Social Media Legislation

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It's happened in Australia and the UK, but could Massachusetts be next to propose social media legislation? We'll have a discussion with Fight for the Future director Evan Greer about regulations that have been proposed, what their consequences might actually hold for children and adults alike in our state, and what to do to protect both our privacy and safety online.

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Transcript

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Anna Callahan

00:00:01 - 00:01:06

Hello and welcome to Incorruptible Mass. Our mission here is to help us all transform state politics. And that's because we know that we could have a legislature that truly represents and fulfills the needs of the 7 million of us who live here in this beautiful state. Today, we have a very exciting, fascinating conversation about some legislation around social media and our kids. And we are going to be talking about that with the fabulous Evan Greer, We will talk about what that legislation actually is and the differences between the House bill, the governor's bill, the Senate. We'll be talking about the coalition that has come out against it, as well as who might be for it. We'll be talking about how that relates to national and even international policies. We'll talk about what the real problem is that we should be solving here instead of trying to solve that problem in the way that they're solving it. And it's going to be fascinating. So before we do, though, I'm going to have my illustrious co-hosts introduce themselves. And today I will start with Jonathan Cohen.

Jordan Berg Powers

00:01:07 - 00:01:07

Awesome.

Jonathan Cohn

00:01:07 - 00:01:16

Hello, Jonathan Cohen, he/him/his, joining from Boston in the South End. And I've been active on progressive issue and electoral campaigns here in Massachusetts for over a decade.

Anna Callahan

00:01:17 - 00:01:17

And Jordan.

Jordan Berg Powers

00:01:19 - 00:01:25

Jordan Burke Powers, he/him, and I'm in Worcester, Massachusetts, and I have a kid in middle school. So this is really relevant at the moment.

Anna Callahan

00:01:27 - 00:02:00

And I'm Anna Callahan, she/her, coming at you from Medford, where I'm a city councilor. I've done a lot of work sort of at the local level, but across the country. And I also am very interested because my son is 11, and he's about to go into middle school. So, you know, very near and dear to my heart to understand these issues. And now I'm so excited to have Evan Greer introduce themselves. They are with Fight for the Future, and they've been working on this and are really an expert in this legislation that we'll be talking about. Evan, take it away.

Evan Greer

00:02:01 - 00:03:20

Yeah, thanks so much, Anna, and thanks, John and Jordan. Glad to be here. I'm coming to you from Jamaica Plain in my little basement studio, so glad to be joining the podcast today. And I'm also— I'm waiting for my 15-year-old to get home from school, so wearing multiple hats. In this debate and fight as well, in terms of a parent and someone who obviously cares a lot about, you know, not just how we protect young people online, but also how we empower young people and recognize that young people have been on the forefront of every social movement for progressive change throughout history. And so when we talk about what policies are needed to protect young people, I just think we always need to be asking ourselves like also how we empower young people and how we make sure that we're listening to young people. And I think that often gets left out of some of these debates. So don't tell my kid I said that because otherwise she'll want me to listen to everything she does. But I'm glad to get into kind of the nuts and bolts of the legislative fight that's happening here. And really, I think also like a story of people power winning a little bit. You know, this is an issue that where a lot of people have come out of the woodwork to make their voices heard and It's clearly making an impact.

Anna Callahan

00:03:20 - 00:03:25

Amazing. Do you mind talking just a little bit about Fight for the Future and then about the legislation itself?

Evan Greer

00:03:26 - 00:04:49

Yeah, for sure. So Fight for the Future is a national digital rights nonprofit. We're probably best known for helping organize some of the largest online protests in human history. So maybe some of your listeners or viewers will remember the SOPA blackout way back in 2012 when tens of thousands of websites went dark to protest internet censorship legislation. That was actually a year before I joined Fight for the Future. But Jordan, you should know that we were founded in Worcester way back in the day. Tiffany Chang and Holmes Wilson, who were, you know, Worcester activists, formed Fight for the Future. So we have some deep Massachusetts roots. But at this point, we are a national organization, although we do have about 60,000 members here in the state. And we work broadly at the intersection of technology and human rights. So, you know, we work on a lot of these issues around online free expression and privacy, but we've also done a lot of work. For example, right now we're running major campaigns trying to ban the use of automated license plate readers and facial recognition surveillance, which ICE and other agencies are using to crack down on undocumented folks. So we work kind of broadly at this intersection of What are the technologies we're building and what are the rules governing it going to be so that we can have a future where technology is a force for liberation and justice rather than a force for exploitation and greed and tyranny?

Anna Callahan

00:04:50 - 00:05:11

Right on. Right on. Great. Tell us what— so there's legislation. It's in the— it's coming out of multiple places. We got the governor's version and the House version and all these other versions. What can you tell us about why does it exist, what are they trying to do, and what are the unfortunate parts of that legislation?

Evan Greer

00:05:12 - 00:08:00

Yes. So this legislation is oozing out of every crack in the Massachusetts policy realm. So here's the first thing I'll say. This broad area of legislation around kids' online safety and addressing online harms is coming from a real place, right? Like, no, none of the members of my coalition who have been fighting against these bills in Massachusetts are fans of Mark Zuckerberg. Right. There are real problems with these big surveillance capitalist social media companies with specific business practices like autoplay and infinite scroll where you can just keep scrolling. We know that these are design features that have been specifically built to keep us on these platforms to generate advertising revenue. Right. So there are ways in which these large corporations design their platforms to benefit their business model and their profit rather than to benefit us and our ability to use them for organizing or learning about the world. And so, like, there are some, you know, like with any good moral panic or any good kind of like misguided legislation, there are some like real issues that kind of are driving the instincts for this. And so I think— I do think it's important that we say that, that like this isn't just coming out of totally nowhere. That said, what's happening here in Massachusetts is unfortunately really our lawmakers here are following in the footsteps of places like Florida and Georgia and Mississippi and Alabama and basically taking up the most conservative and regressive forms of addressing this problem. And so rather than cracking down on the business practices of these companies with something like privacy legislation, which could restrict their ability to collect so much data about our kids and then use that data to recommend our kids content, rather than supporting, for example, the antitrust efforts that have happened across the country, cracking down on these big tech companies' anti-competitive business practices, our lawmakers here have gone in this direction of basically trying to kick kids off these platforms entirely. Or essentially age gate the internet. And this is, again, one of these things that just sounds really reasonable on paper if you think about it for a couple of seconds, right? Like when we go into the liquor store, you show your ID and we're all pretty used to doing that. It's not the end of the world. The problem is when you start trying to force people to show their ID to create an account on social media platforms, we're not just flashing our ID at the guy at the liquor store. We are now uploading our government ID or a scan of our government ID to the least trustworthy companies on Earth.

Anna Callahan

00:08:01 - 00:08:01

Yeah.

Evan Greer

00:08:01 - 00:09:15

And so really what this ends up doing is creating basically a surveillance apparatus for social media and forcing everyone to associate their identity with their social media activity. And, you know, for activists and dissidents and undocumented families, that can be a matter of life and death. So we know, for example, the Trump administration has been sending subpoenas to social media companies demanding that they unmask and hand over the identities of people who run accounts that are critical of the administration, monitoring ICE, raising money for families that have been targeted by ICE. Right now, a lot of those accounts are run anonymously. You can create an Instagram account with a burner email address or phone number. Under this Massachusetts law, are these two proposals that we've seen both from the governor and the House, every single one of those accounts would have either a government ID or a face scan associated with it. And so really what this does is makes it impossible to speak anonymously online. And that's why these types of proposals have also faced First Amendment challenges in basically every state where they've come up. So I kind of dove in halfway through. I can back up to talking about the House proposal versus the governor's proposal, but why don't we jump into a discussion a little bit first?

Jonathan Cohn

00:09:15 - 00:10:06

No, like that overview was great. I just wanted to quickly check I'm in about like when I think of the big tech companies like a Facebook/Meta or like an X, etc., it's like the big CEOs there are people who like want, who often want to collaborate with Trump and are only limited by some of like the legal limitations on their ability to do so in some cases and giving them greater like abilities to do so something that empowers them and endangers the rest of us, as well as giving companies whose business model is sucking up data on all of the users more data for them to find ways to profit off of. Also has its own flood of negative possibilities that flow from it.

Jordan Berg Powers

00:10:07 - 00:11:53

I just want to say that I think about before that, so in 20— oh, I still have the poster here. I got an award. In 2015 for a poly. And at that conference, Facebook came and talked about the fact that Facebook was a place that could help politicians because it was the one place where it followed you from your phone to your computer, to your tablet, all the games you play, back onto your phone. And that they were proud of the fact that they weren't just following you on Facebook, that because of the access given to you through cookies and when Facebook is on your phone, it's basically on, there's no gates to it, that it was following the things it was, people it was doing and it could be utilized for elections. Obviously we know what happened in 2016 and that usage, but I just wanna, like, it's not just those apps. Like, I just think like we need to really be clear that they feel like, so when you say it's not like it would be, so I think the equivalent for me of like showing a thing to ID, for like going to the liquor store, it would be like if the liquor store was the most evil person alive and it followed everything you did. So you showed it at the liquor store and then they followed you home and then they watched you when you were in your house and then they followed you around your house and then they watched everything you clicked, everything you did, everything, right? Like it's that level of surveillance that they have to us. And so that's the problem is it's not, an innocuous, just like one person, "Oh, big deal. Oh, you go onto Instagram and you like think." It's that it follows every, it's not gated to that app. It's sort of not, they are able to follow us around all across the internet, all across our phones, and they're not—

Jonathan Cohn

00:11:53 - 00:12:01

[Speaker] Just chiming in to say that shout out to Jordan for designing a wonderful creepy public service announcement video.

Jordan Berg Powers

00:12:02 - 00:13:09

[LAUGHTER] Yes, so it's just like, and so like that's really what we're talking about. And then they can match that to biometric data in a way that they currently can't do, you know? And so that's a dystopian nightmare situation that's being used, that sort of, that people are masking as, oh, but for the kids. And it's just like, that's, we can figure, like we don't need this to protect our kids, which is something that we obviously care deeply about. So I just think it's really, they really don't understand what they're doing or how deep or the problems that they're, like the level of surveillance that they're handing over to corporations who are completely untrustworthy and doing so in an environment where they themselves admit that the legislators feel that these corporations are too big currently to regulate, right? So they're scared to regulate them now and imagine what happens when they have even more of our data. and they can literally match it to facial scans, run that through AI, whatever, or sort of other creepy things they want to do.

Anna Callahan

00:13:09 - 00:13:20

So, so it sounds like so far in this legislation, what we hear is the first thing is they're going to require a bunch more of our data that will allow them to surveil us way more than they have before.

Evan Greer

00:13:21 - 00:13:21

Wow.

Anna Callahan

00:13:21 - 00:13:30

Great plan. So that's, that's step one. What else can you tell us about this legislation in particular, the parts that we don't like?

Evan Greer

00:13:31 - 00:18:27

Yeah, for sure. So, you know, so there's this proposal from the House, which is H5366, if you want to really go nerd out on it. And this basically has two main components. So one is the blanket ban on anyone under 14 from using social media, which again, like just to explain, in practice, I think often when people hear this, they're like, oh, this will affect teenagers. And like, whatever, screw them kids. The only way to ban 14-year-olds from social media is to make adults prove that they are adults. Right. And so I think— I think this is the thing that people don't grok is that like the headline is about kids. The actual effect is on you. Like you, Jane from Bedford, are going to have to upload your government ID to like post about Diana DiSaglio on Facebook or whatever. And so I think like that's the thing to understand. The other thing that the House bill and the governor's proposal does is they involve parental consent. So they allow kids of different ages to kind of have different sets of rights under these regimes. And, you know, a 15-year-old can create a social media account if they have parental consent. And again, this is one of these things that like sounds like it makes sense, right? Like I, don't allow my kid to have a TikTok account. She does have a Reddit account. We have a family conversation about that and what makes sense and what the rules and norms and how to keep safe are. Like, it's good. I think anything that encourages families to have these conversations is good. But unfortunately, the way that these parental consent models and legislation work is they basically turn social media companies into family court, where how do I prove to Instagram that I am my kid's parent or that my kid is in fact a minor. So, for example, under the governor's proposal, any social media company would have to shut down the account of a minor within 1 hour of receiving a message from someone claiming to be a parent. So let's say I am mad at Governor Maura Healey because I do not like the social media proposal that she's put forward. I could contact Instagram and say, Maura Healey is my 16-year-old daughter, and she created this Instagram account without my permission, and I demand that you shut it down. Instagram now has an hour to figure out, is Maura Healey actually a 16-year-old? No. Turns out she's the governor of Massachusetts. Is this person who's claiming to be Maura Healey's parent actually her parent? Am I uploading a birth certificate? Like, how fast do you think you can create a fake birth certificate in the age of ChatGPT and Anthropic? Like, this is a trivial thing to do, right? And so it just creates all these avenues for abuse where, like, a social media company is in the position of trying to determine whether someone has custodial rights over someone else in ways that have, like, really profound implications. Especially, you know, anyone who's been involved in activism knows that, like, accounts routinely get flagged for abuse or self-harm or things like that using existing models. Just to try to suppress a campaign as it's taking off or a video that someone powerful doesn't like. And so now we're creating this like entirely new avenue for abuse and again, forcing families to send even more of our most sensitive— like, it's bad enough, you know, that these companies harvest all of our data and train their AI on our family photos. Now we're being asked to like upload our birth certificate and like a scan of our face to prove that we are our kids' parents. If we want to give permission for our kids to create a social media account. So I think all of that underscores for me that, like, there are real privacy, civil liberties, and human rights concerns with these age verification proposals. And they've run into major controversy in basically every state where they've been advanced. But these proposals in Massachusetts are also just like— they just don't make any sense. Like, they are unworkable from a practical perspective. Even if you set aside all the political concerns and you're kind of only thinking about like a nice kid who lives in a suburban house with a white picket fence and two parents who love them very much, like there are just serious practical issues with these bills that to me make it clear they were not crafted with input from experts. Like, I have read bills in this area that were clearly written by an expert who I disagree with. This was written by someone who does not have expertise in this area of law. And I think it was very much like, this is vibes coding legislation. Like, this is just— this is a headline about protecting the kids. And I just don't think they even thought like, oh, people might have concerns about this, or like there's a right way and a wrong way to do this. I think they just thought anything that's like a headline about protecting the kids online is going to be like good for white suburban mom votes.

Jordan Berg Powers

00:18:27 - 00:18:27

Yes.

Evan Greer

00:18:27 - 00:20:14

To be— just to be kind of cynical about it, I really think that is frankly a big part of the motivation here. I will say, and let me shut up after this, but I think that they realize that they have stepped in it and the backlash has been swift and resounding. You know, we just delivered a letter. We had a press conference, more than 50 organizations coming out opposing this pretty much across the board of progressive organizations in Massachusetts, from LGBTQ orgs to racial justice organizations to the Sierra Club of Massachusetts. And so I think there is some real understanding that they did not realize what they were walking into. And to their credit, you know, the governor's office, the attorney general's office, Senate leadership have met with our coalition and experts and have shown some receptiveness to, you know, making significant changes to slowing down the process. And so, you know, that is thanks to all the people out there who've been speaking out, all the phone calls that folks have been making. But it is making a difference. And I think that that, to me, as someone who's been working on this issue nationally and seeing these laws get rammed through like practically overnight in other states, I take some pride that here in Massachusetts we were able to mount a real opposition to this. And I think there's a very good chance that either this is going to fall apart for now and we'll have an opportunity to, you know, have some real input before it comes back, or that they're going to, you know, walk back some of the most controversial proposals and maybe just advance some of the things that make sense, like funding for digital literacy programs in schools. Right. Like, again, there are real things that can be done here. Trying to kick all the teenagers off the internet is just not one of them.

Jordan Berg Powers

00:20:15 - 00:22:17

I've been joking that it's like they've been answering the moral panic from 2019 with vibes, and they never really thought it through. And just for folks who don't know how the legislature works, the legislature, the leadership tries to allow progressives to get one bill a year because it forces them to do sorts of things that progressives hate. And they really thought that this would be the thing that people cheer without thinking through how do you practically kick off teenagers off this thing that parents hate? It's to actually take away our rights because that's really what it, the problem is that it's not a social media ban for teenagers, it's a dystopian nightmare taking away rights of everyone for a moral panic that actually doesn't fix it. I mean, comically, we're seeing in the EU that kids are putting fake mustaches and getting by it, which of course they'll fix, like, it's not a permanent problem, but just like, it's just not, you know, it's just, it's not the way to approach this problem. Because they don't really understand the differences between, you know, it's not a liquor store, it's not a corner store, it's something, it's every time you pick up your phone or go on your computer, you are interacting with these corporations even if you aren't on it in that moment. And I just really think people need to grasp what that means. And I think regular people do, and I don't think the legislature quite grasped that when it just came out with this press release without thinking it through. [Speaker:JOSH_FARLEY] Yeah. Do we want to talk a little bit? I think it would be good to say a little bit more about what are some existing policies in other states and how this fits into it. Because one of the things I said to legislators is because a lot of them came out saying, "Oh, look how great progressive this is." And I was like, "You mean the thing that Ron DeSantis did in Florida is the thing you're telling me I should love?" I could not understand what what they were talking about. I don't think they really understood it because they didn't know. It was news to them that this is what Florida did. So, but I would love to know a little bit more about, like, some of the things.

Anna Callahan

00:22:17 - 00:22:18

Before we go there.

Jonathan Cohn

00:22:19 - 00:24:20

Yeah, I just wanted to chime in with two things on that front. One, I think this really, as you were talking about, underscores the kind of often shoddy process of legislation that can happen when you try to rush something too quickly, because the legislature can often be slow and plodding on addressing a number of big issues. And then suddenly, like on certain things, particularly if it's in search of a headline, will move very quickly. But then, as you noted, you can tell that when they do try to rush legislation in that way, it ends up ultimately being sloppy. And I know one of the things that I saw people point out with this bill is that, like, the definition of social media is so incredibly broad that includes things like Wikipedia. And that, like, I know that, like, back when I was in, like, I think back in high school and junior high, the teachers always didn't want you to use Wikipedia as a source to cite. But like, I don't think anybody was about to say ban all kids from Wikipedia. And so it just shows that kind of lack of actual, like, crossing the T's and dotting the I's in this. And there's one note, one of the points that you were saying really struck me because it wasn't something I'd even been thinking about before. Is the way in which like generative AI leads to so many future like digital security issues that you like— we know that for a while teenagers can often end up using fake IDs in the real world, but that at least that there are like multiple steps that can make that more difficult or a physical person looking at an ID better able to pick up the cues of what a fake one is than I trust in terms of if you can just easily do it through like a generative AI website that produces something that is probably over time going to be able to pick up how to convince the other online site that that is real and the host of problems that they aren't even thinking about, about even implement, like how unworkable the idea, like the mix of dystopian and unworkable is really quite striking.

Anna Callahan

00:24:20 - 00:24:28

[Speaker] So we got a question on the floor about other states and how those fit into what we're doing.

Evan Greer

00:24:29 - 00:25:37

Yeah, so here's what I'll say without, you know, holding up a spreadsheet of, you know, 50 states and all the different proposals out there. But I think it's actually interesting to look at a little bit of the history of this. And so if you go back, you know, this modern movement around age-gating social media has deep roots in the kind of general, like, Christian right like media censorship, like community. So for example, one of the largest national organizations working on this right now is NCOS, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, which like sounds very official, like intentionally is intended to sound like NCMEC, which is like a, like, you know, actual like non-governmental agency that does child exploitation work. NCOS is actually formerly Morality in Media. They rebranded themselves and changed their name. But you may remember Morality in Media for like some of their greatest hits, like gay marriage caused Hurricane Katrina. And, you know, like things like that.

Jonathan Cohn

00:25:37 - 00:25:37

Right.

Evan Greer

00:25:37 - 00:25:39

So like, this is the community.

Anna Callahan

00:25:39 - 00:25:41

It sounds like a joke, but I think you're actually serious.

Evan Greer

00:25:41 - 00:27:45

No, I am 110% serious. And so these folks, you know, started in the '90s around like pressuring the FCC to, you know, get on the case of news programs that had anything related to LGBTQ issues on them and claiming that that was, you know, perverse and sexual and being forced onto kids. Right. And they then in recent years, they moved toward pornography, online pornography. And so they've been pushing these age verification laws mostly in red states and mostly around specifically adult sites. So they kind of started with, we should age gate Pornhub, which again, like, sounds extremely reasonable. Like, there's something we can all agree on. No, like, kid should be on Pornhub. There should be some way of mitigating that. But they've very intentionally and strategically, the same way that the pro-life movement has right? They've kind of just like kept moving the goalpost and moved from, okay, well, you know, pornography is harmful to kids and these social media sites have all this like pornographic adjacent content. Or, you know, again, they're like expanding the definition of pornography to include like Steven Universe has queer characters on it, so it's pornographic even though it's literally a children's show. Right. And so by expanding this definition, they've managed to kind of get— they've created this sort of unholy alliance with liberals who are kind of motivated more by, well, I'm concerned about Andrew Tate and these like right-wing influencers, and I am concerned about pornography and how it's misogynist and online hate speech. And so they've sort of created this unholy alliance between pro-censorship elements of the center-left and this like very organized, very well-resourced Christian right, Christian nationalist, like censorship machine that's been operating for years. Well, and so, yeah, go ahead.

Anna Callahan

00:27:45 - 00:28:07

I was going to ask, because you mentioned it before we started recording, it was— it sounds like there are some interesting people who you might think would be in favor of this legislation, but because it's so horribly written and implies a bunch of like awful surveillance things that actually have come out against it. And I'm curious if you can talk a little bit about that segment of people?

Evan Greer

00:28:08 - 00:30:10

Yeah, for sure. So, you know, here in Massachusetts with the bill that came out of the House and the governor, like, I have actually yet to see a single, like, civil society organization that's, like, supporting it. Like, there's, like, rhetoric coming from, like, the sponsors and from the House. And, like, you know, Rep. Ken Gordon wrote an op-ed for the Boston Globe about it. But like, for example, Fair Play, who are a Boston-based child protection organization who I often disagree with, like we have been on opposite sides of some of the federal legislation in this area. But like, I have not seen them come out in support of this. And some of the parents who were actually actively lobbying around the cell phone ban in schools, which is a separate but related issue, were quoted in the Boston Globe as saying they were totally blindsided when the House added all this age verification stuff to it because they were basically, you know, some of these parents have been very active in these debates nationally. And so they actually know that, like, even if in their heart of hearts maybe they do think kids should be kicked off of social media, they know that in other states where they've tried to pass stuff like this, it's been caught up in litigation. And it doesn't actually even go into effect because like the state's then just spending your tax dollars like fighting with the ACLU in court. And so like these parents are pretty savvy and they're like, we know that this stuff doesn't even work. And so like you took— we had this perfectly good cell phone bill and you added all this crap to it and now the whole thing might fall apart. And so I think, again, that speaks to like just the need for a better process, right? Like there's actually pretty broad consensus here. Like even groups that often disagree with each other federally because the political opportunity is so different could actually probably come to consensus around something here in Massachusetts where we ostensibly have a Democratic trifecta that could move something. But that consensus building process just like didn't even happen.

Anna Callahan

00:30:10 - 00:30:14

I know the Democratic [INAUDIBLE] could move legislation forward. I'm sorry.

Evan Greer

00:30:17 - 00:30:19

Cleaning up a mess instead of doing something positive.

Jordan Berg Powers

00:30:19 - 00:33:05

Yeah, I just want to say that like it's not just that, um, you know, so it's— we have, you know, for years— I think the thing that's so frustrating about that is that for years people have been trying to get the state to pass the Healthy Youth Act, which is nominally sex ed but is actually about relationships. And we did pass this in Worcester, thankfully. Uh, my wife, who ran for city council made this the center part of her campaign. She advocated for it. We have good sex ed in our schools in Worcester. And because of that, my daughter, since kindergarten, has gotten sex education. And what that means in practice is actually not about sex education. It's actually about relationships, how to interact with each other, how to talk, how to be safe online is actually a lot of the things that she's learning. They're learning about consent, they're learning about talking to each other. So she's actually well positioned to interact in these spaces because she has, since a young age, been talked about how do we interact with each other? How do we find ways to be safe with each other? How do we consume media in a way that doesn't harm us, right? Like she herself will, does she, my daughter is of age where you think she would want TikTok. She does not have TikTok because she knows the concerns about it, what it might do to her. She's frustrated with some of the kids who do have it. She's like, "I don't wanna be those kids," right? Like, she's consuming, she's, you know, she still needs guidance, she still needs values. We still talk about it in our household, but there is legislation out there that has had a majority of the state reps, a majority of the state Senate, and House leadership refuses. The state Senate has passed it, I think 7 times, and the House leadership won't even bring it up for a vote. That would actually give kids skills they need to interact online, to make good decisions. So you're not just banning it, you're telling kids, how can you use these things, right? Imagine a world where they do ban it and then they become 14, 15. They don't have any skill sets because you haven't given them the skills. It just makes no sense, right? Similarly, there has been for years push to try to have media literacy. That is another bill the legislature has had a majority of the state reps for, a majority of the state senators for, and they continue to still not pass it. To your point, Anna, and it's so frustrating that they don't pass that legislation, which again would do many of the similar aims. You want kids to be safe online? Teach them how to consume these things safely. Teach them how to make good decisions. Give them the skill sets they need to make their own decisions about what's safe for them, what's good for them, and to scaffold that with some of the things we know it would work, which was to regulate the corporations.

Anna Callahan

00:33:05 - 00:34:41

[Speaker] Ooh, I'm gonna pause you there because that's the thing I really want to dive into. But before we do, I'm gonna mention that anybody who feels like donating to the show, taking this episode, sending it to your friends, we have a link just below. You can always donate a little bit to our show. None of us ever get paid. For our wonderful young people who week after week are always doing the video editing and creating the graphics and posting it all on social media and clipping things and doing all that work that needs to be done. So we appreciate them so much and we know you do too. So you can appreciate them with a little donation below would be amazing. You will not hear a lot of these discussions almost anywhere else here in Massachusetts. And that being said, I really want to turn to the question of— and I love the solution that you were just talking about, Jordan, which is really about educating our young people. But I want to talk to something that would just make me so happy, would be regulating these corporations so they can't do all this horrible stuff. And at the very opening of this show, Evan, I loved what you mentioned about the infinite scroll and the algorithms that are used to— the entire purpose is to addict us, to make it impossible for us to put it down. And I would love for your take, and then any of us, because we're coming up here at the end of the show, to talk about what we could do that would in fact actually help not just our kids, but all of us. So Evan, I'm going to give you the first crack at it.

Evan Greer

00:34:42 - 00:35:00

Yeah, for sure. So I actually got tired of of people just being like, well, what should we do instead if you don't support this? And so Fight for the Future actually wrote a piece of model legislation that we put out about a week and a half ago. It's certainly—

Anna Callahan

00:35:00 - 00:35:01

oh wow, it's new! I'm so excited.

Evan Greer

00:35:02 - 00:36:11

Yeah, it's brand new. And it's certainly not, you know, it's a working draft. So I'm sure just like the legislature missed some things, we probably missed some things too. So it's out there for feedback. But basically the way our proposal would work is it takes some of the good ideas from the governor's proposal, which is having strong default settings for users. So instead of kind of like dictating like what you can and can't do, it's just like what's turned on and off by default. So we took that and instead of applying it only to minors, we apply it to everybody. So every single person in the state of Massachusetts, when you first create a social media account, You can have autoplay turned off, infinite scroll turned off, and surveillance-driven algorithmic recommendations turned off, right? There is no free speech implication in that. No adult needs the next video to start playing when your video finishes. Like, we can all go press a button that says, show me 10 more posts. All of those things just kind of create a little friction, right? And just like make it a little bit like you're just a more active participant in using the platform.

Jordan Berg Powers

00:36:11 - 00:36:12

Can we like—

Anna Callahan

00:36:12 - 00:36:19

like with the— like on a thing of cigarettes where it says this is bad for you, can we just say if you turn the infinite scroll on, it's bad for you?

Evan Greer

00:36:20 - 00:39:39

Yeah, I think there, you know, the ACLU might say there's like some compelled speech issues like there, but I think absolutely. Like some— there was some stuff in the governor's proposal around like showing users a warning. And I think you can absolutely say like, if a user turns on this feature, you have to show them a warning, an evidence-based warning about XYZ. Like, I think those are— there are real things that can be done there. But the whole kind of core of our proposal is by applying these protections to all users, you completely eliminate the need for age verification entirely. Yes. And so you don't need to force the platforms to find out who's 16 and who's 19 so that they can exploit the 19-year-olds worse than the 16-year-olds. If you just say, why are we letting them exploit anybody in the first place? Like, regulate the business practices. And I think your point, Jordan, earlier was absolutely right. Like, when they regulate us, really what they're doing is criminalizing us, right? And we know that, like, that's how this ends up working. Like, even when you think about cigarettes, like, the things that actually led to young people reducing their use of cigarettes was not arresting teenagers and slapping them with fines for getting caught with cigarettes. It was regulating the companies and making it illegal for them to advertise in certain ways and making it like forcing them to have warning labels, etc., you know, banning smoking in restaurants. Like all of those things that impacted the corporations is what led to the types of like full societal public health shifts. Just criminal, you know, really like this stuff is sort of like more like arresting teenagers for having a pack of cigarettes instead of figuring out like, well, what's the underlying problem? Why did that teenager buy that pack of cigarettes in the first place? And then just the last thing I'll say is I also think some of the comparisons start to fall apart a little bit. And this goes back to our liquor store like analogy because like no one has ever organized a protest or overthrown their government with a pack of cigarettes. Like, no one has ever started a business in a pack of cigarettes or created, you know, a political podcast or started a band and gotten heard or noticed through a pack of cigarettes. And so, like, when we think about what types of regulatory regimes make sense, we need to contend with the fact that we're not talking about cigarettes or cars or liquor stores. We are talking about like vehicles that are carrying billions of people's speech, and they are flawed vehicles. They are corporate platforms. But like, we need policies that contend with the fact that billions of people use these platforms to speak every day. And, you know, we have a strong First Amendment in this country and a strong instinct to avoid suppressing people's speech, and I think sometimes politicians forget when they're dealing with social media companies that like in the end, these are speech, these are places for speech. And we have to be a little bit more careful and thoughtful when we're trying to regulate what, you know, I think it's foolish to call these things the public square because they're not public. They're more like a shopping mall. But like, if the shopping mall is the only place you have to speak, we have to care a lot about what the rules are at the shopping mall.

Anna Callahan

00:39:39 - 00:39:49

Yep. And so I'm going to go ahead because we do have to— we're going to wrap it up soon. I sadly have to go. I am going to have Jonathan go and then we'll do Jordan and I'll close it up. Jonathan.

Jonathan Cohn

00:39:50 - 00:40:59

The one thing I really do appreciate, like the attention to like how do we change the default rather than focusing on like rather than focusing on individualizing solutions. It reminds me like totally separate issue, but it reminds me of like just thinking of that. Of years ago when I was trying to get like the printers at college to be like, what if you defaulted everybody to double-sided printing rather than say, why don't you consider this option that will save paper? If you want people to do something and if you want to protect people from like the negative consequences of some things, having the— changing the default settings makes a difference, especially because so many of the default settings the way that companies work is how do we default people into our being able to like take what we want from them. But to change that to be how do we actually make the default settings what is actually like best for all of us, especially with, as Jordan noted, it was old people who like Facebook helped, like through old people that Facebook helped elect Trump in 2016. And social media is a problem for all ages, not just youth.

Anna Callahan

00:41:00 - 00:41:01

Jordan?

Jordan Berg Powers

00:41:02 - 00:45:12

Yeah, just a couple things I'd say. First is just, you know, this is the real problem with it. A lot of progressive legislators were trying to push that this is a progressive solution and we're frustrated with people. And I always say, like, the way progressive— progressive solutions are never to take away people's rights. Progressives feel very clearly about people having individual rights. It's about taking on power for us, for regular people. It's the opposite way. And so Fundamentally, this approach is the approach that the legislature takes on a lot of things, which is that it's scared to take on power. It's scared to take on corporations. It's scared to take on the elite and instead wants to put the burden on us. It wants to regulate us, take away our rights. And that is backwards. Like, they need to be taking on these corporations. They need to be giving us more protections. We need everyone, not just young people, needs data privacy protections. We need protections from AI. We need protections that we need thoughtful, which doesn't mean ban them, it means protections. It means people should be able to use social media because there's so many benefits, there's so many wonderful things, but do so in a way that regulates corporations who would otherwise take advantage so that in such a way that we are also protected, right? So it puts us, the people they're supposed to be representing, as the center of who should be protected and who these things should work for and our representative should work for us. And not be scared of the corporate executives and the corporations. So that's what we're talking about. We're talking about how can we regulate these things. And again, if you didn't even wanna regulate corporations, we have legislation that they could be passing to arm young people to interact with these things in ways that work for young people, right? To give them the skills they need, which they're not talking about doing, which is I think really frustrating. The last I'll say really quickly is this came out of the cell phone ban. Which is in and itself a problem. Like we don't need a statewide cell phone ban. My daughter, in her school, they allow cell phones for two 5-minute periods. And what happens in those two 5-minute periods? My daughter makes plans, tells us how, like, you know, sometimes we have to switch up who's picking her up. We let her know who's gonna pick her up in that time. You know, a lot of what happens on cell phones is not some insidious terrible things. It's how most of us use it, which is coordination, figuring out who's going where, And sometimes it's just my daughter wants to let off some steam. She got frustrated in a class and somebody annoyed her and she'll just be like, "Ah, that person really annoyed me." And she'll send me a quick text message in that 5 minutes that they get that the school put together. They have 2 periods where they do it to let the sort of steam out from cell phone usage while putting regulations so it doesn't affect classroom time. And so, you know, one of the things that happened is some kid was using it not in that 5 minutes and they got their cell phone taken away. And my daughter was like, well, good, it was distracting and I'm glad they took it away. And like the other kids agreed. And so that kid then learned not to use it. Like, it's not that there's— it's not that we don't again need any regulations. It's that they're trying to fix this thing with this blanket, big, big approach of like something that was passed away to fix it. But like, really, there are things we can be doing and schools are figuring it out. They've been figuring it out while the legislature dithered for so long on this. You know, there are ways. My daughter needs her cell phone for her diabetes and that probably won't get banned, but she uses it for lots of other things that are actually also helpful to her day. And so you're gonna put a ban in 2026 that will go on and you're not really thinking about like, how are people gonna use these in the future? How are they gonna interact? What are young people needing it for? Why are they doing it? Are they managing their school? Are they managing their work after school? Are they talking to a boss? There's so many things that kids need sometimes to just interact that we can do that in a way that both gets at the problem, which is that kids were using it too much in schools, but also gives kids some of the protections they need and some of the ways to just let off steam and be human beings in the future where these things are a part of our lives. So just this whole thing in itself, the whole approach, the whole idea that we need a cell phone ban is a problem. It's not true. It's not the way to approach it. We need to give schools the flexibility and the backup, maybe legal backup, to do the things they need to do to regulate cell phone usage. But this is just an absolute top-to-bottom disaster.

Anna Callahan

00:45:14 - 00:46:05

I am going to just wrap us up. I appreciate, Jordan, everything that you said about the— that our legislature should really be regulating the corporations and how much they are damaging us. And not regulating us like it is. That's always the thing. It's like punish the individuals for the things that they're doing because— and they're doing those things because corporations are, you know, allowed to do their own horrible things. Let's regulate the corporations. So I'm totally into that. Evan, thank you so much for being on here and for the work that you're doing. It's incredibly important and for really helping us all understand much more about this legislation. And thank you so much also to our listeners and everyone who donates to the show, and we look forward to seeing you all next week. [MUSIC]