Front Burner - The case to ban kids from social media, with Jonathan Haidt

Episode Date: February 11, 2026

Jonathan Haidt, best-selling author of “The Anxious Generation”, is our guest today. He’s been on a global mission to educate parents, the media, and government officials about the harms that social media companies inflict on children.He believes that the world ran a huge uncontrolled experiment on kids in the 2010s by giving them smartphones and social media accounts. And now, there is clear evidence – often through court case disclosure – that the experiment has harmed children, and that it’s time to call it off.Haidt has been calling on governments to ban social media for those under 16. And they’re listening. Canada is reportedly considering one for kids under 14 right now.Today, we’re going to get into some of Jonathan Haidt’s research, what he thinks a ban can achieve, and more broadly about his core goal: reclaiming childhood.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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This is a CBC podcast. Hey, everybody, it's Jamie. So today on the show, Jonathan Haidt is here. He is the author of the Uber bestselling book, The Anxious Generation, and one of the most influential voices shaping how parents and governments are rethinking childhood in the digital age. Jonathan argues that we ran this massive, uncontrolled experiment on our kids by handing them smartphones and social media and that the evidence is now overwhelming.

It is harming them. Today, we're asking whether it's time to end that experiment here in Canada and what reclaiming childhood actually requires. Jonathan, hi, it's a real pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you, Jamie. A pleasure to be here. So you've said this experiment is over and it's time to call it off. You argue that every country should have 16 or higher as the minimum age for social media accounts. Around a dozen countries in Europe are either weighing this or proposing it, several others around the world too. Why 16 and what convinced you that 13 or 14 isn't good enough?

Yeah. Okay. So let's look at the current situation and let's look at the ideal and then let's look at why 16. So the current situation is any nine-year-old who's old enough to say that she's 13 can sign a contract with a company to give away her data to expose herself to a platform that's been designed to addict her. And she does all of this at the age of nine with no parental knowledge or consent. That's the current situation around the world because of a really bad American law from 1998, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. As long as the companies don't know for sure that you're under 13, they can do whatever the hell they want to you. So that's the current situation. And that's why we now have, it's now normal for eight-year-olds to have TikTok accounts,

which is going to devastate their ability to pay attention and show them all kinds of horrible stuff at the age of eight. and for the rest of their childhoods. So the current situation is completely insane. Oh, let's also bring in that all of these platforms connect children with adult men who are anonymous, and some of them want sex or money from children. And this is just a matter of course. This is just the way things are around the world. Millions get extorted every year.

That's the current situation. I don't think that's acceptable. Obviously, this is a completely adult activity. If adults want to talk with strange men around the world, and expose themselves to addiction. Usually we say it either 18 or 21. Like in Canada, is it to gamble? Is that 18 or 21 or what?

Oh, I think it's 18. Okay. Yeah. So, yeah, it usually bounce around between 18 and 21 for those sorts of things. But by the time you're 21, we usually figure, if you choose to take this risk, you know, smoke cigarettes, try dangerous things, you're an adult. But children, we treat very differently. So the age should be 18. Now, what I did, I did.

I came to this as a social psychologist. I'm a social psychologist who studies morality. I'd studied adolescent development for my dissertation, so I've been interested in development in my whole career. But I got called into this while studying Gen Z, while studying what was going wrong. Why were people born after 1995 so depressed and anxious compared to those born before? And what I realized is that it's a collective action trap, that everyone is on because everyone else is on, that parents give their kids a phone because everyone else did. And so I realized that it's a that the solution, the only way out of this is collective action is we have to do it together. And I thought, if I advocate for a minimum age of 18 for social media, I don't think I could get it.

I mean, by the time, you know, kids in the United States, kids are already at university by the time they're 17. Right. And it just, I just thought, you know, it should be 18, but I don't think I could get it. And we have to get everyone to do it. We have to get it widespread. So I said, well, you know, puberty is, especially, that's the most important period. It begins around 10 to 12 for most kids. For girls, it's mostly over by 16, around 15, 15 is when it ends. Boys is a year later or so. So I said, okay, you know, it should be 18, but let's go for 16. I think we could get 60. It was just a, it was a pragmatic compromise. And I think it's working out well. I think I made the right decision because it looks like we are going to get 16 this year. And it's so urgent that we act. I'd rather get

16 this year than 18 and 2 or 3 years. I just want to get into why it's so urgent that we act a little bit more with you, right? Your research. So TikTok, for example, you have said is harming children at, quote, industrial scale, which really takes us out of like a consumer safety issue into a public health failure realm, right? We're talking akin to tobacco or lead. And just like what research led you to that conclusion? Tell me more about it.

Yeah. Sure. So when I wrote the anxious generation, I had my critics on my shoulder. That is, I've been engaged in a debate with about five or seven other psychologists who think there's no evidence of harm. Yes, it's true that social media use is correlated with poor mental health. Heavy users are more depressed and anxious. Everyone agrees to that. But their claim is, that's just a correlation. It's not causation. When I wrote the book, I had them in mind. And so everything I said in the book has a footnote. Every claim I made has a justification, a citation. And so I focused on the decline of mental health. I focused on the rise of depression, anxiety, self-harm, suicide. And now this is affecting, depending on how you count it, let's say an additional 10 to 30% of all kids.

The rates of depression anxiety are up between 50 to 150% depending on how you count it and when you count from. So this is a gigantic thing, but it doesn't affect most kids. Most kids are not mentally ill. But, you know, to have an extra 10 to 20% of your kids damaged, harmed, there's never been an industrial accident like this. There's never been a consumer product that hurts so many kids. But it turns out that I vastly underestimated the harm because I focused on mental illness. And what I now came to see, what I've come to see since the book came out, is that the far larger harm is the destruction of the human ability to pay attention. We see this all around us.

Test scores are literally dropping after 50 years of increase in the United States. and they have been dropping since then. That's never happened before. IQ is literally dropping. Not in all countries, but in a couple of countries, it's clear that the Flynn effect, the long rise of IQ in the 20th century is over and might be reversing. Talk to young people. They find it very difficult to read a book. Talk to young people. They now say they find it very difficult to watch a movie. So I am getting kind of angry about it. And I'm coming to see that this is not just about 10 or 20 percent of kids. This is about most human beings born in the developed world, at least, since 1995. Most of them have been diminished. Their human capital has been diminished. Their chance for life satisfaction. Their social skills. The odds of them getting married. The odds of them being a good employee.

All of this has been diminished. And I believe this has happened to literally most kids. So, yeah, we've got to stop this now. And when you say you have seven streets, Seven streams of research is what you said. Just just like tell me more about what you mean by that. Sure. The academic debate has been focused on two different kinds of research.

They're the correlational studies. We all argue about that. We all agree there is a correlation. But the other side says, yeah, but the correlation is too small. And then the other body is the experiments, the social media reduction experiments, where you ask college students to decrease their use of social media down to one hour a day for a week or two. And then you see, does that make them less depressed and anxious? The answer again is, yes, but they say it's a small effect.

It's too small to worry about. So this is what we've been fighting about for multiple years, these two lines. And what Zach Rauch and I did, we wrote a review paper, which will come out in March in the World Happiness Report. And what we did is we gathered together seven different lines of evidence, two of which are the ones I just mentioned. But let me tell you the others. Line one, what the victims say. if a man mugged a woman and the woman filed charges and she knows the man and he appears in court and she points to him and says he did it is that evidence damn right it's evidence and that's what we have so we have survey after survey of young people just in one i think it's 30% of young women say that social media has harmed their mental health that's not a correlation that's a direct report then you bring in all the harms that young people say this say extortion, the cyberbullying, the deep fakes, the porn, the non-consensual. So, so young people

themselves are saying, I have been hurt by this, my friends have been hurt by this. That's not a correlation. That is causation. Line two, the witnesses. If a man mugs a woman and the woman accuses the man, maybe she's lying, maybe she's wrong. But what if there are witnesses? Who witnessed what's going on? The parents and the teachers and the therapists. They know their kids, they're dealing with kids, they see the kids going in and out of depression and anxiety. And what do they say? Good luck finding a survey in which parents have a positive view of social media. The parents say this is harming kids' mental health. The teachers say it, the therapist say it. Line three, what if the prosecutor in this legal case, what if the prosecutor

showed the jury, I have texts from this guy to his friends in which he says, in which he says, I'm going to mug Sharon at three o'clock. And then he says, I did muck. Sharon at 3 o'clock. Is that a correlation or is that evidence? That I put it to you is evidence of causation. Let me read you some of the quote. We have them from TikTok, Snap, and Meta. Just what I happen to have up on my screen. So this is from TikTok of TikTok researchers. An internal report, quote, compulsive usage correlates with a slew of mental health effects like loss of analytical skill, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety. It interferes with personal responsibilities like sufficient sleep, work school responsibilities,

and connecting with loved ones. There are so many others in which they talk about addiction, how they optimize for engagement. And that's just from TikTok. There's much more damning stuff from Snap and Meta. So that's line three is what the witnesses say. So we have the victims say he did it, the witnesses say he did it, the accused says, I did it. And now let's get to the academic evidence. So yes, there's the correlational studies, and there are some studies that report almost no correlation. But what we did was my lab group and I, we go into these studies, and we always find they got to zero by blending. That is, if you blend together boys and girls, adults and children, all screen time, including watching Netflix, if you blend that all together, and then you correlate it with a blend of every possible well-being variable, which some of them have done, you get zero. But what we show is that even in these studies that report zero, when you go in, if you just look at girls, at adolescent girls, their usage of social media, not Netflix, only social media, and you look at outcome measures of anxiety and depression, you always find a much larger correlation.

So, again, it doesn't prove causation. That doesn't prove causation. But it does show that this is not just random effects. The other two lines of academic research, are the longitudinal studies where you take measurements of someone every year, let's say, and what you're trying to figure out is which comes first over multiple years? Is it an increase in screen time coming or increase in social media time? Is that coming before an increase in anxiety depression? Or do people first show an increase in anxiety and depression, and then they use more social media maybe to find comfort? That would be the argument.

So these are kind of screwy studies because nobody really specifies what the interval is or why we should measure it one year versus three months or whatever. But even still, even though this is kind of statistically complicated stuff to compute, even still, the major well-done studies, the major studies, we're using, say, the ABCD data set, this survey done in the United States. So you generally find that first you get an increase in social media use, and then at the next measurement, you'll get an increase in mental illness. And then the final line is what are called natural experiments. So, you know, we all want to put extra weight on true experiments where, you know, you have a control group. Well, as, as high-speed internet was rolled out in our

countries, it came into certain areas one month, and then it would come into another area two or three months later or maybe a year later. And so there was one study done in the U.S., one in Spain, Germany, Italy, so there's about eight of these studies that we found. And they all find the same thing, which is when high-speed internet comes into one area, and then you look at psychiatric emergency room visits, you look at reports of psychiatric problems. What you find is that they go up and especially for women. Because, of course, before high-speed internet,

you know, there was social media. There was Facebook, but you certainly couldn't do videos. So there you go. Seven lines of evidence, all pointing to the fact that this is hurting kids. And I'm leaving, oh, there's so much more I could say, but that's what we cover in the review paper. This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often.

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I've had the same conversation with Mark Zuckerberg two or three times, depending on how you count it. In which, I mean, the guy is very smart and his team has prepped him with, you know, he knows. the studies. There are a couple of researchers who keep finding null effects. So he knows those studies. And then he and I debate about it. And that's it. It's perfectly civil, perfectly pleasant. But he does not admit that his product is harming children at a very large scale. He does not admit that that's the case. When I raised my concerns with leadership at SNAP and I said, what about this report of 10,000 cases of sex distortion, 10,000 reports of sextortion from 2002. And that was 10,000 not in the year. 2002. That was 10,000 reports a month in 2022. That's how many reports they were getting from their own users from people who are being sextorted. And of course, when it's mostly aimed at boys age 13 to 17

on sports teams. And when that boy sends a photo of himself showing his penis to what he thinks is a sexy girl who wants to, who's sharing nudes with him, as soon as he does that, he then is blackmailed and threatened that unless he keeps paying. and paying and paying, they will show that photo to everyone in his network. And shame is historically a very big spur to suicide. When you are caught in overwhelming shame, many young people will consider suicide as a way out, and many of them have acted on that. So when I brought this up to them, they said, what are you talking about?

And I said, it was in the Wall Street Journal. And one of them said, oh, yes, that. No, look, of course they knew. Of course, I'm sure when it came out in the Wall Street Journal, I'm sure they had an all-hands meeting. So my point is they are not admitting it. Now, they're in a difficult position because they've committed what I believe is the largest industrial accident in history. They've gotten away with it's got caught free until now. And so, of course, anything that they say to me on a call could be used against them.

So I can't fault them for lying to me, but I believe they lied to me. You know, you were just talking about boys. Earlier you had mentioned girls. I wonder if you could just tell me. more about how social media affects boys and girls differently? When I started this, it was clear we have a big increase in anxiety and depression. It begins very suddenly around 2013 in all of the English-speaking countries. Boys go up to, but it's not as sharp and it's not exactly 2013.

So what's going on here? And 2012 is the year that Facebook buys Instagram. They don't change it, but that's the year that all the girls get on. on Instagram, and then the next year is when the mental health crisis begins. So that's a clue. It's not proof. It's just a correlation in history. But the fact that it's in so many countries at the same time knocks out almost every

hypothesis. And so I used to think, and I used to say that girls have it worse, that this is affecting girls more. And I do believe that social media is affecting girls more than boys on average. And if you look in at kids when they're 14, the girls are in much worse shape than they used to be in much worse shape than the boys. And the boys are having fun with video games and porn. They enjoy the video games. They enjoy the porn. They enjoy the gambling. So they seem to be doing better. But after the book came out, or by the time we finished writing the book, I should say,

we realized that the boy's story is more diffuse, but is actually more damning. That is, the boys are actually in bigger trouble, long run. If you look at the girls and boys at the age of, say, 27, the oldest members of Gen Z are now turning 30. The girls are much more likely to have graduated from high school, gone to college, graduated from college. moved out of their parents' house, gotten a job, and become self-supporting. Boys are on a downward trajectory. And the reason why, I believe, the reason why the thing to keep your eye on is not social media, it's dopamine. It's video games.

They spend a lot more time on video games than girls do, and that's quick dopamine. It's not like the games I played when I was a kid, which were much slower dopamine. You'd have to build up to a level. There's not a lot of explosions. There's not a lot of, you know, rewards. So the video game companies have been competing to give boys quicker, easier dopamine for a long time. They're very good at it. Then they get a little older, and then they get porn, all kinds of porn. Now it's three-dimensional. Soon it'll be in robots and

dolls. They get vaping, which is also dope. I mean, every addictive substance is going to affect the reward circuitry, the dopamine system. They get gambling. Now, gambling is everywhere. Everywhere. That's right. Five years ago, it wasn't like this. But now, you know, if you play Roblox, if you're seven years old, you can be gambling for ultimately real money, it's converted to real money. Anyway, my point. My point. My point, is. If you addip someone, and this is here I'm basically quoting Anna Lemke, who wrote dopamine

nation, addiction researcher at Stanford, she says, once you develop one addiction, once your dopamine neurons become attenuated, they become downregulated. It takes more stimulation to get them up.

Once that happens to you from one substance, you're more easily addictable by other substances or activities. So the thing to keep your on for boys is all the different companies that have open season on their dopamine neurons. And so by the time they reach 18, they're so saturated with quick dopamine, their brains have adapted to quick stimulation that everything else is boring. So they'd much rather sit in the basement and play video games than go get a job or get a girlfriend.

In your book, you argue that we as a society have, quote, vastly indefinitely, needlessly overprotected our children in the real world and at the same time we have underprotected our children in the virtual world by leaving them to their own devices. And just like what are the most common, well, well-intentioned, I think, mistakes that parents make when it comes to managing their kids' online lives. Let me just start. I'm glad you brought that up because the discussion tends to focus on the phones and social media, but where I really like to keep the focuses on childhood, human childhood,

is a kind of mammalian childhood. All mammals need to play to wire up our brains. And we need to play in certain ways. A lot of physical activity running around, pretending to be predators, pretending to be prey, all of that. So kids need to do a lot of that in order for their brains to develop normally through adolescents. And the big mistake that we made in America in the 90s was we freaked out about child abduction and crime. We thought our kids would be kidnapped if we ever let them out. And so we stopped letting them ride bicycles. We stopped letting them walk to friends' houses. That happened. It began in the 80s, but it really intensifies in the 90s. So we take away the sort of the free-range normal childhood where kids decide what to do for themselves without supervision.

And part of the reason that we were able to do that is that this was the 90s when now everybody was getting a home computer. And kids love home computers. Boys especially. gravitated to them early on. And so, and then the internet comes in, you know, around that time. And that actually encourages people to buy home computers. In the 80s, they weren't as popular. Once you have an internet connection, now the whole world seems to open up. So parents are thinking, oh, you know, my kid's on his computer. That's great. Oh, my God. This is so much better than him running outside. I mean, he could get kidnapped outside. But on his computer, what could happen? And with the early internet, there was some bad stuff, but there was so much good stuff. And millennials are

generally so grateful to the early internet. It was magical. We all, you know, those of us old enough to remember, it was incredible that you could just sit down at your computer and you could get information from all over the world and you could construct things with other people. So there was a real spirit, a real positivity in the 90s. And that's, I think, why parents were tricked. So we have overprotected our kids in the real world where they must have a lot of activity in order to grow up. And we underprotected them online, even as the online world became sicker and more twisted. I mean, I'm not going to tell adults that you shouldn't go there, but I am going to tell companies, you can't take our kids there. And you certainly can't take them there without our knowledge or permission. So just to give you one example. You know, so while we're all talking about raising the age in December and January, the campaign was helped along by Elon Musk Rock, which people discovered, oh, you can just say, you know, put her in a bikini and you'll get a pornified picture of any girl or woman. You know, your seventh grade class. You can put them in porn bikinis and give them big breasts and all sorts of things.

So this is just horrible. And just the level of degradation, again, I'm not saying, you know, close down the internet. I would never say that. But I would say it's time we recognize that this is just not a place for children to wander around. And we need to start with social media because social media platforms are the major locus of damage, especially to girls. Let's just start there.

The main, I think the main pushback that I hear. to social media bans is that bans essentially let companies off the hook of improving safety on their platforms that bans take away the incentive for them to do better, I guess. Is that something that you worry about? Okay. So this is such a bad idea. This is such a bad argument. I don't even understand it.

Like, what does that even mean? You know, when Congress and safety advocates were pushing for a long time to get seatbelts. I don't think anybody would have said, no, don't put in seatbelts. If you put in seatbelts, that's going to let them off the hook for safety improvements. Or if someone was saying, you know, we need to, we need to not let 12-year-olds drive. We need to have a minimum age of 16. Did other people say, no, because that's going to let them off the hook. Now they're not going to make their cars safer.

So that argument is so bad because it doesn't even make sense. Why would putting on a limit of 16 mean that they would not have any incentive to make their products safer or better? They still have a lot of 16 and 17-year-olds on who are legally minors. They're still legally responsible for harming minors. So that argument doesn't make any sense. What about the argument that the solution needs to be like a regulator who would be able to hold platforms more accountable? The way all these bans work, and this is what my team had suggested long ago, we worked with Australia, we're working with the countries, is don't ban access to social media. I can't imagine a law that says no child can watch.

YouTube. I mean, we all depend on YouTube. It's the video repository of the world. Rather, the central point of these laws is contract law. And at present, as I said, any nine-year-old who says she's 13 can do anything and the company can do anything to her. And what the Australia bill says is, no, you have to be 16 and it's up to the companies who are making money from you. It's up to the companies who've made a defective consumer product. It's up to the companies to verify the age. Nobody ever tried that before. because everybody bought the argument that, oh, it's just too hard. I mean, these companies which know everything about us,

these companies which can create an ad market where thousands of companies will bid to place an advertisement on your screen in the millisecond after you click a link, these companies that can do that, they're not going to be able to figure out how to check ages. And there are already so many companies, third-party vendors, that have age verification solutions. So the argument that is going to require a government regulator, well, I mean, yeah, you have to have some office that's verifying that the companies are doing this. And in Australia, it's the e-safety commissioner.

I mean, what does it say to you that Australia is kind of leading the charge here? Well, Australia has a functioning democracy, which America, in my view, doesn't really. We don't have a system for translating the overwhelming will of the people into law. And in Australia, what happened was the wife of the premier. of South Australia. So Peter Malinouskas is the premier. And his wife was reading the anxious generation in bed. And she turned to him and said, Peter, you have to read this book. And then you've got to effing do something about it. No way. Yeah, that's how it started. In 2024, the Albanese government set up a parliamentary committee to examine the impacts of social media. It stopped short of recommending a total ban, but the government decided to push ahead anyway. And the new law passed with bipartisan support. Here's Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese,

He was explaining his reasoning. I want to see kids off their devices and onto the footy fields and the swimming pools and the tennis courts. We want them to have real experiences with real people because we know that social media is causing social harm. This is a scourge. And he did. So Albanese just stood up and said, damn it, we're going to do it nationwide. And he did. They got it.

They enacted it. And it took effect on December 10th. And the most amazing thing has happened since December 10th, which is all of a sudden, in January, about six or seven countries have already declared that they're going to do it. And my prediction is that at least another 10 are going to in this calendar year, possibly including the entire EU. And the reason I believe is that when the Australia bill took effect on December 10th, there was a lot of news coverage around the world. In Asia, Latin America, everywhere, there was a lot of interest. And a lot of the news coverage included journalists or parents saying, why can't we do that here? Hey, we should do that here.

I think the tipping point happened right after December 10th. And that's why in January we saw so many countries saying, damn it, we're doing it. Yeah. And I mean, I will say there's lots of signals that some kind of legislation is coming from our government here in Canada, too, that it's going to be tabled. The other thing that I wanted to ask you about is this lawsuit in California. Oh, yes. Let's talk about that. Yeah, yeah.

And this is one of many court cases that will be brought against social media companies this year. Met as Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Snap. And the plaintiffs argue that the companies deliberately made design choices that would make the platforms addictive to children to boost profits. And I think the hope here is that it would sidestep legal protections that prevent companies from being liable for content posted on platforms. Right. And, like, if courts accept the. argument that addiction by design is the harm, not user content. Like, how vulnerable does that make the entire social media business model? Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. So the key to understand is that

the U.S. Congress passed a law. It's called Section 230, the Communications Decency Act, that said that nobody can sue these companies for what they were shown. Nobody can sue them. The companies can't be responsible for what everybody posts. And the initial idea there was quite reasonable. But the courts have interpreted so broadly as to say that, If TikTok showed your daughter escalating videos on self-harm leading to suicide, and then she killed herself, they've interpreted Section 230 so broadly as to say that you can't sue them for anything. They have blanket protection. This time around, the lawyers, they've made the kind of obvious common sense argument

that while the company's not liable for what Joe Schmo posted, they sure as hell are liable for the design features of their product. if they designed it for addiction, if they knew that it was addictive, if they knew that kids were going into rabbit holes and then sometimes killing themselves, of course they're liable for that. And did they know it? Of course they knew it. Let me read you some quotes from inside meta. Here's a discussion. This is from school district v. Meta, so a lot of school district are suing. So here's a discussion among two meta researchers. It seems clear from what's presented here in a report that they were discussing that some of our users, that some of our users, are addicted to our products.

And I worry that driving sessions incentivizes us to make our product more addictive without providing much more value. How to keep someone returning over and over to the same behavior each day? Intermittent rewards are most effective. Think slot machines.

So it goes on. But the point is, they designed it to be addictive. They were incentivized. They got extra bonuses. If they increased engagement, they did their own experiments. If listeners go to Meta's internal research.org. My team has collected 31 studies that Meta did that we know about from all the leaks and

the documents and discovery. So there's a huge amount of evidence from meta itself, from the experiments that they did, from the surveys of users that they did, and from their discussion about these surveys, that they knew it was addictive, they took steps to maximize engagement, they were in a war with TikTok, they had to get kids faster than TikTok. And so they knew what they were doing, and they did it anyway. And that, I think, I'm not a lawyer, but I think that seems to me like mens rea, you know, criminal mind. Like they, they did it deliberately and knowingly. And just finally, what do you think a ruling in line with the plaintiffs could do here? So so far, these companies have been completely immune to public pressure,

public shaming, all of that. The only thing that they've ever responded to is the threat of legislation, and if I'm right that they have literally harmed or diminished hundreds of millions of children, meaning most of the world's children, born since 1995, then the liability here is beyond imagination. So these can't all be combined into a giant class action suit, unfortunately, because each one is different. So it's going to be thousands of suits. But these initial cases are called Bellwether cases, meaning they're going to go in front of a jury for, you know, one child, one family, one platform, and then the jury will decide questions of fact. And if these early cases go in the direction of the plaintiffs, if the jury say, yes, the companies are liable, then the

thousands of other cases will be settled out of court because meta will know that they're losing. They can't take, if they take these to court, they're going to keep losing. So this could be, I haven't calculated, I don't know what the liability is, but I would imagine it's high. hundreds of billions of dollars. I feel like a good note for us to end today. Jonathan Haidt, thank you so much for this. It's been really great having you on. Well, thank you.

My pleasure. And go Canada. Please do what the U.S. seems unable to do. All right. That's all for today. I'm J.B. Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.

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