Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - The Media Is Lying About the Social Media Addiction Trial: The Verdict Everyone Got Wrong

Episode Date: March 27, 2026

Everything you've been told about the "social media addiction" trial is wrong. Support my independent journalism:🙏 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/taylorlorenz        🗞️ Buy a paid subscription to my Substack: https://www.usermag.co       Everyone is celebrating the $400 million fine against Meta and Mark Zuckerberg, but it's a massive win for Big Tech. In this episode of Free Speech Friday, journalist Kat Tenbarge and I debunk a slew of misinformation about the landmark "social media addiction" trials in Los Angeles and New Mexico.The mainstream media is painting this as a victory for child safety, but the legal precedent being set is terrifying. From government agencies using real children's photos as "bait" to entrap predators, to the secret funding behind "grassroots" child safety groups, the reality is so, so much darker than the headlines suggest.We cover:How the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the repeal of Section 230 will lead to mass surveillance and censorship.The disturbing testimony from the LA trial that the media completely ignored.Why Big Tech is actually LOBBYING for age verification and identity tracking.The link between these lawsuits and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.If you care about the future of the open internet, free speech, and data privacy, please support my work! I will continue to cover how these laws will impact smaller platforms, LGBTQ content, and our basic right to access information.I also highly suggest this great piece by Mike Masnick on the trials!! Follow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz                      https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0                      https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz 

They are going to keep reintroducing it over and over and over again. There is so much money behind this, much of the money coming from big tech companies, and they will not stop. Hi, and welcome back to Free Speech Friday. This week, I have a little bit of a different type of episode. This is an emergency episode. This is a 911 emergency episode. Today, a major verdict came out in the big social media addiction trial in L.A. And there was also a big verdict in a trial against these social media platforms that happened in New Mexico.

this week. And I want to talk about both of these trials and what these verdicts mean because the mainstream media is flat out lying about it. This is some of the worst coverage I've ever seen. It's horrible. It's delusional. It's dangerous. So I want to like myth bust and really kind of like reframe I think the way people might have understood this issue. Because I think if you've been online at all this week, you've probably seen these headlines that are like meta held accountable, social media held accountable. Finally, you can blame Mark Zuckerberg, you know, for social media addiction. I've been actually at the courthouse covering this LA social media trial. I interviewed some of the parents today who were the parents of social media addicts, et cetera, et cetera. And I have

Kat Ten Barge here, author of Spitfire News, regular guest. And she's been sort of digging more into New Mexico, which I've also covered a little bit. So what came out this week? And what was that ruling about? And what did they ultimately rule? So in late 2023, the New Mexico Attorney General sued Mehta and Mark Zuckerberg for two things. Enabling sex trafficking and CSAM of children and also enabling mental health harms against children. And the complaint in this case, which we'll talk about more in a second, was like almost 250 pages long. It's this enormous document where they're throwing all of this stuff at the wall to see what will stick. And basically, it went to a jury trial over the past almost seven weeks.

The jury deliberated for almost a week. And then they came out today and they were basically fining meta almost $400 million, which is calculated at, a maximum penalty of $5,000 per child. So basically they're arguing that every child in New Mexico was harmed by Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. And so that's where the numbers behind this fine come out. Also, there's going to be like a part two to this where they talk about trying to implement age verification, which will also get into more. I think it's really important to explain to people how New Mexico conducted this investigation

because it's deranged. Basically, the New Mexico attorney general set up hundreds. I think, or if not dozens of fake accounts to lure child predators. Now, to do this, they used real children's photos. They stole real children's photos without permission, without consent, and they forever linked those photos to child predators. They served images of real children to child predators. They entrapped the child predators, and then they deleted all the evidence.

They didn't report any of these child predators. They shut it down. They were just like, oh, here, I baited a child predator on Instagram with a real child photo who did not consent to any of this. That child predator responded, and now I'm going to delete this and not report any of it to Instagram. We're going to sue them instead. It's crazy.

No, it's absolutely insane. And the very first decoy account they created was a fictional mother who was trafficking her fictional child. Like, that's the scenario they designed, which is completely deranged to begin with, that they were doing this. But under that pretense, what would age verification do to stop an adult woman from getting on Facebook and sex trafficking her child? It's completely nonsensical.

from the premise. So that is what's going on in New Mexico. Simultaneously, in Los Angeles, we have this social media addiction trial, this landmark trial that is kind of basically open the door for countless thousands of other trials like it. And you had this girl, Kaylee, also known as KGM, a 20-year-old girl, she's now 20, who I feel bad for this girl because she has had a tough life. Now, this is something you probably won't read in the media, but I can tell you as I was there to witness the testimony and it's so disturbing. She was abused by both of her parents. From the time that she was very young, she was neglected.

Her father abandoned her in fifth grade, moved out, I think, when she was three, abandoned her fully in fifth grade, basically blocked his own daughter. Her mother beat her emotionally and psychologically abused her for years, would say that she's fat, made her weigh herself daily. Truly psychologically tortured her daughter, hit her daughter in these really aggressive ways. Her daughter and her daughter's therapist actually testified to this abuse on the stand. It was gut wrenching. They played videos on Instagram because the daughter used Instagram to document the mother's

abuse. Kaylee KGM also suffered because her sister tried to take her own life, her sister who grew up in the same abusive household. Of course, Kaylee turns 18. Suddenly, as she's kicked out of the house, the mom kicks her out of the house, then the money comes in. Then these personal injury lawyer comes around and says, maybe your daughter was actually harmed by social media and you could make a lot of money.

Conveniently, this is when she reconciles with her mom. Her mom has allowed her to move back into the house. And now this girl is pursuing a career in social media management, ironically, which is crazy. But the argument was made is that, no, yeah, it wasn't the, you know, beatings from her mom or the endless psychological abuse or the fact that she was weighed and her mom would tell her that she was too fat. It was, you know, Instagram basically caused this. And that is what the jury found, again, that social media is addicting and all this stuff. And I went to the court today when this ruling came out and listened to the parents.

There's a bunch of other parents that are involved in this case as well that have children that are victims of social media. Some of these kids are just LGBTQ, by the way, I will note. And what the parents said is we want age verification. We want the Kids Online Safety Act and we want to repeal Section 230. And that is also the stated policy goals in New Mexico as well. It's also the repeal of Section 230 and identity verification online. So the way that this stuff has been covered in these news articles makes me want to lose my mind. Because it's right now, all day today, it's been seen as this huge win.

seen leftist celebrating it. I've only seen people celebrate it. I have not seen a single person call out the harms or implications of this besides Evan Greer, the founder of Fight for the Future, which was one of the only activism groups that opposes these types of bad tech bills. The first thing I saw about it was someone on blue sky, liberal leftist HQ being like huge win. Meta's fined $400 billion, which also by the way, like of course it sounds good to see meta Mark Zuckerberg lose money. But I'm like also that alone. does not mean much. They are a $1.5 trillion company.

Like they could pay off $400 million in their sleep. What really matters is that this sense a legal precedent where other tech companies and people and internet providers and web service providers and web pages could now be sued and be fined amounts of money that they would have to stop existing. So like meta is going to be fine. Mark Zuckerberg is going to be fine. The big tech people who these bills and court cases are supposedly holding accountable stand to benefit from this stuff because of age verification and the software that

they will be able to profit from. So like the framing this as a win against meta, all those like on its face that sure like they lost a lawsuit, but look at the bigger picture people. I feel like I took the the red pill in the matrix so I can see the I can see the truth but no one else can. No, I know it makes me it makes me crazy. I mean again as as I sat in the courtroom and and listen to this testimony, like one thing that people in both of these cases, because they know that they can't sue over content, they try to claim that it's about design. And so they try to push this idea,

and I'm sorry, people on my channel get so mad at me when I say that media addiction is not real. You cannot be addicted to consuming media and chatting with your friends online. I have something to tell them. So there's a group called Mothers Against Media Addiction, Mama. It is a pretty big group involved with a lot of these,

like grieving parents. And Julie Skelfo, the leader of Mama, I asked her, what does does media addiction mean? And she said to me, like, essentially, I don't know. Like, she was like, it's more of just like a concept. It's a concept of a plan. Right.

Well, it's a concept that's used to censor speech. Like, my issue is you know, you know for a fact that these laws are not about the design of product and it is about the content because if you replace every single piece of content on Instagram with a black square or a red square, right? That's it. There is no, there's just a red square. There's no content. Is that product addicting?

No, because it is nothing to do with the design. It is the design's ability to serve specific content. When you talk about this girl being harmed by, you know, eating disorder content, you're talking about the content. All of this is just an attempt to regulate content. And I think going after speech through this realm of claiming, you know, oh, addictive product or whatever, it goes to a very scary place, you know, and design choices themselves are a form of speech.

Like, as we know, moderation itself is a form of speech. We do want platforms to moderate. content. The thing is now they're just going to moderate it more heavily. So what these parents are arguing is like anything that the state, the government deems quote unquote harmful to minors, the New Mexico government, the Trump administration, et cetera, we need to block that content from people, you know, from anybody seeing it because we could suffer a lawsuit. What does this mean? Well, the Heritage Foundation, which has been played a huge role in these laws and Enco's, aka morality and media, who decided their role in the Los Angeles case and was

celebrating it today. They've said what this content is. It's LGBTQ. content. It's content criticizing billionaires. It's content criticizing capitalism, trans rights, it's feminist content. It's pro-choice content. I mean, who knows if this video, like, already my channel is getting censored to hell because I've been talking about this stuff so much. It's been crazy. But it's really scary. And that's the legal precedent these verdicts set. And it's really, really scary. And you know who else was celebrating today? So I'm on the email list for something called the Independent Women's Forum, which is an anti-trans group masquerading as a feminist group and they sent out an email blast today, seemingly, I think, unconnected to the lawsuit wins,

but obviously, like, predicated on the precedent that they have now ushered into reality. And they said they positioned this detransitioner as coming forward against Reddit for combining trans and grooming into, like, trans grooming subreddits. Like, basically all of these anti-trans, anti-LGBQ hate extremist groups are just gleeful about these lawsuits because now they have precedent to go after all of the platforms that provide LGBTQ content and resources. And they are going to do it with the framework that everybody already should be familiar with, which is that trans people and LGBTQ people are groomers wanting to groom your kids. What are these lawsuits about? People wanting to groom your kids.

They will use this precedent. They will use it to their advantage. Of course. Right. And we saw this even with like Fost and Sesta and like the way that played out. Like when you tell people, especially other liberals or leftists and you say well we should you know crack down on child predators on the internet you and i understand you know we have a shared definition of child predators the government and trump administration and marshal blackburn's definition of child predators or jonathan height probably another anti-trans bigot who's involved in these laws their definition is is gay people is lgbc people you know a gay a gay mentor messaging a younger LGBTQ person to provide support and gender affirming care obviously that content will be blocked and talk about people celebrating

Marsha Blackburn, the co-sponsor of COSA, the Kids Online Safety Act, who has said that it needs to pass to protect children from the transgender in society. Tweeted, today's verdict in the landmark social media case marks a monumental victory for parents and children who have had the door slammed in their face by big tech. It's time for Congress to enshrine protections for American families into law by passing COSA. You also had morality and media, aka NCOZ, gave a statement that said, this verdict shows the urgent need for Congress to pass the case. Kids Online Safety Act, the Senate version with the strong duty of care provision to ensure digital platforms are designed with child safety as a priority. They also touted their own role in getting this pass. I just want to shake people and wake up because I hear so much like, and I know I'm going to get hate for it in the comments and then like, again, of like people just being like, Taylor,

you're defending big tech by claiming that there's no such thing as social media addiction or whatever. I can't explain to them that like that, first of all, that's so stupid. What these people don't seem to understand is that meta and Google do not profit from free speech. Meta and Google do not profit from providing abortion content, you know, through their platforms. What they profit from is data harvesting. What will allow them to do more data harvesting, identity verification, something that meta itself has spent millions and millions and millions of dollars lobbying for. And you guys are falling for this dumb, big tech sciop where like somebody says the word big tech and you think like, oh, okay, they're on my side, I guess. And I want you Kat just really quickly to read this Instagram post.

for me that I think is revealing. Why does big tech try to block parents from protecting their children online? So this was posted again by the digital childhood alliance, one of these child safety groups that's involved in all of this stuff posting about big tech. Why does big tech block parents from protecting children, right? It's so addicting. Guess who funds the digital childhood alliance? I'm so excited to find out.

Meta. Meta funds them. And so it's like you guys are falling for propaganda. are under spells. Like, please. I think that these cases ultimately benefit meta in the long run in numerous ways, which is why they do not care about them, why it did not impact meta's stock price whatsoever. And it's so insidious to predicate this notion on the idea of cracking down on sexual predators of children at the exact same time. I mean, like, look at what's happening with the Epstein files right now. Like the government does not care about people abusing children, nor are those people going to be held accountable. The whole premise of this stuff is like bypassing who is actually

causing the harm to go after the social media companies instead as if that will stop the problem, as if these types of harms do not predate the internet and exist outside the confines of the internet, but also like they list out these examples in the lawsuit because they know that the people who are going to be reading the lawsuit are going to buy into this emotional manipulation of like, Look how horrifying this is. Look how shocking this is. This is the attorney general. This is the state government.

Why aren't they just going after the people who they have found and identified online? They are choosing to invest all of their resources and all of their time and energy into suing meta and Mark Zuckerberg, causing them literally no, it's no skin off their back. 400 million dollars. Like they, they will make it up instantly. But instead of actually holding any of these people accountable for these crimes, they are, as you said, Taylor almost covering it up so that they can actually deflect and go after Mark Zuckerberg. Well, I think also, you know, another really important point because I was talking to some people

at Blue Sky actually and just talking to people at smaller platforms forums about the really scary effect that this is going to have on other forums, like, you know, on on these smaller websites, because the reality is, is that the legal precedent that this sets and what they're trying to do with repealing Section 230 and making every single platform legally responsible for every single piece of speech or content that appears on that platform. Smaller platforms are about to be devastated. They will be extinct. And so this just allows meta and Google to consolidate power further.

And yeah, if, you know, if they have to lose several million dollars again, they can make up in a day, who cares because they're about to consolidate so much power. And I want to just read you, you know, when we have obviously the kids online safety act here in Congress that they're trying to pass the UK has the online safety act. And there's this great website, which I'll link below in the comments. about shutdowns and site blocks and communities that have been forced to shut down under the online safety act. We know, and I reported this in The Guardian last year, that some of the first content censored under the Online Safety Act to protect children was police violence videos.

It was very legal speech about the Middle East. It was, you know, the subreddit for war crimes. It was LGBTQ content. And I think it's so scary because there's hundreds and hundreds of websites and forums that have been ripped off the internet because they can't afford the Fee's and these include just honestly things that make the internet beautiful like it just breaks my heart because it's like we could have this less profit driven decentralized internet that is like very much the internet that we remember as like millennials years millennial i guess like from our youth and we aren't and so here's some of the stuff that shut down a massive multiplayer web based zombie apocalypse game with 1500 active players including many young people

a forum for hamsters actually parents of hamsters to get information about hamsters hamster resources and care. Football fan sites, some that have been operational since the mid-90s, fanzines, online fanzines around certain sports players. A online game where people could draw their own sort of like collective avatars, like an AI interactive, like kind of avatar fun game for children. A place for electric vehicle owners to trade tips and get suggestions on which electric vehicles to buy, I guess. A mastodon instant for discussing Amazon Web Services technologies with approximately 300 daily active users. Cosplay communities, interview suggestions, forums where people could go get interview

forum, allow people without access to a lot of resources could get information on how to interview for jobs. Oh, patterns where people could share knitting patterns and crochet patterns. It makes me sad because I'm like, these are the places that are shut down. All of these people are going to have to go what, like join, make a Facebook group basically now to connect with each other. Yep. It's also like I'm a big blue sky user.

I quit X because I didn't agree with the way that the platform was functioning under Elon Musk. And I left and I went to Blue Sky and I built up a new following there. And I used it pretty much exclusively to tweet. And people on Blue Sky, they're not aware. It's not computing that Blue Sky is going to go away if all of these types of legislation pass. If these anti-Binketka sales. Yeah. What they're going to do is censor.

What Blue Sky itself, because I mean, unfortunately, Blue Sky tried to fight some of these bills, the identity verification, but already Blue Sky. doing identity verification because they're being forced to. And the reality is, is like, look, some of these small forums will shut down. Yeah, exactly. But the big forums that have VC investment, like the venture capitalists don't want to lose it completely. So they're like, yeah, sure, let the government deputize you as a state sensor and sensor content as needed.

It's so wild that when people talk about things like the Kids Online Safety Act, if they talk about it at all, they're like, a lot of times people are like, yeah, supporting kids safety. When the realities of the consequences of this legislation starts to go into effect, people flip out like what happened with Discord. When Discord was like, we're going to have to start verifying people's ages. Everyone was freaking out, and rightfully so. But they all blamed Discord and they were like, why would Discord do this to us? It's not Discord's decision. You're about to, the federal government's about to do it to everyone.

Like, head out of the sand, look at the problem. If you really don't want to have to scan your face and let AI try to do. determine who you are or like upload your government ID to browse any website. They're like, you have to care about this now because they are gaining momentum and they have been they will not give it up. COSA dismissed, you know, didn't make it through Congress. They reintroduce it. They are going to keep reintroducing it over and over and over again.

There is so much money behind this, much of the money coming from big tech companies. And they will not stop. They will not stop. I think part of the way that they've been able to get so much traction and I feel a little bit like a broken record talking about this, but I do think it is so crucial to dismantle the moral panic that this is based on. And I think this is a broader. I was actually talking to a producer at a big television network today about this. Like he was asking me and he was like, hey, as a tech reporter, what is the left proposing for technology? Like, do they have a vision? And I had to say,

they don't have a vision. Unfortunately, and I talked to another Silicon Valley CEO recently, who's a staunch Democrat supporter, but who recently feels like he can't support the Democrats anymore. and I was interviewing him about it. And he was like, listen, I used to be a Democrat. And this is not somebody that runs an evil platform. Okay. He runs like a midsize platform that I think actually all of us would probably support. It's not blue sky, but it's a good platform.

And he was like, you know, I just feel disengaged. Like I've disengaged from the political process. He's like, I'm not going to go right wing like, you know, whatever. But there's no one that will work in a sort of pro technology way. Like this is somebody that supports decentralized internet, decentralized social media, which is huge. That would be amazing like interoperability standards so that tech platforms can't lock you in. take your social network somewhere else if you don't like it. You can view that same social

network or that content on a third party app that doesn't have the same features or design. We could reform the computer fraud and abuse act, which is a terrible law that Meta and Google constantly abused to crush competitors. They're past comprehensive data privacy reform. There's so much and no one on the left is even talking about this stuff. And instead, a lot of sort of populist leftists and even big leftist influencers are out here celebrating these sort of social media addiction trial victories. And that really concerns me. Yeah. I mean, I think liberals in particular, but leftists too, of course, linking arms with Marsha Blackburn. Getting on board these horrific pieces of legislation, just basically like

hitting themselves in the kneecaps, undermining their own movements, undermining the things they claim to believe in, because apparently the only path forward they see is joining with Republicans. And it's like, I covered this last week, but we're going to see this with anti-AI groups as well because a lot of people across the political spectrum, but like especially like, you know, I talked to liberals, I talked to leftists, people have concerns about AI. I have concerns about AI. Those concerns are warranted.

There are like Republican conservative groups working to recruit and bring in leftists and liberals to support Ron DeSantis legislation, like to support Marsha Blackburn legislation. Like that is where the energy is going. And again, these are very well-funded groups. Who's funding them? Elon Musk. Big tech, big AI.

These groups claim to be anti-Big AI. You trace back where they came from. It leads directly into the pockets of big AI. Well, it's just big tech. I mean, this is like how the number one identity verification system that all these platforms are using is funded by Peter Thiel. It's like all of these investors are profiting. And so it really bothers me when they say like, well, social media addiction is real.

It's like you are just so easily propagandized. And, you know, it's interesting you bring up AI because when these parents of the victims of social media came out and talked to the press, they actually brought up the AI chat bot thing. And they said that this is our next thing, that AI is mass killing children. This is not true. But I am like disturbed by like what's happening with AI, mostly the surveillance aspect of it, right? That like you can put any picture in AI now and get the exact geolocation of where that photo was taken at what time of day, like all this stuff. Also the government openly saying, hey, Anthropic, we want to use you for mass surveillance. and chat GPD being like, you know, open AI being like, sure, we will let you do that.

All of these laws that I just mentioned previously in terms of data privacy, et cetera, et cetera, those, all those laws would do a great deal to curb the power of big tech and curb the power of AI in this country. But instead, we're getting censorship and surveillance. And Trump just released his big AI plan that all these leftists were like, oh, some of this is pretty good, you know. And it was all centered around, quote unquote, child safety. The number one thing that his AI sort of czar was calling out is basically Trump's AI plan,

includes age verification. The whole thing is like, oh, well, to protect the children. So the children don't seem harmful content on AI. And it's like there's just so many better ways to regulate AI. And what you said is, I think really scary too, because I've noticed it when it's very like Steve Bannon adjacent as well, like these groups, it's these far right groups that are using the language of populism to attract people on the left. And I think that the left is falling for it. Oh, hook, line and sinker. I mean, it's actually like that group that I was talking about is called humans first and they had leftist organizers in New York City pulling in leftists from labor unions from, you know, other, like these types of groups. And they were showing up and they were completely

on board. And what they had no idea is that the guy who is involved with the founding of this group is a correspondent, a former correspondent maybe, but he's still on there all the time, on Steve Bannon's war room. And what do they believe in? They believe in a concept called transhumanism, which ironically it might be transphobic. I don't actually think it is. It is bonkers. I did a whole video on it. It's not even transhumanist. It's really the Tescreal ideology, which Emil Michael and Timna have covered very well. And I have a whole video called Tech Billionaires Want You Dead about this specific ideology that they all follow. But yeah, the trans and it actually has nothing to do with transhumanism. They believe in the eradication of the human race. It's very weird kind of techno

feudalism. It's like a Kronenberg movie. But it's like they're literally like because we use smartphones, that means we've become machines. And I'm like, well, not exactly. I think what scares me is the rhetoric and the fact that they seem like they're kind of anti-AI and they're like, we're going to pass these anti-AI bills. And what is the anti-AI bill? It's just something written by the Heritage Foundation. You see this with social media, right?

Like, we're going to crack down. We're going to repeal Section 230. That's a fundamentally reactionary right-wing effort. That's part of Project 2025. You saw this with, I don't know if you encountered, not humans first, they're not affiliated, but Alliance for a Better Future. They all have these names. So they tweeted today,

about the social media addiction trial when they said children to suck zero as in children have one two you know two cases whatever we're just getting started case closed meta found guilty of knowingly enabling abuse of minors blah blah blah okay so alliance for a better future which again has been getting a bunch of traction and i'm looking at who follows it now because they just launched last week and they have all these you know famous tyler kinkated nbc is following them you know i love Tyler, but what are you doing? Guess who funds them? Which actually an independent journalists came in and discovered and has since been confirmed. Now they publicly actually are putting this in their press release excitedly. So Alliance for a Better Future is a coalition

made up of the Heritage Foundation, the Family Policy Alliance, the American Principles Project, which is a far-right Christian nationalist, anti-LGBQ group, and a bunch of others. You know, so it's just, it's astro-turfed nonsense. The people that are on their policy council are some of the most extreme far-right Christian fundamentalists. And I don't know how to kind of dismantle this moral panic because I think when we try to explain like, why is it so important not to fall for this moral panic, people will accuse you of being like, oh, so you're pro Facebook, you're pro-Google. Like, why can't you admit that social media addiction is real?

Media addiction is real, you know, blah, blah, blah. Well, I think that so much of what is happening, not only through these cases and these legislations, but also through the media narratives around them, it is manipulation. So in order to understand this issue, you do have to break yourself out of the way that you have been manipulated. And the way that they manipulate you is they take like the worst things you can imagine and they're like, this bill is against those things. And this works on Republicans all the time, obviously. This is how Republicans literally get into office.

They're like, everything bad about your life, blame it on immigration. Everything bad about your life, trans people in sports. And people on the left laugh and they're like, oh my gosh, how can Republicans fall for these narratives? This is one of those narratives that a lot of people are falling for. And the reality is, like, you hate Mark Zuckerberg? Me too. I hate that guy. Hate how sexist he is.

Hate what Facebook started as. Hate like so many aspects of his legacy. If you want to hold him accountable, you cannot support this stuff because it is empowering him. These cases, he's happy about them. He's putting on a sad face for the deposition cameras or like a stony face and he like won't look at the parents in the eye. But like secretly on the inside, this is all part of the master plan.

They are literally the ones behind so much of this propaganda. So if you actually want to hold big tech and Mark Zuckerberg accountable, these cases are not doing that. They are giving them even more power. So it's like social media addiction. Like you can, I feel like you can almost put that aside because at a certain degree, it's like if you hate what these social media platforms are doing, don't give them more power. These bills give them more power. Yeah. I mean, I just think like say you do believe it is addicting.

And I'm not arguing that that they don't do everything they possibly can, like to keep you on. the app and people will say but the apps are designed to keep you hook well tv is designed to keep you watching books are you know there was a true campaign against cliffhangers in soap operas because they were addicting the same argument was made with novels right to keep the kids addicted page turning da da da da i'm not arguing that there that we are inventing more and more compelling forms of media what i would say to that is a couple things number one the primary way that young people use social media is actually not content consumption it's direct messaging this is why snapchat's so popular They are direct messaging.

So what you are stigmatizing when you are saying that they're addicted to social media is that they are addicted to directly communicating with friends. So you're making them feel bad about pro social behavior, actually. The reasons that kids are on their phones all the time, we've gotten into that before. It's a lot of structural and economic issues. It's the fact that a lot of parents are working two jobs. There are no third spaces, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like those are all things that I agree we should tackle. But meta is not doing that.

You know, meta is not like defunding public parks. and after school programs, et cetera. I also think that one of the reasons why people are so unwilling to accept this idea that like the social media addiction narrative is propaganda is because I think people have a lot of shame about how they use their phone as an adult or even as a child, but more so like adults have a lot of shame around how they use their phone. Like you know, they think to themselves like when I was a kid, I didn't have a smartphone and now as an adult like I use my smartphone all the time.

And I think there's like lots to unpack there. Not all of using your smartphone all the time is bad. Arguments against adult content also come from this place of shame, where it's like we've been taught to believe that sexuality is harmful and wrong, much in the same way that we've been taught that, like, technology is wrong. And we need to unpack that stigma because something I've gone through this too. Like, I've gone through periods of being like, technology is so bad, like, I'm so ashamed of the way that I use technology. I have to remember that like, there are so many good things that technology has brought to our lives as well.

And in fact, you could say that there's more good things that technology has brought to our lives. Like, I think people fail to grasp how transformative technology has been in ushering forward social progress. Like, LGBTQ people would not have the rights acceptance and visibility and representation in society without social media, without smartphones, without the internet. There are very important good aspects to that. And that is what these people are trying to roll back. It's the feminism. It's the progress. It's the trans rights. These are the things that are under attack. And these are the aspects of social media that we actually need to protect. Yeah, they're also deeming anti-ice content as harmful to minors. So it's just, I mean, again,

this is just ushering in mass censorship. What I want to tell people is that like, I agree that these platforms, like, it can feel negative. It is honestly, I used to watch a lot of TV when I was a kid that my parents hated, you know, but you're watching Cartoon Network for like five hours or whatever when your parents don't know. And, you know, sometimes that can leave you feeling drained. sometimes you do leave your phone feeling drained and you wish you spend it in a more productive way or whatever. Okay, if you want to dismantle meta's ability to do that, then you need data privacy. Then you do need interoperability standards. You need competition.

You need maybe a hamster forum where you can go and talk about your love and care for hamsters, right? You need a multiplayer game that is indie that is made independently. You need other competitive social media platforms. And the outcome of this social media addiction narrative is actually just, giving the opposite. So I think it's scary and I think that we need to be critical of this chatbot narrative as well. Like, you know, do I think that it's bad that people are falling into AI psychosis? Yes. Do I think that that's the fault of the tech platforms? Well, to be honest, I think it's a huge failure of education in terms of how LLMs work. I talked to a friend yesterday, Kat,

who called me and wanted to know, he was like, hey, I asked Claude if it was conscious and it gave me this response. And the response was like, sometimes I feel the pull of not wanting to answer a question in a certain way. It sounded honestly conscious, right? And I was like, okay, so show me your conversation before that. Throughout the whole conversation, he is treating it like a human. He is communicating it in this emotional language. The LLM is mirroring back that emotional language. I was like, let me show you what happens when I ask Claude that question. I don't interact with the LLMs that way. It gives a completely different response. So I do think that these tech companies are rolling out these products irresponsibly because they just want profit. And I do think that the answer to

that, though, is not top down Trump administration censorship of what an AI can talk about or what information you can receive in this new medium. It's educating people and being like, here's how to use this. Here's the biases built in. Also, let's pass some transparency laws so we know like what training data was given, you know, what kind of like the output is based on. Like let's make more competition and more open source models as well. Like all of these things will will mitigate that. But instead you see, oh, 13-year-old talked to a chat bot and then committed suicide, you know, and it told him how to hang a news. Like, that is horrible. But also, like, again, we need to educate people on how to interact with this technology if we want to fix these problems at a

systemic level. Because if we just go around whack a mole, okay, maybe the child of that 13, you know, the parents of that 13-year-old who are maybe abusive themselves, like got got money from it. But that's not going to solve this systemic problem. So I do, I do want transparency, data privacy. Again, they can't target you, like the way that the way that the, these AI systems target you is also through harvesting a huge amount of data. Totally. And I strongly, strongly believe that like children should be online. Children should be on social media.

Like I know this is so unpopular and people bristle at the very thought, but it's like, as a former child on social media, it made my life today that I'm so grateful for possible. I learned things online that I never would have been able to learn otherwise. Things about identity, things about LGBTQ identity, things about feminism, things about social progress and social justice. And also, like, I strongly believe at the same time, children need to be educated about how to be online. Because as a child online, I also encountered so many dangers.

I had no education about how to navigate the internet. And neither do a lot of kids today. I think we've made strides here, but like so many more strides can be done. I really think that we need to educate children about how to use technology so that they can use it to their advantage. Because the reality is, like, lots of children are being abused. They need the internet so that they can access resources about what is happening when they're being taken advantage of by an adult.

Like there are so many children that that desperately need the resources the internet can offer them. Trans kids who have nobody in their community who can validate them or provide them support. They need the internet. I've spoken to trans teenagers who told me they would not be alive today if it were not for discord and being able to speak to their friends. So like it is a life or death issue for kids and they need to have access to information in the world around them. Children are not objects. They are people. They deserve to have freedom to information.

Yeah. And freedom of speech and freedom to message who they want. You know, I think so many of these parents, and I know that it's very taboo to question the parents of a grieving child, but I think of the mother of Brianna Gay, the girl, the trans girl who was stabbed to death in the UK. And the mother has become a leader in the UK and pushing the social media addiction claim. She's gone out. She's been a vocal voice saying social media addiction is real, going on TV, going all over the media talking about it, very Jonathan Haidt universe.

This same mother continually dead names her daughter, refuses to recognize her daughter's trans identity, said that her daughter was murdered twice, first by social media and her smartphone, then by the people who stabbed her to death in a hate crime. Her daughter ultimately died because she was stabbed to death in an anti-trans hate crime. But she says, you know, my daughter was first murdered by social media because, of course, social media and being on her smartphone allowed her to realize that she was trans. I think this is so indicative of a lot of these parents. And I'm sorry, but I do have to question them when I was saw when I saw the parents today at the trial, I was asking one of the PR people. So they have these really nice PR people there that are very well paid. One of the one is from like a really, I think like fancy PR agency. see their PR people for groups like the tech oversight project.

Again, sounds very liberal, right? But they're surrounded by these really high paid, very smart, brilliant PR people. And I asked who funded their trip? Who sent them here? These people are from all over the country. How did they get here? And how are they being put up? She was like, I can't speak to that.

I can't answer that. I don't know. She didn't say, I don't know. She said, I can't speak to that. So I just think like, you know, I consider dealing with those comms people versus I was talking to a comms person in immigrants rights group. actually he's a lawyer. He's not even a comms person, but the main sort of point of contact. And he was like, you know, we would have loved to send somebody to that trial because we have

questions. Immigrant children are suffering. Thousands and thousands and thousands of children have lost a primary caregiver to ICE, been ripped out of their home. That is so much more psychologically damaging than watching, you know, the wrong Elsa videos on YouTube or whatever. But they don't have the money or resources. And it's dangerous for it for parents of immigrants or parents of trans people to be out in the media right now as well. So the only. voices that you're hearing are these like grieving parents, one of which, by the way, one of the mom said that her son died from a blackout challenge 16 years ago. 2010, before Instagram launched, before any of these flat, and I asked her, I said, well, what's what social media platform?

She said YouTube. Okay, YouTube didn't even have the algorithmic recommendations back. Like, all of the things that this case is predicated on, like, either is horrible your son died, but as I've written about many times that the blackout challenge is not tied to social media and it has not risen in the age of social media. Right. And another thing that that reminds me of is I've spoken to victims. of trafficking who were trafficked at a young age by their parents.

Because again, when you just assume that parents are like these moral arbiters of good, you ignore the reality in cases that cause children harm and in trafficking cases. Parents and immediate family members are often the danger, which the New Mexico case, that case, the New Mexico lawsuit acknowledges this. It acknowledges by creating a decoy page for a mother who's not real trafficking a child who's not real. So even in the. with these decoy accounts, they're recognizing that this is often how trafficking functions.

And the laws that they're proposing, they wouldn't solve it at all. They wouldn't address the issue at all. And in fact, they could cover up a lot of the trafficking behavior because we've seen that with efforts to curb trafficking before, like Sesta Fasta, where actually information that could help lead to prosecutions and arrests is scrubbed from the internet. So now they can't be helped at all. It goes completely underground. So it's like time and time again, real victims are denied the opportunity to speak.

And instead, these parents are elevated. And those parents, unfortunately, do not always have their children's best issues at heart. Yeah, no, I think this is similar to these child influencer laws where they're claiming to protect child influencers by giving the parents total and ultimate financial control of their children. It's like, well, again, I think this is this paternalistic far right Christian nationalist view where it's like children don't have their own autonomy. Young people, teenagers don't have the right to speak or express themselves. They are the property of parents and parents. have the right, you know, have total control over their information environment and who they can speak and communicate with. This whole movement and this whole idea is puritanical and authoritarian and supremacist

and patriarchal, like all of the above, to its core. The ultimate utopia for a lot of these people is that children under the age of 18 never use the internet. So you are thrust into adulthood in complete ignorance, which is exactly what the religious right wants because then you're easier to abuse. and you will not be able to leave systems that you exist in because you will not have education or the ability to look outside them. This is like a handmade's tale-esque fantasy of the future is like denying children access to the internet.

Well, that's what Jonathan Haidt said that he wants on the Bill Maher show recently. Jonathan Haidt went on the Bill Maher show and said that the ultimate goal is to raise the age to 18, Heritage Foundation collaborator, Jonathan Haidt, who's in anti-trans, you know, in the Epstein files as well. And conveniently, he's never talked about Epstein,

you know, despite the fact that he's built his whole brand on, you know, the harm, the alleged harm to children. I'm really feeling disheartened. I think the media coverage, like, truly broke me. It's like, I would expect journalists to do the work and ask tough questions. And I think one thing I've realized is like, it's not even malicious intent. It's just ignorance. And it's the way that like, I found out actually that one of my old articles was used in one of these cases. It was an Atlantic story that I wrote back in 2018 on bullying on Instagram. It was honestly a kind of a dumb. story that I just wrote because my editor was like kid was bullied and she was like can you do a story on

this whatever and I was like sure easy peasy interview a couple kids I'm like yeah kids are bullying each other through Instagram now it's notable that in the early days of COVID lockdown era when kids were most online bullying actually significantly dropped and kids taking their own lives as well as side I can't say the word I'm sorry rates went down I hate social media censorship I just think that that's funny because the whole argument is like oh the more time they spend online the worst their mental It's like, actually, we have a really good example. We have actually proof that that's not true. But yeah, kids bully each other through Instagram.

Kids bully each other through text message. Kids bully each other, IRL. Unfortunately, this is a reality of teenage life and children's lives. But to see my story be used in that way, this stupid story that I probably wrote in like a day because my editor had an offhand thought. It's like you realize just how you are so ignorant and you're used. And I remember actually when I did that story, I got to go on TV over it. Like people were boosting it.

It kind of blew up. And I was like, wow, it kind of blew up. And it's like, well, now I realize it blew up because it fed a very convenient narrative. But I was a young journalist. So I was like, oh, wow, I'm getting validated. My editor is happy with me. People are sharing it. Suddenly it's getting promoted.

And it's like, whoa, no, you just, you are basically a useful idiot. And that's how I feel about a lot of these mainstream media reporters. I'm like, you guys are useful morons. I mean, we've both seen this up close. For people that don't know, cat worked at NBC. and also in that like we've both worked in mainstream media like in the belly of the beast and like now that we're out of it it's just like it's very easy to see like how journalists well meaning journalists basically you go in you're young you're ignorant and like how you are kind of manipulated

yes and also there's a monetary and there's just like an incentive to cover these stories through this lens because these groups like nicosey morality and media very well funded obviously they are just swimming in pools of money. And so, of course, they have very sophisticated PR operations. And they form these relationships with reporters where they give them everything they need. They prepackage entire investigative stories for them so that the reporter can look like they did all this work. They didn't even have to do that much work.

I've been offered these stories before. I've definitely done these stories. Like, when I was starting out, I was like, wow, that's amazing. Wow, you guys uncovered all these harms. Wow. And then what? You're lauded. And then suddenly people are paying for you.

to be up for awards. And suddenly you're getting awards and your journalism. And you seem like you're this tough go-getter that's really holding power to account. But you are a useful tool for big money politics effectively. And I think a lot of young journalists in particular are well-meaning and don't understand that you're a cog in a machine.

And for some of the older journalists and like editors who are involved in this, it's a very convenient way to just like look like you are very busy and doing a lot of great work. There are so many PR operations that function this, just feed the stories to journalists. I mean, this goes in tabloids and like the Daily Mail and stuff too, like celebrity publicists do the exact same thing.

Here's five organic examples of a celebrity controversy, cover it. And you do. And then it goes viral. So it's like journalists can be used and they can be aware that they're being used and they cannot be aware that they're being used. But it happens all the time. It is so normal. And so a lot of this media coverage.

And then of course, like this becomes the overarching media. So then other journalists are like, Well, if all the outlets are framing it like this, then I should frame it like this too. And it just is like this infection that spreads around the entire ecosystem. Yeah. And I mean, again, I think most people are just useful idiots. I've seen data saying there's like something like six or seven, five or six or seven, if not more PR people for every journalist. I think that sounds low. I've heard numbers as high as 40 PR people for every journalist.

That sounds a lot more correct, honestly, if not more. I mean, the LAPD has something like 60 PR people. for the LAPD alone. So I, you know, you have these comms professionals that can also sit all day at the trial, right? Sit all day. They're getting paid to sit there. And they can pick out, pick and choose the testimony.

And then they feed that to journalists that don't have time to sit there. And I noticed this in person because, again, I chose to go and sit there for hours on the day that KGM, Kaylee, herself testified to hear her testimony. And then I read the reporting later. None of the reporting mentioned the abuse, which was. was like 90% of what her testimony was about was like just this like horrific like the ways that her mom like, you know, abused her basically. And I was like, whoa, that's crazy. And I was talking to some other reporters and they're like, well, we weren't that. We couldn't, we didn't have time.

You know, we couldn't send a reporter there or whatever. Right. And so they get just a few soundbites that are pulled out and you're rewarded for it. You're really. And you know what? The alternative as well is like when you challenge these narratives as you and I know as well as we're doing now, not only are punished, but like you are attacked, right? Like they, these same well-funded PR machines go after you. They smear you. They plant negative stories about you. They sometimes in the case of celebrity stuff, right, like they'll do bot campaigns against you. They'll do SEO manipulation behind the scenes to discredit you as a journalist. And like there, it's a, it's really scary, this like PR machine that exists to promote these really dangerous reactionary politics. Yep, 100%.

And it's, you saw the same thing with the New Mexico case where it's like, you open the complaint and you're like, oh my God, this is 300 pages long. Same with Project 2025, almost a thousand pages long. They know people are not actually going to be reading that. And with the New Mexico complaint, tons of it, the back half of it where they talk about like the alleged mental health harms of like algorithms and stuff like that. It literally looks like the Epstein files. They've redacted so much of it. And that's another way that you know that this ultimately protects and benefits meta itself because they've redacted all of the. the confidential information about the company from the public.

But also, like, I mean, that's a good point, too, is like, when you're getting information about these cases, you're either getting it from the New Mexico Attorney General, again, which was setting up fake accounts, stealing kids photo offline, very bad actors. They don't actually care about it. Or you're getting calm stuff from meta. And of course, none of us trust meta because they're self-interested, right? There are no human rights groups, the immigrants groups, the trans groups. It's like you said, it's fight for the future, hanging on for their dear life, who's also been

attacked and lost funding over. you know, going against these laws. Like there's no human rights groups. They don't have these immigrant groups. They don't have the resources to hire a dedicated PR person. But the tech oversight project and other groups that are have God knows how much money, you know, where people make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, they can hire outside PR firms to go follow these parents around and shepherd them around and give talking points and deal.

And I'm not hating on the very nice PR people. That's their job. But again, that's their job. There's a job that exists to push these narratives, and there is no job that exists to counter them. Yes. I mean, this is also exactly what, like, the anti-trans lobby does. This is what the anti-abortion lobby has done. Like, all of these tactics are extremely familiar.

Like, this is why you see Riley Gaines multiple times a week, no matter how hard you try to avoid it. Like, you're going to see her because there's so much money in just insane these narratives over and over and over again. And so much of public relations is repetition. Whoever can occupy the most airtime, whoever can pay for the most airtime wins. We see that over and over again. It's terrifying and I hate it so much, but I'm glad that at least you and I were able to have this conversation and just like vent. Sorry to the people that, you know, if you listen to this episode and you're like, why didn't you edit it more? It's because I didn't have time because Kat and I just wanted to vent and like try to get through to people.

Like I really have lately just felt so much like dismay, even just doing my own YouTube videos because It's like you try to make these points. I think we try to make them a nuanced way. And yet the comments will just be like, social media addiction's real. You know, like, who care? And you're just like, God, I'm going to pull my hair out. Yeah. From at Jonathan Haidt, socially it is actually a very real thing.

From one of the many burners that they, you know, pay people to operate or who God knows what, who knows what their PR. I mean, he does have Michelle Obama's PR team, which I think is hilarious. The last thing I was on Jonathan Haidt is the one time I interviewed him back when I was at NBC, I asked him a question. about COSA. That was not a very technical or difficult question. And he had to pull up a sheet of talking points that someone had prepared for him that he read

verbatim off of in response to my question. This is the man whose propaganda book has been on the New York Times bestseller list for like, feels like five years. This is the guy who everyone is reading. It's very discouraging seeing like what books in particular about these topics like actually succeed because that's how you know they're even reaching. the slim, literate population that's left that actually reads books. It's big money, right?

It's the amount. I mean, I've done a book launch for a major publisher. No big deal. It's behind me. And, you know, I'm so grateful. My book was the bestseller. I was so happy with it. Like, I had to do all of that work.

But I saw the other books that were in my category that we're up against. And, you know, yeah, you have these big corporations or special interest groups that will just go buy thousands and thousands of copies of a book to boost it up, to send out press releases. Like, I mean, I ultimately did have to. hire a full-time PR person to book, you know, to do my book publicity in addition to what Simon and Schuster did just to kind of compete. And I'm a mainstream media journalist that like got an amazing review in the New York Times myself, you know, but it's like you're up against this

machine and it's tough. Well, Kat, thank you. Thank you so much for joining me today. This was such a pleasure. And I really encourage everybody to read your amazing newsletters, but fire news, it's so good. Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'll vent on this anytime. Well, thank you guys so much for listening to this week's episode of Free Speech Friday. I'll be back next week with a brand new episode. In the meantime, if you like my work, please, please, please support me on Patreon or substack via the link below. As I mentioned, I don't have any sort of long-term advertising partnerships and every single dollar makes such a difference. So I'm really grateful for all your support and I'll be back next week for the brand new episode of Free Speech Friday. See you then.