“A Gallup and Walton Family Foundation study showed that Gen Z teens are twice as likely to identify as more conservative than their parents in comparison to millennials and their parents 20 years before. This was especially true for male Republican teenagers. Younger people are also more skeptical of major American institutions, including political parties, the government, and the media.
Trump’s campaign directly spoke to this demographic: He echoed that same mistrust in institutions, and did so while stopping at seemingly every podcast, Twitch stream, YouTube channel, and TikTok page whose viewership is dominated by Gen Z men and boys. He joined Adin Ross, a now 24-year-old streamer who once famously looked up and struggled to read the definition of “fascism” on camera, for an interview during which Ross presented Trump with a Rolex and a Cybertruck.
He went on the mulleted comedian Theo Von’s podcast, where they discussed cocaine, golf, and UFC.
He palled around with YouTube millionaires like the Paul brothers and the Nelk Boys, known for their distasteful pranks and crypto scams.
And, of course, he talked to Joe Rogan, the most famous podcaster in the world; the two rambled to each other for three hours. For this, he received Rogan’s much-coveted endorsement.”
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“Nearly half of men between 18 and 29 say there is “some or a lot” of discrimination against men in America, up from a third in 2019, according to the Survey Center on American Life, which is affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. They believe the Me Too movement was an overreach and that many women are simply lying about being abused.
It’s not exactly surprising they’re drawn to media that speaks to these grievances — and more often than not, that media comes in the form of individual influencers who are unaffiliated with existing media institutions.”
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“men are even lonelier, more likely to be single, more skeptical, and more afraid than ever. They find solace and community online, in places that older folks still don’t understand, where they see idealized versions of masculinity winning. They cheer on UFC fights and boxing matches, use “edgy” slurs, trade in risky crypto investments, bootlick Silicon Valley billionaires, listen to toxic dating advice, and denigrate women.
They vote for a man who has done everything you’re not supposed to do — steal, lie, rape, idolize Hitler — because his election fulfills their fantasy that men really can get away with whatever they want.”
The algorithm is not free speech. It puts people in contact with misinformation and anger-inducing content. Inciting people to violence is not protected free speech. In England, people were attacked and property was destroyed because people were incensed by what turned out to be false information.
“The Biden administration did pressure Meta, as well as its competitors, to crack down on Covid-19 misinformation throughout the pandemic. In 2021, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called it “an urgent threat,” and Biden himself said that misinformation was “killing people,” a statement he later walked back. This pressure was also at the center of a recent Supreme Court case, in which justices ruled in favor of the Biden administration.
We also knew that Meta, then known simply as Facebook, pushed back at efforts to stop the spread of misinformation on its platforms. Not long after Biden’s “killing people” remark, leaked company documents revealed that Facebook knew that vaccine misinformation on its platforms was undermining its own goal of protecting the vaccine rollout and was causing harm. It even studied the broader problem and produced several internal reports on the spread of misinformation, but despite pressure from Congress, Facebook failed to share that research with lawmakers at the time.
We actually learned about the specific kind of pressure the White House put on Facebook a year ago, thanks to documents the company turned over to, you guessed it, Jim Jordan and the House Judiciary Committee.
The Biden administration issued a statement after Zuckerberg’s latest letter became public. It said, in part, “Our position has been clear and consistent: We believe tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the information they present.”
But the Zuckerberg letter didn’t stop with details of the well-known crackdown on Covid misinformation. It also reminds the public of the time, ahead of the 2020 election, the FBI warned social media companies that a New York Post article about Hunter Biden’s laptop could be part of a Russian disinformation campaign. Without mentioning any direct pressure from the government, Zuckerberg says in the letter that his company demoted the laptop story while it conducted a fact-check. He told podcaster Joe Rogan something similar in a 2022 interview, when he mentioned that an FBI disinformation warning contributed to the decision to suppress the story. Twitter also suppressed the laptop story, and its executives denied that there was pressure from Democrats or law enforcement to do so.
Zuckerberg also addresses some donations he made to voting access efforts in the 2020 election through his family’s philanthropic foundation. “My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another — or to even appear to be playing a role,” the billionaire said. “So I don’t plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.” The House Judiciary Committee responded in a tweet, “Mark Zuckerberg also tells the Judiciary Committee that he won’t spend money this election cycle. That’s right, no more Zuck-bucks.” Neither party mentioned that Zuckerberg also declined to make a contribution in the 2022 cycle for the same reasons.
The right is taking a victory lap over this Zuckerberg letter. Others are simply wondering why on earth, on an otherwise quiet week in August, did Zuckerberg even bother to remind us of all of these familiar facts?
“So, on the same day that the Supreme Court appears to have established that a sitting president can commit the most horrible crimes imaginable against someone who dares to speak out against him, the same Court — with three justices joining both decisions — holds that the First Amendment still imposes some limits on the government’s ability to control what content appears online.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined both decisions in full. Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the Netchoice opinion in full, plus nearly all of the Trump decision.”
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“That’s such a sweeping restriction on content moderation that it would forbid companies like YouTube or Twitter from removing content that is abusive, that promotes violence, or that seeks to overthrow the United States government. Indeed, Kagan’s opinion includes a bullet-pointed list of eight subject matters that the Texas law would not permit the platforms to moderate, including posts that “support Nazi ideology” or that “encourage teenage suicide and self-injury.”
In any event, Kagan makes clear that this sort of government takeover of social media moderation is not allowed, and she repeatedly rebukes the far-right US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which upheld the Texas law.
As Kagan writes, the First Amendment does not permit the government to force platforms “to carry and promote user speech that they would rather discard or downplay.” She also cites several previous Supreme Court decisions that support this proposition, including its “seminal” decision in Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo (1974), which held that a newspaper has the right to final control over “the choice of material to go into” it.
Nothing in Kagan’s opinion breaks new legal ground — it is very well-established that the government cannot seize editorial control over the media, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who cares the least bit about freedom of speech and of the press. But the Court’s reaffirmation of this ordinary and once uncontested legal principle is still jarring on the same day that the Court handed down a blueprint for a Trump dictatorship in its presidential immunity case.
It’s also worth noting that Kagan’s decision is technically a victory for Texas and Florida, although on such narrow grounds that this victory is unlikely to matter.”
“As Corn-Revere points out, “adopted in 1996, Section 230 was proposed as a way to counter efforts to censor internet speech.” Prior to its passage, online platforms were treated as publishers of material posted on their sites if they made any attempt at moderation. They were incentivized to allow free-for-alls, or else scrutinize all content for legal liability—or not allow third parties to post anything at all.
Included in the Communications Decency Act, Section 230’s important provisions survived the voiding of most of that law on constitutional grounds. It reads, in part: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” Those are the 26 words credited as creating the internet by Jeff Kosseff’s 2019 book. They also take the blame for what so many politicians hate about the online world.”
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“”For the biggest players, more carefully policing content would probably mean bolstering the ranks of thousands of hired moderators and facing down far more lawsuits,” added Shields and Brody. “For smaller players, the tech industry argues, it could prove ruinous.””
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“”The law is not a shield for Big Tech,” point out the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) Aaron Mackey and Joe Mullin in defending Section 230. “Critically, the law benefits the millions of users who don’t have the resources to build and host their own blogs, email services, or social media sites, and instead rely on services to host that speech.””
“Haidt cites 476 studies in his book that seem to represent an overwhelming case. But two-thirds of them were published before 2010, or before the period that Haidt focuses on in the book. Only 22 of them have data on either heavy social media use or serious mental issues among adolescents, and none have data on both.
There are a few good studies cited in the book. For example, one co-authored by psychologist Jean Twenge uses a large and carefully selected sample with a high response rate. It employs exploratory data analysis rather than cookbook statistical routines.
Unfortunately for Haidt, that study undercuts his claim. The authors did find that heavy television watchers, video game players, and computer and phone users were less happy. But the similar graphs for these four ways of spending time suggest that the specific activity didn’t matter. This study actually suggests that spending an excessive amount of time in front of any one type of screen is unhealthy—not that there’s anything uniquely dangerous about social media.”
“The constitutional law here appears straightforward: Congress can’t outright ban TikTok or any social media platform unless it can prove that it poses legitimate and serious privacy and national security concerns that can’t be addressed by any other means. The bar for such a justification is necessarily very high in order to protect Americans’ First Amendment rights, Krishnan said.”
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“members of Congress have not provided concrete proof for their claims about Chinese digital espionage and seem to have little interest in offering any transparency: Before the committee voted to advance the bill Thursday, lawmakers had a closed-door classified briefing on national security concerns associated with TikTok.”
“The latest wave of fearmongering about TikTok involves a study purportedly showing that the app suppresses content unflattering to China. The study attracted a lot of coverage in the American media, with some declaring it all the more reason to ban the video-sharing app.”
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“But there are serious flaws in the study design that undermine its conclusions and any panicky takeaways from them.
In the study, the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) compared the use of specific hashtags on Instagram (owned by the U.S. company Meta) and on TikTok (owned by the Chinese company ByteDance). The analysis included hashtags related both to general subjects and to “China sensitive topics” such as Uyghurs, Tibet, and Tiananmen Square. “While ratios for non-sensitive topics (e.g., general political and pop-culture) generally followed user ratios (~2:1), ratios for topics sensitive to the Chinese Government were much higher (>10:1),” states the report, titled “A Tik-Tok-ing Timebomb: How TikTok’s Global Platform Anomalies Align with the Chinese Communist Party’s Geostrategic Objectives.”
The study concludes that there is “a strong possibility that TikTok systematically promotes or demotes content on the basis of whether it is aligned with or opposed to the interests of the Chinese Government.”
There are ample reasons to be skeptical of this conclusion. Paul Matzko pointed out some of these in a recent Cato Institute blog post, identifying “two remarkably basic errors that call into question the fundamental utility of the report.””
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“the researchers fail to account for differences in how long the two social networks in question have been around. Instagram launched nearly 7 years before TikTok’s international launch (and nearly 6 years before TikTok existed at all) and introduced hashtags a few months thereafter (in January 2011). Yet the researchers’ data collection process does not seem to account for the different launch dates, nor does their report even mention this disparity. (Reason reached out to the study authors last week to ask about this but has not received a response.)
The researchers also fail to account for the fact that Instagram and TikTok users are not identical. This leads them “to miss the potential for generational cohort effects,” suggested Matzko. “In short, the median user of Instagram is older than the median user of TikTok. Compare the largest segment of users by age on each platform: 25% of TikTok users in the US are ages 10–19, while 27.4% of Instagram users are 25–34.”
It’s easy to imagine how differing launch dates and typical-user ages could lead to differences in content prevalence, with no nefarious meddling by the Chinese government or algorithmic fiddling by Bytedance needed.”