Sometimes, its effects feel uncontrollable.
This is the third election cycle in the United States—2016, 2020, 2024—where social media is going to play a really important role in the election. The United States has yet to grasp the fact that our democracy is becoming more and more precarious. It’s becoming more polarized, it’s becoming more hateful, it’s becoming less capable of consensus. With the 2020 election, we saw that people are no longer even accepting that elections are real. It’s important that we start to put in place the necessary transparency and accountability for these platforms that control the information ecosystem that has such a huge impact on our election cycles.
Why do you think social media management is so difficult and what harm can it cause?
Countries around the world are doing it. The UK has enacted the Online Safety Act. The EU has enacted the Digital Services Act. Canada has enacted legislation through C-63, and I will be giving testimony in Ottawa at some point on this. In the United States, we have seen social media companies put up the most robust defences they have put up anywhere in the world. They are spending tens of millions of dollars on lobbying on Capitol Hill, supporting candidates, trying to prevent the inevitable from happening.
Something has to happen, right?
Ironically, I think the thing that is most likely to impact lawmakers is parents, and parents in particular are concerned about the impact of social media platforms on their children’s mental health. And that’s the problem with social media, it affects everything. CCDH looks at the impact of social media, the loss of control, on our ability to respond to the climate crisis, on sexual and reproductive rights, on public health and vaccines during the pandemic, on identity-based hate and children. It’s a problem for children—really, it’s just an overwhelming case for change.
My wife and I are about to have our first child. I understand what you would do to protect your child from harm. I think when you have platforms that are hurting your child on such a scale, change is inevitable.
The optimist in me hopes you’re right. The next generation will inherit a better world, but there are so many things working against it.
You know, one of the things that really scared me was we did some polling last year and it showed that young people for the first time, 14 to 17 years old — the first generation raised on algorithmically curated short-form video platforms — they’re the most conspiracy-theorizing generation and age group in America.
Great.
Older people tend to believe in conspiracy theories a little bit more. But it goes down as you get younger, and then 14- to 17-year-olds, boom, it’s the highest of them all. We did that by testing nine conspiracy theories: transphobic conspiracy theories, climate change denial conspiracy theories, racist conspiracy theories, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, deep state conspiracy theories. And across all of them, younger people tend to believe them more. And that’s because we’ve created an information ecosystem for them that’s essentially chaotic.
And the situation is getting more and more chaotic.
Look, the way tyrants maintain power is not just by lying to people, but by keeping them from telling them what the truth is. And that creates apathy. Apathy is the tool of the tyrant. That was true of the Soviet Union. That was true of Afghanistan. It’s no secret that the CCDH is a top leadership of people who come from places where we’ve seen this kind of destruction of the information ecosystem that leads to tyranny. So, yes, there’s this awareness that things can get really bad really fast. And you’re right that we worry about our children and we want to make our world a better place for them.
