Taylor Lorenz

under direct supervision and with guardrails because you want them to be able to operate in the media and information and technology sort of landscape of their time and not fall for misinformation and not fall for scams the minute they turn 18.

But to do that, you have to introduce them to this stuff really young.

That's why when we grew up as millennials, we had computer class.

We learned about these things.

You know, people should be learning about this stuff in civics class and social studies, et cetera.

We should say, like, here's what misinformation is.

Here's how you can look at this platform.

Here's some tools to navigate.

Like, instead, we're going the opposite way and we're trying to kind of like ban kids completely.

And then we know that the later they get on, the more likely they are to fall for scams, the more likely they are to fall for misinformation, et cetera.

yes literally is there data behind that like yeah definitely yeah and there's a lot of like media educators that have tried to talk about this repeatedly journalists like others i think what's hard is that like a lot of these parents feel like i can't do like a media studies class with my kid like why is it my job you know i don't i don't have the and and i totally they don't have the time a lot of them are working two jobs a lot of these you know kids are growing up in households where both the parents work they see them for an hour

So what I would argue is for some sort of public education system, especially with AI, we're seeing this a lot with AI.

Say you ban social media tomorrow, we're about to see this on steroids with AI.

We need to reform our public education system.

We need national educational

you know, things and maybe make the tech companies pay for it, you know, make the tech like tax them.

There are so many things that we can do to fix these problems.

We can also pass comprehensive data privacy reform laws so that these young people are not getting, as you say, like addicted, whatever you want to say.

We know that this content is highly engaging.

Part of the ways that that, you know, these feeds are made so engaging is because they can hyper target you.