horrible, horrible life.

She grew up with an abusive mother, an abusive father.

Her father abused her and abandoned her when she was quite young.

That's true.

Her mother also physically abused her, emotionally tortured her.