Social Media Goes to Court

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Talk about the right book at the right time. Two years ago, a book called The Anxious Generation came out and it was an instant bestseller.

Jonathan Haidt A social psychologist teaching at New York University laid out a very stark thesis that Generation Z, the kids born with smartphones in their hands, have been harmed profoundly by those phones and the social media programs on them, harmed emotionally and intellectually by the addiction mechanisms programmed into the technology. Now, some readers scoffed initially, calling it the latest panic over new technology, and some academics have said that Hayde doesn't quite prove the negative effects he attributes to social media. But for a huge number of people, the anxious generation nailed it.

The book has now spent nearly 100 weeks on the bestseller list and more important it's helped to galvanize a movement. It inspired the world's first national law to verify the age of social media users. It also encouraged school districts to restrict the use of phones, and you see that happening all over the country. There have also been lawsuits in California that are aiming to pin liability for harms on the social media platforms themselves. I spoke with Jonathan Haidt when The Anxious Generation first came out two years ago, and he joined me again the other day.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (30 minutes, 5,656 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.