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I think what’s different this time around, and what gives the Meta AI glasses staying power, is the AI integration and the plausible deniability around the intention of the device.

Previously, it was easy to label people who chose to wore recording devices on their face creeps. When the glasses only existed to film and record the world around us for content’s sake, the devices could be effectively stigmatized. The way the glasses are being framed now, however, and the capabilities they offer are starkly different.

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These are atrocious numbers. This comes on the heels of the Democrats announcing a new Project 2029 plan, that is the EXACT SAME tech policies outlined in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, but I guess the Democrats are going to try to force them through now under their blue team. It’s all very bleak.

Because of this, I wanted to run this piece by Molly Buckley, a legislative analyst at the EFF on how and why we should reject these bans. I hope that you’ll read the full piece and consider the implications of what these bans would actually mean.

How and Why to Fight Back Against Social Media Bans

This post is by Molly Buckley, a legislative analyst at the EFF

Several U.S. states are pushing to ban young people from social media entirely. This marks the latest wave of censorship bills masquerading as “children’s online safety” measures, with states like Massachusetts, Idaho, Minnesota, North Carolina, South Carolina, Illinois, and EFF’s home state of California leading the charge.

Just a few years ago, lawmakers supporting age-gating laws insisted their efforts were narrowly targeted at limiting young people’s access to adult content. At the time, we warned that they would not stop there: once the government established the authority and built the infrastructure to collect and “verify” massive troves of user data, it would inevitably sweep broader and broader categories of lawful speech into this mass surveillance and censorship system.

Unfortunately, our predictions came true. As legislators across the country advance proposals that would block all young people from accessing the “modern public square,” the Overton window has shifted dramatically towards mass censorship—and the speed of this shift should concern all of us.

This primer breaks down this dangerous wave of social media bans: how they work (and why they don’t), who they harm, and how we can fight back.

How to Spot a Social Media Ban

The details of these bills vary from state to state. Some (like California’s AB 1709) are a flat-out social media ban for all young people under a certain age, while other states (like South Carolina and Minnesota) allow access to young users who hand over even more data to show verifiable parental consent. Many bills regulate certain social media features, too, including by setting default privacy settings, time limits, or notification preferences for all accounts that fail the age-gate.

As for the age-gating mechanism itself, most proposals fall into two broad categories: age verification bills and behavioral age estimation bills.

Age Verification Bills require online services to collect highly sensitive data, including government ID and biometric information, from all users before either restricting or allowing them access.

For example, take California’s social media ban (AB 1709). Starting in January 2027, operating systems will be required to collect enough information from users to sort them into age groups, or “brackets.” Under AB 1709, social media apps would then use that age bracket information to completely block anyone under 16, while supposedly letting everyone else through. By contrast, Florida’s law (HB 3) takes a more aggressive route by forcing platforms to verify users’ identities directly, usually by contracting with private third-party companies to perform verification services.

Behavioral Age Estimation Bills, on the other hand, are a more recent innovation of states like Minnesota (HF 1438) and South Carolina (H 4591). These bills require platforms to estimate the ages of users based largely on data that they already collect, including self-attested age, behavioral information, and account history and activity. In practice, these bills enable tech companies to use algorithms and/or AI to analyze our online behavior and estimate age based on that.

Proponents of behavioral age estimation bills claim that their proposals avoid the massive security risks that come with mandatory age verification bills. However, much of the data that social media platforms collect from us “in the ordinary course of operation” is collected in order to serve us targeted behavioral ads. If we force platforms to use this imperfect data to make more important judgments about who can access their services, we risk entrenching those insidious data collection practices. Surely we don’t want to give social media companies more reasons to justify and sustain their reliance on this exploitative business model.

If you want to dig into the nuance here, our terminology guide sheds more light on the technical differences between age verification and age estimation bills.

Overall, it’s a lose-lose scenario: either platforms collect new forms of our most sensitive and immutable data, or they unleash their AI and algorithms on our existing behavioral data to make creepy guesses about who we are and what we deserve to see. No matter which age-gating method your state chooses to execute its social media ban, there will be lots of error at the margins—and lots of users who will be blocked or chilled from access to lawful online speech.

Why Social Media Bans Are So Dangerous

Social media bans are unconstitutional, discriminatory, and deeply misguided. They reinforce existing structures of oppression, and they are broadly unsupported by young people, whose voices are conspicuously absent from this conversation. They undermine parental decision-making and replace tailored family-level solutions with a one-size-fits-all band-aid. And, in the places we have seen social media bans go into effect, early reports show that they don’t even work.

For example, in Australia, where a social media ban has been in effect since late 2025, a majority of young people can still access social media, those who can’t have lost their access to the news, and crisis helplines are reporting skyrocketing numbers of calls from youth left stranded without online community or resources.

We could go on and on about all of the inherent harms here, but we’ll try to keep this short as we walk through some of the major issues.

1. Security Risks and Privacy Harms

In order to ban some users, social media platforms first must confirm the ages of all users, regardless of age. Bans thus incentivize companies to force users of all ages to hand over government IDs, face scans, and other sensitive information. When parental consent is required, companies must collect even more verification data and often create explicit links between child and parent accounts—further destroying users’ anonymity.

Both of these databases create massive data “honeypots” that invite identity theft and permanent surveillance. We’ve already seen repeated data breaches involving age- and identity-verification services. Yet these laws would force both adults and the youth they claim to protect to feed their most sensitive data into this growing surveillance ecosystem.

If we don’t trust tech companies with our private information now, we shouldn’t pass laws that force us to give them even more of it.

2. Disproportionate Harm to Vulnerable Communities

Age-verification technology is deeply flawed and prone to discrimination. These systems frequently misidentify or lock out people of color, people with disabilities, and trans or gender-nonconforming individuals whose IDs may not match their appearance.

Where these bills require parental consent, they impose disproportionate access barriers on low-income, non-traditional, and immigrant families. These sorts of families are more likely to share a single family device or have strong reasons to not want the government to track family associations and ID documents.

Beyond the technical failures, these bans cut off a vital lifeline. For LGBTQ+ youth, foster kids, and those stuck in unsupportive home environments, social media is often the only place to find community, explore their identity, or access life-saving resources. Forcibly removing young people isolates those who need connection the most, while creating massive new barriers for adults.

You can read a breakdown of the diverse groups vulnerable to these laws here.

3. Based on Shoddy Science

The current legislative push to ban young people from social media relies heavily on the idea that the “great rewiring” of the adolescent brain is a proven fact. This simply isn’t true.

Social science indicates that moderate internet use is a net positive for teens’ development, and negative outcomes are usually due to either lack of access or excessive use. For LGBTQ+ and marginalized youth in particular, social media offers an essential space to access support they might lack offline. By forcing youth into digital isolation, these bans cut off vital access to political news, community, and health resources. They also completely ignore the calls of young people themselves who favor digital literacy and education over restrictive government control.

Instead of cutting off these lifelines, we should support measures that arm all youth (and the adults in their lives) with the knowledge they need to navigate online spaces safely.

4. Reckless Free Speech Violations for Users of All Ages

No matter your age, the First Amendment protects your right to speak and access information.

Blanket social media bans immensely and unconstitutionally chill all users’ exercise of this right. They cut off young people’s access to lawful speech, or ruin their privacy in the home by mandating parental consent and sometimes even parental access to their account activities and settings. They force all users (adults and young people alike) to hand private information over to tech companies before speaking or accessing information on social media platforms, imposing annoying obstacles on lawful online expression and wrongfully blocking some adults outright.

Critically, these bans destroy our right to online anonymity—a cornerstone of our right to free expression that protects whistleblowers, journalists, activists, immigrants, and everyone who has ever used a private browser or account to ask the internet an embarrassing question.

How to Fight Back

Social media bans weaponize parents’ concerns about children’s safety to justify unprecedented levels of surveillance and censorship. In the process, these laws deny young people their rights, threaten online anonymity for everyone, expose our sensitive personal data to breach and abuse, and replace parental decision-making with state authority. This is a battle over the future of the open, private, and free internet, and we must act now to protect it.

Here’s how you can help us fight back: Talk to your community (including young people!) about what’s at stake. If you’re a parent, lean on open conversations and platforms’ existing tools to tailor your child’s experiences instead of handing that power over to the government. And no matter where you live, contact your government representatives and tell them clearly that social media bans are not the answer to kids’ online safety.

This piece originally ran on EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

The KIDS Act Will Require ID Checks To Get Online

On Monday night, the House passed the KIDS Act, a big package of mass surveillance censorship laws that will affect every single American. It’s awful. I can’t begin to describe how bad this law is!! (Call your senators!!)

I sat down with Adam Thierer, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), to break down the terrifying reality of what’s happening in Washington D.C. right now.

Adam, who has been fighting for internet freedom since the 1990s, explains how these laws demand mass age verification (which applies to adults too), regulate design features like infinite scroll, and even target messaging apps and VPNs.

We also dive into the 1,800 AI bills popping up across states, Bernie Sanders' misguided plans for AI, and why the government is moving to create an identity layer for the entire internet. Finally, we discuss the toxic brew of "moral panic," fake anti-big tech sentiment, and censorship that is driving this and other bad tech legislation forward. [WATCH]

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Over the past few months, Peter Thiel has become fully infatuated with Argentina. He bought a house there, enrolled his kids in school, has been attending local soccer matches, playing chess with locals, and the Argentine government is exploring offering the billionaire permanent residence and citizenship.

But why Argentina? Why now?

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We discuss:
• The rise of online censorship around the world
• The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA)
• Government surveillance and digital ID requirements
• The future of online anonymity
• Section 230 and why it matters
• TikTok, Big Tech, and content moderation
• Government pressure on social media platforms
• Free speech on the left and the right

As governments push new regulations in the name of “online safety” the debate over free speech, privacy, censorship, and freedom is becoming more important than ever.

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Why Timothée Chalamet Is Shilling Kalshi

Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket have become one of the most powerful forces in American media, politics, and culture. In the latest episode of my Power User podcast, I sit down with NPR’s Bobby Allyn, the country’s top prediction-markets reporter, to break down how Kalshi went from a tiny startup that 50 lawyers refused to represent to an inescapable cultural juggernaut backed by the Trump family, celebrities, and major news organizations.

We dig into how Kalshi exploited a legal loophole to bring sports betting and election betting to every state, why Donald Trump Jr. became an advisor to both Kalshi and Polymarket, and how the companies called the 2024 election for Trump before the mainstream media would, cementing their place in the MAGA universe. Bobby explains the rise of Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour, Polymarket’s offshore “crypto bad boy” founder Shane Coplan, and the regulatory war happening right now inside the CFTC.

We also cover the dark side nobody is talking about: undisclosed influencer marketing flooding your feed, the Timothée Chalamet Kalshi deal, secret ads during the NBA playoffs, the Mr. Beast video editor insider trading scandal, betting markets on wildfires and war, and the casinoification of the entire economy. We dig into the lawsuits, the looming Supreme Court showdown, and whether this whole gambling empire could vanish overnight! WATCH NOW.

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Last week, Pump.fun, a platform where you can buy and trade meme coins, launched Pump Fun GO, a new service where you can “pay ANYONE to do ANYTHING.” Users can create and complete on bounties “for ANY task.” The company claimed that this new feature would “leverage the power of humans and money across the globe.”

What it has actually done is create a new dystopian market where poor and desperate people debase themselves and others for small sums of money. As many online have pointed out, this is literally the plot of a famous Black Mirror episode.

Pump Fun GO is just the latest in a new class of platforms that are defining the next phase of the attention economy. Prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi are part of this new era, as is the rise of so-called “UGC marketing.” I think we can call it the bounty economy. All of these platforms— Pump Fun, Polymarket, SideShift and others— are building a new synthetic reality where an increasing number of the things we witness IRL or encounter online are not spontaneous occurrences. They are commissioned performances designed to generate attention, engagement, and ultimately financial returns.

If you think my work is valuable, please buy a paid subscription to this newsletter or support me on Patreon.

Unlike other independent journalists, I have ZERO advertisers, ZERO outside funding, and accept ZERO political money. My work is entirely funded by people like you. Please become a paid subscriber today or support me on Patreon and ensure I can continue to do independent journalism.

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By Taylor Lorenz & Tyler Johnston

Last July, ten days after Build American AI, a dark money group tied to pro-AI super PAC Leading the Future, filed its articles of incorporation in Nevada, a new meme page called “Doomers are dumb” cropped up on X. At first, it appeared to be a standard meme account attempting to go viral by posting generic content like “Gay son or thot daughter?“ and joking about getting cheated on by their waifu.

But in October, around the time Build American AI began publicly campaigning, the account pivoted. Suddenly, it began posting relentlessly about AI and sparring with “Jonathan Doomer,” a self-proclaimed AI skeptic who says he quit his job to spread warnings about the technology on Twitter (and who also began posting about AI on the exact same day).

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Over the past several weeks, campaign disclosures have revealed that California Gov candidate Tom Steyer has been paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to influencers, almost none of whom initially included proper disclosure on their posts.

Progressive YouTuber Carlos Eduardo Espina received $400,000 from the Steyer campaign. FOOS GONE WILD, an Instagram page with 3.3 million followers that posts viral clips received $50,000. Instagram tea page The Shade Room received another $25,000. Earlier this month, a report from The Sacramento Bee revealed that, in addition to Steyer’s direct influencer marketing, the campaign is also utilizing a UGC platform, paying regular people, some of whom live out of state, $10 to post in support of Steyer on TikTok and Instagram.

After Kamala Harris’ loss in 2024, Democratic insiders finally began to meaningfully dip their toes into the new media landscape. Well paid consultants began pitching donors on a slew of new initiatives aimed at helping Democrats “win back the internet.” Last year, I reported for WIRED on one disastrous initiative funded by the powerful liberal dark money group The Sixteen Thirty Fund called the Chorus Creator Incubator Program. Content creators in that program accepted thousands of dollars per month to take part in a program aimed at boosting Democratic messaging online, all without disclosure.

When the story broke, the response from the influencers was indignant. The content creators, who signed contracts that some in the program described as restrictive, claimed that they “deserved to be paid for their work.” The Steyer campaign echoed this rhetoric more recently. “We compensate [influencers] for their work and their time, just like campaigns pay staff, consultants, media firms, strategists, and vendors across every part of politics,” the campaign posted after their disclosures were made public. “We’ve never paid for an endorsement, and we never will.”

This seems to be the new cut-and-paste response from Democratic political campaigns as they veer deeper into influencer marketing. Yes, we paid that influencer nearly half a million dollars to be a “strategic advisor” and he happened to post favorably about our campaign online, do you not think influencers are doing real work? Do you not support creatives being paid for their labor?

As someone who’s reported on the influencer industry for over 16 years, wrote a book on it, and has argued relentlessly for labor protections in the space, I find this new line of response lacking. Saying “creators deserve to be paid for their work” obscures the central question: what work? Because the type of “work” these creators are currently producing, I would argue, is not something influencers should be paid for under a fair political system.

When a political campaign or affiliated super PAC or LLC pays an influencer to produce content in support of a campaign, it’s usually classified as “digital advertising”. But the content produced is hardly recognizable as an ad. It is usually organic-seeming hyper-personal content. Often, the creator weaves details about their own life into the political messaging.

“I’ve dreamt of the day that I would be able to press a billionaire,” one influencer’s recent sponsored post with Steyer is captioned. “I was brought in to ask Tom Steyer some questions myself, and many of my followers needed answers to! What do you guys think?” The disclosure that the post was wholly paid for by Steyer was hidden at the bottom of the caption, only visible to users who clicked “see more.”

Larry Lessig, a professor of law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, who has dedicated much of his career to getting money out of politics, told me that the proliferation of this type of influencer marketing in politics is “terrible, because it weakens the ability of people who are not being paid to be heard credibly. If everybody thinks that everybody’s being paid and nobody’s going to pay attention to what anybody says.”

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Lately, several campaigns have avoided the few disclosure requirements that exist by hiring influencers on as “consultants” or paying them vague “appearance fees.” They issue payments through management companies or throwaway LLCs to obscure who is being paid for what.

But fundamentally, what the campaigns are buying is a new form of highly effective political advertising where influencers will promote a candidate or their messaging to parasocial audiences in an organic-seeming, often hyper-personal format that does not read to the average viewer as an ad. That is the “work” that these creators are being paid for, whether they want to acknowledge it or not.

The campaigns are not exchanging money for the creator’s time or their editing skills. The value the influencer is offering is access to their parasocial audience who doesn’t realize they’re being marketed to.

If the work the creator was being compensated for was merely making a video, the honest version of that work already exists: create an overt ad for the campaign, co-post the ad with the campaign page, use the paid partnership label, and clearly disclose the content as the ad that it is. The reason campaigns and influencers don’t do this, is because a clear political ad is nowhere near as effective as the covert advertising they’re producing instead.

“If Tom Steyer paid CBS $10 million and then CBS ran ads for Tom Steyer and Steyer said, well I didn’t pay CBS for the ads, I just paid CBS, I mean, nobody would believe that,” Lessig said.

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The entire influencer industry is built on simulated intimacy and audience trust. These political campaigns are buying access to that trust and those relationship dynamics. In any healthy democratic system, there would be an understanding that this type of thing should not be for sale.

I do think content creators should be free to endorse whichever candidates they support as citizens, and I think politicians should absolutely engage more with the creator economy. Candidates should appear (for free!) on podcasts, go on YouTube livestreams, make Twitch appearances, and speak to the new media. If campaigns want to explicitly promote their candidate or message, there are many legitimate digital avenues to do that. They can buy ads on podcasts and YouTube channels, they can pay to promote their own advertising content directly across Instagram, TikTok and X in posts that are clearly marked and presented as ads.

What should not be normalized is this ethically dubious middle ground where campaigns covertly purchase access to parasocial trust networks while pretending they are merely compensating creators for “labor.”

In any just political system, this kind of advertising would be heavily regulated, if not outright illegal. The entire point of campaign finance and advertising law is supposed to be ensuring that the public understands when they are being advertised to. Influencer political marketing is explicitly designed to blur that line.

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Unfortunately, because political advertising is regulated by the FEC, which is functionally non-existent, we are left with a patchwork of state regulations. California’s Fair Political Practices Commission has launched an investigation into Steyer’s influencer campaigns to determine if they violated state transparency rules. However, the results will likely have zero consequences.

I realize that my stance on this is unpopular in the political world. When I bring the topic up, Democratic political strategists all argue that they should not hold themselves to higher standards than the Republicans, who have a long history of leveraging dark arts digital marketing tactics to amass online power. Doing so will cause them to lose. Liberal and left-leaning creators also say that they don’t want to turn down paid opportunities with Democratic candidates when so much of the right wing creator ecosystem is pay to play. I’m sympathetic to those arguments, and I think the Democratic consultants are right, they will lose if they avoid keeping pace with the Republicans. But I also think we need to think bigger.

Right now, we are in race to the bottom that Democrats, of all people, should understand they cannot win. The more that campaigns and political groups normalize this type of dubious influencer advertising, the more they erode public trust in our entire online media and information landscape. Audiences are already drowning in ragebait, AI slop, and sponsored content. Injecting undisclosed or barely disclosed political messaging into that ecosystem only accelerates the total and complete collapse of trust.

Eventually, voters will tap out. You’re already seeing this nihilism take hold. The public cannot discern who is bought or what is paid for. The Democrats might not realize this now, but refusing to fight for more transparency and regulation on the vast amount of money flooding the influencer advertising ecosystem is suicide for their movement long term.

Poorly mimicking the far right’s most unethical online marketing schemes is not an effective way to rebuild public trust in democracy or elections. Democrats cannot claim to care about protecting democratic institutions and the integrity of our information ecosystem while insisting that creators "deserve to be paid for their work” dismantling both.

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In late February, Alexis Rose Hinkley, a Los Angeles influencer with over 1.1 million followers on TikTok and more than half a million on Instagram, sent an email to Rae Huang’s campaign with a proposal. She touted her “large, highly engaged following” and asked the campaign for payment. She wanted $2,000 per month for a minimum of six months for “strategic messaging” and helping to “translate policy priorities into compelling, authentic content,” according to an email verified by the campaign.

“If the campaign can help build a platform and framework that allows me to put my audience behind Rae without compromising the trust I’ve established, this collaboration can expand,” she wrote. That expansion “would include a full public online endorsement and a coordinated push to galvanize other creators and influencers.”

Huang’s campaign balked. They had not yet hit the city’s matching program for fundraising and were subsisting entirely on small dollar donations. They certainly didn’t have the money to pay an influencer thousands of dollars per month. They made it clear to Hinkley that she would not be paid. Hinkley stopped responding and soon began consulting for Nithya Raman, whom she now uses her platform to support.

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The Bulwark’s Will Sommer joined me on this week’s episode of Power User to dive deep into the rise and fall of Ben Shapiro. We break down the details of Shapiro’s explosive feud with Candace Owens, the catastrophic failure of his Hollywood ambitions, how a changing Facebook algorithm killed their traffic overnight, and what Ben Shapiro’s fall reveals about the future of conservative media.

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The Violent History of Resisting Technology

What if everything you've been told about technological progress is a lie? AI is changing our lives faster than ever, but resistance to technology is not new. For this week's Free Speech Friday I spoke with academic Thomas Dekeyser, author of the new book Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine, about the history of anti-technology movements, from ancient Greece to Luddites smashing machines in the Industrial Revolution to anarchist groups bombing computer companies in the 1980s.

We discuss AI, labor automation, surveillance, moral panic, Silicon Valley ideology, tech CEOs, machine breaking, environmental destruction, and why backlash against technology keeps returning throughout history. We also explore whether technological progress actually benefits ordinary people, or mainly serves corporations and power. Sometimes it's not what you think!

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In March 2025 an alleged debate between Elon Musk and Keanu Reeves went viral on Substack. The post amassed 25,000 likes and nearly 5,000 reposts. Even today, it continues to spread. But the debate between Musk and Reeves never happened. The Substack post was entirely generated by AI.

Lately it feels like I’m encountering more and more AI-generated conte…

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Kat Tenbarge of Spitfire News joins me on this week’s Power User episode to discuss the AI “Hot Girl Economy” and how tech giants are using aesthetic trends to Trojan-horse AI into our daily lives. We cover everything from viral Studio Ghibli filters and the AI puppy photo craze, to how startups like Higgsfield are targeting fashion influencers.

We also discuss what this “AI girly pop era” is designed to distract you from: extreme labor displacement, massive energy consumption, and the tech industry becoming increasingly intertwined with the US War Machine. [WATCH]

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I investigated this question for a story in Vanity Fair. I dug into the rise of AI digital clones and how more influencers and celebrities are seeking to scale their digital likenesses. You can read the full story here! One quote that really stuck with me:

Robert Freund, an attorney in California who works with content creators and talent agencies, said that influencers may be a canary in the coal mine for problems that all of us might soon face with the rise of this tech.

“The typical person does not want to see their face on billboards without their consent,” he said, “and that’s effectively what can happen if you sign up for one of these AI platforms without understanding what you’re doing.”

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Inside Iran’s Gen Z Meme Army

We are living in an era where global internet culture and meme warfare are even more influential than the mainstream media, and LEGOs are being used to create the most effective messaging around the US-Iran war.

I sat down with Areeba Fatima, a journalist for Dropsite News, who’s been reporting on the team behind “Explosive Media,” the group of seemingly Gen Z Iranians producing this viral content. Areeba got inside access to the Explosive Media Telegram channel, and was able to reveal clues about the identities of the young content creators producing these videos.

We dive deep into how these LEGO videos are actively reshaping Americans’ perceptions of modern warfare, and why this content is uniquely bridging the gap across the American political spectrum. [WATCH]

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I’ll be writing about some of what I see/learn at this conference later this week or next depending on how hectic things get. In the meantime, here’s this week’s newsletter…

After his Wichita school district began installing AI cameras in school busses, local bus driver Kent Myrtle began been fighting back. He got himself thrown out of a safety hearing and has been trying to sound the alarm to local press about potential privacy concerns with the new AI surveillance tech.

From Wichita to Massachusetts, school districts are partnering with AI companies to implement "real-time monitoring" and "hazard detection” AI cameras.

I had Myrtle on to discuss what’s happening in his district, the "safety" claims around AI threat detection, AI systems mistaking bags of chips for weapons, how school buses are being turned into roving surveillance machines for law enforcement, and more. [WATCH]

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As every top free speech lawyer in the country and the writer Peter Suderman has noted, “tobacco is a chemical that is ingested into the body with specific, measurable, physical effects. Social media is a delivery system for speech—speech that will be different for every user, and speech that is protected by the First Amendment because, well, it’s speech.”

My former Atlantic colleague Derek Thompson wrote similarly last week explaining that, social media “isn’t a toxin that we can isolate and test and ban. It is an information-delivery system — a relentless, inescapable IV drip of news, connection, outrage, friendship, conspiracy, solidarity, and garbage — whose effect on any individual depends entirely on what’s in the drip.”

The New York Times Opinion section also ran a piece attempting to make this distinction. Titled, Don’t Cheer Too Hard for the Facebook Verdicts, they write, “a social media site isn’t a bottle of alcohol or a cigarette. It’s not delivering a drug. It’s delivering speech. Sometimes that speech is silly and harmless. Sometimes it is toxic and harmful. Sometimes it’s educational or inspiring. But it’s all speech, and in America speech traditionally can only be blocked, censored or regulated in the narrowest of circumstances.”

Still, proponents of censorship and mass surveillance laws claim that there’s some magical way social media is providing “dopamine” that makes the content uniquely “addictive” and worthy of mass government censorship.

Christopher J. Ferguson, a psychologist and researcher who studies this topic, wrote about how delusional these claims about dopamine are in a fantastic piece for RealClearInvestigations:

There’s a problem with this scientific-sounding explanation for an alleged explosion in addictive behaviors: It is not supported by science.

Solid research connecting dopamine spikes to drugs and alcohol – that is, the capacity of one chemical to ignite another – has not been shown to occur in similar ways with other behaviors. Drug use is fundamentally and physiologically different from behaviors that do not rely on pharmaceutical effects. This has been confirmed in humans: Technology, such as video games or social media, simply doesn’t influence dopamine receptors the way illicit substances do.

Experts say what we are seeing instead is pseudoscience that appears to legitimize a moral panic about behaviors that trouble certain segments of society. By falling for this pseudoscience, parents and others are at risk of missing more fundamental mental health issues that could be at the root of the obsessive behavior, potentially harming the very children they seek to help.

“Addiction is an important clinical term with a troubled and weighty history,” said Dean Burnett, a neuroscientist and coauthor of a brief explainer of what dopamine does and doesn’t do. “People enduring genuine addiction struggle to be taken seriously or viewed sympathetically at the best of times, so to apply their very serious condition to much more benign actions like scrolling TikTok makes this worse.”

Burnett likens current narratives about dopamine and technology to “science garnish,” effectively adding a dash of scientific language to nonsense beliefs. “It’s the informational equivalent of sprinkling parsley on a lasagna that’s 90 percent horse offal,” he said. “It may look nicer, but it isn’t.”

The pseudoscience, however, does play a useful role for parents and others who seek to restrict the behaviors they find disturbing. After all, “Don’t do X because it will dangerously rewire the reward circuits of your brain and cause addiction” is more compelling than “Don’t do X because I don’t like it and think you are wasting your time.”

Pete Etchells, a professor of psychology at Bath Spa University in England and author of “Unlocked: The Real Science of Screen Time,” says research doesn’t support the claim that dopamine drives addiction in other pleasurable behaviors that don’t rely on pharmaceutical effects.

“The role that it plays is really complex, to the point that neuroscientists no longer really consider it the sole or universal factor to consider,” he said. “So, when we try to say dopamine ‘surge’ = pleasure surge = addiction, that doesn’t really hold up under scrutiny.”

You can read the full piece here. I think of a conversation I had with a safety researcher a couple weeks ago, who said that she thinks the entire framing of “dopamine” is deeply misleading. Using social media is nothing like listening to a pleasurable song or playing with a puppy, she said. Instead, it often causes us stress.

She said that, from what she’s seen, social media causes frequent cortisol spikes (sorry Clavicular!) which keep people engaged. This isn’t because of some harmful “design feature,” it’s because much of the information users confront online is stressful, and so they have a stress response. This is very different than the “dopamine” narrative that many grifters are pushing. I’d love to speak to anyone else doing work in this area.

Ari Cohn and Tyler Tone, also highlighted a really good thread over on Bluesky, where a user named lizardky.bsky.social basically asked the question, (as Ari and Tyler summarized): Wouldn’t a platform like Bluesky, where there is no content-recommendation algorithm and users can tailor their feeds to contain precisely the people and types of posts they want to see, even more addictive?

As Cohn and Tone write, “it seems clear that the actual complaint is: the specific content being delivered by the content-recommendation algorithms is the source of the harm.”

Of course, that’s the entire goal of these “social media addiction” lawsuits. We know that those pursuing them aren’t actually interested in changing the design of social media, their goal is to censor “harmful content.”

We know this in part because minutes after the verdict was announced in L.A., the parents of “social media victims” held a press conference. At that press conference, they didn’t mention a single thing about laws that would alter “design features.” Instead, they immediately began advocating for mass online ID verification, repealing Section 230, and passing the Kids Online Safety Act with a strong “duty of care.” All three of these policy proposals would lead to mass censorship and surveillance, and none of them would do anything to change the alleged “addictive design” of the platforms.

Cindy Cohn, former director of the EFF for 30 years, who has a great new book out called Privacy’s Defender, went on The Daily Show last night and attempted to explain these issues to Jon Stewart. He didn’t seem to really get it, and the audience clapped and cheered when the “social media addiction” verdict was mentioned, but she did her best and it’s worth a watch!

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We also discuss how the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the repeal of Section 230 will lead to mass surveillance and censorship, the disturbing testimony from the LA trial that the media completely ignored, and the link between these lawsuits and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. [WACTH]

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Protect your data with Proton

Big tech scans your emails, documents and photos, and uses that data to do things like train AI, profile you and sell your information to advertisers.

Proton Mail is end-to-end encrypted email, which means your email content can’t be scanned. There’s no email trackers to tell senders and advertisers what you read and click on.

Proton Drive is the same principle applied to your files. You can securely store things like tax documents, family photos, sensitive files, because even the file metadata is encrypted.

Sometimes it feels like big tech is tracking us everywhere we go, but you don’t have to move to the woods and go off grid to escape.

Proton brings secure email and private cloud storage together in one simple subscription. Take control and protect your data!

Sign up for Proton today for FREE! 👈👈👈

What I’m reading

Read more

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It’s Cheaper Than You Think to Bribe The Right Wing Media

It’s no secret that the right wing media ecosystem is flooded with writers, influencers, and media outlets that will happily accept bribes or dark money payments in exchange for positive coverage.

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