The Matt Walsh Show - March 30, 2024


A Few Reasons Why Kids Shouldn't Use Social Media [Weekly Walsh Original]


Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

199.89607

Word count

1,667

Sentence count

100

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signs a bill that could ban TikTok and other social media apps for minors under the age of 14 in the state. But what exactly does this mean and how will it affect children? Plus, a new product from Provia that could make your hair better.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.260 Legislation that would ban TikTok in the United States, unless its Chinese owner divests from the company, is currently making its way through the Senate.
00:00:06.580 It's still not clear what's going to happen to that bill exactly.
00:00:09.620 It overwhelmingly passed in the House by hundreds of votes, but it appears to be significantly less popular in the upper chamber.
00:00:15.240 And that's true in no small part because of the most intense lobbying campaign in recent memory is underway to kill the legislation.
00:00:21.760 So that's why legislation that was just signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida is so significant.
00:00:26.940 It hasn't got much attention, but it should because it addresses the legitimate concerns about apps like TikTok without granting the government any kind of sweeping new, unprecedented powers to regulate the lives of American citizens.
00:00:38.240 Instead, it regulates the behavior of children in a manner that's consistent with all sorts of other regulations that already apply to minors.
00:00:46.000 Watch.
00:00:46.560 His grandpa says Bryson's screen time is limited, and of course, he's entirely too young for social media.
00:00:53.120 But just how young is too young?
00:00:55.400 It's done. There you go.
00:00:56.940 Look how fat that little thing. Look how fat that little fish is. 1.00
00:01:00.940 Talk about fat. Look at that.
00:01:04.240 House Bill 3 would require social media companies to ban accounts belonging to someone under the age of 14 to be on sites like Instagram and TikTok.
00:01:17.260 Fatty.
00:01:18.820 Let's go home.
00:01:19.720 So generally speaking, under this bill, children under the age of 14 can't have social media accounts and 14 to 15 year olds will need permission from their parents to have a social media account.
00:01:32.920 The bill is set to take effect at the beginning of next year, although, as you heard, there are undoubtedly going to be legal challenges on First Amendment grounds.
00:01:38.580 Several months ago, a federal judge blocked a similar law in Arkansas, which banned minors from creating social media accounts without parental consent.
00:01:44.900 But the Florida bill is meaningfully different from the legislation that was struck down in Arkansas.
00:01:48.500 And it's important to get into the specifics because, as we've learned, the media will misrepresent the substance of every Florida bill they possibly can.
00:01:56.420 Well, they misrepresent everything all the time, but especially legislation in Florida, as we've seen, that's when they really go to town.
00:02:02.160 So here are the details.
00:02:04.060 The Florida bill is not a blanket ban on any particular app.
00:02:07.720 Instead, it's focused on banning apps that have particular features which are designed to keep children on the app at all times.
00:02:13.420 In order to fall under this ban, according to the Texas legislation, the app must have one of the following.
00:02:18.960 Infinite scrolling, which the bill defines as continuously loading content or content that loads as the user scrolls down the page without the need to open a separate page.
00:02:26.140 Two, push notifications or alerts to inform a user about specific activities or events related to the user's account.
00:02:31.740 Or three, autoplay video or video that begins to play without the user first clicking on the video or on a play button for that video.
00:02:38.060 The point of the law isn't to ban content per se.
00:02:41.600 It's to regulate how much of it children are being exposed to.
00:02:44.760 And that's a significant distinction because there's a lot of evidence that these addictive features harm children.
00:02:50.160 In fact, rewire their brains.
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00:03:55.820 The journal World Psychiatry recently published an analysis which found that, quote,
00:03:59.440 the primary hypothesis on how the internet affects our attentional capacities is through hyperlinks, notifications, and prompts,
00:04:05.120 providing a limitless stream of different forms of digital media, thus encouraging us to interact with multiple inputs simultaneously.
00:04:10.880 Now, these are the kind of notifications that are specifically banned in the Florida bill, and there's more research along those lines.
00:04:17.080 Researchers at UNC, for example, found that, quote,
00:04:19.320 checking social media repeatedly among young teens ages 12 to 13 may be associated with changes in how their brains develop over a three-year period.
00:04:26.380 In their analysis, which was published in JAMA Pediatrics, the UNC researchers specifically determined that, quote,
00:04:30.940 the brains of adolescents who check social media often, more than 15 times per day, became more sensitive to social feedback.
00:04:37.040 Now, there's much more research on this point, but intuitively, we all know this is true.
00:04:40.880 The social media companies know it, too, which is why they have these kinds of features.
00:04:44.040 Their goal is to rewire children's brains so that they seek positive social feedback from apps instead of from people in their day-to-day life.
00:04:51.560 And that is obviously concerning because when their brains are developing,
00:04:54.800 children are especially prone to falling into addictive behaviors that, once learned, can affect them for the rest of their lives.
00:05:00.220 We are mentally and emotionally deforming entire generations of children who do not know how to interact with the world unless it is filtered through a tiny screen.
00:05:10.060 And this isn't just concerning.
00:05:11.700 This is a crisis.
00:05:12.780 It is impacting the future of our civilization.
00:05:15.080 If we could look into a crystal ball and see what the world will look like 100 years from now,
00:05:19.840 it would probably terrify us so much that we would call for the ban of every social media company and every smartphone in existence.
00:05:26.920 And this is why we need to protect children in particular.
00:05:29.220 We already protect them from all kinds of other things that we have judged to be toxic or inappropriate for them.
00:05:34.700 We don't allow children to say, you know, to say gamble or smoke or drink alcohol.
00:05:40.140 We also already regulate how companies can engage with children on the Internet.
00:05:44.320 There's something called the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, for example.
00:05:47.780 And among other things, that law requires that websites get parental consent before they allow children to post photos, videos,
00:05:52.880 or audio recordings of themselves or any other, you know, identifying personal information.
00:05:57.020 This law is the reason why major social media platforms, including Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook,
00:06:01.720 already prohibit children under the age of 13 from using their platforms.
00:06:05.560 So what Florida's law does is slightly expand limitations like this to social media platforms that are targeting young children.
00:06:13.300 Now, in response to the Florida law, one of the most common counterarguments you'll hear is that children will just circumvent the ban,
00:06:18.120 as they've already circumvented the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.
00:06:21.440 All kids have to do is provide a fake birth date and they can make an Instagram account.
00:06:25.060 But all this tells us is that the feds aren't concerned with enforcing that law.
00:06:29.100 Florida is taking a different approach.
00:06:30.520 And we've already seen that when states actually want to enforce these laws, they can get results.
00:06:34.980 Many of the laws that we call unenforceable, it's because there's no real attempt to enforce them.
00:06:39.280 But when there is an attempt, you know, it's amazing.
00:06:42.320 How many laws can be enforced if you actually try to enforce them?
00:06:48.780 The other common counterargument you'll hear is that parents should be in charge of policing this sort of thing, not the government.
00:06:53.960 From now on, we're going to limit the time we spend looking at our stupid phones.
00:07:00.200 That's one of the major arguments that came up in Florida.
00:07:02.320 It's why DeSantis vetoed another version of legislation which would have prevented 14-year-olds from accessing these apps, even with parental consent.
00:07:08.800 So the final bill is kind of a compromise position, which addressed the concerns of the parental rights dissenters.
00:07:16.200 But the truth is that although parents should be the ones policing their children's social media use, many parents don't.
00:07:23.120 Or many parents try and they're not able to do it, you know, sufficiently.
00:07:26.840 It's also true that parents should stop their kids from drinking alcohol or using tobacco products, but they don't always do that either.
00:07:33.780 You know, that's why we still have laws against those things, and most people don't think that those laws should be repealed for good reason.
00:07:41.060 What this means is that Florida, without much fanfare, has found a solution to the TikTok debate that has dominated Congress for the past several weeks.
00:07:47.240 All we have to do is what we've done before.
00:07:49.500 We don't have to open the door to future government bans on Twitter or any other social media platform.
00:07:53.500 We just need to do something that's fallen out of favor recently, which is to protect children from strangers on the internet and from the internet itself, which wants to harm them.
00:08:05.180 I put a spell on you.
00:08:12.880 Cause you're mine.
00:08:14.440 Cause you're mine.
00:08:18.140 Cause you're mine.
00:08:19.240 Cause you're mine.