Jonathan Haidt says Zuckerberg trial could finally hold Big Tech accountable for the harm done to young users

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has been sounding the alarm for years. 

He is the best-selling author of The Anxious Generation, a blockbuster book that argues Gen Z — those born after 1995 and given smartphones and social media in ways no generation before them had been — has experienced a profound mental health crisis as a result.

On Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg appeared in court for the first time before a jury, defending Meta Platforms against allegations it knowingly targeted young users and deliberately designed its platforms to keep them hooked.

Haidt spoke to Front Burner host Jayme Poisson last week before the trial about why he believes this moment marks a turning point. Here is part of their conversation.

I just wanna get into why it’s so urgent that we act. What research led you to that conclusion?

When I wrote The Anxious Generation, I had critics on my shoulder. I’ve been engaged in a debate with about five or seven other psychologists who think there’s no evidence of harm. Yes, it’s true that social media use is correlated with poor mental health; heavy users are more depressed and anxious, everyone agrees to that. But their claim is [that it’s] just a correlation, it’s not causation. 

When I wrote the book, I had them in mind, and so everything I said in the book has a footnote, every claim I made has a justification, a citation. And so I focused on the decline of mental health. I focused on the rise of depression, anxiety, self-harm, suicide. 

There’s never a consumer product that hurts so many kids, but it turns out that I vastly underestimated the harm because I focused on mental illness. And what I now came to see, what I’ve come to see since the book came out, is that the far larger harm is the destruction of the human ability to pay attention. 

WATCH | How smartphones are harming kids’ mental health:

How smartphones created The Anxious Generation of kids

The push to get kids off screens and into the real world gained a lot more traction this year thanks to the bestselling book The Anxious Generation. Author and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt tells CBC The Current host Matt Galloway about his research and how the smartphone profoundly changed consciousness and the human experience.

Test scores are literally dropping … IQ is literally dropping. Talk to young people, they find it very difficult to read a book; they now say they find it very difficult to watch a movie. So I am getting kind of angry about it, and I’m coming to see that this is not just about 10 or 20 per cent of kids. This is about most human beings born in the developed world, at least, since 1995, most of them have been diminished, their human capital has been diminished, their chance for life satisfaction, their social skills, the odds of them getting married, the odds them being a good employee, all of this has been decreased. 

So yeah, we’ve got to stop this now. 

I know you’ve met with people like Mark Zuckerberg and the team at Snap. When you put this all to them, what do they say to you? 

Denial, complete denial. 

I’ve had the same conversation with Mark Zuckerberg two or three times — the guy is very smart. He knows … there are a couple of researchers who keep finding null effects. He knows those studies, and then he and I debate about it, and that’s it.

It’s perfectly civil, perfectly pleasant, but he does not admit that his product is harming children at a very large scale. 

When I raised my concerns with leadership at Snap, and I said, “what about this report of 10,000 reports of sextortion [a month] from 2022?” That’s how many reports they were getting from their own users, from people who were being sextorted. 

When I brought this up to them, they said, “What are you talking about?”

And I said, “It was in the Wall Street Journal.” 

And one of them said, “Oh, yes, that.” 

Look, of course they knew.  

I wanted to ask you about this lawsuit in California. This is one of many court cases that will be brought against social media companies this year. It’ll be the first to use a different argument to go after Meta’s Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Snap. How vulnerable does that make the entire social media business model? 

The key to understand, is that the U.S. Congress passed a law — it’s called Section 230, the Communications Decency Act — [which] said that nobody can sue these companies for what they were shown, [that] the companies can’t be responsible for what everybody posts, and the initial idea there was quite reasonable. 

But the courts have interpreted [this] so broadly, [so] as to say that if TikTok showed your daughter escalating videos on self-harm leading to suicide, [and] then she killed herself, you can’t sue them for anything. They have blanket protection. 

This time around, the lawyers [have] made the kind of obvious common sense argument that while the company’s not liable for what Joe Schmoe posted, they sure as hell are liable for the design features of their product. If they designed it for addiction, if they knew that it was addictive, if they know that kids were going into rabbit holes and then sometimes killing themselves, of course they’re liable for that. 

And did they know it? Of course, they knew it. 

If listeners go to metasinternalresearch.org, my team has collected 31 studies that Meta did … so there’s a huge amount of evidence from Meta itself, from the experiments that they did, from the surveys of users that they did, and from their discussion about these surveys, that they knew it was addictive. They took steps to maximize engagement. They were in a war with TikTok. They had to get kids faster than TikTok. 

They knew what they were doing, and they did it anyway. I’m not a lawyer, but I think that seems to me like mens rea, you know, criminal mind — they did it deliberately and knowingly. 

What do you think a ruling in line with the plaintiffs could do here? 

So far, these companies have been completely immune to public pressure, public shaming, all of that. The only thing that they’ve ever responded to is the threat of legislation. 

If I’m right, that they have literally harmed or diminished hundreds of millions of children, meaning most of the world’s children born since 1995, then the liability here is beyond imagination.

WATCH | Zuckerberg testifies in court:

Zuckerberg defends Meta in civil trial on social media addiction | Hanomansing Tonight

During testimony in front of a jury in Los Angeles, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg pushed back against claims that his company’s social media apps target young users.

These can’t all be combined into a giant class action suit, unfortunately, because each one is different, so it’s going to be thousands and thousands of suits. But these initial cases are called “bellwether cases” meaning they’re going to go in front of a jury for one child, one family, one platform, and then the jury will decide questions of fact.

And if these early cases go in direction of the plaintiffs, if the jury says “yes, the companies are liable,” then the thousands and thousands of other cases will be settled out of court because Meta will know that … if they take these to court they’re going to keep losing. 

I would imagine [the liability is] hundreds of billions of dollars.