The Australian government’s legislation seeking to ban access to social media for people under 16 has received plenty of attention in International media, mostly leading with the government’s that 4.7 million accounts were banned or deactivated when the legislation came into effect. Rather less attention has been paid to discussion of the outcome within Australia, where the consensus is that there has been very little effect for most. With most kids still active, the minority who have been caught by the ban have suffered feelings of ostracism and exclusion When discussing the issue on my own social media (which had few if any teenage readers to begin with) I’ve only had one parent report their kids being thrown off.
Before coming to the real issues, I’ll point out that the 4.7 million figure is almost certainly bogus. Depending on guesses about the age range of those affected, this would imply between two and four accounts per kid. For reasons best known to themselves, the government gave specific numbers for Meta, but for no one else. Of the ten platforms subject to the ban, Meta had three – Facebook, Instagram and Threads which together issued 0.5 million bans, of which Instagram accounted for 330 000. That leaves 4.4 million for the remaining seven, including niche sites like Twitch and Kick, along with X, which is not very teen-oriented. It appears that the largest “ban” may involve nothing more than YouTube cancelling kids’ accounts (all that was required by the law) and shifting them on to the (much worse) public feed.
The ban was rushed through parliament a year or so ago. I wrote a series of posts criticising it at the time
The posts are here , here, here and here
I won’t recap them except to complain again the role of my bete noire, all-round charlatan Jonathan Haidt, who has been the subject of lengthy critiques on Crooked Timber for many years, long before he became an instant expert on kids and social media
Before it was implemented, the ban had strong, but not universal, support among parents of teens. However, it applied to all teens whether or not their families supported it. In this context, Albanese’s claim that “”This is families taking back control” is somewhat dishonest. The government was attempting to take control from families, though it has largely failed.
From reports I’ve seen around, a third of kids got their parents’ support to dodge the ban. In many other cases, the ban was ineffective and parents either didn’t know or couldn’t do much about it. But there was a significant remaining group of families where parents hoped that the law would give them an ace to play in the eternal dispute over screen time. The hope (which I’ve seen expressed quite literally) was that they could tell the kids “get off your phone, it’s the law”. Of course, the law says nothing of the sort, since it only binds social media companies.
For families where the kids lost accounts and parents have sought to enforce the ban, the result has often been intensified conflict, along the usual lines of such conflicts. The kids want to do what all their friends are doing, and fear isolation and exclusion, while the parents see themselves as protectors. Inevitably, parents will lose most of these fights well before their kids turn 16.
I have an almost unique perspective on this, having been born in 1956, the year TV came to Australia. As a result, I was a participant on both sides of the TV era of the screen wars, first as kid and then as parent. I was also exposed to the continuous denunciations of the “idiot box” by writers like Neil Postman (amusing ourselves to death) and Newton Minow (a vast wasteland). It’s startling to read supporters of the ban (can’t find the link now) reminiscing nostalgically about spending Saturday morning lying around watching cartoons.
Where to from here? It appears that we will see some before-and-after studies both official and independent, which will provide some kind of reality check on the claims and counterclaims. Regardless, the Albanese government, having passed some hastily drafted laws (see hate speech) will declare victory and move on.
Meanwhile, the big problems of social media – the toxicity of X/Twitter, algorithmic feeds, information harvesting, the distortions produced by reliance on social media – will remain. Dealing with them would require tackling powerful US interests, which is much harder than announcing restrictions on teenagers.
{ 62 comments }
Matt 01.23.26 at 7:27 am
Because I don’t have kids, I didn’t pay as much attention to the ban as I otherwise might have. I’m tempramentally opposed to such things, especially when I think they are not likely to be especially effective and may just encourage people to skirt the law. (I think it’s bad to make laws that are hard to enforce and that people are likely to skirt, as it tends to encourage disrespect for the law more generally.) But, for the sake of argument here, I’ll link to a post by the political philosophers Luara Ferracioli (a friend of my who teaches at U Sydney) and Liam Shields, from the UK, on the topic. I think it’s probably as good of a philosophical case as can be made, though I would have liked to see a bit more attention to practical questions.
https://www.publicethics.org/post/social-media-ban
engels 01.23.26 at 10:18 am
Reflexive snark deleted. I’m not banning you this time because you sometimes say interesting stuff, but you’re getting close. Before you hit send on a comment, consider whether it’s likely to be something I haven’t already thought about
engels 01.23.26 at 12:06 pm
Now the rest of the world is belatedly rebalancing against the US perhaps that could involve launching some kind of non-addictive, non-exploitative UN networking site and banning all the Silicon Valley opium (you may say that I’m a dreamer etc)
Laban 01.23.26 at 12:14 pm
So happy my kids just made it to near end of school before smartphones became ubiquitous (Blackberries were big). There were a few suicides at their schools, one at least from bullying – imagine what it’s like when you can be bullied 24/7 by phone .
“toxicity of X/Twitter”
To be fair, didn’t Twitter ban the former president of the US for incitement to violence?
https://blog.x.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension
And perhaps more importantly both Twitter and Facebook suppressed sharing of the Hunter Biden laptop story, which may have had a material impact on the 2020 election. So it may all depend on whose ox is getting gored.
Kenny Easwaran 01.23.26 at 4:51 pm
That’s surprising to me! In my experience, most of the people advocating getting people (and particularly young people) off of social media are also against addicting broadcast TV.
John Q 01.23.26 at 7:22 pm
Laban @4 One of the points I make in the linked critiques of the ban is that it doesn’t do anything about bullying. Messaging services aren’t affected, let alone ordinary SMS texting
https://johnquigginblog.substack.com/p/five-problems-australias-u16-social
Kenny @5 If support for the ban were confined to people who were strongly hostile to TV, it would never have passed.
Alex SL 01.23.26 at 9:02 pm
That last paragraph is what I find most important. Social media are not harmful as such; some find support and validation when they feel isolated in meatspace, some use forums to sell each other used items to avoid unnecessary waste and consumption, some show each other the art they created, and some look up tips and how-to guides in text or video form. The problem isn’t people communicating with each other online, it is things like algorithms deliberately serving them the most addictive or right-wing items (depending on the preferences of the billionaire owner), lack of moderation that empowers bullies and the dissemination of abusive material, the network earning money from scam and fraud advertisements, and lately Grok generating horrifying non-consensual and child abuse imagery.
None of those are solvable by banning 15 year olds from the networks. All of them are moderation or quality control failures that are only solvable by the owners of the networks. Non-cowards would tell the likes of Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter that they have a month to implement sufficient moderation and quality control or they are blocked in the country. Or alternatively, one can solve nothing but make millions of one’s own citizens go through a humiliating verification process that is also a data safety risk.
I am particularly depressed by the Grok situation of the last few weeks. One would have thought that what is now euphemistically called CSAM is the one red line even if there is no other line left. In a world where the same rules applied to billionaires as to everybody else, police would be waiting to arrest Musk in every country on the planet where his plane was ever headed. But we do not live in such a world. We live in one where it is apparently always easier to make live worse and more inconvenient for one’s own voters than to stand up to a small handful of rich people.
Matt 01.23.26 at 9:15 pm
FWIW, I thought that engels’ comparison w/ drinking bans for under-age kids, while terse, was worth thinking about – how are they different? Why not “parent’s choice” in both? I think there are some clear differences that tell between the cases – risk of serious harm to self or others, annoyance to others, etc. is much higher in the case of drinking, and it’s easier, even if not cose to foolproof, to enforce a ban on underage drinking, among other things, but they seem like the sort of things to consider. All that said, I think that most kids would be much better off with significantly less social media, too.
Tm 01.23.26 at 9:28 pm
Musk has now turned his Nazi network into a tool for generating and disseminating revenge porn and even child porn, and authorities (with few exceptions), most media, prominent X users, and the public at large are shrugging this off as just another eccentric move of the world’s most admired genius. At this point it’s undeniable that the most basic standards of ethics and decency have been eliminated and no laws will ever again (or at least until the revolution) be enforced against our oligarchic overlords. Not just in the US but in Europe and elsewhere as well. Most depressing is the absence of any meaningful public outcry.
engels 01.23.26 at 11:28 pm
Apologies if it came across as snark, I was trying to make a serious point: the various arguments I referenced also apply to age limits on alcohol etc (that doesn’t mean they’re wrong, it might mean we should rethink those bans; I didn’t mean to imply this hadn’t occurred to you).
Kenny, there is a type of liberal, over-represented on Twitter/BSky, who appears to think written literature (with the possible exception of the complete works of JK Rowling) was largely superseded by “intelligent” TV shows like the West Wing: getting them to relinquish their streaming subscriptions would be harder than prying colts from the hands of the NRA one assumes.
John Q 01.24.26 at 12:20 am
Engels @10 Thanks for apology, and apologies if I over-reacted. I will try to do a more general post on how the law treats kids some time soon.
Responding to Matt, in most places, the supply of alcohol to kids is “parents choice”. The law makes it illegal to sell to kids, but parents can give them alcohol if they choose. Parents supplying tobacco is illegal in lots of places, though it doesn’t seem as if this is enforced or enforcable.
notGoodenough 01.24.26 at 1:43 am
It seems to me that a rather useful question to consider would be “what is the most effective way to mitigate harm?” – policy decisions should, after all, surely consider both practicality and effectiveness.
Societies generally adopt one of two approaches when regulating behaviour: start with maximum freedom and intervene only when harm is demonstrated, or start with maximum restriction and relax rules once activities are proven safe. For practical and ethical reasons, society overwhelmingly relies on the former approach. Regulatory tools are varied: society can prohibit, restrict, or guide behaviour in ways that are universal, conditional, or demographic-specific (e.g. by age). When it comes to social media, it is perhaps worth asking whether targeted prohibition is preferable to broader regulation for all users. Measures designed to protect some (such as content moderation, time limits, or enhanced privacy controls) may often benefit all other users too. It is worth noting that research suggests that social media may both benefit and harm young people – adolescents gain social connection, access to information, and safe spaces for expression (which seems rather useful given the decreasing availability of public spaces, at least in places like the UK), though admittedly excessive or problematic use can correlate with anxiety, depression, or reduced self-esteem [1]. However, it is important to note that harms are heterogeneous and often linked to context and patterns of use [2]. This might underscore the importance of content-focused and context-sensitive regulation rather than blanket age-based prohibitions.
Consider the analogy regarding alcohol regulation: consumption by those under age is indeed heavily regulated, however restrictions generally seem to focus on setting and supervision rather than total prohibition; moreover, responsibility primarily falls on those serving alcohol rather than the under-age drinkers themselves. Additionally, it is perhaps worth noting that laws vary internationally, reflecting the absence of universal consensus on developmental judgment or the degree of potential harm. In contrast, structured social initiatives can amplify the impact of regulation in reducing harm, demonstrating how targeted messaging and community engagement reinforce broader regulatory goals and illustrating how social initiatives complement legal frameworks and public health policies [3]. Human rights and practical concerns may also support cautious regulation – blanket bans risk limiting freedoms including expression, access to information, privacy, and social participation, and it seems reasonable to be concerned that this consequently removes important avenues for social support, belonging, and being able to voice belief [4].
So, it may be worth considering whether structured guidance – for example, through education, parental oversight, and safer platform design – addresses these issues more effectively by combining age-appropriate protections with broader regulatory safeguards and harm-reduction strategies.
As ever, YMMV.
(I will note that this is seperate to what to my mind is a rather important point; namely the control of social media – and media in general; this is a point I touched on briefly before, and don’t propose to expand within this already too-lengthy post, but I suspect that the harm resulting from consolodation within the hands of the few has been far more harmful in a broader societal sense)
[1] K. L. McAlister et al., JMIR Ment. Health, 2024, doi: 10.2196/64626
[2] N. Agyapong-Opoku et al., Behav. Sci., 2025, doi: 10.3390/bs15050574
[3] D. M. Vallone et al., Health Educ. Res., 2022, doi: 10.1093/her/cyab025
[4] https://humanrights.gov.au/about-us/news/proposed-social-media-ban-under-16s-australia; https://www.humanrights.unsw.edu.au/students/blogs/australia-social-media-ban-under-16s
Matt 01.24.26 at 1:47 am
On “parents’ choice”, I didn’t check enough places to give me an idea of what “most places” do for alcohol, but did check enough to see that the rules vary quite a lot. In California it seems to be illegal to do even in one’s own home. In New York you can do it in your own home, but not anywhere else. In Texas parents can let their kids drink in places like restaurants so long as the parent is present with them. Australia seems to allow it in one’s own home but not in bars or restaurants, and in QLD and the NT, the parent must be present, while in the other states the parent has to give permission, but need not be present so long as some responsible adult is supervising. So, no where that I found can parents just decide for themselves that it’s okay that their underage kids drink alcohol and then it’s legal – it’s limited by place in many places, and all places require the parent or some other responsiblie adult to be there. In that way underage drinking rules are more permissive, at least in many places (but not Califorinia, and assumedly some others) than the social media ban, which is interesting, I think.
nonrenormalizable 01.24.26 at 11:35 am
FWIW, I wouldn’t agree with the assessment of Twitch (and to a lesser extent, its smaller rival Kick) as “niche”, though I don’t know the specific audience sizes in Australia. Since at least the start of the Covid pandemic, these live-streaming sites and the streamers on them have become a big part of youth culture — accepting that many of these figures might be unrecognisable to oldsters who may only have grown up during the early years of YouTube.
The streaming format has sort of crossed over into podcasts nowadays, as has some of the more extreme political views. Perhaps it is a bit of a cliche now to describe this as a “radicalisation pipeline”, but if you’ve been online enough, you can see the evolution of a popular streamer from a couple of years ago into some kind of alt-right figurehead, dragging some of their adolescent audience into adulthood with them.
engels 01.24.26 at 2:27 pm
Btw isn’t it part of the Haidt problematic that teenage drinking/sex/drugs/rock’n’roll went down due to social media?
Laban 01.24.26 at 2:51 pm
“It’s startling to read supporters of the ban (can’t find the link now) reminiscing nostalgically about spending Saturday morning lying around watching cartoons.”
Yes, very few will identify with
“When I was but thirteen or so
I went into a golden land”
J, not that one 01.24.26 at 4:37 pm
I have a teenage child and I’ve found the age restrictions impossible to navigate over the past decade and a half, and the response from the companies and often the public (it’s parents’ job to supervise their kids, and bullying wouldn’t happen if we were on the ball) very unhelpful. Some of these sites had content catering to children (like comics or games) and I suppose pretending they didn’t let teens use them allowed them not to filter content by user.
Schoolteachers aren’t well informed about these issues either and in my experience don’t know how open some of the apps they use are.
I’d expect watching gamers on Twitch is a big thing for many teens if only because they give hints for gameplay. She and her friends also tend to use the “more niche” apps to avoid Google and Musk.
J, not that one 01.24.26 at 4:42 pm
FWIW the site that let you be sorted into a Hogwarts House or get fan material about the novels was 13+ at minimum, which was almost certainly to avoid the regulations that only applied to children, and which obviously was kind of ridiculous.
SusanC 01.24.26 at 5:42 pm
The UK has a porn block, which is getting applied to much more than porn. For example, Ofcom is threatening to block Wikipedia.
The outcome seems to be that about half of UK Internet users have just learned how to set up a VPN. I imagine Australia is similar; there is no particular reason to think they’re less VPN literate than the poms.
Yes, the UK government is now threatening to ban VPNs. Of course they are.
SusanC 01.24.26 at 5:50 pm
Oh, and the effect of UK telling US sites to institute blocks of UK users is that the US is about to pass legislation to the effect that Ofcom will be fined some amount (I think 1 million dollars has been suggested) for each and every single web site Ofcom sends a threatening letter to.
If that goes through, each and every US reader will have the opportunity to get Ofcom fined yet another million dollars by (a) setting up a web site (b) telling Ofcom to get lost when they send you a threatening letter (c) reporting the threatening communication to the appropriate US authorities…
SusanC 01.24.26 at 5:54 pm
Oh, and the effect of UK telling US sites to institute blocks of UK users is that the US is about to pass legislation to the effect that Ofcom will be fined some amount (I think 1 million dollars has been suggested) for each and every single web site Ofcom sends a threatening letter to.
If that goes through, each and every US reader will have the opportunity to get Ofcom fined yet another million dollars by (a) setting up a web site (b) telling Ofcom to get lost when they send you a threatening letter (c) reporting the threatening communication to the appropriate US authorities…
MisterMr 01.24.26 at 11:38 pm
The last time this story came out I was quite dubious about the effect of social media on kids, but now I believe the problem is real (because I read Haidt ‘s book, blame him).
So I will note just this problem: if you think the responsibility should fall more on social media sites, then social media sites still need to know who is a minor and who is not, so you still have the privacy problem; the same happens if you think the parents have the responsibility (and now the sites need the identity of the kid, of the parent, and proof they are related).
Also, how comes everyone is so pissed to give away their documents to Facebook, but then use their credit card on Amazon.
John Q 01.25.26 at 10:27 am
MisterMr @22 “because I read Haidt ‘s book, blame him” Truly depressing to read this from a longtime CT reader. There’s a decade of posts to show that
(a) in his previous incarnation as a supposedly libersl concern troll, he made a big thing of the notion that Republicans were all about purity, which he had to drop (but not retract) when they all voted for Trump
(b) from the same history, that he has no relevant background whatsoever to make claims that have been rejected by most real experts on teen problems
(c) Once someone has been exposed as a fraud, they should not get the benefit of the doubt. Even if you checked Haidt’s references, you ought to presume that he has ignored any contrary evidence.
It makes me wonder why I bother.
somebody who remembers 01.25.26 at 11:21 am
The following criminal complaint was one of many criminal complaints which finally lead to the EU fining Elon Musk and it was also posted on CT and for a German-French-Italian Non profit who tries to protect children and young adults – the only thing which would really work is taking Criminals like Elon Musk and Donald Trump completely out of business – even if it mean to get banned visiting the US.
Datum: 23.07.2024
Betreff: Strafanzeige wegen Verbreitung Pornografischer Inhalte, Volksverhetzung, Diffamierung und Beleidigung.
Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,
hiermit erstatten wir Strafanzeige gegen Twitter Germany GmbH Am Zirkus 2 Berlin
10117 sowie deren Besitzer Elon Musk wegen des Verdachts der Verbreitung Pornografischer Inhalte, Volksverhetzung, Diffamierung, Beleidigung, Verleumdung und stellen Strafantrag wegen aller in Betracht kommenden Delikte.
Dem liegt folgender Sachverhalt zugrunde:
Schon Anfang des Jahres haben nicht nur wir festgestellt, dass Twitter Germany GmbH, vertreten durch Elon Musk gefälschte pornografische Nacktfotos des Idols von Millionen minderjähriger Deutscher Mädchen publiziert. (Anlage1)
Am 26 Juni 2024 wurde von einem sogenannten ,Twit sogar eine mögliche Vergewaltigung propagiert. (Anlage 2)
Monate zuvor wurden außerdem in hunderttausenden sogenannter , Tweets’ junge sogenannte ‚Swifties’ auch in Deutschland als , Anhänger einer Satanischen und/oder Demonischen Sekte’ verleumdet und beleidigt. (Anlage 3/4)
Anlässlich der Deutschlandtournee von Taylor Swift behauptete X (ehemals Twitter) dann mit gefälschten Fotos, dass ‚Swifties’ Zugabteile zerstören (Anlage 5) und anderes Ekelhaftes (Anlage 6) Solche bösartigen Verleumdungen wurden von Swifties in unserem Verein mit großer Betroffenheit zur Kenntnis genommen und Elon Musk darum gebeten – wie von ihm versprochen -,Kinder zu schützen – vor allem auch vor den brutalsten Naziparolen oder der Holocaustverleugnung, die in Deutschland strafbar sind. Doch Elon Musk sieht seine Firma als nicht verantwortlich für die Tweets seiner Twits und ist der Meinung, dass nach amerikanischen Recht selbst die bösartigsten kriminellen Verleumdungen und Beleidigungen ,Free Speech’
(Meinungsfreiheit) sind.
Nur gilt das auch in Deutschland? Und muss sich die GmbH eines Amerikaners, die in Deutschland firmiert nicht auch an Deutsche Gesetze halten?
Dies sollte endlich ein für alle mal gerichtlich geklärt werden. Die Anzeige wurde von uns -, einem gemeinnützigen Verein gestellt -, weil unsere Mitglieder auf Twitter bereits massiv bedroht wurden und deshalb darauf bestehen, anonym zu bleiben. Zu den Anlagen ist zu bemerken, dass diese nur ein kleiner Teil sind. Für einen Film über die ,ARCHAEOLOGY OF HATE’ wurden von Vereinsmitgliedern über 2000 Hass-Tweets dokumentiert und sie könnten als weitere Beweise zugezogen werden.
Wir bitten Sie daher, ein Ermittlungsverfahren einzuleiten und uns über das Ergebnis zu informieren.
engels 01.25.26 at 12:42 pm
the US is about to pass legislation to the effect that Ofcom will be fined some amount (I think 1 million dollars has been suggested) for each and every single web site Ofcom sends a threatening letter to
How are these fines collected?
J, not that one 01.25.26 at 3:31 pm
JQ @ 23
My feelings about (a) are: People who believed Haidt when he said Republicans were about purity, and the only reason his fellow academics objected to his work was prejudice against people with traditionals, are also largely likely to be largely the same people who are willing to fall for Trump and MAGA when they say that, regardless of the quality of their personal virtue, they are going to enhance the respect for purity of the citizens of the United States.
I guess I would distinguish that group from people who followed Haidt because it seemed to them that a lot of people whose opinion they should care about appeared to believe him. To be fair.
In either case, I would hope that some among both those groups are recognizing their mistake, but I’m not holding out hope for the first of those. Rationalization is too strong a force.
J, not that one 01.25.26 at 3:43 pm
Also, I kind of wonder whether the fact that until recently, there was very little TV especially for kids (and for some of that time no ability to pick and choose what you watched and when you watched it, as well as at most on TV per household), and until even more recently, not that many books written specifically for young kids and teenagers — so that people my age spent a lot of time consuming content made for adults — was a good or a bad thing. Some of the very beautiful picture books we got from the library had kind of horrific implicit (and sometimes explicit) values, like “the wide world is fun, but it’s best for a polar bear to be safe at home where everything and everyone are white,” and “some kids, like some dogs, are just deep-down bad.” And trying to keep all those messages out is going to be entirely futile and maybe not even a good idea. But I don’t think they’d have gotten past an adult reader and marketed as just like all the other picture books.
MisterMr 01.26.26 at 12:01 am
For the record, I did read two books by Haidt, the one about the moral foundations and the one about the anxious generation, and in both I believed that he arguments as a sleazebag (more obvious ain the moral foundations, but also in the other the analogy with Mars at the beginning is very tendentious).
However, the fact that he is a sleazebag doesn’t automatically make his arguments wrong, the increase in depressions and suicides is really happening, and I have a 3yo nephew that I realized I have to keep away from YouTube because he would scroll videos continuously changing every 5 seconds, so that I really came to fear for his attention span (TV is way less bad so I swapped YT for the TV).
Irrelevant for the present discussion, but I have no problem tò believe trumpist are obsessed with purity, just they only care about the purity of the ones they perceive as outgroup.
John Q 01.26.26 at 4:35 am
To spell it out, there’s no guarantee that the conclusions drawn by a lying sleazebag are wrong (even if the proportions differ there are lying sleazebags on all sides of any argument), but there are very good reasons to ignore any arguments they put forward. A rational person would ignore the advertisements put out by a company with a long history of consumer malpractic. Their products might actually work, but you would look for a credible source to confirm or refute this.
“Purity” on the revised definition just means racism, the charge on which Haidt was acting as defence counsel for Republicans.
engels 01.26.26 at 10:12 am
It’s a long time since I read Haidt’s book but I think you can separate the moral psychology stuff from the centrist way it’s used to legitimate the right. I didn’t find Haidt’s approach convincing (though it didn’t seem to me dishonest in any way). I’m not sympathetic to the second agenda but I think the first is an important topic that no one on the left has addressed since Adorno (or maybe Altemeyer).
Fwiw though I think cultural polarisation is a real problem, which predates Trump and isn’t just a legitimate response to Trump and it isn’t good for the class-based left/America/the world (I think it’s connected with Piketty’s merchant/Brahmin argument) so I am a kind of centrist on some cultural issues I think (as someone once said as a slamdunk of me) though not Haidt’s kind (maybe closer to someone like Vivek Chibber).
MisterMr 01.26.26 at 12:16 pm
So, a longish response divided in four parts
First, why I think Haidt is a sleazebag. In “a righteous mind”, Haidt continuously changes the target in a way designed to influence people based on emotional non sequiturs: for example, he starts by saying that he is doing a descriptive, not normative thigie, but in the end he is clearly telling you what is the correct moral (normative), or he spends a chapter saying that Bentham was an autistic guy who had no friends, and hey I don’t mean that utilitarianism is normatively bad for this reason, this would be a lowly ad-hominem, but did I tell you that he was an autistic guy with no friends and everybody hated him? And so on.
Now, he is a trained psychologist who specializes in the psychology of morals, so it is obvious that he realizes that he is influencing his readers indirectly, so he is doing this on purpose, but while pretending he isn’t. A sleazebag.
Second, about “purity” and other stuff in “a righteous mind”. Recentrly I did read a lot of evo-psy and psychology of morals (including Righteous mind), and this comes on top of an old interest I have about old psychanalisis stuff (Freud, Adler and Jung, mostly).
When we speak of the psychology of morals, there are 3 levels that should be kept separate: at a first level we have some basic social instincts, whithout which we could not have any form of morality; this is the territory of evo-psy and what Haidt purports to study whith his 6 moral foundations stuff.
At the second level, we have the sort of social conditioning that we absorb growing from our parents and other people around us; this is what corresponds to Freud’s superego, Durkheim’s taboos and norms and most critical studies about culture. Haidt ignores this level big time, even if at the end of the book he randomly pulls out Durheim from the hat in a way that has nothing to do with the six foundations (??).
The third level is the “rational” morality that we recognize in arguments like the utilitarian one (but also in rationalist theology and similar). When we speak in normative terms, we are mostly working in this level.
Now, the basic “social instincts” (first level) are the base of morality, but they are not the same of morality proper (third level), otherwise there would be no point in reasonong about morality. It is evident that our basic social instincts, that developed in prehistory and partly in pre-human stages, contain a lot of stuff that is horrible: for example we obviously have a natural tendency to love the ingroup, hate the outgroup, and this tendency is largely what something like fascism or racism in general feeds on, although because these instincts are discructive in modern society generally they are repressed at the level of social mores (second level) or rational morality (third level).
So the study of this first level is interesting and the theory of the six foundations is interesting even if I doubt it; the problem is that Haidt at some point switch gears and threat these foundations as normative. Obviously if all our prehistoric moral instinct are accepted normatively, some seriously bad stuff like extreme hate for the outgroup (fascism) can happen.
Also the “durkheimian” effects that Haidt like so much can cause extremism due to the effect of e.g. social media (the idea that lefties are less “durkheimian” than the righties make no sense, as if extremist lefties could not exist).
Third, more relevant for the OP, the problem is if it is true that social media and to a lesser degree porn is bad for small kids. There has been a fast worldwide increase in depression and suicide attempts, and this happened in a relative short time (10 years IIRC). Haidt’s and other’s theory is that this is the effect of the abuse of social media by kids and early adolescents in a period of life where they should socialize (and also understand their own sexuality), but instead they now mostly socialize through social media, so that their normal socialisation goes wrong. Is this true? this is an empirical question and the answer might be yes, regardless of the fact that Haidt agrees with this. As the uncle of a 3yo toddler my impression is that this is quite realistic, the toddler’s response to e.g. youtube videos is excessive and social media are in fact built in order to create instant gratification and a tendency to continuously scroll.
I’m not a psychologist, my understanding is that psychologists are divided but a large part agrees.
Fourth, the privacy stuff: I see that many people are pissed by the personal privacy implications of implementing this kind of laws, but it seems to me that at some point some sort of age verification, for certain sites, is a necessity. For example many webcomics sites I follow have a lot of porn stuff, often quite heavy; genrally you can see this stuff only if you are logged in and declare that you are not a minor, but the site administrators have no way to know if you are 51yo or 6yo, I remember a thread where a moderator spoke of users who declared to be like 21 but then by their answers the mod realized they were under 12.
If we compare this to alcohol, it is like if the supermarket by law can’t sell alcohol to minors, but also by law if a toddler comes and says he’s 21 the shop cannot see he is a toddlers and has to give booze anyway.
This is obviously a problem, so the real argument should be more something like “how do we implement an age verification system that doesn’t infringe on privacy”, just saying “let’s not do anything” isn’t going to solve the problem because for a reason or the other this kind of thing will turn out again.
I mean if we can manage to use credit cards online, we probably can create some sort of age check thing.
J, not that one 01.26.26 at 2:33 pm
Haidt is just writing up his preferences and dressing them up to make them loom scientific, supported by evidence, and so on. A clue is that the first stab at the “moral tribes” or whatever matches a common set of prejudices and never gets investigated with data. No one ever offers a rival theory, he never addresses critics as having something serious to say, etc.
There’s literally no reason to prefer his theory over any other writer who says “culture matters in some way,” other than that you already agree with him on a lot of things. Sure, I think phones aren’t great. I also suspect the success of his first book probably led him to do less work to shore up this new, less scholarly one.
engels 01.26.26 at 5:16 pm
the first stab at the “moral tribes” or whatever matches a common set of prejudices and never gets investigated with data. No one ever offers a rival theory, he never addresses critics as having something serious to say
What are the rival theories to Haidt’s moral foundations (“moral tribes” afaics seems to be associated with a Harvard social scientist, Joshua Greene).
engels 01.26.26 at 5:40 pm
Haidt is just writing up his preferences and dressing them up to make them loom scientific
I don’t see this. Iirc he’s claiming to describe, not defend, two American moral systems; the prescription he’s making is for something like neutrality between them (I’m not really sympathetic to this agenda, eg making universities more friendly to “conservatism”, but I think some CTers, eg Harry Brighouse, are and I don’t think it’s completely unreasonable either.)
J, not that one 01.27.26 at 3:30 pm
@33 & 34 I said “moral tribes or whatever” because I don’t remember what term Haidt uses and as far as I can tell he and Greene are engaged in the same thing and their books support one another, even though they use different terms.
My overall criticism of Haidt is that he presents a conservative meta-theory about why liberals are wrong to dismiss conservative values, and wrongly presents it as “science.” What he’s really doing is making a polemical argument where he tries to explain liberals to themselves “correctly,” while defending conservatives as understanding themselves perfectly well thank you.
In the details, what I find is that his book has a lot of moving parts, which don’t mesh together well. There’s the part where he gives a description of what his categories like purity are, what kind of categories they are: which is probably fine though a different writer could use different terms, which is OK for a humanities field but isn’t science. There’s the part where he says THESE are the only useful categories: which seems awfully culturally and politically and even theologically specific, and which still is probably OK for a humanities book but raises serious questions when it’s presented as science. There’s the part where he distributes his virtues-or-whatever between groups, which seems really question-begging and politically charged to me. There’s the part where he explains specifics in terms of the theory he’s built up, which raises questions how these evaluations were made and whether they’re scientifically valid, or only personal and idiosyncratic. There’s the part where he cites clinical studies, where (leaving aside whether those can be reproduced) the links between the results and what he makes of those results often seem tenuous.
In other words, as far as I can see, this is a humanities book masquerading as science. Which, OK, we need humanities books too. But what kind of authority we should take it to have seems fuzzy. Even if it’s a humanities book, that raises questions about culture and so on. Is this what Haidt thinks every smart person on Earth today believes? All Americans? All “ruling class” Americans? Say he wrote a book describing what a lot of right-leaning or conservative American intellectuals believe. That reduces his authority for “readers in general” quite a bit.
Add that that to some very important mistakes, like not understanding that “purity” for many of the people he was defending really did mean racism or something only infinitesimally distinct from racism, and a reader might wonder if giving him the benefit of the doubt for so long wasn’t a very serious mistake..
J, not that one 01.27.26 at 3:51 pm
Also, a further reason to distrust “humanities-masquerading-as-science” books is exactly the thing engels brought up earlier. Maybe we really can distinguish the theory from the political practice. We can say that here are these categories that help us understand cultures and so on. And we can say that there’s what the author thinks the political salience of the theory is. So a fairly sophisticated reader, if she wanted to be fair to people she disagrees with, could do that.
But what then? Does she recommend the book tout court to everyone, even people who aren’t as sophisticated? And then there’s the problem that it’s now been designated “science,” and the most natural reading is that applies to the whole book. And in this case Haidt showed he didn’t want people to do that, so I don’t know why we would expect the other cases to go differently, if the authors were put to the test in public.
engels 01.27.26 at 6:42 pm
What he’s really doing is making a polemical argument where he tries to explain liberals to themselves “correctly,” while defending conservatives as understanding themselves perfectly well thank you.
How many conservatives think they’re all about purity (to take what I suspect is the rather caricatured version of Haidt’s claim that’s been reported here since I can’t remember the actual book)?
Does she recommend the book tout court to everyone, even people who aren’t as sophisticated?
For the record, I’ve never recommended the book to anyone, sophisticate or rube, I just thought it opened up an interesting topic that I’d like to see tackled from a direction I’m more sympathetic to.
engels 01.27.26 at 6:48 pm
Preferably by someone called Love, to give reviewers some low-hanging puns.
J, not that one 01.28.26 at 4:29 pm
engels
I say that’s what he was doing for the reason that after his book was published he acted like someone who was doing that, and not like someone who would welcome a critical article from a direction you or I might be more sympathetic to. And he engaged in organizing to support people on the right who were overtly engaged in even more extreme versions of that project.
John Q 01.28.26 at 7:46 pm
Engels, conservatives were all about purity until 2016 (eg Bennett’s Book of Virtues). Liberals said it was just a front for racism and misogyny. Haidt’s moral foundations idea was that liberals didn’t really understand conservatives.
After 2016, we didn’t hear quite so much about this.
Haidt didn’t worry, moved on to a more promising topic, and prospered.
Tm 01.29.26 at 2:59 pm
Reading up on this thread, it occurs to me that my comment at 9 is could in itself serve as a refutation of Haidt’s purity theory, given that not just most conservatives but also most of Haidt’s liberal supporters are active on the Nazi child porn network apparently without suffering from any cognitive dissonance.
engels 01.30.26 at 12:28 pm
Haidt’s purity theory
To the best of my recollection/instant Googling Haidt mapped liberals and conservatives on half a dozen dimensions, all of which are held to contribute to both; the ones that distinguish c.s from l.s are loyalty, authority and purity. It was meant to be a descriptive, not a normative, theory and it seems reasonable to believe all those have legitimate (religious/conservstuve/communitarian) and illegitimate (nativist/racist/fascist) elaborations. Viewing racism as a malign form of purity politics is a very common idea and a well-work anti-racist trope.
engels 01.30.26 at 12:52 pm
it seems to me that at some point some sort of age verification, for certain sites, is a necessity. For example many webcomics sites I follow have a lot of porn stuff
You could just ban internet porn. If you want to watch porn buy a DVD in person and bring ID. That this might seem unthinkable shows how much the world has changed in 20 years.
John Q 01.30.26 at 7:01 pm
Engels @42 “all those (loyalty, authority and purity) have legitimate (religious/conservstuve/communitarian) and illegitimate (nativist/racist/fascist) elaborations
That’s exactly right. But Haidt accepted, quite uncritically, conservative claims that they held the legitimate version. His central point was that liberals who imputed the illegitimate versions simply didn’t understand conservatives.
Tm 01.30.26 at 8:20 pm
Engels 44, you seem to be quoting from my 43, but not clear what your point is. Of course Haidt’s theory is supposed to be descriptive. But some of us doubt that his description of “conservative values” is accurate. Certainly not any more.
engels 01.30.26 at 9:45 pm
Possibly we’re not disagreeing that much? I said he’s a centrist and I disagree with his efforts to legitimise the right. I think the Republican Party has been crazy and evil since at least GWB. I just think the project of investigating polarisation by describing competing value systems is an interesting one. Again, if anyone wants to suggest anyone less “sleazy” who’s done that I’m all ears.
MisterMr 01.30.26 at 10:04 pm
@Engels 43
You could just ban internet porn
Yes, but I don’t see how this is less a restriction on freedom than age verification is.
Non-porn sites (other than social media) would not require age verification, so someone who either doesn’t want porn or accepts to buy porn DVDs would not need to do the age-verification stuff, so your proposal doesn’t really protect anyone’s privacy.
MisterMr 01.30.26 at 10:09 pm
@Engels 42
it seems reasonable to believe all those have legitimate (religious/conservstuve/communitarian) and illegitimate (nativist/racist/fascist) elaborations.
It is also possible that we have various “natural” social instincts, that evolved in late pleistocene, and half of those instincts when applied in modern societies suck.
Haidt however in his book strongly implies that liberals are the weird ones for repressing the 3 dimensions that they lack.
(it is not clear that the liberals are repressing those, since at some point Haidt says that political positions are influenced by genetics[!!] more than by class, but it seems to me this is the most logical interpretation of Haidt’s book).
MisterMr 01.30.26 at 10:23 pm
Another snipe at Haidt.
If you compare Haidt’s “The righteous mind” with Lakoff’s “The political mind”, Haidt says:
That there are 6 dimensions of morals;
That liberals are extremely low relative to normal human values in 3 of those, while conservatives are normal;
Also randomly pulls out Durkheim and says that liberals are not Durkheimian enough (Durheim has nothing to do with any of the 6 dimension, perhaps Haidt disagrees but didn’t explain his point).
Also Haidt strongly impies that there is something innatural in liberal ethics.
Lakoff says:
That there are two main cultural metaphors for politics, Nurturing Mother and Tough Father;
That liberals are somewhat balanced between the two, while conservatives are way unbalanced in the direction of the Tough Father;
That conservatives will lead towards fascism if liberals don’t manage to turn the narrative.
Both are making a point, Haidt is pro-conservative and Lakoff is pro-liberal, so in this sense there is a tie. But lakoff never hides his politics, he explicitly speaks to liberals, whereas Haidt pretends to be non-normative. The problem is in the pretension in being super partes, if Haidt just said: “hey I’m a conservative, I think that you liberals are wrong on this, that and that other item” I might have disagreed, but I wouldn’t have called him a sleazebag; the problem is in the hypocital way he does this.
engels 01.31.26 at 12:59 pm
Haters gonna hate Haudt I guess.
I’d forgotten about Lakoff’s Mommy/Daddy thing, which obviously has a grain of truth and explains why, for some of us, following American politics from afar is like listening to a spiralling domestic row between a particularly obnoxious rich couple.
Tm 01.31.26 at 1:51 pm
Regarding polarisation, a recent book by German sociologist Nils Kumkar argues that “while polarization is readily observed in political discourse, profound ideological divides don’t necessarily reflect the sentiments of the broader population”. My feeling is that this applies to moral values as well. I don’t think when you ask regular people about their moral values, there will be much difference based on their politics. What is different is how moral discourse gets used in the service of politics.
A typical example is “family values”. Liberal and conservative family values, as they are actually lived, are not terribly different. Liberals prefer stable monogamous relationships just as conservatives do (or say they do), except they may be more tolerant of other models. Yet, our broken media discourse describes the party of multiply divorced Epstein associate Trump as the “family values party”, as opposed to the party of model family man Obama. That’s really all you need to know about polarization vs reality…
(I couldn’t find an English review, maybe this is helpful:
https://inkovema.de/en/blog/253-gddz-polarisation-of-society-nils-kumkar/
https://news.osna.fm/sociologist-political-strategy-not-division-defines-germanys-polarization/)
engels 02.01.26 at 7:27 pm
Haters gonna Haidt…
Lakoff’s mommy/daddy thing explains a lot, and perhaps not least why from 3000 miles away US politics mostly sounds like a never-ending domestic row.
Tm 02.02.26 at 2:22 pm
More reasons to Haidt the Smartphone:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/01/the-conversation-not
John Q 02.02.26 at 7:15 pm
TM @53 I got an error trying to load this. But as a general point, the jump from “smart phone bad” to “let’s throw kids off social media” is the most common way in which supporters of the ban have argued.
Engels: Similar dichotomy in 1938 Germany, with both US parties now copying the rhetoric of their German counterparts. Still not taking sides?
Tm 02.02.26 at 7:54 pm
JQ : the link works for me… I honestly don’t know what to do about this problem.
engels 02.02.26 at 11:39 pm
My official policy on US and UK electoral politics is that I’m happy to take sides just as long as I’m not on the same side as Jeffrey Epstein.
J-D 02.03.26 at 4:48 am
TM’s link works for me, but I’ve also run it through tinyURL.com just in case that helps:
https://tinyurl.com/yeysjt7b
(For those who didn’t know about tinyURL.com: now you do!)
ETB 02.03.26 at 12:39 pm
Well, thank goodness there wasn’t a recent populist movement demanding abusers (no matter how wealthy or powerful) be called to account to which you responded with sneering contempt about relative importance or circumventing due process while downplaying the legitimacy of anything not centring the class struggle as being divisive identity politics – otherwise you’d look a bit insincere right about now, wouldn’t you?
engels 02.03.26 at 8:04 pm
you responded with sneering contempt about relative importance or circumventing due process while downplaying the legitimacy of anything not centring the class struggle as being divisive identity politics
Actually I said than attacking Brett Kavanaugh for waving his dick around 40 years ago rather than supporting torture and opposing international law demonstrated some seriously skewed priorities (not to say utter moral bankruptcy) on the part of Democrats, and as time has gone on that opinion has only grown stronger.
ETB 02.04.26 at 10:52 pm
“Actually, dismissing sexual assault as mere triviality demonstrates my sincerity about opposing sexual assault.”
Indeed – after all, who would disagree with O’Brien?
(the notion occurs that had society been just a little less indulgent of our elite’s propensity for such self-amusements we might not have been blessed by The Dark Lord and his protégé Morgan – but no doubt that’s the sort of cultural polarisation that all goodthinkers must decry)
engels 02.05.26 at 11:02 am
Tell it to Monica Lewinsky.
engels 02.05.26 at 11:26 am
I didn’t dismiss sexual assault as a triviality.
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