Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Is Social Media Destroying Kids’ Lives? + Elon’s Secret X Account

Episode Date: April 11, 2024

A moral panic has been emerging lately. People in the media, government, and across the internet are declaring that children are suffering an unprecedented mental health crisis and that smartphones and social media are to blame. But is this true?Taylor Lorenz talks to longtime researcher and author Danah Boyd about some of the problems that young people today are facing, why quick fixes like banning social media apps are never the answer, and what we can actually do to help the younger generation.Plus, Taylor weighs in on her latest profile of RFK Jr’s new social media guru, Elon Musk’s secret burner account, why X might get banned in Brazil, a huge investment into the YouTubers Dude Perfect, and why a Chinese glycine factory is going viral on TikTok. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week, Elon Musk has been secretly tweeting as his toddler, the 25-year-old behind RFK Jr's TikTok success. And our main topic, does banning social media and smartphones actually help children? I'm Taylor Lorenz, and that's all coming up right now on Power User. A moral panic has been emerging lately. People in the media, government, and across the internet are declaring the young people are suffering a national mental health crisis and that smartphones and social media are to blame. In response, lawmakers have sought to take unprecedented steps to restrict kids' access to social media and the internet.

State laws in Utah and Florida have sought to raise the age of social media use. TikTok is on the verge of being banned, and the Kids' Online Safety Act would put intense restrictions on how kids can express themselves and connect online. Much of this panic has been driven by an academic named Jonathan Haidt, and we'll get into that later. But hate aside, it's clear that people are worried about the children. Unfortunately, many of these proposed solutions like federally restricting young people's access to social media or taking away everyone's phones until they turn 16 or 18 are unlikely to help. My guest today, Dana Boyd, would know. She spent 12 years studying young people and social media.

She literally wrote the book on it called It's Complicated. And she's a founding board member of Crisis Text Line, a nonprofit that provides free and confidential text-based mental health support to kids in crisis. We're going to talk about some of the problems that young people are facing today, why quick fixes like banning social media apps are never the answer, and what we can do to actually help the younger generation. Hi, Dana. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. So it feels like everywhere you look these days in the media,

there's this panic about kids in technology. There's a lot of fear that social media is turning kids into sort of anxious, suicidal zombies. Where do you think these fears are coming from? And why is this panic cropping up now? Yeah. It's always, they keep popping up. It's this constant flow of new moral panics around young people and it has decades behind it. This particular one is coming from a set of forces that came together at the same time. One, young people were home in new ways during COVID, which meant parents were much more attentive to certain things that were happening in young people's lives for better and for worse.

And then mixed with that, when young people went back to schooling, it didn't go as well as people hoped. coming out of the pandemic, people really wanted to go back to normal. They wanted to feel like their kids were going to be back in school and everything was going to be great. And that's not what happened. For a lot of young people, they were really struggling. And all of the data is making it clear. There's a mental health crisis going on. And so people want an explanation.

They want the quick, easy thing that they could possibly say. And they see their kids on their phones. And they see their kids using social media. And they're like, that must be the reason that they're not doing so well. Yeah, I want to talk about the pandemic because I think there's all these fears around too much screen time. But then, you know, at the same time, bullying and suicide rates for kids actually went down during the start of the pandemic when kids were spending more time on screens than ever. What does this tell us and what role does the pandemic play in all of this? Right. So the pandemic ended up being a strange and awful natural experiment on a lot of different things.

And one of the most striking to me was around bullying. And unfortunately, I never found a U.S. researcher who, who collected the data in the U.S., but there was a bunch of research that happened in Europe. And what people kept seeing was that the rates of bullying just dropped precipitously when people were spending maximal time online. And when they were trying to unpack what was going on, what they were realizing was that most of what we call online bullying for young people is an extension of what was happening in school. And so they didn't go to school. They didn't have to interact with those people. And all of a sudden, a lot of the pressure that they faced from their peers sort of let up. And the place where we saw this in the United States, sort of coming back home, was that when, you know, return to school happened, we saw a lot of vulnerable and marginalized youth being like, I don't want to go back. I'm not interested. And a lot of why they said they didn't want to go back was because school is not always the most pleasant place for young people. Yeah. No, of course. Totally makes sense. At the same time, as you mentioned, there is this undeniable mental health crisis that seems to be unfolding among young people. And of course, it's not just among young people. It's also about

among adults. And this mental health crisis seems to coincide with the rise of smartphones and social media. I mean, there's plenty of articles with all of this data that will sort of show these correlations. How can we be so sure that it's not social media causing this mental health crisis among this younger generation? So let's tease this apart, because there are places in which you have clear undeniable causality. And I want to identify these first. And this is work that's been done over a much long period of time. So when a young person, or really anybody, is already in a state of mental duress,

a state of autonomy, a state of like really not coping with things, especially if they're in a state where they're thinking about suicide, if you expose them to media that sort of says, it's okay if you die by suicide, or sort of pushes them in any way to think that they could justify this, the rates of suicide amongst those vulnerable youth go way up. Now, the thing that's interesting is that we've been watching, this for 50 years at this point.

And it's one of the reasons why journalists are often cautioned against putting suicide into the headlines. Because there's a lot of things we see spikes. Whenever a celebrity dies by suicide, the spike of copycats is huge. The same is true with TV shows like 13 reasons why. That show was costly.

It costs young people's lives in a significant way. So if you think about the internet as being filled with all sorts of other media, that you can be exposed to. If you're in a vulnerable place, absolutely. This can be a very toxic dynamic. There is no question about that. But that doesn't explain all of what's going on. And it's not just, you know, when young people are in a bad place, are they going to the internet? They're going to the internet all the time everywhere for all sorts of different reasons, using their phones, using social media, using gaming, etc. So then we have to say, okay, that doesn't

make sense because if they're all using it all the time, you know, when we start to do weird measures of rates, it just gets a little murky. Like YouTube, great, you're listening to music while you're doing your homework or not doing your homework. That's not a meaningful signal. Instead, I want to think about it ecologically. What else is going on, right? Mental health is never just one thing.

And, you know, I've had the privilege over, you know, 10 years to be a founding board member of a mental health organization called Crisis Text Line. And I endure the organization because they're really helping people who are absolutely in an acute crisis. But it's also given me the ability to watch certain kinds of trends unfold over time and see some of these patterns over literally this last decade. And what is really notable to me, you know, and this is U.S. data, is really notable, is just the emergent feeling of hopelessness about the future. And it comes in many different forms. It's like, you know, climate change. Climate anxiety is huge. And there's, you know, international work.

showing that climate anxiety is happening globally. There's feelings of precarity, right? Like, what is my future possibility? And this is always this weird one because we're like, oh, the economics look fine or the economics go up and down. But the feeling of precarity, that feeling that you don't know if you're going to have an opportunity or how much debt you're going to go into to have that opportunity,

that is not necessarily always tied to these, you know, economic measures. And that feeling of precarity is global. Another big thing that's changed over the past decade, along with the rise of social media and smartphones, is that young people have fewer non-custodial adults to turn to for help. So what role does that shift play in this new sort of anxiety that this younger generation is feeling? When young people don't have access to non-custodial adults, the pastors, the coaches, the mentors, the aunties, they don't have a separate extra eyes looking out and being like, you're doing okay? check in with you, let's go get ice cream, right? Like various versions of that kind of check in, but they're also missing the people that they can turn to where they're like, hey, I'm not doing good because a lot of times it's not your parents that you turn to when you're in a crisis.

And that was on a decline for years. And then it became acute during the pandemic, right, which is that you were stuck at home with your parents and maybe your siblings. And the thing is that when they've come back, what we find is that those relationships aren't actually being reformed. And so certainly when we're, you know, with crisis text line, when they're trying to de-escalate someone who's in the middle of a suicide attempt, part of that process is being like, who can you turn to? And the scary thing is how many of them say no one, right? That's what should make us all worried. There's a lot of discussion about this shift from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood. And the phone in these situation is always referred to as the culprit. Everybody's not

playing outside anymore because they're just sitting at home on their phone. They're not going to the movie theater anymore because they can just watch everything on Netflix on their phone. But what are some of the underlying reasons why many parents are restricting kids from maybe access to public spaces? Or are there any other explanations other than phones as to why people might be spending less time in third spaces? Yeah. And I think it's important to realize the directionality of this, which is that young people can't get access to the public spaces. So they're trying to find sociality anywhere and the technology is the thing that they have access to. So we have to ask, why are they not being able to access those public spaces? This is fear, is the dominant reason.

And that fear for the longest time really took on the form, especially in suburban, you know, and particularly white culture of just like stranger danger and all of these fears of like terrible things that could happen. But they also started to progressively have other layers into them. And the stuff that's most heartbreaking to me has to do with guns. You mentioned movie theaters. I can't tell you how many parents won't let their kids go to a movie theater because of the mass shootings that have happened in movie theaters. And they spend the whole time anxious themselves. They can't imagine leaving their kid in this space. You see kids not being able to go to festivals of any form, like or, you know, parades because of that anxiety.

But perhaps the thing that was most shocking to me from over the last decade is listening to the parents of black and brown kids talk about Trayvon Martin and talk about how they feel safer having their kids stay at home and talking to their friends on their phone, then possibly going out, certainly after Dart. And I just keep coming back to those PSAs that I grew up with. It's 10 o'clock. Do you know where your child is? And it was always like, that doesn't exist. And young people are so heavily structured.

They don't have a lot of that freedom and flexibility. There's not a norm. And this is a collective issue, right? If you're that one weird parent that lets your kids run out and to play on the street, everybody else is like, ah, but your kids are like, I have nobody else to play with. At the same time, so much conversation around teens and the internet frames social media as this inherently negative bad thing that we want to restrict as much as possible. And thinking of those images of kids on their phones themselves, right? So I guess it seems like it's kind of a mixed bag because you can use social media healthfully. You can use it unhealthily.

A lot of people argue, well, there's no real way to ensure. that people are having healthy usage of social media. So why not raise the minimum age to use the internet or social media rather? You know, I know there's been some state legislation seeking to raise the age from 13 to 16 or 18 even. And many pundits out there say, this is a no-brainer. What are your thoughts on these efforts to restrict social media use until the age of 16 or 18 and just say, you know what, we don't know if they're using it correctly and we don't want to do any harm, so why not bump up that age? So in all of the different uses, there can be good and bad uses.

That's also true in public life, right? Going into public life isn't always wonderful. And when I think about where young people complain about parental dress, it's like school, you imagine blocking young people's access to school until they're 16 or 18? No. You build resilience. That is part of the process of parenting is to help a child, develop skills to exist in the world. And what that means as a parent is that you think thoughtfully

about how to socialize children through the ages. And I think there's some really interesting comparisons we can make in the U.S. Right. One of the most classic is the laws that we built to restrict access to alcohol until kids are 21. This is not ending well, right? You know, maybe they get through high school without drinking. Maybe. And then college turns into a very expensive party, right? Because they haven't been socialized into a process. And this is where we see such a difference in the U.S. versus Sague Europe, right? Where young people are socialized. It's not a process of like you're getting drunk at six, right? Like there's a socialization process. And the same is true with a lot of different aspects of things we call the internet. The internet is many

different things. And so one of the things I'm struck by when we get into these modes of like legislation and blockage. One, it's very strange to me. Like again, we're in these, like hyper parental control modes. We're like, okay, we're going to block it. And I'm like, how are you going to socialize a person into this? You want them to go to college with no experience doing this? But you're also taking away some of the other things that are really beneficial, right? The ways of interacting with their peers, the ways of learning about the public space.

And you're also, at the same time, you know, for me, when I think about like vulnerable youth, you're taking away their opportunities for a lifeline, right? Which is that so many youth I know, like I talk to you, like they use it together. get help. And so I'm struck by how strange this is that we're going to restrict that rather than thinking about how to build resilience, right? And I want to build resilience with young people, right? Like they need to develop empathy and resilience. But ironically, we're also creating laws that outlaw the school programs to do empathy and resilience. So it's like, what, are we just trying to create maximum control of young people? And why?

Speaking of these comparisons to alcohol, you know, you also hear pundits, especially compare social media to cigarettes, right, or these vices and say, well, we restricted those. We ignored the harms of those for years and we let them spread. You know, what do you think about those comparisons? And is that an accurate framing to talk about social media? So this is the addiction framing, and it's interesting because we've gone with the addiction framing for every form of media throughout history. And I think it's interesting to unpack some of the older ones because they're really interesting. My favorite is the work of Mahai Chicks in Mahi, who was looking at television. And he was really interested in how when we went to really fast shutter changes, think MTV, you actually see this sort of depression in the body and you end up processing food at a rate slower than. sleep while staring at the TV. That's fascinating. That is a biological response to all of this. You know, is the right answer to say, we're going to block young people from TV? I couldn't imagine that point being pulled off. But at the same time, like, how do you actually build your understanding

of your own relationship to this? And that's where it comes to young people. Like, this is not cigarettes. This is not that kind of a chemical thing where you need more of it. You are addicted to sociology. You're addicted to these opportunities to interact with other people. And of course, when you're exhausted and tired, you just want to be entertained, whether it's TV or TikTok. So the question is then, how do you actually build the capacities to respond to that desire for more, more, more? There's a lot of complaints about the auto play, right? Which I think that's reasonable. Require non-autoplay on all of these video content.

I don't object to that. That's for commercial interest and that's to keep you going. If you want to do that, that's an acute intervention that I have. No problem with. I would not target it specifically to children. And maybe you want to let it be override. But those are very different interventions than like, I want to block young people and then suddenly they're going to wake up one day and be able to use these things. How do we make sure that young people have a healthy relationship with the media of their day? Yes, I love that. Just the keyword media of their day, because like you said, it changes so much. You know,

there's this one book that I'm thinking of that's been getting so much attention lately called the Anxious Generation written by this man, Jonathan Haight, who is an academic himself. I've certainly been hearing a lot about this in my own coverage. And I worry that, you know, his book and on some of the claims that he makes about this are kind of leading to some negative consequences, unintended negative consequences. Have you heard of this? And what is your reaction to sort of a lot of the stuff he puts forth? Yeah.

He generally centers technology as the greatest cause of all the problems of young people, which, as we've discussed, I think is not accurate. And I think that part of it is that when it comes to selling a book, parents are anxious. They are not sure what to do. So it's a really successful thing as it feeds into parents' anxieties. But it doesn't, again, it doesn't send her what young people are going through as a collective. And it doesn't give them the tools to actually focus on the struggles they're facing. I keep coming back to the ways in which technology makes visible the things that are happening.

in the world, right? And when young people are struggling, you can see it online. And many of the interventions that I want are not about blocking the things that make them visible, but actually finding ways to help them. And so one of the parallels I think back to is, you know, there used to be these street outreach programs, like when people were struggling with addiction and they were on the street, clean needle programs. And the thing about those street outreach programs, it was like, I see you, I hear you, I know you're in pain. Here's something to get through the night, and here are services that can actually help you. I want a digital street outreach program, right?

Because these kids, there's so many that are crying out for help. We know the numbers are huge. But these moments where the policy intervention or the parenting intervention is just cut it all off, I am so worried that this is just a recipe for disaster, something that will actually do more harm, especially to already vulnerable youth, then it will actually help young people.

And I understand why it feels like a quick and easy solution for folks, but I don't think it will get us there. And I worry that the arguments he's making are going to put young, especially vulnerable young people in a worse place. Absolutely. I think the quick fix is never the answer for almost any complicated issue. I also really worry about some of the commentary he and other lawmakers even have made in regards to these issues. You know, you heard Marcia Blackburn saying essentially that kids are being poisoned by these cell phones into the transgender lifestyle. I know Jonathan Haight recently said on PBS

that social media can lead to gender dysphoria among young women, and especially as somebody that covers a lot to do with LGBTQ rights and the internet and stuff, these raise alarm bells for me because I think, well, what is the real underlying motivation here? And why are we sort of conflating young people sort of expressing an increasingly wide gender identity

with social media and cell phones? You know, for young people, especially when it comes to gender, young people struggle with gender for history. They don't have a lot more language. They have a lot more flexibility to talk, to experiment, to process, to make sense of how they want to express themselves, how they want to live in this world. There's no doubt that network technologies and media that allow you to, you know, see the world as a whole, expose you to many different ways of living and being that may not be like what you're growing up. And I will say as a queer teen growing up in rural Pennsylvania, that was my lifeline, right? The internet was, and I say it over and over again, it was the thing that kept me alive in those darkest of days.

And because random people on the internet were so willing to talk to me and tell me that, like, I am an okay human being and I can grow and I can learn and I can see a bigger world. And I am, you know, I'll never know who these people are, but I am so grateful to these anonymous. strangers for frankly holding me in dark nights. And it's part of why I've been committed to finding other ways of supporting young people when they themselves aren't doing well. Yeah. I think you're so right about this sort of like regressive and vaguely authoritarian kind of underbelly to this moral panic around this issue because it is used to push quite regressive policies that are scary. And there's a reason why you have all of these major LGBTQ groups coming out as well against these restrictions like the ones we've saw in Florida and Utah and stuff.

I also find it a little ironic that the answer is to coddle a child. I'm not sure I understand that. I guess I'm wondering, you know, these narratives are so pervasive and I think they're so compelling, especially to parents, because so many parents feel like, well, look, my kid is addicted to the phone or I can't get them to pay attention. But at the same time, so I understand why these things take hold, but how can we kind of have more nuanced conversations about this and fight against kind of maybe some of these overly simplistic answers that it's the cell phones that are causing this depressed generation? Because I think it's really hard to combat. I think that that is a very, like, easy answer, right, to this far more complex problem. So I think, I've been working on

this for decades. I don't know. It's complicated. Yeah. I mean, I think. I think. I think. It is a compelling narrative because it allows you to think as a parent, like, oh, it's not me or choices I'm making. It's this thing that has reached out and affected my child. And that's reassuring in some ways because, you know, we don't get a manual as parents, right, on how to parent. And so you're experimenting, you're trying things out. Something's go really badly as a parent. You're like, I thought that would be helpful. It was not, right?

And so even when it comes to, you know, devices, I think parents feel like they're at which ends because they don't know how to deal with it. Because part of it is they've introduced those devices usually when children are pretty young as a way of getting a break for themselves, right? Let's be honest. That's why parents give their kids a device, right? Stop screaming here. Right. And they've set in motion a set of norms and expectations that I think, you know, we compare it to cigarettes, but I think it's better to compare it to. sugar, right? Which is like, of course you can get a state of obesity out of this, right?

You can, if you're constantly consuming and that's what you're patterning to, that is an unhealthy practice. And as a parent, I think part of it is how do we help our children develop healthy practices to a complex world? And that is the hard work of parenting. And it's especially hard in the United States where we don't make this into a village. We make this all up to you individually. I mean, I know you were comparing it to sugar. I would just compare it to food. in the sense that, like, you can use social media to have that salad or, like, eat, you know, eat healthy and, like, use it in a really positive way. I mean, I've got, was sick recently. And, like, it was just such a lifeline, right? To, like, be able to chat with people and FaceTime into my

friend's party that I couldn't go to, right? Or you can have those sugary moments where you're just maybe watching TikTok and sort of just having pure fun, right? But it's about sort of striking that balance. And it's true for adults and kids. You know, I remember. Again, we'll go with 1980s PSAs. I learned it from watching you, Dad, which is that young people are always complaining about their parents' uses of phones. That is actually really intense. And so whenever I hear a parent complaining about the use of phone,

I'm like, create a household contract, right? The rules for everyone in the house and co-construct it with your kids. And I can guarantee you that the first thing they're going to put on there is no phones at the dinner table or some version of this. No phones at my game, because you're not actually working. watching me. You've showed up, but you're not really there. They are so aware of this. And if there are listeners out there with really small children, one of the things I encourage them to do is vocalize every time you pick up the device. I'm picking up the phone so that I can

look up directions to where we're going. I'm picking up the phone so I can call your other parent. I'm picking up the phone so that I can research this question you had. I'm picking up the phone because I'm doom scrolling because I don't want to actually talk to you. You're not going to do that. So it's a way of checking yourself as well. And so this is for me is like, you know, I'm frustrated to listen to parents do this when I watch them doing this all day and I'm like, what do you think your kids are doing? Yeah. I think part of this we're projecting on to kids our own anxieties is about our inability to cope with ourselves. Not to mention the feelings that our kids might not always like us. Yes. And I think it's so funny that you're hearing. I was talking to some teenagers

yesterday on my meme page about this exact issue because they were like the older people. people are having this panic. Like, I think, yes, younger people feel these stresses and it's hard to navigate young life and they're having a mental health crisis. But this particular sort of manifestation of, oh my God, the screen time or the whatever, like, it's very driven by, I hate to say it, but people over the age of 40 or 50 or whatever, not, you know, everyone. But I think the most sort of vocal pundits about this are not Gen Zers, just the way that the most vocal people about us freaking out about watching hours of MTV and I watched hours of MTV. And I watched hours sometimes. Like, it was a lot of parents, you know. So I want to talk a little bit more about

sort of like what we can do, right? Because I think these simplistic answers that these people write books on and do podcasts on and kind of give in the media of like, well, just eliminate the phones, eliminate social media, it'll solve it all. What kind of help our kids asking for? And how, what can we do to kind of solve this mental health crisis? Yeah. So I think one of the most startling things that I found in crisis, we've been in crisis. text line. They've done a lot of research, sort of asking young people what helps them when they're in a crisis? And overwhelmingly, you know, the answer is, I need to have access to other people, people that are trusted that I can turn to that are loving. So this is the thing as a parent.

My biggest advice to you as a parent is build a robust adult network for your child, right? All of those aunties, all of those people that they can turn to, get into the habit of your kids having other adults that they spend time with one-on-one from a young age. That is something like every adult could do to build those relationships because it is going to be those aunties that the kids are going to turn to. That is an easy first step. Another really critical thing for me has to do with mental health services. Young people don't have access to them.

So we need universal mental health access, right? And that's where you can think about the policy components of it all. You know, again, back to the parenting level, what does it mean to start norms setting and start building structures in place. The educational level, we need resilience to be a central part of schooling. Resilience building, empathy building. These are things that one can learn and one can develop their muscles. Those are things that educators do, and so can parents. So there's a lot of interventions. It's just that, again, if we center the child and their well-being as a whole, the interventions look very different than if we center the technology. Well, I can't thank you enough for a

chatting with us today. Dana, thank you so much. And where can people follow your work? Thank you for having me. So I am on most socials. Either with my name, D-A-N-A-H, G-A-N-A-H-Lassim Boyd or Z-E-P-H-E-P-H-O-R-I-A. And, you know, you can search my name and there's websites and lots of posts. There's even a book. So, but reach out. I mean, this is a complex issue. And I'm always glad to talk to people about it. Yes, I cannot recommend your writing on all these issues more. I feel like you're just the person that I know that's been studying these issues the longest. So I really appreciate your time.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. When we come back, we'll be talking about Elon Musk secretly tweeting us his toddler and more news from the week. Hi, welcome back to Power User. I'm here with my showrunner, Zach Mack. And we're going to run through some headlines for the week. Taylor, you had a story come out this week about RFK and TikTok. Yeah. Yeah, so I profiled Link Lauren, who's the 25-year-old Gen Z content creator that RFK Jr. has hired as his senior strategist on the campaign.

He's kind of the mastermind behind RFK Jr's massive digital presence, especially on platforms like TikTok, where RFK is soaring. He's getting millions of views. He has 1.2 million followers. Bobby, what's the first thing you do in office to overhaul the pharmaceutical industry and send a message for positive change? The first thing I'm going to do, day one is, and assign an executive order getting all of the pharmaceutical advertisements off of television. Okay.

Link Lauren is a recent NYU grad. He studied entertainment and music in college, and he's really made a name for himself as a political influencer lately. He's collaborated with tons of long-shot presidential candidates. So first, he did an interview with Marianne Williamson. He made a video with Dean Phillips back when Dean was challenging Biden for the Democratic nomination.

Then he did a bunch of collaborations with Vivek Ramis Farmy. Now he's officially working for RFK Jr. and supercharging his internet presence. I don't care who you voted for. I want everyone to get involved in the political process. If you have a camera phone and a Wi-Fi connection, your voice is just as valid as all these mainstream media stations. Did you get a sense of his politics at all?

You know, he's super anti-establishment. I talked to Olivia Newsie, colleague at New York Magazine, and she was saying, you know, he really represents this kind of sentiment among young people where he doesn't really identify as a Republican or Democrat. at. Although when I asked him who some of his heroes are and who he looks up to, he did name a bunch of conservative media figures like Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald. But he's, I wouldn't necessarily call him a full on like Trump conservative. That's not to say that he couldn't go down

that path. But he's, you know, he really wants to kind of walk that line. He's very critical of Biden, but he's also sometimes critical of the Republicans. He's young, he's talented. He's obviously doing a great job for RFK. Like, what would you say his, his gift is? This quote got cut for my piece, and I'm kind of bummed because I think it really articulates what his superpower is, which is that he's really good at speaking to specific political segments without giving messages that are necessarily coded right or left. So he has that kind of like, I don't want to say plausible deniability, but he's able to kind

of like mainstream some of RFK's views to younger people, but without pushing maybe some of his more extreme positions or coming off as specifically partisan. And I think being able to position yourself as an outsider and not behold into one of the vain, you know, corporate political parties, it really does appeal to young people. I feel like every young person I talk to was just so out on politics and so out on the idea of like Republican Democrat, you know? Well, because we've been sold this nonsense system for too long. And I think as a lot of people are beginning to see, both of these powers have inordinate level of corporate interests sort of swaying them, right? And I think people are sick of that and they want more options, which is totally legitimate.

That's why I think a lot of young people support things like ranked choice voting and alternatives to this duopoly that we have right now in the political world. Did you get a sense of like what he's ultimately after where this is all going after the campaign? Yeah, he really just wants to be in politics. He said he's this political nerd. He's loved the political process since he was young. He's considering a run for himself, maybe in a district in Texas. I think he's just going to be around for a while. He's super well connected.

He's like in with Megan McCain, Kelly Ann Conway, a lot of big political figures on the right. Obviously, he's sort of developed a lot of connections in the media. So I don't think we're going to see the last of Link Lauren. I think RFK Jr's campaign is more of a stepping stone for him. All right. Well, I'm terrified. So. Elon Musk is in big trouble in Brazil this week.

A Brazilian Supreme Court judge opened an inquiry into him after he said that he would reactivate a bunch of accounts on X that the judge had previously ordered to be blocked. A lot of these profiles were tied to extreme far-right accounts and were affiliated with their version of January 6th, which was January 8th when there was an insurrection in that country as well. Anyway, Elon said that this order was unconstitutional. He called for the judge to resign or be impeached. I think this shows that Elon Musk really has no problem submitting to censorship requests from foreign governments,

as long as their politics align with his. But the minute that the politics of that government are out of step with his, he's suddenly ready to die on a cross. Elon recently failed to support a Saudi man with just eight followers on Twitter who was sentenced to death for retweeting posts that were critical of the government. He's also remained totally silent when Indian Prime Minister Modi banned all links to a BBC documentary that was critical of him. So this is very like free speech for me, but not. for thee. Yeah, this is always his MO. He is a free speech absolutist when it is convenient for him. You notice he never really has much to say about China because China is very important to Tesla. So he'll never talk about China. Yeah, he'll never talk about anything that threatens his business

interests or that doesn't sort of help him politically. And he clearly has an agenda. He doesn't like Brazil's more progressive government. And so, you know, now he's putting up this fight, which could ultimately result in the app getting banned in the country of Brazil. which would be a huge problem. That's a major market. It would be a huge problem for Twitter. It would be a huge problem for X. I mean, getting banned in a country as big as Brazil is not good.

Also, as we know, Brazil has heavy Internet use. They're huge social media users. Do they use Twitter much? Yeah, people in Brazil really do use Twitter, especially fan accounts. It's a very celebrity-driven culture. It's a huge market, and they do have tens of millions of users. Yeah, so that's important to him. Speaking of Elon Musk and X, it came out this week in a deposition that Elon Musk has actually been secretly running a Twitter account pretending to be his toddler son.

The post from this account are so creepy. He was posting things like I like Japanese girls and I wish I was old enough to go to nightclubs. He was responding to really thirsty, strange posts. You know, Taylor, in the kink community, this is called age play. And I'm not here to kinkshame. You know, if he wants to get his rocks off by pretending he's a toddler online, that's his right. I just want to know how many, I mean, I think it came out that he has at least two burner accounts, and I know he claimed these are just for testing, although he was posting from at least one of them.

I bet you he has more. I swear, like, he's so Twitter addicted or ex-addicted. I think this man has many. Yeah, this happens. You see powerful people getting caught up with burner accounts all the time. Famously, when I was working at the ringer, they revealed that. the president of the 76ers basketball team had a burner account and he was like tweeting all this crazy stuff about, you know, about the team and all the secret stuff. And they revealed that

he or his wife was behind it and he had to step down. Just, you know, if you're a powerful person, maybe don't have a burner account. They have to. They want to weigh in. I think powerful people want to be part of the discourse and they want to weigh in so badly, but they want this like plausible deniability. Ironically, Elon weighs in all the time from his main account. I think he's just a creepo lurker and wants to, you know, like, yeah, just wanted to like... Right. He does seem fairly unafraid to say wild shit from on Maine, you know? Yeah. It's like no one censoring his main stuff. He's posting enough crazy things. But I would be interested to see this baby's following list and... But he deleted it. It was deleted shortly after all of

this came out. But thanks to the internet archive, those posts will live forever. The thing, though, is he's sort of hiding in plain sight. He's posing as his infant child who is too young to be using Twitter. Yeah, exactly. So he's not even like taking that much of an identity leap. He's just posing as a younger musk. I think it's really weird for any parent to start a social media account with, you know, under the guise of being your child. I've seen those Instagram accounts where they post as if it's the baby. A lot of people do this with their pets. Like a lot of people post, you know, in the first person as their pet. Yeah. That's also really weird. Just posts on Maine of whatever you want to say. Well, speaking of Twitter again, there is now another Twitter competitor. It's an app called Lyric,

and it looks and functions almost exactly like Twitter. It's technically built on activity pub, so it should synchronize with apps like Macedon and theoretically threads. But what sets this app apart is that they really want journalists on there, which is incredibly rare for tech platform these days. They say that they actually want to focus on news and real-time events. And that's just very different than all of these other platforms, which have been moving far away from real-time events and media. I think any tech company or social media

that wants to emphasize news and journalism and good information, that sounds great to me. But best of luck, there's really a million Twitter clones already. I don't think any of them are. particularly taking. It sounds like Threads is doing okay. Nobody's really using Blue Sky. I don't know what's going on on Mastodon.

We have a lot of these, so I don't know how well this is going to do. I think the format is just fundamentally dated. Although I love it, and I'm such a Twitter head. Same. I think text, I just truly believe that people don't want that

that information delivered in text. Like, they really want more immersive forms of media. which sucks as a writer. But, you know, I'll use it. I'm on it at Taylor Lorenz. I think, you know, sports is one thing and like live events, like award shows. That's when like these real-time networks really shine. So maybe they can cleave off NBA Twitter. They tried to make NBA threads happen and it's just simply not happening. So as an NBA fan, I have yet to use NBA threads, but I'm still on NBA Twitter because it's good. The playoffs are coming up.

Yeah. Everything on threads is like four days old. You can't follow games in real time. Okay, if you've been on TikTok at all in the last couple weeks, you've probably seen a lot of videos espousing the many benefits of Donghua Ginglong Glycine. It can promote muscle growth and repair, boosting immune function, lower cholesterol levels, and protect your nervous system. It's a food-grade glycine produced by Donghua Jean-Long.

So a few years ago, a bunch of Chinese factories got on TikTok and started promoting their goods and services to foreign markets. This whole phenomenon became known as factory talk, and as Louise Mitzikas notes, these videos are really compelling because they sort of offer this rare glimpse into the global supply chain, which we never see here in America. This company has specialized in the research and development of Glycin for over 40 years, all to provide you with the highest quality products, with over 40 years of research and manufacturing experience, strictly adhering to FCC-640 USB BPEJJJ-JPA production standards. So recently this factory Dong Hua Jin Long, I hope I'm saying that right, which is a Chinese factory about 200 miles outside Beijing and sells high quality industrial grade glycine tongue twister, which is actually this type of nutritional additive that's pretty common in processed food joined TikTok. God knows why they joined because I don't know what the market for industrial grade glycine is like on TikTok. But these videos seem so out of place in the for you page that they just quickly went super viral. We just got a big update on Dong Hua Jin Long's new second account. So they posted this to their stories last night and it's gone now, but we got an exclusive look into their packaging department for their industrial glycine.

So Taylor, why was this so interesting to you? Tell me why this one really captured your imagination. One, that it shows the sort of global nature of TikTok and how a Chinese factory outside Beijing can join the platform and just go microviral. Also, I think it speaks to the kind of like absurdity and, um, serendipitous nature of what succeeds on TikTok. It almost, it's like sort of this anti-social media where like things that you think would succeed, don't succeed.

And then the most random, absurd things are often made viral by people mocking them. And I just think it's interesting that like factory talk has been such a huge part of the platform. And there's so much concern over like Chinese influence on the youth and Congress freaking out about this stuff. Meanwhile, one of the biggest most viral memes on the app is this Chinese factory, which has no understanding or idea that it's viral. Like, they don't understand the comments that they're getting. They're like very confused.

They're like, do these people want the Glyacine? Like, what is happening? Like, people are standing them. Also, when you go down the whole of Chinese manufacturing TikTok, there's just so much lore and so many people involved. A lot of people have been making these fake sort of promotional videos for competitors. based on real direct competitors of Dongwa Jane Long, talking about things like, you know, the prices of this distributor. They've also been talking about the machinery and the factory.

Like, there's so much to learn about this world. And I think it's truly a peek into a world that most Americans will never see, but it's probably much more commonplace in China. And so it's like, it seems like this like strange alternate reality. Is there merch yet? Oh my God, no, but somebody needs to get on that. immediately. I actually I'm sure there is at this point. But if they don't drop a merch line immediately, I bet they could sell more Donghua Jean-Long merch than industrial grade Glycine

on the app. I just love how many times we've gotten you to say that. I'm not even going to attempt. I can barely pronounce it. I unfortunately have very bad pronunciation because I'm very dyslexic. I don't even know if I'm pronouncing my own name right half the time. Also, now we know what glycine is. I never knew what glycine is and now I'm noticing it. Same. The more you know. Oh, also like, I'll just end it by saying like, it's only a matter of time before we see a member of Congress having a meltdown on the house floor about how TikTok is forcing children to chug industrial grade glycine because that is where this will all end up. Dude Perfect, which is one of the biggest and most well-known sports channels on YouTube, just landed $100 million.

of investment. Their group of men that make up dude perfect initially got famous for their elaborate trick shot videos on YouTube, but they quickly expanded to become one of the most well-known sports brands on the internet. Now that they've gotten this money, they are taking their team of 25 employees based in Frisco, Texas, and blowing it out, expanding it, they want to become the new major sports brand across America. So they've landed major partnerships, including their own smoothie line at Smoothie King, a line of Nerf products, their own board games. They're a line. They're on board games. and they want to use this big influx of money to open retail stores, launch their own streaming platform,

introduce a line of toys and games in Walmart, and even build a $100 million theme park, which I think would be crazy. Damn. I think this really just shows how these YouTubers like Mr. Beast and others are taking the brands that they've built on YouTube and really using it to sort of launch these massive enterprises with retail space, theme parks.

I mean, they're true modern media companies. it's very like Disney-esque. The merch, the personalities, the lore, you know, like this rich history and this rich world and these endless product lines. There's also a 30 for 30 on Dude Perfect premiering at the Dallas Film Festival soon. They got a 30 for 30? Yeah, I'm in it, actually. Whoa.

Damn. I didn't know that. That's kind of crazy. I also feel like these YouTubers are often transforming the area in which they live in, right? You know, Mr. Beast, I feel like has done a lot in Greenville, Carolina. It also reminds me of the HD TV show that just transformed Waco, Texas. What are their names? Joanna and Chip Gaines.

Yes. And now they have their whole streaming network called Magnolia. So I totally agree. I think personality-driven media is obviously a huge thing. And that is kind of where these businesses seem to be growing most successfully. So this investment is significant. And I think we are going to be hearing a lot more about Dude Perfect. All right, Zach, thanks so much. That's our show for today.

This podcast is also on video. You can watch the full episodes on my YouTube channel at Taylor Lorenz. Power User is produced by Travis Larcuk and Jalani Carter. It's mixed and mastered by Brandon McFarland. Our video producer is Brandon Kiefer. Our executive producers are Zach Mack and Nashat Kerwa. Power User is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you like the show, give us a rating and review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen. We'll be back next week with another episode of Power User. See you then. Thank you.