Allowing our political discourse to be swallowed up by the internet and spit back out as chewed-up, attention-grabbing “content” has obviously not been good for the American psyche. Unfortunately, in the wake of the 2024 election, the Democratic Party seems to have decided that there’s no path forward except plunging headfirst into the online cesspool.

The DNC recently poured millions into a project called Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan, billed as an effort to “study the syntax, language, and content that gains attention and virality” in male-dominated online spaces. Meanwhile, a startlingly annoying crop of Democratic influencers emerged, teenage boys with resistance-lib politics who mimic online MAGA aesthetics to produce truly terrible videos like “Clueless MAGA Bro Gets SHUT DOWN During Debate.”

Politicians, too, are getting in on the fun. California Governor Gavin Newsom—apparently convinced that the key to being a successful governor is to fill the “liberal Joe Rogan” void—launched a podcast. His debut episode featured the late Charlie Kirk and was so obsequious that Kirk criticized him for being “overly effusive.” Later, after an amicable debate with Steve Bannon, Newsom switched to mocking Donald Trump in posts that mimic the president’s disjointed, braggadocious style. 

As demeaning and debasing as all this is, maybe it’s also part of a necessary correction. The left’s approach in recent election cycles—engaging in digital shaming pile-ons and strong-arming social media companies into moderating speech on their platforms—mostly backfired by convincing millions of Americans that liberals were censorious scolds. But if that strategy proved counterproductive, this frantic attempt to match the online MAGA world’s tactics in an attentional race to the bottom might be just as doomed to fail. 

I’d like to suggest a different approach, one that is already gathering adherents among liberal strategists, grassroots activists, and legal scholars. Instead of accepting the existing digital political battlefield as inevitable, Democrats should challenge it as the root cause of our dysfunctional politics, and vow to be the party that cleans it up.

The core of the issue is that we have a digital economy built on a business model of trapping people in the virtual world for as long as possible. D. Graham Burnett, a historian of science at Princeton University, calls it “human fracking,” where instead of oil, companies are extracting our attention. Should we really be surprised, then, that at the same time the internet is subsuming the real world, what’s emerging around the globe is a convulsive, reactionary politics? Addressing this crisis—rather than fueling it—should be central to the Democrats’ strategy in the digital age. 

There are abundant signs that people want something different. For example, a 2020 Pew survey found that about two-thirds of American adults believe social media is negatively affecting the country’s direction; only one in 10 think it’s helping. Perhaps the most compelling evidence of social media users’ simmering discontent comes from a study conducted by economists at the University of Chicago. Participants were asked how much money they would need to be paid to quit social media. The average answer was around $50. But the participants’ attitudes changed dramatically if asked to imagine that everyone else had already quit. In that case, they would not only give up their accounts—they’d be willing to pay to do so. That exodus may slowly be under way—time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has slightly fallen since, with young people representing the largest decrease.

Thankfully, there are more options in the playbook than to surrender to the internet or simply log off. As the political speech scholar Susan Benesch put it to me, the question Democrats need to answer is this: “Do you want to ape the game the other side is already playing in an environment that is bad for people, or do you want to change the game?” Democrats don’t need to abandon the digital sphere to challenge its terms; in fact, a few of its younger rising stars have shown that liberal messages can gain purchase. But to answer that hunger for reform, while also creating a level playing field for sane, fact-based discourse, Democrats must make a serious political commitment to reforming these technologies that govern our lives and yet remain subject to no meaningful democratic oversight. 

The movement to make online life healthier is already well underway. Currently leading the charge is a growing coalition of parents, scholars, and activists focused on protecting children from the most harmful aspects of the digital world. This movement has also launched a state-by-state campaign to claw back some modicum of digital privacy, with state legislators finally taking steps to curb the relentless surveillance and manipulation of individuals by tech platforms. 

Nearly every expert I spoke with agreed that these crusades offer Democrats a clear strategic opportunity: embrace these efforts, raise the profile of their issues, and campaign on federal legislation that embraces these movements. If the goal is a more dramatic restructuring of digital life, though, these measures must be seen as just the opening moves. The harms that have galvanized these reform movements are symptoms of the broader underlying sickness plaguing the online world.

Right now, MAGA channels much of the anger toward modern life by offering a fantasy of a lost, mythic past. But if Democrats were willing to engage with this dissatisfaction honestly, they could expose the central lie of the movement: Despite all its posturing, MAGA wants nothing more than for you to live your life on a screen. 

Unlike the current race toward the most optimized attentional capture possible—which is also disastrous for our politics by favoring the loudest, most outrageous voices—the lane of reform belongs to Democrats alone. With the right’s online dominance, the political conversions of platform owners like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, and Republican leaders like Donald Trump and J. D. Vance, pathologically online, the GOP is an unlikely reformer. Rather than join the stampede of human frackers, Democrats could be the one force fighting to protect your mind from being mined.

The most obvious place where the online world has impoverished the real one is childhood. Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation documents the teen mental health epidemic that began in the early 2010s, arguing that the “great rewiring of childhood”—the shift from a play-based to a phone-based upbringing—fueled the crisis. Haidt outlines multiple causal pathways linking social media use to mental health harms: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. To safeguard future generations, he proposes four societal norms: no smartphones before high school, no social media before age 16, phone-free schools, and a renewed emphasis on real-world independence and play. 

The book has achieved remarkable success, generating widespread media attention and sparking an eponymous movement attempting to enshrine Haidt’s norms into law. The most effective policy efforts to date have centered on making schools phone-free, with 26 states enacting legislation or executive orders to restrict or ban student cell phone use during the school day. Beyond that, some states have adopted more aggressive measures, banning social media entirely for children under 14 or implementing age verification laws that require parental consent for minors. Other states have taken aim at platform design itself, passing “Kids Codes” that turn on the highest privacy settings as the default for children or prohibiting personalized, algorithmically driven content feeds. Nearly all of these laws have faced legal challenges from NetChoice, the leading tech industry group, which has succeeded in securing injunctions in many cases as the court battles continue. 

Using the judicial system cuts both ways, though. Over the past couple of years, state attorneys general across the country have launched waves of litigation against social media platforms. The immediate outcome of these lawsuits is the exposure of troubling internal communications that reveal how these companies disregard the harms their platforms cause. For example, Kentucky’s lawsuit against TikTok alleges that the company deliberately concealed the app’s addictive design. Internal documents revealed that TikTok identified the habit-forming threshold—260 videos, or about 35 minutes—and linked compulsive use to negative mental health effects. Despite this, it took no meaningful action. A parental control feature, promoted as a safeguard with 60-minute time limits for kids, reduced usage by only 1.5 minutes on average. “Our goal is not to reduce time spent,” one project manager candidly admitted. 

In addition to revealing the true motivations behind platform decisions, these lawsuits could drive real accountability if legislation stalls. Perhaps most significant in this regard is the nearly nationwide lawsuit against Meta for knowingly harming children’s mental health and thus violating consumer protection laws, building on the documents leaked by the whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021. “Nobody thought there could be a 44-state lawsuit against social media,” Haugen told me. “And now we have a lawsuit comparable to the tobacco lawsuit.” (The lawsuit involved 41 states and Washington, D.C.)

The other reform effort that has gained real traction is the fight for digital privacy. In recent years, data privacy advocates have slowly begun to restrict the surveillance and profiling rampant in the online world. Today, social media platforms and other tech giants engage in nearly limitless online surveillance in order to create a vast informational asymmetry between the internet platforms and their users. If corporations know everything about you—your communications, preferences, habits—it is much easier for them to manipulate you into acting in their best interest. Last year, U.S. internet users had their information shared 107 trillion times—an average of 747 exposures per person, per day.

California is headquarters to most of the companies who pioneered this business model, which is why it was the first state to wise up and pass a comprehensive consumer data privacy law in 2018. To this day, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) remains the nation’s strongest privacy regulation. The CCPA was built around the concept of “data minimization,” which means that companies should only collect and use personal information if it is for a purpose that consumers would reasonably expect. For example, a person using a ride-share app would expect the app to use their location to allow the driver to pick them up and drop them off. The user would not reasonably expect that the app continuously tracks their location well after the ride, learns that they visited a pawn shop, and then sells that information to Google, which in turn might start showing that individual ads for predatory loans.

The effort caught Silicon Valley by surprise and came as a blow to the online platforms who have no interest in scaling back their immense data collection practices. Since then, industry lobbyists and privacy advocates have clashed in state legislatures over how to shape privacy laws. Unlike California’s approach, industry-backed bills typically allow companies to collect personal data without meaningful limits, so long as they disclose it somewhere in a privacy policy. Consumers who want their data must submit individual requests to every entity that holds it (this is in the hundreds or thousands). These laws also deny individuals the right to take companies to court. The tech industry has brought enormous resources to the fight: In 2021 and 2022 alone, 445 lobbyists and firms representing tech giants were active in the 31 states considering privacy legislation. Of the 19 states that have passed privacy laws, the vast majority have adopted industry-backed models. 

But in one of the most high-profile privacy battles to date, the tech industry suffered its first major defeat since California. Maryland state Senator Sara Love, who introduced the privacy bill in 2024 while still in the House of Delegates, said she had never experienced anything like it. “It was exhausting. I have never seen that level of lobbying. Nor had a lot of other legislators,” said Love, who has served in Maryland’s state government since 2019. “The first year lobbyists were telling legislators, ‘You’re not going to get your Starbucks points anymore,’ ” she recalled with a chuckle. “The biggest bunch of malarkey. But they [other state legislators] didn’t understand the technicalities of the bill.” 

This time around Love succeeded in passing the strongest privacy regulation since the CCPA, and now a handful of other states are working on similar laws modeled after California’s or Maryland’s approach. The biggest challenge is in convincing lawmakers that defying Big Tech’s warnings won’t bring the sky crashing down. “Knowing that it can be done helps,” Love reasoned. “The more of us that get these good strong bills, the more that will follow.” 

In The Sirens’ Call, Chris Hayes compares the development of today’s attention economy to the Industrial Revolution. “Attention now exists as a commodity,” he writes, “in the same way labor did in the early years of industrial capitalism … a social system had been erected to coercively extract something from people that had previously, in a deep sense, been theirs.” In fact, Hayes thinks the digital revolution may be even more disruptive because, “unlike land, coal, or capital, which exist outside of us, the chief resource of this age is embedded in our psyches. Extracting it requires cracking into our minds.” 

Much like in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, people today face a collective action problem: Those whose data is being mined have few institutions capable of pushing back against systemic abuse. Just as labor unions and worker protections emerged to confront the excesses of industrial capitalism, we now need digital equivalents to defend users in the age of surveillance capitalism. Rights like the ability to delete your data, to move it between platforms, and to hold companies accountable for their abuse of it should be the starting point. 

One promising step in this direction is the Digital Choices Act (DCA), a law passed in Utah this year. Doug Fiefia, the sponsor of the legislation, was inspired to act after growing disillusioned with the data practices he witnessed during his time at Google Ads. After joining Utah’s state legislature, he proposed a simple idea: Make it possible for users to take their data from one platform to another or delete it from any platform they choose. This kind of data portability could eventually allow users to organize and demand better treatment, backed by the leverage to deprive tech platforms of the data they so desperately need. “What we’re doing is taking back what we never should have given to this industry in the first place: control of our data,” Fiefia explained. “That should always have been ours.” Since Utah passed the DCA, the first legislation of its kind, six other states have reached out to Fiefia to explore introducing similar bills. 

Meanwhile, a group of legal scholars has been pushing for a promising reform called “friction-in-design” regulation. These reformers argue that the tech industry’s obsession with seamless efficiency has stripped users of meaningful choice and enabled what they call the “technosocial engineering of humans.” They propose deliberately designing pauses—like speed bumps in neighborhoods or warning labels on products—to help users reflect, exercise autonomy, and protect their well-being online. Previous attempts to regulate social media have often floundered because they focused on specific types of speech or particular actors, inviting partisan backlash. Friction-in-design offers a politically neutral alternative, one that addresses the underlying dynamics of online harm without censoring content or favoring one viewpoint over another. Just as speed bumps make roads safer without restricting where people can drive, digital friction can reduce harmful online behavior without infringing on free speech. 

There are a vast array of friction-in-design regulations that could curb harmful platform dynamics. Addictive features like infinite scroll (which continuously loads new content so users never reach a natural stopping point) and autoplay (which automatically plays the next video without user input) could be banned outright. Platforms could be forced into imposing automatic time-outs after extended continuous use of the platform. They could also be required to add a short delay after a user posts, likes, or replies to someone else. Content that begins to go viral could be deliberately slowed as it passes certain thresholds. High-reach accounts could be regulated like broadcasters, with posts that reach a certain audience threshold treated as public broadcasts. In the realm of privacy, courts could refuse to enforce automatic contracts and instead require evidence of actual deliberation by consumers. 

When tech platforms have voluntarily adopted some of these measures, they’ve worked. After a wave of gruesome lynchings in India in 2017 and 2018 that were sparked by viral false rumors of child kidnappings, WhatsApp restricted the forwarding of messages that had already been shared five or more times, allowing them to be sent to only one user or group at a time. That minor tweak resulted in the spread of “highly forwarded” messages declining by 70 percent. Of course, platforms are unlikely to adopt these measures on their own, which is why government action is necessary. 

The situation requires many more reforms than the ones that have been outlined here. Aggressive antitrust enforcement to break up the monopolization of the digital economy is crucial. Today’s internet giants have achieved a level of vertical and horizontal integration with few parallels in American history, in large part because previous generations of lawmakers worked hard to prevent it. Even at the height of its power, Ma Bell couldn’t listen to your telephone conversations, learn that you were thinking of buying a house, and then sell that information to banks, which could then cold-call you at dinner with loan offers. Government today could largely eliminate this “surveillance” business model by enforcing existing law—breaking up tech companies’ control of competing social media platforms (like Meta’s ownership of both Facebook and Instagram) and requiring that they follow the same “common carrier” rules that governed previous communications technologies. This would curb a great deal, though not all, of their most exploitative behavior. 

Modifying Section 230, which allows platforms to hide behind total legal immunity even as they algorithmically make editorial decisions, is also important. Beyond that, greater transparency around how algorithms function, and stronger oversight to ensure that they serve the public interest rather than manipulate it, will be key to creating a healthier digital ecosystem. Most major platforms’ algorithms promote the content that gets the most user engagement, which gives undue weight to outrage and misinformation. But those incentives don’t have to be written in stone. Scholars and some smaller platforms are testing out different algorithmic systems, such as “bridging-based ranking,” which sorts internet content using metrics that promote constructive disagreement—such as whether users with opposing views engage with it positively. Documents from Haugen, the Facebook whistle-blower, reveal that the company tested bridging-based ranking in its comments sections, and found that it promoted posts that were “much less likely” to be reported for bullying, hate speech, or violence. But they decided not to implement it widely.

Of course, none of this means Democrats can’t or shouldn’t engage with social media. Politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani have shown that it’s possible to use social media platforms effectively in service of progressive causes. But they are the exception. The structure of the current internet ecosystem overwhelmingly favors reactionary, conspiratorial content. Democratic engagement should be grounded not in mimicking that logic, but in naming the alienation the internet produces and offering a more humane alternative. 

The way we live online is not good for us. The average American now checks their phone 205 times a day, or once every five waking minutes. The average young person today spends 5.5 hours staring at screens, putting them on pace to spend 25 years of their life online. Rates of depression, anxiety, and behavioral addictions have soared; rates of friendship and romantic relationships have plummeted. 

Meanwhile, those in the tech industry want to double down on all of it. Marc Andreessen, cofounder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, is often called Silicon Valley’s “philosopher-king.” He argues that the goal of improving material conditions on Earth is misguided, the folly of those who cannot see past their own “reality privilege”:

A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substances, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date … Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege—their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world … Reality has had 5,000 years to get good, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people; I don’t think we should wait another 5,000 years to see if it eventually closes the gap. We should build—and we are building—online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in.

It’s hard to imagine a more noxious ideology—or less likable messengers—to run against. To think that the answers to our most existential problems could be found by building ever more seductive online worlds to disappear into is essentially a surrender of faith in the human project. No wonder figures like Peter Thiel hesitate when asked if humanity should even survive. Let MAGA have this bleak vision. And let them own the horror that is our online world. 

Democrats, meanwhile, should start listening to other voices. Zadie Smith, more than a decade ago, wrote that the technology shaping our lives is unworthy of us. We are more interesting than it. We deserve better. It’s time to build something different.

The post Draining the Online Swamp appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Not a week goes by that book publishers don’t disgorge a tome on Big Tech, whether it’s a tell-all about C-suite leaders keeping us hooked to their algorithms, a boosterish guide to Artificial Intelligence (AI) by a tech insider, or a dire warning on how the tech platforms are hollowing out our attention spans.  

Add two more volumes to the pile. One is a meditation on technology and AI by Vauhini Vara, a Wall Street Journal alumnus and the first of the paper’s reporters to cover Facebook, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age. The second chronicles a key piece of computer code that helped launch the social media age, Like: The Button That Changed the World. The latter’s success and the former’s sprawl suggest that a narrower aperture is a more enlightening way to view our tech world.  

Searches is a chimera of a book: part AI, pastiches of journalism, an exhortation against what she calls technological capitalism, and hints of a postmodern novel couched within a memoir. For example, Vara shares a decade’s worth of queries she has typed into Google—something we all do multiple times a day and can easily relate to: “What is wastewater charge on water bill. What is a cardigan without buttons called. What to spray in ovens to clean. What is turbot fish.” She finds the excavation “unexpectedly moving,” as many of us might. “The material that Google valued for its financial potential was, for me, valuable on its own terms,” she writes.  

Similarly, Vara, who landed her first post-undergraduate covering tech for the Journal in the mid-2000s after attending Stanford, looks back at product reviews she wrote on Amazon and lists the topics X has determined she is interested in based on its algorithm. This record of her, and by extension, our behavior, shows the creepy and long-lived surveillance we subject ourselves to when we engage with any of these platforms. The book’s experimental approach works best in these passages. By showing us evidence of, rather than declaring, how our data is the very product driving the hundreds of billions of dollars generated by the tech giants, we feel the violation.  

When she does resort to telling rather than showing, Vara is prone to familiar assessments that online life resembles but doesn’t replicate or enhance lived experience. “To live like this—endlessly comparing our imperfect fleshy selves with sanitized digital simulacra of selfhood that [sic] appears online and finding ourselves wanting, endlessly finding ourselves trapped in an infinite scroll of algorithmically advantaged outrage and scorn—exerts such a subtle psychic violence that we might not even be aware of it as it’s happening,” she surmises.  

The book’s deconstructive way of critiquing Big Tech falls flat when it becomes something of a gimmick: One in every few chapters is “written” by the latest Chat-GPT model (in this case, Chat-GPT4), which summarizes the previous two chapters in a bloodless facsimile of human writing: “Your portrayal of tech companies, particularly Amazon, captures a complex and multifaceted view that many share about the impact of these corporations on society.” If nothing else, these chapters confirm that AI will never replace the writing and art of actual humans, though it’s unclear whether Vara intends to make us feel this way.  

An aspiring novelist, Vara left her plum gig at the Journal to attend the storied Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She published her first novel in 2022, The Immortal King Rao, which narrates the rise of a visionary tech CEO from humble beginnings in India to presiding over an algorithm-fueled dystopia. In her memoir Searches, Vara appears to deploy some of the techniques picked up in Iowa of interrogating the text and calling authorship into question when she asks Chat-GPT to write about the death of her sister when Vara was still in high school, resulting in a chapter called “Ghosts” that went viral when first published a few years ago in the literary magazine The Believer. While “Ghosts” may have already found its way on syllabi in literary theory seminars, it sits uneasily alongside other chapters like the compilations of our personal data that offer a clearer takedown of Big Tech. After her close observation of Silicon Valley, it’s apparent that Vara has emerged as a critic. She lauds efforts to rein in Big Tech by former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan and her mentor, Barry Lynn, executive director of Open Markets Institute, where I work as the editorial director. Despite its high-flown aspirations, Searches is ultimately a magpie’s nest of diffuse thoughts and musings on the digital world but illuminates little about the handful of companies that own it.  

Taking a radically different approach is Like: The Button That Changed the World. This seemingly circumscribed ambit is a far more successful look at the tech industry than Vara’s sprawling meditation. Like is so direct in its scope that at one point, the reader is treated to a history of when we came to use an upwardly directed thumb to indicate a positive sentiment or enthusiasm. TL;DR: It’s not entirely clear, but it may have started with gladiator fights in ancient Rome as a way for the audience to indicate whether a fallen fighter should be spared.  

One of the coauthors, Bob Goodson, is a Silicon Valley insider who helped invent an early iteration of the like button at Yelp in 2005, a few years before Facebook universalized this symbol, among the most important pieces of computer code ever to be written. Yelp’s early version didn’t include a thumbs-up symbol or the word “like,” but it did offer a way to interact with a posted review by clicking one of three buttons—“useful,” “funny,” and “cool.”  

Goodson and his coauthor Martin Reeves of BCG Henderson Institute, a think tank for developing business ideas, describe the impetus behind Yelp’s emotional reaction button as giving a website user the most effortless way of engaging with online content—one-click commenting—all while remaining on the same page and avoiding a change in URL that would trigger a page refresh. Back then, two decades ago, none of this was intuitive. It was akin to inventing the wheel.  

The book quotes former Max Levchin, the former chair of the board of directors of Yelp, on why the company’s emotional reaction buttons gained so much traction then. Noting that only a small percentage of users would write and create web content, he says, “The psychological or psycho-behavioral foundation of the like button is really about breaking out of the ‘only one percent who will say anything online’ assumption.” 

The authors don’t give Yelp all the credit, though. Silicon Valley was humming with web design ideas in the mid-2000s, and other websites, too, developed or borrowed emotive reactions. When Facebook launched the thumbs-up button in 2009, after Mark Zuckerberg had rejected the idea two years earlier, it became today’s familiar icon.  

“After Facebook finally added its like button, the feature proceeded to spread like wildfire, both in its use and through its replication on other sites,” the authors write. “It was a watershed moment.” They estimate that today, like buttons are clicked 160 billion times per day around the internet, tantamount to every human clicking a like button 20 times. 

This deep dive into the invention of the button and the ramifications of this piece of code is insightful. The authors credit the like button with underpinning the entire social media industry. Each like is a data point, after all, and once collected and combined with others, it powers algorithms driving more likes, shares, and reposts. “What seems like an ephemeral action produces a data point with a life of its own—a life that may last forever, working its way into endless other corners of influence and action,” they write. 

The authors recognize the dark side of what they call the like economy, the world of people and brands “amassing thumbs-up and finding ways to be paid for that positive attention.” They cite an internal Facebook report that found that the site’s monitoring of users’ emotional states could enable the delivery of ads when young people feel down and need a confidence boost.  

“We can’t have it both ways: we’ve given the like button a lot of credit for fueling the rise of social media, so it must share some responsibility for the repercussions,” the authors write, acknowledging the threat to society posed by social media, namely its impact on mental health and addiction, especially on young people; the invasiveness that defines surveillance capitalism whereby our data is sold to third-party brokers and used to serve us ads; and the extreme political polarization that has led to the election of a man determined to undermine democracy. 

What started as a clever, low-stakes way to keep a website’s users on the page—the like button—has helped create a threat of epic proportions. While Goodson and Reeves don’t have answers, they contribute to our understanding of how a few corporations have transformed our lives in a decade and a half. 

Correction: The original version of this story misnamed one of the co-authors of Like. He is Bob Goodson, not Bob Goodman. Max Levchin was incorrectly identified as the CEO of Yelp. He is a former chair of the board of directors of Yelp.

The post How the Digital Age Changed Us appeared first on Washington Monthly.

As a parent of two members of Generation Z, I think I’m among the lucky ones. My sons were still in elementary school in 2012, the year of Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram, the introduction of the “like” button, and the front-facing camera on the iPhone. Before they spent even one hour scrolling, the critical pubescent pruning and myelination of their neurons were almost complete. 

In 2019, my oldest son started high school without a smartphone, and I wrote about our family’s experience. Unlike parents just a few years ahead of me, I had a chance to notice something strange going on before my boys were old enough to make cogent arguments for having their own phones. The dystopian signs were everywhere. Children stumbling down my street toward the bus stop with their head down, ears plugged with tiny pods, eyes transfixed by handheld screens. Teens sitting around tables in restaurants ignoring each other in favor of their individual flashing distractions. “We are forever elsewhere,” wrote the MIT professor Sherry Turkle in 2015, describing our lives with smartphones. 

It’s bad enough for adults, but for many children it’s catastrophic. In his new book, The Anxious Generation, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out with detailed research, common sense, and a nod toward the sublime how giving kids constant, unfettered access to the internet has rewired their brains, thus causing an epidemic of mental illness—documented by the surgeon general and the American Academy of Pediatrics, among others—in the generation born between 1997 and 2012—Generation Z. 

Most parents Haidt talks with don’t necessarily have a child with a diagnosis. “Instead, there is an underlying worry that something unnatural is going on,” Haidt writes. Even those with no obvious signs of emotional or mental stress are being imprinted by social media as they go through the sensitive “wet cement” period of puberty, a time when whatever they’re exposed to “will cause lasting structural changes in the brain.” This way of growing up, unprecedented in human history, is not just bad for children but possibly also changes who they are. As Haidt writes, “It’s as though we sent Gen Z to grow up on Mars when we gave them smartphones in the early 2010s, in the largest uncontrolled experiment humanity has ever performed on its own children.”

Haidt uses the results of the U.S. National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which asks questions about feeling “sad, empty, or depressed” and loss of interest in activities that were previously enjoyed. Answering yes to more than five of the survey’s nine questions indicates the likelihood of having suffered a “major depressive episode” during the past year. In 2012, the number of 12-to-17-year-olds across all races and social classes who had suffered such an episode increased 150 percent—two and half times more than just two years before. By 2020, according to data collected before and after pandemic shutdowns, “one out of every four American teen girls had experienced a major depressive episode in the previous year.”

Anxiety and depression are, of course, part of the human experience for many people of all ages and have many causes, from genetics to childhood trauma. This book focuses on why, despite no warning during prior years, rates of mental illness among adolescents suddenly have surged across all races and economic backgrounds worldwide at this particular moment. Haidt’s answer is that between 2010 and 2015, basic cell phones were replaced by smartphones in most pockets, purses, and backpacks, creating what he calls the “great rewiring of childhood,” as the first generation of humans in history went through puberty with constant access to the internet and social media. For evidence of this collective move away from the real world and into the virtual one, he points to a slow decrease in daily face-to-face time with friends beginning in the late 1990s that quickly accelerated in the 2010s.

Again, even those with no diagnosis, and no clear signs of distress, are affected by this new way of growing up. Haidt describes human childhood as “an apprenticeship for learning the skills needed for success in one’s culture,” and humans take longer than other animals to get this done. Children require years of eye contact, face-to-face conversation, and exposure to body language and facial expressions to learn how to function as adult members of the community. “Social media platforms … hijack social learning and drown out the culture of one’s family and local community,” Haidt writes. This is how Gen Z has gone through adolescence. 

That this generation also happens to be more anxious, depressed, and suicidal than Millennials born just a few years earlier points to a causal relationship between social media and mental illness. To prove this, Haidt and his colleagues performed dozens of randomized controlled trials where the depressive symptoms of a group of students who continued to use social media were compared to those of a group that had taken a break. Results showed reduced depression in those who abstained from social media for three weeks. 

Haidt boils the impact of the “great rewiring” down to four foundational harms: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. The story of how he arrived at his conclusion—of what happened to Gen Z—has two plotlines. The first is a cultural shift away from free play due to “safetyism.” The second is the rise and ubiquity of technology. 

Safetyism is “a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people become unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns.” This theory was first introduced in “The Coddling of the American Mind,” a 2015 article in The Atlantic that Haidt coauthored with the First Amendment lawyer Greg Lukianoff. That piece, later expanded into a New York Times best-selling book of the same name, explored the culture of fear and anxiety that both authors had noticed on college campuses—fear of speaking up, fear of exposure to ideas different from one’s own. Their explanation of this new fearful atmosphere was that “many parents, K–12 teachers, professors, and university administrators have been unknowingly teaching a generation of students to engage in the mental habits commonly seen in people who suffer from anxiety and depression.” Unlike the students a few years ahead, who arrived on campus in “discover mode,” looking for opportunities to grow, Gen Z arrived in “defend mode”—scanning for threats. 

The authors’ suggestion that calling out microaggressions, for example, is less a pursuit toward equality and social justice and more of an emotional response to a perceived threat was met with criticism by some who suggested that the authors were condescending to student activists. “Enjoying the luxury of living free from discrimination and domination, [Haidt and Lukianoff] … insist that the crises moving young people to action are all in their heads,” Moira Weigel wrote in The Guardian in 2018.

But in the context of Haidt’s new book, safetyism is about more than the social justice movement on college campuses. It’s about kids’ perceptions of themselves as fragile as the natural result of growing up under the watchful eyes of well-meaning but overprotective parents. In The Coddling of the American Mind, the authors look back to a watershed moment in 1981, when six-year-old Adam Walsh was kidnapped while shopping with his mother and later murdered. Adam’s tragic and widely publicized story raised a national panic about “stranger danger,” and led Adam’s father to lobby for the creation of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Suddenly, the children of Generation X, once free to roam their neighborhoods and play outside until dark, were herded inside and nestled away from the dangers of the outside world, a change that was especially hard on boys.

Fast-forward 30 years to those children’s children, and overprotection has become the norm—not only at home but also at school and in society at large. Kids of the middle and affluent classes attend chaperoned playdates and supervised sports practices and music lessons. Children from all socioeconomic backgrounds are less likely to walk to neighborhood parks unsupervised lest an overzealous citizen report an unattended child to authorities. And even when kids manage to get to a park, the playground equipment has likely been designed to prevent injury rather than to challenge growing muscles and imaginations. In short, play has become more supervised and less risky, and thus not geared toward wiring the human mind in the way it was designed to evolve and grow.

Herein lies the irony at the core of the current epidemic of childhood mental illness. It’s all about trying to keep kids safe and protected. But humans are by nature “antifragile,” a term coined in Nassim Taleb’s 2012 book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Haidt writes, “The ultimate antifragile system is the immune system which requires early exposure to dirt, parasites, and bacteria in order to set itself up in childhood.” Free play and its accompanying confrontations, disappointments, and even injuries can vaccinate against anxiety and depression. Safetyism is dangerous to mental health because it’s an “experience blocker.” 

And so is the smartphone.

If safetyism is the topsoil of the mental health crisis, then the smartphone and its accompanying social media are the seeds, sunshine, and water. Haidt points out that for millions of years, human interactions have had four characteristics. The first is that “we are physical, embodied creatures who evolved to use our hands, facial expressions, and head movements as communication channels.” Second, our communication is synchronous, meaning that it is “timed to respond in real time to the similar movements of our partners.” We are also designed to carry on one interaction at a time, and to exist in communities that have “a high bar for entry and exit, so people are strongly motivated to invest in relationships and repair rifts when they happen.” 

However, for the past few decades, humans have experimented with communication in the virtual world, which is disembodied, asynchronous, one-to-many, and with a low bar for entry and exit that creates, as one college student wrote to Haidt, “relationships that are often disposable.” We’ve done this in the name of being better connected, but that connection is a mirage, and teenage girls have suffered the most. It’s possible that they are more affected simply because they use social media more, but there are plenty of additional reasons for their increased vulnerability. Haidt finds that girls are motivated by “communion” and connection, but their virtual social lives are making them lonely and depressed. Girls are also more likely than boys to compare themselves to others and place a higher emotional premium on the outcome of that comparison. Gen Z girls, Haidt writes, “are subjected to hundreds of times more social comparison than girls [have] experienced for nearly all of human evolution.”

And then there’s the addiction, which also affects boys and girls differently. Boys tend to be addicted to pornography and video games; girls are often addicted to crafting ever-more-perfect versions of themselves for the ever-present camera. And too many teens are addicted to the devices themselves, spending an average of six to eight hours a day engaged with a screen. This is time not spent playing sports, reading books, or spending time with their peers in person. 

“God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,” said the first president of Facebook, Sean Parker, in a 2017 interview about the company’s intentional efforts to hook users. Thanks to the whistleblower Frances Haugen and “The Facebook Files,” a set of internal documents that she leaked to The Wall Street Journal,we all know that Facebook knew plenty. Take, for example, one slide, included in a presentation to employees, showing an MRI image of a human brain with the caption, 

The teenage brain is usually about 80% mature. The remaining 20% rests in the frontal cortex … At this time teens are highly dependent on their temporal lobe where emotions, memory and learning, and the reward system reign supreme.

Haidt writes that acceptance by one’s peers is the “oxygen of adolescence.” Tech companies have exploited and capitalized on this vulnerability in an experiment that has used as its subjects the kids of Gen Z and their parents. Thus far, we’ve all done our best to navigate this new world with no maps and no role models. 

Thankfully, Haidt’s book provides both. He says we’ve sent our children to Mars but insists we can bring them home if we all work together. It sounds cliché and also chafes at my own individualistic tendencies—whose business is it if I want to give my own child a smartphone for his 11th birthday? Smartphone use is sort of like cigarette smoke in that it affects even the people who aren’t participating. Think of the sixth-grade girl who shows up at school not knowing the steps to the latest TikTok dance, or goes outside after school to play but her neighbors are inside on their phones. Haidt applauds the efforts of volunteer groups such as Wait Until 8th, where parents of elementary school students sign pledges not to give their children phones until the eighth grade—although he says even that age is too young. It’s better to wait until high school for both the smartphone and social media.

Parents can’t and shouldn’t be expected to solve this problem alone. Haidt calls on tech companies to raise the age of internet adulthood to 16 and to employ age verification systems. He points to the U.K.’s Age Appropriate Design Code (AACD), versions of which have been passed by several U.S. states. The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) currently making its way through Congress includes many standards of the AACD, and Haidt supports this kind of legislation at the federal level. He also urges government to encourage phone-free schools, which means phones must be left at home or turned in to school officials during the school day all the way through high school. 

Haidt uses Mountain Middle School in Durango, Colorado, as an example of a phone-free school where the ban was “transformative.” Academic performance improved—but perhaps more importantly, kids talked with each other more in the hallways between classes. 

In compiling the research for his book, Haidt writes, he realized that he was seeing the “radical transformation of childhood into something inhuman.” But he is hopeful, as am I, that we can bring childhood back to the real world and make it human again. We can teach our children to stand barefoot in the dirt and look up toward the sky.

The post The Doomscroll Generation appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Internet platforms have enjoyed a legal status that exempts them from legal liability for their content. Tech giants such as Google, Meta, and TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, have been under this umbrella thanks to the Communications Decency Act of 1996, specifically its Section 230, establishing that companies cannot be treated as the publisher of the content on their sites. This distinction helped create the sprawling modern internet. But in the last decade, YouTube, Twitter, and other platforms have been accused of abetting terrorists and insurrectionists to radicalize converts and plan attacks. In a new era, should internet giants be treated like phone companies with no liability for plans hatched on their networks, or should they face greater accountability?

Next month, the Supreme Court will hear two cases that could upend this legal immunity. In Gonzalez v. Google LLC, the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, killed in a 2015 ISIS attack, will argue that Google is liable not only for allowing the terrorist organization to post videos on YouTube but also for its algorithm promoting those videos. In Twitter, Inc. v. Taamneh, the family of Nawras Alassaf, killed in a 2017 ISIS-affiliated attack in Istanbul, argues Twitter is liable for the growth of ISIS because the organization used Twitter to recruit members and proselytize.

Margaret Hu, a professor at William & Mary Law School and a faculty fellow with the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences at Penn State University, is an expert in national security in the age of social media and cyber surveillance. I spoke with Hu about the upcoming cases and content regulation.

This conversation has been edited and shortened for clarity.

GN: Why do you think the Court decided to hear these two cases?

MH: The Supreme Court understands the great importance of weighing in on the future of Section 230 in light of recent developments, and they are not immune to the political climate. They understand the [January 6] hearings and questions about holding big tech accountable.

GN: What concerns you most about the possibility of the court ruling in favor of the tech companies?

MH: The greatest concern of many privacy experts is that if blanket immunity is granted in the absence of reform to Section 230, there will be greater difficulty holding the companies accountable for spreading disinformation and misinformation.

Because of the control that [internet platforms now] have over content—to curate the content, drive visibility, and shape our views—it’s not as neutral as serving as a conduit of information. A lot of these tech companies have the power to drive our exposure and our interest in the content through the algorithms they use.

GN: If the judges rule against Google and/or Twitter, what impact could that have on content moderation?

MH: One of the great concerns about this case is what can happen to the First Amendment. Part of why Section 230 was passed was to preserve the freedom of speech. So, I think the complexity is, how do you strike that balance? How do you walk the line between First Amendment rights and safety? If you have technologies that allow the platforms not simply to host information, then it seems like Section 230 is outdated. It doesn’t really reflect the current situation. And this is why I think you have more calls for statutory reform or a better interpretation of Section 230 to limit the harms.

GN: The Twitter case also involves Section 2333 of the Anti-Terrorism Act, amended in 2018, which lets U.S. nationals harmed by international terrorism sue anyone who aided and abetted in the act. How will social media platforms’ liability be impacted if Twitter loses?

MH: I think that what’s critical is to assess the meaning of “knowingly” offering “substantial” support to a foreign terrorist organization. That is at the heart of the question in the Twitter case. Is that going to impact companies if that liability is extended? Yes, it would. But the hope would be that it would restrain harmful content in a way that’s responsible and careful and does not unnecessarily limit the freedoms of speech and expression of users.

GN: Could the Twitter case establish the company’s responsibility for hosting domestic terrorist communications, or is this limited to international terrorism?

MH: Well, because of the Anti-Terrorism Act and the particular case, this would be limited to international terrorism. You might have members of Congress considering whether it’s necessary to extend those protections to mitigate against domestic terrorism.

It’s a question of to what extent you’re going to shield against harms that inflame and radicalize extremists in the U.S. You see with the January 6 Committee report and the recent report that wasn’t included, the potential liability of social media companies, [and more discussion around] whether there needs to be greater regulation to prevent violence. But that’s going to be left to potential statutes to address.

GN: If there were greater regulation of these platforms, do you think this could prevent extremists like those who stormed the capital on January 6 from organizing?

MH: A revision of Section 230 would possibly move us in the direction of trying to mitigate against the type of disinformation and misinformation that we saw leading to January 6.

The SAFE Tech Act proposed in 2021 by [Democratic Senators Mark] Warner, [Mazie] Hirono, and [Amy] Klobuchar to modify and revise Section 230 included liability to tech companies that in whole or in part created or funded the creation of the speech. So, to the extent you have the tech companies trying to feed upon disinformation and misinformation campaigns, the question is whether that can be construed as the “creation” of the speech.

GN: Could statutes like this deter violent speech from politicians? I think of Trump’s infamous “be there, will be wild” tweet, encouraging people to protest at the Capitol on January 6. Do you think internet companies would intervene to prevent tweets like this from having such an impact?

MH: That is something that the tech companies would say they are already trying to engage. I’m not sure I necessarily see that direct result flowing from these cases. But I think that the tech companies understand there is a concern they need to address. I think courts also are grappling with the long-term consequences if they don’t try to take the issues seriously.

GN: There is concern that forcing big tech to moderate certain types of content could lead to the government being arbiters of what content is or is not admissible. Do you think this concern is legitimate?

MH: Yeah, I think you always have to be careful about censorship and having the government intervene as some type of content moderation arbiter. But we have a history of setting up tests and guidelines that restrict speech in ways that are seen as constitutionally consistent when speech incites violence or advocates the overthrow of the government. Given that we do have a history of ensuring that we walk that line, there is precedent for taking the steps necessary to minimize some of the most detrimental impacts.

The post “You Always Have to be Careful About Censorship” appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Orson Welles once said, “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” It’s a statement full of wisdom, but it also carries a degree of irony. Welles made Citizen Kane—one of the most daring and inventive movies of all time—when RKO Radio Pictures granted him historic levels of artistic freedom. It might be more accurate, then, to say the enemy of art is the absence of limitations for most—but not for an exclusive few. 

In fact, in the history of motion pictures, there might be only one other filmmaker who could make films of such consequence and majesty with complete creative control: Buster Keaton. His life’s greatest tragedy was that, once he gave up that freedom, he could never get it back.

The vaudeville child star turned filmmaker had a run in the 1920s that makes him, as Roger Ebert once declared, arguably the greatest actor-director in the history of movies. During that decade, he churned out 10 silent feature films—including his most famous, The General—and a collection of shorts that created the grammar of cinema. At the dawn of the medium, Keaton figured out visual storytelling like none other. His gags worked not only because of his physical courage and prowess—he did his own stunts, often in one take—but because of his ingenuity with the camera. 

In his short film The Goat (1921), for instance, Keaton tries to escape from the police by hiding in a spare tire attached to the back of a car. Once the car drives away, however, we see that the spare tire is not, in fact, attached; rather, it’s part of a display for a tire store. We are then left with Buster, his body encased helplessly in rubber next to the curb. It’s a joke that requires hardly any technical trickery; it works because he knew where to put the camera. To this day, Keaton’s shots are among the most imitated, like the house collapse in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) when a wall falls down on him, but he’s saved by standing on the perfect spot to pass through the attic window. 

Keaton loved the comedy of action and the ability of the camera to fool the eye. He was a genius at experimentation. With the exception of The General, he never worked with a completed script. He would devise a compelling beginning and a satisfying finish. “The middle will take care of itself,” he would say. 

Unfortunately, though, like all things, Keaton’s incredible run came to an end in 1928, when he joined MGM Studios and lost his creative control. The move, he said, was “the worst mistake of my life.” Around the same time, he was drinking excessively. He went in and out of rehab and nearly lost everything. MGM fired him. 

After an extended bout with chronic depression and alcoholism, he made his way back into pictures. None were as good as the ones he made in the 1920s. Then, after a lost period, he was at the cutting edge of television comedy in the 1950s. In many ways, his experience in vaudeville and silent film equipped him perfectly to reach audiences on a smaller screen, who were harder to capture without the inoculations a theater provides from the outside world.

As Dana Stevens writes in her new book, Camera Man—an impressive confluence of biography, film criticism, and cultural history—Keaton’s trajectory tells, in its own way, the history of modernity and the evolution of film technology.

Keaton’s life essentially coincided with the first 70 years of film. And yet he was stunningly ahead of his time. Indeed, a quick scan today of Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok yields an endless stream of gags that carry influences from Buster—even if their makers don’t realize it. 

Joseph Frank Keaton was born in the small town of Piqua, Kansas, in 1895, the same year the Lumière brothers made their first films. As Stevens, a film critic for Slate, notes, at some point in that year, Louis Lumière is said to have proclaimed, “The cinema is an invention with no future.” It’s no small irony that this is when our hero—the man who proved him wrong—emerged.

Buster’s parents, Joseph and Myra, were comedic performers in a traveling vaudeville show. As legend has it, when he was six months old, he fell down a set of stairs, amazingly without a scratch. Another traveling performer, Harry Houdini, witnessed the tumble and reportedly said to Joseph and Myra, “That’s some buster your kid took.” (“Buster” at the time was a common word for a fall.) From then on, young Joseph went by Buster. 

It wasn’t long before he became one of the nation’s premier vaudeville stars. Joseph, Myra, and Buster were known as “the Three Keatons,” with Buster as the main attraction. As a kid, he loved to make people laugh by taking the fall—a formative time for his physical comedy. His dangerous gags were such a pervasive part of the show that critics accused the elder Joseph of child abuse, including for once throwing a young Buster at a heckler in the audience. But as contemporary critics have noted, the Keatons were skilled performers who knew what they were doing, and Joseph likely wouldn’t have wanted to hurt his son, the star of the act. His parents weren’t avaricious, either. Buster was able to keep his share of the earnings. By the age of 12, he had his own car. 

In 1917, he appeared in his first film, The Butcher Boy, after being discovered by Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. He went on to act in 20 of Arbuckle’s films, with an interruption to serve in World War I, where he lost hearing in one ear. 

Keaton got his next big break in 1920, when an impressed studio executive, Joseph Schenck, gave him his own production unit. From 1920 to 1929, Keaton made his masterpieces of silent film: Our Hospitality (1923), a satire of the warring Hatfield and McCoy families; Sherlock Jr. (1924), a surreal comedy about a movie projectionist who becomes the famed detective; Seven Chances (1925), about a man who must fulfill a series of bizarre terms to inherit $7 million; The General (1926), an epic tale of a Civil War train engineer who schemes to be reunited with the two loves of his life; College (1927); and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928). 

Keaton’s daring was unquestionable; his famous $42,000 train wreck in The General—almost $650,000 in today’s dollars—is the most expensive shot in silent film history. Two of Keaton’s most famous rules were to never fake a gag and to never use a stuntman. “Stuntmen,” he once said, “aren’t funny.” For Seven Chances, he manufactured an avalanche of rocks falling down a mountain so a camera could capture him running from them. The 1920s were also when he cemented his reputation as “the Great Stone Face.” He was known for maintaining a deadpan expression even as cataclysm was happening all around him. Because he was human, after all, he did eventually get hurt. At one point, he broke his neck—from which stunt, no one knows—but he didn’t even realize it. (Years later, a doctor asked him when he broke his neck. “Never,” Buster said. “Yes, you did,” the doctor replied.) 

In the century’s first three decades, Keaton rose from obscurity to become one of the industry’s biggest stars. 

But when MGM poached Keaton in 1928, both his friend Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd advised him not to give up his independence. Financially, it was a hard offer to turn down; MGM was offering Keaton $3,000 a week (a little under $48,000 today). But the studio, one of the most regimented in all of Hollywood, was a stifling place for him. 

Although his first film with MGM, The Cameraman (1928), was a box office hit, there were endless battles behind the scenes. His entire method of filmmaking was deemed unacceptable. Scripts had to be written; everything had to be planned. From then on, Keaton’s films didn’t have the same energy.

Meanwhile, his personal life was also falling apart. Keaton began drinking heavily. In 1932, his wife Natalie divorced him, and his drinking got worse. He went to rehab, where he met a nurse and married her, but he couldn’t quite kick the booze. By 1933, MGM had fired him, but his drinking continued. He got divorced again, and then suffered a nervous breakdown and was taken to a hospital in a straitjacket. 

Newspapers said he would never appear in movies again, but after a year of sobriety, Buster went back to acting. He was clearly still depressed; on the set, he would take breaks to cry. 

Eventually, he signed a 10-film contract with Columbia Pictures, but again without creative freedom. His salary was also seriously diminished, from a peak of $3,000 a week to just $100. 

In 1940, Keaton got married, for the last time, to Eleanor Norris, a dancer whom he met playing bridge. (He was known as one of the best bridge players in Hollywood.) Keaton had lost most of his money, so they moved into his mother’s home. 

Around this time, he made the last big transition of his career: to television. 

In the 1940s and ’50s, he starred in commercials and made short appearances in a few feature films, including Sunset Boulevard (1950) and, most memorably and movingly, in Chaplin’s late film Limelight (1952), in a routine where the silent-era stars played a pair of inept stage musicians. It was the only time the two giants would ever appear together on film. 

But it was his appearances on television comedy shows, such as The Ed Wynn Show, that got him attention again. Keaton’s background in vaudeville proved highly useful, because so many of those early shows relied on skits. “The overlap between early television and vaudeville was so marked that a new term, ‘vaudeo,’ was coined to describe the phenomenon,” Stevens writes. 

This galvanized a reconsideration of his silent films from the 1920s. In 1960, Buster received an honorary Oscar. He had seemingly risen from obscurity once again. Suddenly, with the dawn of a new medium (television), a newfound appreciation had surfaced for an old medium (silent film), and the innovations from Keaton that had shaped it. 

In 1966, Keaton died while playing bridge. He was 70 years old and suffering from lung cancer. Luckily for the rest of us, Eleanor Keaton outlived her husband by 32 years and became a dedicated promoter of his work, traveling around the world to speak at screenings and festivals that featured Buster’s silents. 

Even as the industry continued to experience “sea changes,” as Stevens calls them—including the collapse of the studio system in the 1970s, shortly after Keaton’s death—his influence became increasingly visible. Jackie Chan re-created his gags—from falling out of windows to hanging on the side of moving buses—and Wes Anderson emulated his shots, with their emphasis on geometry and the way characters move inside of the frame.

Now, with the birth of social media, many of his stunts have become popular memes and gifs. On TikTok, whose short videos featuring physical comedy make it well suited to Keaton homage, there is an entire page with content from Buster’s films. It has received more than 44 million views. 

As Stevens makes clear, Keaton was a singular 20th-century man. He brought film from its inception to the present, and he created a cinematic language that now travels with virtually everyone, all the time, contained in a small device that we carry around in our pockets. “He is out there to be seen,” Stevens writes, “streaming past us on every conceivable platform, still and always ahead of his time.” 

And yet the best way to experience Keaton is in the mode he originally intended: on a big screen, in the company of others. That’s where the magic comes alive. 

I remember my first time seeing a Keaton film on a big screen, in 2017. It was a showing of The General at the AFI Silver Theatre, in Silver Spring, Maryland, with live musical accompaniment. The shots were astonishing, better than anything that computer-generated imagery can produce. The soundtrack was beautiful and elegant. But the most memorable part was laughing with the audience. The film was more than 90 years old at the time, and yet—like Citizen Kane, another movie made by an unconstrained genius and imitated for generations—Keaton’s comedy still held the power to delight and surprise.

The post How Buster Keaton Became a Digital Meme appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Our son was not at home when the FBI called looking for him. The agent introduced herself and then told my husband and me, “We believe your son is a witness and possibly a victim in a case we’re investigating.” My husband, holding the phone to his ear, looked at me pleadingly with eyes that said, I don’t understand. He asked the agent, “Will you send me an email confirming that you are who you say you are? And do I need a lawyer?”

First, she said our 16-year-old son was not in trouble. He was a witness to something bad that had happened to another kid; he had received some photos on his phone. Yes, she would send my husband an email, and then, if we decided it was okay, she wanted our son to call her back so she could ask him some questions.

My husband put down his phone, and we sat and waited. Our son was due home in half an hour. We checked the computer for a new email message. Nothing yet.

“Is this for real?” I asked, probably too loudly. “Did he do something bad? And are they going to trap him? If so, wouldn’t they just show up and demand to see his phone? They wouldn’t call first. Right?”

Then we checked the computer again, and there it was: an email from the agent with an “fbi.gov” address. Finally, just a few minutes later, we heard the car in the driveway. He was home.

It didn’t take long for the disquisition to begin. Almost as he walked through the door, we asked him, “Have you received any photos on your phone? Anything out of the ordinary?”

His eyes darted back and forth, first to his dad and then to me, and then suddenly they grew round with recollection and fear. “Yes!” he exhaled, before he sheepishly told us that he had received a message on Instagram containing nude photos of a friend.

“Oh my God,” I said. My husband was silent.

“Mom, I was freaked out, and I deleted it.”

We asked him when it had happened. He said it was at the end of our summer vacation. We were in the car on our way home.

Shortly thereafter, we called the FBI agent. We placed the phone on the kitchen counter, and hovered over it as the friendly agent’s calm voice came through the speaker. She explained to us that the child in question, the victim, originally sent the photos through Instagram to someone he thought he knew and could trust, but this message came back in reply: “Send me $500 or I’m sending these photos to everyone you know.”

My son and this child follow each other on Instagram, so my son received the photos.

Unfortunately, that’s how incidents like these often play out now—explicit photos, blackmail, shame. These are the characters in the nightmare of parents in the digital age. We still pace the floors waiting for the glow of headlights in the driveway, fighting back images of a dark road with a car wrapped around a tree. Unlike our own parents, however, we also have to worry about our children when they’re at home right under our noses. If they have a smartphone in their hands and wifi access, they are never completely safe.

The impulse as adults is to ask ourselves why a kid would put something so personal on the internet. Of course, we are judging actions based on the norms and mores of a time that might as well be 200 years ago. Kids today are living in a different world than the one I grew up in. In a 2018 study by the Pew Research Center, 95 percent of teenagers reported having a smartphone or access to one; 45 percent reported being online “on a near constant basis”; only half of those used Facebook, compared to 72 percent who used Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.

The ubiquitous participation on Instagram, Snapchat, and other platforms—both by adults and children—ushered in an era when “hanging out” is something you do on your phone rather than in a diner, in a parking lot, or under the bleachers. It was only a matter of time before more intimate relationships on digital technologies followed suit. Now, as the fellow parent of a teen told me recently, “Sending nude photos is the new second base.”

You don’t have to be a prude to be unwilling to accept nude photo sharing as a natural part of coming of age. Adults know that sending such photos out over the web or an app is far more dangerous than teens do (we also know that the old-fashioned form of second base is a lot more fun). Surely we can see that it’s time to pump the brakes on this cultural phenomenon, before we end up with an entire generation of Anthony Weiners.

Of course, every encounter on Instagram or Snapchat does not lead to bullying and blackmail, but let’s be honest, the Age of Digital Sharing isn’t going well for our kids. As The Wall Street Journal’s new series “The Facebook Files” makes painfully clear, Instagram is clearly less than healthy in the lives of teens. Facebook’s own research, which has just recently come to light, shows that teen girls point to Instagram as a primary influence in their struggles with anxiety, depression, and negative body image.

Indeed, Instagram’s algorithms are designed to keep the freshest, most “liked” content at the top of our feeds—the highlight reels of the newest and best developments in everyone’s lives. And usually, the highlight reels of all your friends’ lives are better than your day-to-day life—or at least, it appears that way. Is anyone shocked to learn that the C-suite at Facebook has always known that teenagers—girls especially—would shrivel and wilt under the heat lamp of persistent peer assessment and comparison?

As parents, it’s our responsibility to protect our children. So just don’t buy them a phone—right? Deny them access. That works for a while, as I wrote in The Atlantic two years ago. But when teens reach a certain age and they’re driving a car and their inevitable departure from home comes into focus, you recognize your responsibility to teach them how to navigate the digital world, not to suppress them from it. Thankfully, my husband and I have had many conversations with our two boys about what to do if they see or receive something dangerous online. Fortunately, those conversations paid off. When the incident happened, my son knew what to do. He deleted the message—and now he’s also had the memorable experience of a chat with a law enforcement officer.

Still, the question of when and if we should allow our children access to the internet and social media is the defining parental struggle of our time, and Generation X, the last analog generation, is pioneering this frontier. It’s no wonder we are tied up in an anxious knot.

A father of a 17-year-old girl wrote to me recently in response to my piece in The Atlantic about the angst he feels about denying his child a smartphone. “The conflict I feel is just the self-inflicted, second-guessing, guilt-trip that hits me when I ask, against my gut and also my better thinking, ‘Is this cruel? Am I a retrograde who can’t accept anything that’s different from what I knew as a teen? Am I hurting her socially?’”

No one goes through these kinds of mental and emotional gymnastics over telling their kids not to smoke or not to drink and drive. Smartphones are a whole new ball game. And if the internal angst weren’t bad enough, we’re also fighting cultural messages like this one from Teen Vogue:

When schools, laws, and parents punish you for sexting, they are usually assuming that the best way to keep you safe from a devastating privacy violation is to prevent sexting in the first place. It’s true that if you never take a nude selfie, it can’t be used to harm you later. And choosing not to sext might be the right choice for you. But sharing nude selfies is really common, and young people aren’t going to stop doing it just because it’s illegal.

Parents shouldn’t have to wage this battle on our own. The power of social media is a society-wide problem. Leaders and executives of the social media giants need to get their Frankenstein under control. If Facebook can figure out things about me—like my love of any video featuring a dog, my anxiety about my aging skin, my passion for baking muffins—then they can figure out how to curb the nefarious use of their product.

Thankfully, Congress is investigating what Facebook knew, and when, about the dangers of Instagram. In The Wall Street Journal’s coverage, the psychology professor Jean Twenge says, “If you believe that R. J. Reynolds should have been more truthful about the link between smoking and lung cancer, then you should probably believe that Facebook should be more upfront about links to depression among teen girls.”

We are a divided country right now, but reasonable adults should be able to come together to figure out a way for our children to coexist safely with new modes of technology that are not going away.

I keep thinking that when my son received the message with these photos, he was sitting right behind me in our car watching a show that I had approved. I could see him and touch him, but I couldn’t protect him from an exploitative perpetrator who reached him through a small device that, like 95 percent of kids in America, he takes with him everywhere he goes. From a parent’s perspective, it feels like the only safe place for kids is somewhere outside of our culture where people still hunt for their food and cook it over open flames (not that such a life is without its own perils).

In the 1940s, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the inventor of the atomic bomb, came to a profound moment of revelation when he discovered that there were no political or societal checks to prevent people in power from abusing what he had created. Clearly, it’s time for Mark Zuckerberg to have an “Oppenheimer moment,” and realize that he has done the same.

The legacy of the digitally shareable life is the commodification of shame, tattooing kids with their lowest moments of naive misjudgment. We must change our course. Otherwise, our children and grandchildren will be left with the fallout of an atomic bomb of our making.

The post Mark Zuckerberg’s “Oppenheimer Moment” appeared first on Washington Monthly.

After Twitter and Facebook banned Donald Trump and over 70,000 QAnon-related accounts, two things quickly became apparent: 1) it was the right thing to do and had a salutary effect on public discourse, and 2) tech moguls have a frightening amount of control over democracy and public discourse.

Of course, most of the Right and parts of the libertarian left have strongly objected to the decision to deplatform Trump and right-wing conspiracists. But democracy depends largely on agreement on a basic set of facts, and widely shared conspiracy theories about stolen elections or cannibal pedophilia can lead to violence and authoritarianism. Social media has been primarily responsible for allowing those conspiracy theories to flourish, and social media has an obligation to fix the problem.

And indeed, deplatforming conspiracy promoters has been proven to work, both now and in the past. In the wake of the recent bans of Trump and QAnon mavens, election misinformation online has dropped by over 70%:

Online misinformation about election fraud plunged 73 percent after several social media sites suspended President Trump and key allies last week, research firm Zignal Labs has found, underscoring the power of tech companies to limit the falsehoods poisoning public debate when they act aggressively.

The new research by the San Francisco-based analytics firm reported that conversations about election fraud dropped from 2.5 million mentions to 688,000 mentions across several social media sites in the week after Trump was banned from Twitter.

Election disinformation had for months been a major subject of online misinformation, beginning even before the Nov. 3 election and pushed heavily by Trump and his allies.

Zignal found it dropped swiftly and steeply on Twitter and other platforms in the days after the Twitter ban took hold on Jan. 8.

The problem, of course, is that if a single push of a button by Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey can so profoundly affect democratic discourse and even election outcomes, then our democracy is functionally profoundly affected if not controlled outright by a few autocratic corporations. After all, what if Facebook and Twitter had taken these actions far earlier? What if their leadership, or the whims of their CEOs, changed to being sympathetic with autocracy? It’s far too much power in too few hands, without democratic accountability.

The flip side of the argument, though, is that it would indeed be totalitarian for the government to dictate to a private company that it must allow certain speakers or irresponsible speech on its platforms, even when they run counter to its terms of service or even expose it to liability. It was comical to hear conservatives claim that “Twitter censorship” resembled “Communist China” when the reality in China is that media networks are required to support its political leaders–quite the opposite of being empowered to ban them.

Both sides of the debate over free speech and social media then culminate in unacceptable outcomes: either forcing these companies to continue to promote misinformation destructive to democracy or allowing their whimsical terms of service to promote or restrict the speech of any political actors they see fit.

The fundamental challenge is that these companies have too much control over the information economy to begin with. Facebook has more power over the news people see than the biggest newspapers in the country combined. Facebook and Google allegedly colluded to lock down ownership of the online advertising market, which in turn affects the financial incentives of journalism as a whole. Twitter has effectively become the public square in which political elites and influencers drive narratives.

It won’t be easy to do, but creating a healthy and organic information environment will require significant public regulation of social media companies and content and renewed investment in publicly funded journalism as in many other major democracies. Antitrust action from the Biden administration can also help.

As long as we are stuck in this privately controlled social media dominated system, deplatforming the worst actors–even if they’re the president of the United States–is the best of a set of imperfect options. But long-term, we will have to fix the system itself if we want a healthy democracy.

The post It Turns Out That Deplatforming Works appeared first on Washington Monthly.

When does a lie become so pervasive and consequential that its truth can no longer be responsibly debated?

Maybe when a deluded mob starts an insurrection and storms the Capitol to stop the certification of presidential election results.

The events of January 6 were inspired by two enormous lies. One was that President Trump was robbed of victory in the 2020 presidential election. The other was the QAnon conspiracy theory. Both lies were encouraged by the president, and both contributed to the loss of life.

On August 19, 2020, President Trump gave a rare non-coronavirus-related press conference from the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room in the White House to announce he was reneging on the terms of the Iran Nuclear Deal. The first question he received, however, was about the growth of the QAnon conspiracy group. He responded, “Well, I don’t know much about the movement, other than I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate.”

This invited a follow-up question:

Asked if he believed the crux of the theory, described by a reporter as the belief that the President “is secretly saving the world from this satanic cult of pedophiles and cannibals,” Trump said: “Well, I haven’t heard that, but is that supposed to be a bad thing or a good thing?”

 “If I can help save the world from problems, I’m willing to do it,” he went on. “I’m willing to put myself out there. And we are, actually, we’re saving the world from a radical left philosophy that will destroy this country.”

On January 6, 2021, Ashli Babbitt, a 35 year-old Air Force veteran and QAnon supporter, was shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer as she tried to move into the Capitol through a broken window.

Babbitt was a loyal Fox News watcher, according to thousands of tweets to Fox News hosts, but she also engaged on social media with the conspiracy news internet news site InfoWars. In 2020, Babbitt began to tweet with QAnon accounts and use QAnon hashtags. QAnon conspiracy theorists subscribe to a false belief that high-profile Democrats and Hollywood celebrities are ritually sacrificing children and that Trump is fighting to stop it.

A few hours later, 34 year-old QAnon devotee Rosanne Boyland became one of three insurrectionists to die of medical complications when she collapsed in the Capitol Rotunda after storming the building. She may have been trampled on the way in.

Boyland’s brother-in-law, Justin Cave, said “My own personal belief is that…the president’s words and rhetoric incited a riot that killed four of his biggest fans.”

Of course, President Trump spent much more time and energy stoking the other conspiracy theory about a “stolen” election. In a July 9, interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News, the president stated that mail-in voting was going to rig the election and refused to say that he’d accept the results if he lost, “I’m not a good loser. I don’t like to lose,” he said. “I don’t lose too often. I don’t like to lose.”

We know the rest of the story. He was soundly defeated in the election but refused to concede, made false allegations of fraud, and dispatched a mob to the Capitol to stop the Electoral College count.

Prior to the election, social media was already grappling with how disinformation was spreading on their platforms, inspiring violence and undermining confidence in our elections.

In September, Twitter and Facebook began putting warning labels on Trump posts that spread lies about mail-in voting.

In October, Facebook started banning QAnon groups and YouTube began taking down QAnon videos. On Friday, Twitter followed suit and banned thousands of QAnon-supporting accounts, including the ones belonging to former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and former Trump attorney Sidney Powell.

Post-insurrection reaction from the big tech companies has been swift and harsh. Trump was permanently kicked off Twitter, denying him access to his 88 million followers, many of whom moved to conservative alternative Parler. Google and Apple then removed Parler from their application stores and Amazon booted it off their servers. As of Monday, Parler was offline.

It’s not just social media sites that are looking to shut down the lies. On January 6, the day of the insurrection, Cumulus Media, which hosts many of the most popular right-wing talk radio shows, issued a directive that their “on-air personalities…stop suggesting that the election was stolen from President Trump — or else face termination.”

And then there are the Republican lawmakers who supported Trump’s efforts to challenge the Electoral College and thereby helped incite the deadly riot at the Capitol. In the Senate, the ringleaders, Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ted Cruz of Texas, both of whom seemed to think it would help their 2024 presidential aspirations, were condemned loudly at home.

In St. Louis, on Saturday, protestors chanted “No Hawley. No KKK. No fascist USA,” and called on him to resign which might not be notable except they were echoing the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s editorial board, which called for Hawley’s resignation on Thursday. The Houston Chronicle ’s editorial board asked Ted Cruz to resign on Friday.

The Associated Press reports that many of the 139 Republican congressmembers who voted against certifying Biden’s presidential victory are facing condemnations and calls to resign from protestors and editorial boards in their home districts.

All of these actions share one thing in common. They are efforts to define the false beliefs that inspired the insurrection as outside the arena for debate.

Distinctions are important. Democrats Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones and Sen. Barbara Boxer  alleged “widespread irregularities” to challenge the results in Ohio in the 2004 election which handed the election to George W. Bush. (John Kerry had already conceded and it was questioning one aspect of one state not alleging a mass conspiracy.) But that’s different in degree and kind than what happened in 2020 when the president and his supporters sought to overturn multiple state contests based on allegations that had been thoroughly rejected by the courts. Kate Ruane, an A.C.L.U. lawyer, raised a good point when she told the New York Times, “it should concern everyone when companies like Facebook and Twitter wield the unchecked power to remove people from platforms that have become indispensable for the speech of billions.”

On the other hand, it should concern everyone when a mob fed on lies assaults the Capitol while chanting “Hang Mike Pence.” It should concern everyone that the #HangMikePence hashtag trended on Twitter after the president’s account was suspended.

At least since Justice Robert Jackson’s famous 1949 dissent in Terminiello v. City of Chicago where he argued the First Amendment isn’t a “suicide pact,” the country has struggled to find the right balance between protecting free speech and protecting the public.

That case involved a Catholic priest who had been fined $100 for inciting a riot with racist and inflammatory rhetoric. Justice William Douglas, writing for the majority, overturned the fine:

… Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for acceptance of an idea. That is why freedom of speech, though not absolute is nevertheless protected against censorship or punishment, unless shown likely to produce a clear and present danger of a serious substantive evil that rises far above public inconvenience, annoyance, or unrest. 

The insurrection at the Capitol certainly qualifies as a “substantive evil,” as it struck at the very heart of our system of government. But it’s harder to point to one discrete act that caused it. Rather, it was the result of a variety of factors, some technological, some cultural, and some arising from the peculiar mind of Donald Trump.

What’s clear is that lies were allowed to grow and fester until a mass delusion created “a clear and present danger.” The country is now trying to cool this fever before it kills the body politic.. The failed coup certainly justifies this treatment.

But disabusing Americans of these lies is complicated by the complicity of so many Republicans. How can they be part of the solution when they really should be held to account instead?

It an ideal world Republican officials and broadcasters would consistently and emphatically declare that Biden won the election and QAnon is a hoax. But there needs to be accountability, too, starting with President Trump who clearly incited the insurrection.

His lies finally became so pervasive and consequential that the country couldn’t withstand the pressure. Now his followers and enablers are de-platformed and their arguments are not necessarily considered protected speech.

This, too, will be part of Trump’s legacy. He violated every norm and pushed everything to the breaking point. He led the Republican Party so far astray that many of their applause lines are now unsuitable for publication.

This won’t be fixed easily or quickly, but the road to recovery begins on January 20.

The post When A Lie Gets Too Big appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Barry Lynn, the executive director of the Open Markets Institute, has provided a major service to the incoming Biden administration. The fierce anti-monopoly advocate offers a roadmap for the new president to pursue a progressive and transformative presidency without cooperation from Congress.

In his new piece How Biden Can Transform America, which appears online and.in the next print issue of the Washington Monthly (please subscribe), Lynn explains how existing antitrust laws can help Biden control health care costs, stimulate the economy, create jobs, reinvigorate America, tackle climate change, and build a stronger independent media more capable of combatting disinformation.

As Lynn explains, this isn’t just a matter of combining good policy with good politics. It’s really Biden’s only chance at success. It’s a view he fleshes out at greater length in his new book Liberty from All Masters: The New American Autocracy vs. the Will of the People

The Democrats, of course, have a very narrow majority in the House of Representatives, and Senate control hinges on the outcome of those January runoff elections in Georgia. Even if the Democrats win those races and get a 50-50 Senate majority (the vice-president casts tie-breaking votes in the Senate), they can’t end the legislative filibuster because of the opposition of some of their own members, like Joe Manchin of West Virginia. This means legislation will require the assent of at least 10 Republican senators who operate under the leadership of Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

Through no fault of his own, Biden’s legislative agenda is blocked for at least the first two years of his presidency, and most likely for the entirety of his first term. He can resign himself to being ineffectual, or he can use the antitrust tools he has at his disposal, and those tools are more powerful than is commonly understood.

On day one, President Biden will be able to strap himself into the cockpit of a governing machine purpose-built during the Wilson and Roosevelt administrations—and fortified by Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, and even Richard Nixon—to break power, distribute opportunity, build community, protect security, and engage citizens in constructive activities. This system includes agencies with great untapped powers, like the FTC and the Department of Agriculture, which have far-reaching and long-neglected rule-making authority. And it includes strong anti-monopoly powers in just about every office of government, including the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department, the Federal Communications Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Defense Department, the Transportation Department, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, among many others.

These powers have lay largely dormant since the Reagan administration when traditional antitrust regulation was gutted in favor of what was supposed to be the advancement of consumer interests. Rather than breaking up monopolies to protect small business owners, farmers, and entrepreneurs, they encouraged corporate concentration believing it would yield greater efficiencies and lower prices. They didn’t repeal the antitrust laws or authorities, but rather chose to enforce them differently, or not at all.

This change was largely continued by the following five administrations, leading to the massive corporate consolidation we see today. But Biden would not need permission from Congress to revert back to the previous practice of antitrust enforcement that prevailed under Democratic and Republican presidents between the Woodrow Wilson and Reagan.

A hidden advantage to this strategy is explained, in part, by understanding how Reagan got away with what Lynn calls “the single most dramatic ideological reversal in American history.” By the time Reagan took office “anti-monopoly enforcement had become so successfully routinized by the early 1980s that few Americans thought much about it.” Since the important changes took place not in Congress but in office spaces throughout the vast federal bureaucracy, the transformation was almost invisible to the public.

It didn’t hurt that Reagan has some ideological support on the left:

It was also because highly influential “progressive” thinkers such as John Kenneth Galbraith and Lester Thurow largely agreed with the underlying goal of Robert Bork and the other libertarian scholars who were advising Reagan. They too favored extreme concentration of corporate power, but, in the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt, they intended it to be under the day-to-day direction of the executive branch.

Biden can capitalize on a similar dynamic. While the public is focused on quarrelsome and unproductive debates on Capitol Hill, he can work behind the scenes to bust up monopolies. He’ll find sympathetic ears on the right where concern about market concentration is on the rise.

Just this week, Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed an antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet Inc.’s Google, accusing them of colluding with Facebook to manipulate online advertising exchanges in their favor. Bloomberg Businessreports that Clinton-era Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr and his firm will be hired to prosecute the case. Paxton is generally a laughable figure. He is facing allegations of bribery from his own top staff and led a frivolous and menacing lawsuit to overturn the presidential election in four states that went for Biden. The Supreme Court unanimously chose not to overturn those contests. But Paxton has had an interesting footprint when it comes to antitrust. He helped, convince Bill Barr’s Justice Department to bring a major antitrust suit against Google in October. The DOJ case focuses on Google’s use of exclusive contracts to assure its search dominance in browsers and mobile devices.

On Thursday, Google’s monopolistic search practices were challenged by over 30 states in an antitrust case led by the Democratic attorney general of Colorado and the Republican attorney general of Nebraska. Axios reports that it accuses Google of hurting “rival specialized search companies like Yelp or TripAdvisor by favoring its own results” and “using those same tactics to extend its search-related monopolies into emerging technology like smart speakers.”

In addition to the scrutiny Facebook is facing for its role in Google’s ad exchanges, the social networking site’s acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram are in the crosshairs of both the Federal Trade Commission and a coalition of attorneys general led by New York’s Letitia James. The suits were jointly announced on December 7 and may be combined. The FTC filing seeks nothing less than the breakup of Facebook.

This extensive and bipartisan push to limit the power of social media giants gives Biden some momentum to push a broader antitrust strategy. While congressional Republicans would surely oppose strengthening antitrust laws –mainly because of the high costs GOP lawmakers pay when they’re seen to be cooperating with the enemy–he may get tacit blessing for tougher enforcement from populist conservative quarters outside the Beltway.

Importantly, however, he won’t require their support. Well-established laws give him the power he needs..

For Lynn, however, it’s important that Biden consider the alterative to getting tough on monopolies:

By contrast, if Biden fails to seize the initiative, he might be remembered as little more than a woebegone regent for Trump in his exile, in Elba by the Sea Florida. And Democrats should be absolutely honest about what a defensive, cautious, backward-looking, tortoise-like Biden administration will deliver, which might be something like the end of democracy in America and around the world.

Failure to use anti-monopolism to seize the initiative would leave Trump’s Republican Party free to use the same populist rhetoric to divide and scatter the Democratic Party in 2022 and 2024, while once again bringing the Koch-funded neoliberal wing of the GOP back into gawky alignment with Trump’s national populist wing.

Trumpism, in part, grew out of the devastation wrought by four decades of lax antitrust enforcement and the loss of economic liberty, opportunity, and growth it wrought. The best way to weaken Trump’s movement is to take on market concentration and revive entrepreneurship and the sense of freedom that has been choked out of so much of America.

If Biden doesn’t take Lynn up on his advice and follow his roadmap, he’s inviting a Trump comeback in four years, and our Republic cannot survive that.

The post How Biden Can Have a Successful Presidency Without Congress appeared first on Washington Monthly.

As counterintuitive as it may seem, if we want to understand why Donald Trump is threatening to veto the annual military spending bill, we have to take a detour back to May. That’s when Twitter took the extraordinary step of slapping warning labels on some of the president’s inaccurate tweets about mail-in voting, instigating a war between him and Big Tech.

In June, Facebook took down a Trump campaign ad because it included a Nazi symbol. In August, the Menlo Park, California company removed Trump campaign content that falsely claimed children are immune to COVID-19. In October, it withdrew a Trump campaign post falsely stating that the seasonal flu is more dangerous than the novel coronavirus, which had by then already taken over 200,000 American lives.

By the end of the campaign, both social media giants were almost routinely taking actions to protect Americans from disinformation originating with the president or his campaign. And it didn’t stop there.

On November 7, CNN reported that Twitter had applied warning labels on 37 percent of Trump’s post-election tweets, informing readers “some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process.” On Thursday, Jack Brewster of Forbes cited an anonymous Twitter spokesperson saying that Trump’s serial policy violations could result in a permanent ban from the platform once his presidential term is over.

At some point in this drama, someone convinced President Donald Trump that Big Tech would not be able to censor or put warnings on his social media content if not for Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA). Yet, Section 230 actually serves to protect free speech. Without Section 230, you would not be allowed to post comments at the end of this article.

The CDA is a controversial subsection of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Its purpose was to protect minors from sexually explicit materials on the Internet. Section 230 cuts in the other direction, however, protecting publishers and software providers from liability. As the fiercely pro-free speech advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation explains, Section 230 allows publishers to permit guest posts and comments sections that may include defamatory material. Without it, bloggers could not exist, and the risk of litigation would consume smaller media outlets like the Washington Monthly.

As we know, social media would be impossible without Section 230 because every user post would need to be pre-screened by lawyers. If anything, this would result in more censorship of Trump’s content.

Nonetheless, the president is refusing to sign the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the budget for the military and most members of the Armed Forces, unless it includes language that effectively repeals Section 230.

Section 230, which is a liability shielding gift from the U.S. to “Big Tech” (the only companies in America that have it – corporate welfare!), is a serious threat to our National Security & Election Integrity. Our Country can never be safe & secure if we allow it to stand…..

Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 2, 2020

If he were doing this purely as an act of revenge against Facebook and Twitter, it might make sense since it would effectively destroy them. But as a defense of free speech, it’s completely incoherent. The collateral damage to publishers would be immense, and the ability for ordinary Americans to freely express their opinions online would be severely curtailed.

Fortunately, Republicans in Congress seem uninterested in going along with this draconian move. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jim Inhofe said on Wednesday that he doesn’t intend to include repeal language in the NDAA. “First of all 230 has nothing to do with the military,” the Oklahoma Republican said. “And I agree with his sentiments we ought to do away with 230 but you can’t do it in this bill. That’s not a part of the bill.”

This sentiment was echoed by other Republicans, including Senate Majority Whip John Thune and Senator Mike Rounds, both of South Dakota. With Trump and his supporters braying about Big Tech’s censorship, the lawmakers are unwilling to defend Section 230 on the merits. Still, they’re not going to hold up the paychecks of every soldier, airman, and sailor over it, either.

The NDAA usually passes with veto-proof margins, but Trump’s antics and the resulting pressure from the GOP base could complicate things. Ordinarily, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would not put a bill on Trump’s desk that the president had promised to veto, but he can’t include the repeal language without the cooperation of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Since that’s a nonstarter, especially for a member from the San Francisco Bay area, home to the social media companies in the president’s sights, McConnell must choose between a veto and no bill at all.

Considering the national security risks of letting defense spending lapse and the political fallout of military families going without paychecks during a pandemic, McConnell will probably allow the NDAA to move forward. If Trump follows through on his veto threat, the Majority Leader has to decide whether to attempt an override. This would require a two-thirds, or 67-vote majority in the Senate, meaning that at least 19 Republicans would have to defy Trump and his supporters. The House would need a two-thirds majority, too, placing House Republicans in the same dilemma.

All of this is surely infuriating for congressional Republicans. There are political risks in angering Trump, but also in savaging the military. They’re in this position because Trump is mad at Twitter for warning labels and Facebook for putting the kibosh on some of his ads. But his solution would actually be a gigantic blow to free speech.

The irony here is that there is an emerging left-right consensus on reining in the power of these companies. House Democrats have grilled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg over his company’s power and spread of disinformation. Senate Republicans such as Missouri’s Josh Hawley have also lambasted the giants. If Trump wanted to, he could make a serious move against them, but he chose, instead, to hold the military hostage to his ire.

Meanwhile, instead of pursuing serious antitrust cases against these companies, the Justice Department filed a civil rights suit this month over their hiring practices, charging discrimination against Americans.

It’s not just Democrats for whom January 20^th cannot come soon enough.

The post Trump’s Maddening War Against Section 230 Which Protects Digital Publishers appeared first on Washington Monthly.