The Daily Signal - Why Tennessee AG Is Suing Social Media

Episode Date: June 5, 2024

Instagram’s parent company, Meta, knew the harm the platform was inflicting on minors and did nothing to mitigate it, according to a lawsuit filed against the social media giant.  In 2023, Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti filed a lawsuit against Meta Platforms Inc., calling on the company to prioritize the protection of minors. “Over about the last 15 years, the mental health of American teenagers has plummeted in anxiety, suicidality, depression, sleep deprivation—all these metrics that show something is not right,” Skrmetti told "The Daily Signal Podcast." “Not only do we have experts who say it was social media, there have been a variety of leaks from within the social media companies that indicate they knew that it was having this negative effect,” he says.  While Skrmetti says that “social media [are] not inherently bad,” and the lawsuit is not intended to micromanage platforms such as Instagram, it’s Meta’s responsibility to make its products "safe for kids.” Skrmetti joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss where the lawsuit against Meta stands. He also discusses his state’s fight to protect women’s sports against males who identify as women entering female athletics.  Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal Podcast for Wednesday, June 5th. I'm Virginia Allen. Tennessee has filed a lawsuit against Meta Platforms Incorporated, also known as Facebook. They filed a lawsuit to protect children, demanding that meta put protections in place to guard minors from the harmful effects that we know social media has on kids. Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Scermini joins me on the show today to talk about the state of Tennessee. relentless pursuit to protect young people from the harms of social media. Stay tuned for our conversation after this. It was 10 years ago that the Daily Signal officially launched as an alternative to the establishment press. We believed then that major newspapers and broadcast networks were leaving a massive audience of conservatives and independent-minded Americans unserved. We set out on June 3, 2014, to inject competition into the market.

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Well, it is my honor to be joined today by Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Scermetti. Attorney General, thank you so much for being with us. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here. Well, Tennessee, like so many states, you all are tackling the issue of how do we protect our kids, our youngest, our most vulnerable population, from the harms of social media. And you all have really approached this in a strategic way and through a legal fight. If you would, explain a little bit about a lawsuit that the state of Tennessee fight. against META, formerly Facebook.

So we've sued META based on a consumer protection theory that its product hurts children, that it has a negative impact on the mental health of kids. And I want to start by saying social media is not inherently bad. There's a lot of good that comes out of it. And America has prospered immensely because we've had very sophisticated companies that have mastered social media and provided great platforms for people. but these are incredibly sophisticated companies that have pursued engagement at a level nobody has ever done before. They have used neuroscience.

They have used A-B testing on a massive scale to make a product that's hard to stop using and that people want to go back to. And that has a really outsized impact on kids' brains. Developmentally, children are different than adults. It's why the law treats them differently than adults. And they're impacted very adversely. If you look at the statistics over about the last 15 years, the mental health of American teenagers has plummeted in anxiety, suicidality, depression, sleep deprivation, all these metrics that show something is not right. Not only do we have experts who say it was social media, there have been a variety of leaks from within the social media companies that indicate they knew that it was having this negative effect. And so our lawsuit isn't about shaking the companies down.

It's not about trying to micromanage them. It's saying you need to make your product safe for kids. And we are hoping to work collaboratively toward a settlement if that's the way to get there. But if we have to litigate it, we will litigate it. We need to protect our children. We need to make sure that as a thriving representative democracy, we have a citizenry capable of running the country. So what is the state of Tennessee asking META to do as far as how do you make these social media platforms safe for kids? Does that look like putting in guardrails, actually changing the algorithm?

What's included within that? So I don't run a social media company. If I did, I live in a much nicer house. So I don't want to micromanage what the outcome is. I think what we can do is set the goals that the law allows and say, we know that your product is causing this harm. Fix the harm. And they're technologists, they're brilliant.

They have done amazing things with their platform. They know better than we do how to make it safe. but they've made thousands or millions of incremental little decisions to make the platform more and more and more engaging. They know what levers they can pull to undo that, and they know which users are underage. So they have all the information they need to fix it. Where does this lawsuit stand right now? We have a motion to dismiss that I think is pending, and we're in the middle of a number of big discovery fights. Okay. Within the state of Tennessee, obviously we've seen stories come out just across the

country of those harms, have you all experienced within the state of Tennessee really seeing the negative impact on your own young people, middle school, high schoolers, even elementary age students? So we heard from a lot of teachers, we heard from parents, and we heard from some kids that there are problems that come from social media use. And the problems vary fairly widely. And I think the fundamental issue here is the algorithm and its sophistication. And that's something that's hard for people to articulate.

They don't know exactly what's being pushed inside their brain that makes them not feel good when they're done using it. But we've heard from a lot of kids and we've heard a lot of secondhand accounts that they don't feel good when they're done using it. They want to stop, but they can't stop. They use it longer than they would like to. It creates all sorts of negative feelings. So it's our job to look at the data, to look at the sort of inchoate personal narratives and identify where the problem is and figure out how to fix it. As the adults to stand up for the kids.

Absolutely. Now, Tennessee is tackling this also on a legislative front. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, he signed a bill aimed at specifically curbing those harms of social media. The law is called Protecting Children from Social Media Act. If you would just explain a little bit about what this bill does. So this bill requires parental consent for minors, and I don't want to get too much into it because we may end up litigating this at some point. I understand there are other states that have considered similar things.

And, you know, sometimes we just can't talk about it until the litigation is underway. Sure. And the contours of what we're discussing are clear. But, I mean, the impetus here is, I think, the same as that's driving our lawsuit, which is we know this is a problem for kids. You have Jonathan Hyde out there leading the charge, but a number of child psychologists and other research. researchers in various fields who are really concerned that we're just not producing a generation

capable of maturing along the trajectory they should because we're inhibiting them with these experiences. Well, and as a father yourself, this has got to be also pretty personal for you. Yeah, my kids are just starting to get into this. And, you know, it's, we talk about it. I talk to my 10-year-old about fear of missing out and, you know, how the algorithms are trying to drive him to keep using these products and how it's great. Like it's awesome that you can get cool tips for Minecraft from YouTube.

But you just need to make sure that you're in control of your experience and that you're aware of the effort underway. And it sounds harsh to say manipulate, but to manipulate you to suck you in. Yeah, really, really critical. What's the response been, as you all have talked to parents in the state, even young people in the state that know that leaders. Tennessee are trying to do what they can to curb those negative effects of social media? From the adults, the feedback is uniformly positive with just a few people who say, well, it's a

business. Just let them do their business, leave them alone. But most people say, we appreciate there's a problem. Either they see the data or they see kids firsthand and say, something's not right here. Yeah. So there's been a lot of encouragement, which, you know, it's ratified by the legislative action, which really, you know, when you get that kind of uniformity among a very diverse set of legislators, it's a pretty good indicator that there's a proper direction to move in. Absolutely. And it's been fascinating to even watch that play out at a federal level in regards to TikTok that as a nation, Republicans and Democrats all see those threats and a rally behind to say, wait a second, we've got to push the brakes here. Something has to be done.

Yeah. I mean, it's awesome to see government work. You know, this is something where, people can come together and there are a lot of times when we shouldn't be bipartisan where there are good fights to fight. But there are times when we do need to work together and it's heartening to know that we can when we have to. Yeah. I want to talk about an issue that is a little bit more on the divisive side and that's the fight over Title IX right now and this gets into the fight over women's sports. Tennessee has really taken a front seat to trying to push forward truth on this issue. And what we've seen is that the Biden administration has introduced changes to Title IX that would redefine sex within Title IX to include gender identity and sexual orientation.

While Tennessee has filed a lawsuit to stop this, share if you would. What exactly your lawsuit is aimed at doing? So this is a huge policy divide. There's been a lot of movement very quickly on how society perceives people with gender dysphoria. There's been a lot of pushing as far as what the law requires, but the underlying statute hasn't changed. Title IX has been the same for quite some time. It was intended to protect women to end discrimination and education. And our lawsuit focuses on the regulatory overreach here. So the federal government, the executive branch, cannot say a law says something different than it actually says. Congress makes the laws in our system. And by redefining terms in a way that's completely alien to how they were understood

by the people who voted on them in Congress, by the Americans who have been affected by it, by the agency itself for years and years and years and years, the Biden administration is taking a power that's been delegated to a different branch of government by the Constitution. And the concentration of power is the fundamental evil that our Constitution is intended to check. So there's a fierce policy debate here, but at heart the lawsuit is about separation of powers. It's about maintaining our constitutional order. It's about the right of the people to control the laws that affect them. And there's multiple other states, right, that signed on to this lawsuit with you all? Yes. So we've got, I think, six in this one, West Virginia,

Virginia, Kentucky, and Indiana, I believe, are in it with us. Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. Now, Biden's rewrite of Title IX, it's supposed to take effect on August 1st. How confident are you that this lawsuit, others, can be effective at actually stopping, pausing that this rewrite going into effect on August 1st? I think it's hard to say with certainty what's going to happen, but we have very strong arguments. We've got a hearing on the injunction starting, I believe, next Monday. Excellent. And we are loaded for it. I mean, we have solid constitutional arguments.

There's a lot of case law on our side. And we have out of West Virginia some very compelling individual narratives that have been incorporated into this of a middle schooler who's been affected firsthand by this really radical change in how we view the sexual binary. So I don't know for sure what the judge is going to do. I like our chances. And of course, whoever wins at the trial level, they should not sit too happily on that because it will immediately be appealed. So it's going to take some fighting to figure out exactly where this lands. Yeah. Attorney General, before we let you go, I do want to ask you about another case that we've all been watching in the news and in the courts.

and that's that of former President Donald Trump out of Manhattan. And of course, we just recently saw that ruling that on all 34 counts, he was, former President Donald Trump was convicted. What was your response when you learned that for the first time in history, a former president had been found guilty on felony charges? I mean, because of the nature of this particular case, I was concerned. I think it's important that the law holds. everybody accountable, but there were a lot of irregularities here. I was a prosecutor for almost a

decade, and the philosophy that we universally had was you don't swing for the fences on legal theories, you don't get creative, you don't get cute. And in this case, you have misdemeanors from eight years ago that were turned into felonies through a very creative questionable legal theory. You know, if you can turn uncharged federal violations into the factor that changes a state misdemeanor into a state felony, that has sweeping ramifications. For instance, in the red states, I think you see a lot of concern about immigration. And if this case opens the door to allowing uncharged federal violations to elevate crimes to felonies, that's going to have a huge impact. I think the states will take that and run with it. So it's opening doors that were not expected.

And I worry too, and it's come up frequently on Twitter, but it's just fundamentally true. The Roman Republic was brought down by escalating lawfare where one side needed to maintain power because they were going to use it against the other side and the stakes got raised and raised and raised and raised. And it never stops at legal bickering. I mean, it inevitably spirals into violence if it's not checked. We need to make sure that we're not so polarized that people are abusing their power to go after folks on the other side solely because they're on the other side. If Donald Trump was anybody other than Donald Trump, this case never would have been brought. And I think it's going to be an incredible strain on our system.

And we either need to decide as a country that we're going to step back from this precipice or the knives are going to come out. And it is just a free-for-all. And that's not going to be good for us. It's not good for our kids. It's not good for our nation. Yeah. What a critical time in history. Social media, the fight to protect women's sports, our legal system on all fronts.

Thank you just for weighing in. Thank you for your expertise and for the work that you all are doing down in Tennessee. Thank you. And with that, that's going to do it for today's podcast. Thank you so much for joining us here on the Daily Signal podcast. If you've not had the chance, be sure that you check out our afternoon show where every weekday around 5 p.m.,

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