Here’s how Hadopi’s “graduated response” approach worked when a revised version came into operation in 2010. Alleged infringers were warned twice; if another allegation was made within a year of the second warning, the subscriber’s Internet connection could be suspended. A fine of €1,500 could also be imposed. The first notices were sent out in September 2010; by December of that year, copyright companies were issuing between 25,000 and 50,000 infringement allegations per day. At the end of July 2013, Hadopi had issued 2 million first notices and 200,000 second notices. There were 710 investigations to ascertain whether those who had been accused three times should be referred to the prosecutors.

That gives an idea of the scale of the investigations into people’s everyday use of the Internet in France, and of the databases of personal data that were created. And yet the first and only disconnection order, issued in June 2013, turned out to be unenforceable, because the disconnection only applied to Web access – other services like email, private messaging, the telephone line or TV services had to be preserved somehow – and was later dropped.

By 2020, Hadopi had been in existence in various forms for a decade. Working from Hadopi’s annual report for that year, the French magazine Next INpact calculated that in total the agency had imposed €87,000 in fines. The cost of running Hadopi was picked up entirely by French taxpayers and came to €82 million. In other words, a system that had failed to discourage people downloading unauthorized copies of copyright material, had also cost nearly a thousand times more to run than it generated in fines.

As Walled Culture reported at the time, in 2023 the French digital rights organization La Quadrature du Net brought a challenge to the Hadopi system, still running in theory, on the grounds that it was incompatible with the two EU laws defining Europe’s data protection regime, the General Data Protection Regulation and the ePrivacy Directive. Shockingly, in 2024 the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the EU’s top court, ruled that “the general and indiscriminate retention of [Internet Protocol] addresses does not necessarily constitute a serious interference with fundamental rights”. La Quadrature du Net did not give up. Alongside the case at the CJEU, it was also taking legal action in France:

In 2019, we asked the Conseil d’État to overturn Hadopi’s central decree, which authorises the storage of personal data needed for the graduated response system (IP addresses, civil identity and downloaded material). The case was referred to the Constitutional Council and in 2020 we had our first partial victory: the Constitutional Council restricted Hadopi’s broad access to personal data (the law at the time provided that it could access “all documents”). However, despite to our initial assessment, this did not necessarily mark the end of the Hadopi.

The defeat handed down by the CJEU in 2024 offered a glimmer of hope:

The outcome was disappointing, as we lost on the principle: the CJEU agreed to weaken its case law. It accepted that access to metadata might, in certain cases, not be subjected to prior independent review. However, it required numerous conditions to this possibility, relating to both the retention of such data and the requirements for prior independent review.

Those two issues – retention of metadata and the requirement for prior independent review – have now been acknowledged as problematic by the Conseil d’État in a new ruling:

the Conseil d’État finally agreed with us on these two points. Firstly, it found that the retention of metadata is not carried out in a manner that safeguards civil liberties. The CJEU required “watertight separation” of IP addresses and civil identity data (which can be understood as two distinct databases, or files, that can only be technically correlated after a formal request for access by Arcom). The Conseil d’État notes that “no legal provision imposes such retention, under these conditions, on electronic communications operators”.

Secondly, it also notes that access to this data is not subject to independent review. It fully endorses the conclusions already made by the CJEU, that Arcom [the body that took over Hadopi’s role] cannot be both judge and jury: it cannot request access and then review the legality of that access itself, even though it is an independent authority. However, like the CJEU, the Conseil d’État considers that this lack of review is only an issue from the third access to the data onwards, the stage at which a registered letter is sent.

As La Quadrature du Net notes, in practical terms, this latest ruling means that Hadopi is “stalled”:

The Arcom can no longer take you to court, as the requirements set by the CJEU are not satisfied. And it can only send you an email if it has first ensured that your internet service provider has stored your metadata with a “watertight separation”. It has now been downgraded to the function of a giant spam machine.

Hadopi is not quite dead yet: the French government could try to solve the two problems pointed out by the CJEU and confirmed by the Conseil d’État, by setting up yet more independent bodies to handle these specific aspects of Hadopi. That would involve throwing even more taxpayers’ money at an approach that has not only failed completely, but which is fundamentally misguided. Clearly, trying to keep the moribund Hadopi alive in this way would be an irrational and wasteful thing for the French government to contemplate; but given this is the world of copyright, it might well try to do it anyway.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally posted to Walled Culture.

What’s happening now is even more disturbing. We’re killing people simply because they happen to be in boats spotted exiting certain shores and headed towards international waters.

The War on Drugs has always been evil. It has always relied on the ends justifying the malicious means, especially when the means usually meant the killing or incarceration of non-white people.

Under Trump, it’s gotten even worse. Trump has pretended the mere existence of a drug trade — something that involves the exchange of money for goods by consenting adults — justifies the wholesale slaughter of people in boats in international waters.

The Defense Department and Trump himself have posted clips of boat strikes on social media, almost always accompanied by self-serving statements about protecting Americans from foreign-based drug cartels.

But the government has offered very little in support of its social media postings and public statements. Almost no documentation exists to buttress assertions about the at-sea execution of alleged drug traffickers. Almost nothing connects these random murders to cartel activity.

The government has shown absolutely no interest in identifying the victims of its extrajudicial murder program. And why would it? Identifying drone strike victims might undercut the government’s unproven assertions. Worse, it might expose it for what it is: small-scale genocide meant to kill non-white people whose ultimate destination might be the United States.

It’s up to everyone else to do what this government and its historically large deficit won’t do: address the human cost of its antagonism towards any nation located south of the US border. Those doing this heavy lifting don’t have the benefit of billions of dollars of funding or internal pressure to discover the truth. They’re doing it because our government won’t.

Twenty journalists involved with the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP) have managed to identify 13 victims of Trump administration drone strikes. And even though it’s only a small percentage of the nearly 200 people our nation has murdered in open waters since Trump took office, it still matters.

This administration may prefer these people to remain faceless and nameless, since it makes their killing that much easier to shrug off. But anyone with an operating conscience shouldn’t pretend this effort is too small to matter. It does, and these are the names of a small portion of the people this administration has presumably straight-up murdered — an assumption that should stand until the administration is willing to produce evidence that says otherwise.

Of the 16 victims now identified, eight are Venezuelans: Juan Carlos Fuentes, 43; Luis Ramón Amundarain, 36; Eduard Hidalgo, 46; Dushak Milovcic, 24; and Robert Sánchez, Jesús Carreño, Eduardo Jaime and Luis Alí Martínez, whose ages are unknown. Three are Colombians: Alejandro Andrés Carranza Medina, 42, and Ronald Arregocés and Adrián Lubo (ages unknown). Two are from Ecuador: Pedro Ramón Holguín Holguín, 40, and Carlos Manuel Rodríguez Solórzano, 34; two are Trinidadians: Chad Joseph, 26, and Rishi Samaroo (age unknown); and one is from Saint Lucia: Ricky Joseph (age unknown).

Some of the people murdered by Trump’s Defense Department were simply going from one country to another to secure employment. Some of them may have been transporting drugs, but they were mules, rather than key members of international drug cartels. What’s actually known about the nearly 200 people the administration has killed is minimal. And the one entity that could provide more insight on its drone strike targets isn’t interested in sharing this information with anyone.

In the eight months since the airstrikes began, the US has not provided any evidence that any of the 194 victims were involved in drug trafficking.

Read that again: the US government has not provided evidence about any of its 194 murder victims. Instead, it has produced a steady stream of baseless invective meant to persuade the stupidest of Americans that these killings were justified.

What is being said by government officials doesn’t erase its refusal to provide evidence backing its claim, much less justify killings it’s unwilling to honestly discuss with the US public or its congressional oversight.

A spokesperson for US Southern Command said that all the strikes were “deliberate, lawful and precise, directed specifically at narco-terrorists and their enablers. We have full confidence in the operations and intelligence professionals who inform our missions.”

This is not evidence of anything. This statement is conclusory, which is the exact opposite of evidence, as any court will tell you. It simply says the government is in the right because the government says it’s in the right. That’s not justification. That’s someone representing entities swallowing up billions of federal officers telling the people paying its outsized paycheck “because I said so” and expecting that to be the end of the discussion.

The American public is not the government’s child. It’s actually the other way around. The government is reliant on the public, which makes the general public the adult in this conversation. That far too many MAGA enablers refuse to be the adults in the room makes it that much easier for the government to pretend it owes the public nothing. But that doesn’t change how this actually works. The government works for us, rather than the other way around. And when it doesn’t, it’s up to the public to remind it of its place.

In this case, it took people in other countries to generate the modicum of accountability this nation — under Trump — appears unwilling to do itself. That’s just fucking sad.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Publicly, these billionaires insisted that Elon was a sure shot business genius who would easily make them much richer. Elon then sent around a presentation to other investors who would perhaps take a bit more convincing. The NY Times got its hands on Elon’s clearly pulled-out-of-his-ass projections. $26.4 billion in revenue by 2028! That included $12 billion from advertising, $10 billion from subscriptions and the rest from licensing.

Remember, at the time, Twitter’s ad revenue was decent: $4.51 billion in 2021 (its last full year as a public company) with another half a billion in licensing revenue. So Elon was suggesting he had the magic formula for massively increasing ad revenue and subscription revenue.

There was plenty of reporting over the last few years on how the opposite happened. Ad revenue absolutely tanked. It got so bad that the company started suing advertisers for not advertising on the newly renamed X (and threatening advertisers that choosing not to advertise would get them added to the lawsuit), pretending that it was some sort of antitrust violation. It took a court to point out that this was utter nonsense.

Anyway, given the private nature of X, we didn’t have any real official confirmation on some of the revenue numbers. But in the last year and a half, Elon has been merging his Xs. He merged X into xAI, then merged xAI into SpaceX. And now SpaceX has filed for a massive IPO, giving us an S1 with some financial information about how X is actually performing after all.

Of course, by merging all these companies, it gives Elon a bit of a chance to obfuscate the numbers. The user metrics, for example, show both users of X and xAI’s grok (which are not all the same). Also, somewhat ironically given Elon’s pretextual whining about how there were too many bots on Twitter, the S1 admits that a lot of the activity on X these days is almost certainly bots and they apparently have no way to break out how many humans still use the service:

“supported accounts” refers to, when used in the context of our X platform and Grok, a human, bot or similar account that logged into the X platform or Grok. The total number of supported accounts may include fake, spam or bot accounts if they are active.

Gosh. I thought you were taking over the site to get rid of all the bots and spam.

Anyhoo, now that we have some numbers, let’s compare them to what Elon sold his investors.

Remember, the plan was $26.4 billion by 2028. We’re more than halfway there. How’s it going? Well… when he combines xAI (grok) revenue with X revenue (so not even just breaking out X’s ad revenue)… we get… a total of $3.201 billion in 2025. So, just to put this in perspective… when he took over in 2022 he laid out a five year plan to take the company that had $4.5 billion in ad revenue the year before he bought it up to $12 billion in five years. Three years in and… it’s now somewhere pretty far below $3 billion. And they’re proud of the fact it’s finally started to go up again:

Revenue for the year ended December 31, 2025 increased by $581 million, or 22.2%, compared to the prior year ended December 31, 2024. This increase was primarily due to an increase in advertising revenue of $116 million as advertising spend increased from advertising partners on X and an increase in AI solutions and infrastructure revenue of $465 million.

So… from 2024 to 2025… they increased advertising revenue on X… by… $116 million, after knocking it down by somewhere in the range of $2 billion? BUSINESS GENIUS.

But, that’s okay. Part of the pitch was that he was going to get advertising to be less than 50% of Twitter’s revenue by 2028 because it was going to be replaced by a massive wave of subscription revenue. $10 billion by 2028! Musk predicted 69 million users of Twitter Blue (what became X Premium) by 2025 and 159 million in 2028. And then also another 104 million subscribers to a mysterious “X” subscription by 2028, which was not explained in the pitch. Even though this was before the rollout of ChatGPT, if we want to grant Elon credit to think he had already planned to launch an AI subscription service called “X” by then… how are we doing towards those numbers?

As of March 31, 2026, we reached approximately 6.3 million active paid subscribers, which was comprised of approximately 4.4 million X Premium and Premium+ paid subscribers and approximately 1.9 million SuperGrok, SuperGrok Heavy and SuperGrok Lite paid subscribers.

Leaving aside the Grok subscribers… they have… 4.4 million X Premium subscribers. That seems a bit short of the 69 million paid subscribers (which was almost certainly chosen because Musk is, emotionally, a 12-year-old boy). Once you combine that with the Grok subscribers (most of those plans cost significantly more than X Premium) and you get a grand total of… $365 million. Given the breakdown of X vs. Grok subscribers and the different pricing, X subscribers likely account for less than two-thirds of that revenue — call it under $250 million. That seems juuuuust a bit short of $10 billion.

His initial pitch to investors also projected that by 2028 the payments business would be bringing in over a billion dollars. It’s now 2025 and while the S1 mentions payments, it’s very much a future thing:

We plan to further broaden the value proposition of X through offerings like Money, a product we launched in beta in November 2025, which aims to expand platform utility by enabling payments and other financial services.

In the pitch to investors, the plan was to have that generating revenue by 2023. A bit behind schedule, it seems.

Also, part of the pitch was that all the debt he’d taken on would be paid back through free cash flow. He even says that by 2025 (hmm… last year…) the company would grow to $3.2 billion. Uh, not so close. Again, that almost matches the revenue number, but the cash flow was… decidedly negative. The entire AI part of the business lost over $6 billion last year. I don’t think Elon’s paying off the debt with free cash flow any time soon.

Look, obviously, forward looking projections and investor pitches are fantasies. They always are. That’s kind of the point. And also, obviously, the consumer AI/LLM race which really became a consumer phenomenon started right after Musk closed the purchase, and shifted the landscape somewhat. Also, obviously, by merging X into xAI and then merging that combined company into SpaceX, the various investors are likely to make out just fine (even if it is stacking multiple houses of cards on top of each other).

But, given how there was a group of Silicon Valley VCs and Wall Street banker types who absolutely insisted that Elon had a Midas touch and would absolutely know how to turn Twitter into revenue gold, it seems worth checking in on just how badly those plans failed. Yes, he’s been able to paper that over with mergers between companies he owns, but the actual numbers don’t lie.

So where does this leave the investors who lined up to hand Elon a few billion dollars, no questions asked? Probably fine, actually. The SpaceX IPO will almost certainly value the combined entity at a number that makes early Twitter/X investors more than whole. That’s what merging a struggling social network into a so-so AI startup into a deeply in debt (but in strong demand) rocket company will get you — the underlying failure gets laundered by the valuation of everything else in the stack.

But the operational track record is what it is. Twitter was generating $4.5 billion in ad revenue the year before Musk bought it. Three years into his five-year plan to reach $12 billion, the combined X/xAI advertising business is at somewhere under $3 billion — and that’s counting the separate AI business he launched after acquisition. The 69 million paid subscribers became 4.4 million. The $10 billion subscription business became $250 million. The payments business that was supposed to be generating revenue in 2023 just launched in beta in November 2025.

The “business genius” narrative was always doing a lot of work. Now we have the numbers. They don’t.

That this results in an internet positively full of lazy mass-produced cack — and what that does to the public interest, authentic creators, and informed consensus — doesn’t really enter into it.

Not to be outdone, Amazon appears poised to join the AI slop podcast race. The company announced this week that it had begun mass producing AI-generated podcasts featuring two fake experts having conversations about all sorts of stuff. More specifically, Amazon is reformatting Alexa+’s extended answers on different topics and turning them into “podcasts.”

During this process, Jeff Bezos owned software will express manufactured opinions on all sorts of things, from the death of monoculture to the health of the U.S. recording industry:

“In an example clip shared by Amazon of the new Alexa Podcasts feature, the two AI-generated hosts discuss “the latest music releases.” A male Alexa+ narrator says more than 50% of music listening now comes from unsigned artists. “The monoculture is just gone,” a female-voiced Alexa+ narrator chimes in. The male Alexa+ host says there has been “stoner metal,” indie pop and experimental hip-hop music “all dropping on the same Friday,” and adds, “That’s not chaos — that’s the healthiest the music ecosystem has ever been.”

Cool.

For some reason the Variety story didn’t quote the best part of the shared Amazon example clip; namely where software in a female voice informs you that there’s no gatekeeping anymore and authenticity rules the day:

“There’s no gatekeeping anymore. If you make something real people are going to find it, and the algorithm is working for artists in a way it wasn’t five years ago.”

Clearly concerned that people would accuse them of creating yet more lazy and quickly automated engagement slop in the era of AI obituary scams, Amazon is pinky swearing that journalists will play a central role in fact-checking the content:

“Seemingly to dispel the notion that these “podcasts” will be AI audio slop, Amazon emphasized that it has deals with major news organizations to ensure “accurate, real-time news and information.” Those include the Associated Press, Reuters, the Washington Post, Time magazine, Forbes, Business Insider, Politico and USA Today; publications from Condé Nast, Hearst and Vox Media; and more than 200 local newspapers across the U.S.”

All that extra journalistic manpower just laying around from places like the Jeff Bezos owned Washington Post (which just fired 300 journalists and shitcanned its last black female opinion columnist). Or Business Insider, one of the cornerstones of what I call “CEO said a thing!” pseudo journalism. Or Forbes, which now just lets any random yahoo contribute as a “regular columnist.” Or Vox, which is about to be sold off to Rupert Murdoch’s kid. Or Politico, the website owned by a rich German Trump fan.

You know, all the places that have been hollowed out by layoffs and mismanaged into the ground by incompetent billionaires who have no idea how anything works and are keen to produce a giant badly automated engagement ouroborus that shits money without needing to pay human beings a living wage (or health insurance).

In effect they’re using software automation to algorithmically hijack and repackage the informed expertise of other people, then reselling it to you as something new. With some lip service to the idea that there are enough journalists left to maintain factual quality control over large language models prone to errors, plagiarism, and all sorts of disastrous fuckery at scale.

I desperately want to believe that as we accelerate into the era of badly automated mass engagement slop, there will be a value premium placed on authentic expertise. That the bland homogenized vibe coded half-assed sameness being plattered up at impossible new scale will usher forth a renaissance for real connection, genuine skill, actual talent, and human expertise.

But then I remember what most people buy at the grocery store. And the kind of people dictating the contours of both large language models and our increasingly consolidated, authoritarian-friendly media gatekeeping systems. And I quickly have my doubts that authentic expertise and connection has any meaningful chance of being heard above the din.

The point of that post was two-fold. First, I wanted to highlight just how damning to his legacy the appointment of Kennedy to HHS has become to his legacy. Second, I wanted to highlight that this supposedly serious senator was perfectly willing to give up on his principles the moment he thought, incorrectly as it turns out, that it would be politically expedient to do so.

And if you need a bow to put on that second point, you can get it now that Cassidy has flipped his vote on the Senate bill to end America’s involvement in the war with Iran until the Trump administration gets authorization from Congress.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., who just lost his primary for renomination over the weekend after he faced opposition from Trump, voted “yes” to advance the measure, the first time he has done so after having repeatedly voted “no.”

“While I support the administration’s efforts to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, the White House and Pentagon have left Congress in the dark on Operation Epic Fury,” Cassidy said in a statement. “In Louisiana, I’ve heard from people, including President Trump’s supporters, who are concerned about this war. Until the administration provides clarity, no congressional authorization or extension can be justified.”

It’s amazing how post-election-loss clarity can assist someone in rediscovering their own spinal cord. Now, you can read Cassidy’s comments about how Congress has been left in the dark and that he’s hearing from people worried that maybe this whole warlord routine by Trump isn’t so great and believe that Cassidy came to all of these epiphanies in the last couple of days… if you want. But I’m going to point at you and laugh in your face if you do.

Now that Cassidy has nothing to lose, he’s decided to do the right thing. That isn’t some feather in his cap. It’s a self-indictment of all of his actions leading all the way up to his primary loss. If Cassidy thought this vote was the right thing to do today, what made it the wrong thing to do a week ago? The answer is nothing.

Even if a vote is taken and the bill passes, it would still need to get through the Republican House and survive a presidential veto. There is little chance of either happening. But that isn’t the point.

The point is that Bill Cassidy could have been a patriot over the past year and a half since Trump’s reelection, but he chose not to until he didn’t have a Senate seat to defend. And that makes him a coward.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

In this week’s roundup of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, In this week’s roundup of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike is joined by civil liberties lawyer Jennifer Granick. Together they discuss:

• Kickstarter rolls back its mature content policy after outcry (Engadget)
• Apple gives update on the App Store and its key protections (9to5 Mac)
• Thoughts on the £1,000,000 SaSu Fine (Preston Byrne)
• Pushing back from Big Tech: Africa’s hard road to AI sovereignty (Rest of World)
• America’s dangerous, messy deepfakes crackdown is here (The Verge)
• X accounts are limited to 50 posts and 200 replies a day unless they pay for a blue checkmark (Engadget)

Support the podcast by joining our Patreon, with special founder membership available until May 28th.

As a digital rights organization dedicated to the civil liberties of all users, EFF’s expertise lies in reminding lawmakers that young people enjoy largely the same free speech and privacy rights as adults. EFF is not a social science research shop, but we can read the emerging research. What that research shows is much more nuanced than what is claimed by those proposing to ban young people from social media, and it is clear that research and theories used to justify these sweeping bans is far from settled. The rush to ban access to digital platforms is being fueled by “pop psychology” narratives and a collection of statistically flawed studies that do not meet the rigorous standards required for such a massive infringement on youth autonomy and constitutional rights.

The Lie of A “Settled” Consensus

The current legislative push relies heavily on a specific, media-friendly narrative that the “great rewiring” of the adolescent brain is a proven fact. This theory suggests that smartphones and social media are the primary, if not sole, drivers of a global uptick in teen anxiety, depression, eating disorders, self harm, etc. While this narrative makes for a compelling airport-bookstore read, it quickly collapses under the scrutiny of the broader scientific community.

Independent researchers, including developmental psychologists from institutions like the University of California, Irvine, and Brown University, have repeatedly found that the evidence for such claims is mixed, blurry, and often contradictory. Large-scale meta-analyses covering dozens of countries have failed to show a consistent, measurable association between the rollout of social media and a decline in global well-being. In reality, we are seeing a classic case of what many of our middle school science teachers warned us about: “correlation” being sold as “causation.”  

Additionally, the studies used to support these measures often fail to account for or exclude significant alternative explanations for rising teen anxiety and depression, such as the lasting impact of pandemic-era isolation, the persistent threat of school gun violence, and mounting economic or climate-related stress. By focusing narrowly on social media, these findings frequently overlook the broader societal factors that also impact youth mental health.

The Cult of the “Anxious” Expert

The current push for blanket social media bans relies almost exclusively on the work of Jonathan Haidt, particularly his book The Anxious Generation. While Haidt is an amiable and brilliant storyteller, he is not a clinical psychologist or a specialist in child development. He is a social psychologist who writes about moral psychology at a business school. Nonetheless, the book has made it to every Best Seller list, and with Haidt revered as an expert on podcasts with massive reach, like Oprah, Joe Rogan, Michelle Obama, and Trevor Noah—his message has been heard by a large subset of society, which primarily relies on: no smartphones or social media before age 16, phone-free schools, and more “unsupervised, real-world independence.”

To highlight Haidt’s reach when it comes to legislation banning social media: the California committee analysis for the proposed California social media ban mentions Haidt 20 times; the Governor of Utah promoted the book as a “must-read” months before signing the nation’s first social media ban; Haidt is cited in bill analysis for the bill banning social media in Florida; his work is mentioned in a federal bill aiming to ban phones in schools; and he provided formal testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee (Subcommittee on Technology, Privacy, and the Law) in May 2022. 

While Haidt’s research has been paramount to legislation stripping millions of young people of their rights to expression and connection, his conclusions are not without challenge, and many experts in the field argue that the evidence is less than ironclad. 

The “Bad Science” Fueling Social Media Bans

While we can admit that Jonathan Haidt’s “great rewiring” theory makes for a gripping narrative, we cannot ignore that independent researchers and statisticians have identified significant flaws in the data used to justify it. Which means we are currently watching policymakers legislate blanket bans based on evidence that would be rejected in almost any other field of public health.

The reality is that research has consistently disproven the oft-assumed link between social media use and poor mental health in youth, and actually 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. In one major study of 100,000 adolescents, a “U-shaped association emerged where moderate social media use was associated with the best well-being outcomes, while both no use and highest use were associated with poorer well-being.” We also know that young people’s relationship with social media is complex, as it provides them essential spaces for civic engagement, identity exploration, and community building—particularly for LGBTQ+ and marginalized youth who may lack support in their physical environments. 

But again, the image Haidt presents in his book is increasingly at odds with the broader academic consensus. As mentioned, critics argue that the evidence for the mental health impacts of social media is mixed, blurry, and often misinterpreted. NYU statistics expert Aaron Brown, writing for Reason, notes that many of the studies in Haidt’s exhaustive reference list are statistically unreliable or fail to show a strong causal link. Prof. Candace Odgers, a leading voice in psychological science, explains the “selection effect” that legislators often ignore:

“Hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations. Most data are correlative. When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers.”

This raises a fundamental question of legislative responsibility: If the science is not settled, how can legislators confidently declare a “public health crisis” to justify stripping away young people’s First Amendment rights? By bypassing the rigorous, nuanced findings of the scientific community in favor of a more convenient narrative, legislators are choosing emotion over evidence. Before imposing such draconian restrictions on young people’s access to information, policymakers have an obligation to do the heavy lifting: to dig into the actual research and listen to the experts who are sounding the alarm on oversimplified conclusions.

The Dangers of “Social Contagion” Narrative

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Haidt’s crusade is its overlap with ideological rhetoric that pathologizes the identities of marginalized youth, and how that makes its way through efforts to ban social media for youth. A recurring theme in the literature favored by proponents of social media bans is the idea of “social contagion“—specifically regarding the rise in young people identifying as transgender or non-binary. Haidt dedicates an entire chapter of his book to this (ch.6, pt 3, p. 165), talking about “Why Social Media Harms Girls More Than Boys,” stating that: 

“The recent growth in diagnoses of gender dysphoria may also be related in part to social media trends, […] the fact that gender dysphoria is now being diagnosed among many adolescents who showed no signs of it as children all indicate the social influence and sociogenic transmission may be at work as well.”

These harmful theories suggesting that social media is “infecting” young people with gender dysphoria are false and not supported by peer-reviewed clinical research. But by legitimizing “experts” who promote these debunked theories, legislators—especially those in states like California who pride themselves on being a sanctuary for LGBTQ+ youth—are inadvertently platforming the same rhetoric used in other states to ban gender affirming care for youth. This “social contagion” narrative is a tool of exclusion, not a scientific reality, and we must be wary of any “public health” argument that treats community-building and self-discovery among marginalized young people as a “purported mental illness” spread via TikTok.

A Better Path: Digital Wellness, Not Bans

Fortunately, there is a measured, evidence-based alternative already emerging. California’s A.B. 2071, for instance, is a student-authored “digital wellness” bill that offers a measured, evidence-based alternative rather than prohibition. The bill advocates for a curriculum that teaches students how to manage algorithms, recognize cyberbullying, and regulate their own relationship with technology. Instead of trying to completely shield young people from social media, education-based approaches empower young people and have the benefit of providing skills that stay with a young person long after they leave the classroom. 

JustLeadershipUSA, a criminal justice organization, has a slogan that rings true in this instance too: “Those closest to the problem are closest to the solution.” So let’s start listening to what our young people are asking us for—more education—instead of imposing paternalistic, disempowering bans.

Legislating With Precision instead of Emotion 

Adolescent mental health struggles are a complex, multifaceted crisis. It is a crisis that has existed for as long as time, and has been driven by economic instability, the opioid epidemic, the threat of school violence, amongst other issues. To pin all of society’s woes on a smartphone app is not just a scientific error; it is a policy failure that ignores the real, material needs of young people both online and off.

Legislators must stop legislating as “anxious parents” and start acting as measured policymakers. Because for some youth, social media platforms are a lifeline. UNICEF and other global human rights organizations have warned that age-related restrictions and blanket bans can backfire in three critical ways: isolating marginalized youth (like LGBTQ+ youth, students in rural areas, foster youth, or those with disabilities) who social media is often the only place they can find a supportive community; necessitating invasive mass collection of biometric data or government-issued IDs from all users, including adults; and pushing young people toward less-regulated, “darker” corners of the web where content moderation is non-existent and the risks of actual exploitation are significantly higher.

Legislators have a valid interest in protecting children, but that interest must be pursued through tailored, measured approaches. We cannot allow emotions or a collection of flawed data sets to justify a historic rollback of digital rights. 

Reposted from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

We’ve seen this moral panic before.

And nothing has yet convinced me that “the kids these days” are any worse off than any previous generation. Yes, the technology is new, but like every generation, they tend to actually figure out the pros and cons of new technology way before their parents do.

To be fair, the Wired excerpt presents Rosenbaum’s argument as somewhat more nuanced than a standard “kids are dumb now” panic — he’s describing how Gen Z has developed different epistemic habits, relying on emotional cues and communal verification through social networks rather than traditional institutional gatekeepers. Some of that uncovers a real phenomenon that might be worth discussing. And yet, something about the framing still felt off to me — as if “different” was being dressed up as “broken.”

Also, if you tend to read a lot of AI-generated content, the Wired excerpt has a large number of tells. Plenty of “that’s not x, it’s y” and a bunch of words that AI loves to use (to be clear: that’s not definitive, as a reason why AI tools use those types of words and phrases is because they’re so common in human written communications, and it frustrates me to no end that I now feel the need to consciously limit my own use of certain rhetorical devices I actually liked to use in my past writing).

Speaking of which… a week later, the NY Times reports that Rosenbaum’s book appears to be stuffed with quotes that were made up entirely by whatever AI tool he used to write it. Oops!

The author of a nonfiction book about the effects of artificial intelligence on truth acknowledged on Monday that he had included numerous made-up or misattributed quotes concocted by A.I.

The author, Steven Rosenbaum, whose book “The Future of Truth” was released this month to great fanfare, incorporated more than a half-dozen misattributed or fake quotes in sections of the book reviewed by The New York Times.

Yes, but the truly astounding bit is buried all the way at the end of the the NY Times article, in which Rosenbaum seeks to judo this total editorial failure into evidence supporting the premise of his book. I only wish I were kidding:

In his statement, Mr. Rosenbaum said that if the episode “serves as a warning about the risks of A.I.-assisted research and verification, that is why I wrote the book.”

“These A.I. errors do not, in fact, diminish the larger questions that the book raises about truth, trust and A.I. and its impact on society, democracy and editorial,” he added.

Dude. No. Just… no.

You don’t get to write an entire book fretting about how the kids these days don’t understand truth because of AI… and then when its exposed that you didn’t even check the quotes AI gave you, claim that this just proves your point.

That’s not how any of this works.

This is a book called “The Future of Truth.” It seems like you should at least grapple with the fact that part of the “future of truth” is that your own book is spreading false information because you didn’t… actually write parts of it.

If anything, it seems likely that kids are learning whatever lesson there is to be learned here way better than the adults. The widespread disdain many kids have for AI is, in part, a direct response to all the bullshit ways adults are using it. I will continue to argue that LLMs are a tool that, when properly used, can be quite empowering. But the absolute worst way to use these tools is to let them do your primary work for you. They can help assist you, but anyone who is relying on them as a lazy way of doing the deeper work you need to do will run into problems.

But I don’t think any of that has to do with how “the kids these days” “understand truth.” A lot of it has to do with how adults are rushing around looking for shortcuts and schemes to get away from doing the actual work. But apparently there’s no book deal or Wired feature story in “the kids these days are probably figuring it out just fine.”

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.