Haidt's Moment

Was Jonathan Haidt right all along? Readers of this newsletter—and writers at Reason—are surely divided on this one. On Wednesday of this week, news broke that Meta had reached a humongous $17.1 billion settlement with 47 states and the District of Columbia, forced to pay damages due to child-endangerment claims stemming from its social media algorithms and platforms.

“The owner of Facebook and Instagram agreed to the financial penalties for violating federal child privacy and states’ consumer protection laws, the states announced,” reports The New York Times. “Meta also agreed to limit how long teenagers can spend on its platforms and to bans on features that stoke mental health issues, striking at the heart of the company’s business of engagement for advertising.”

“The settlement effectively ends a bellwether federal trial in the U.S. Northern District of California in Oakland, where California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey were seeking roughly $200 billion over accusations that Meta harmed children,” adds the Times. Meta, the owner of Instagram and Facebook, at times invoked a Section 230 defense, the “First Amendment of the internet” that makes it so companies don’t bear liability for the posts of their users—which Reason has repeatedly defended amid a media landscape that doesn’t seem to understand the value of Section 230.

“After years of being barred from suing social platforms, state prosecutors have gotten creative,” wrote Reason‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown earlier this month about the California/Colorado/Kentucky/New Jersey suit. “They’re now claiming that this isn’t about user-generated speech but about tech companies’ product design. In this case, the states claim that providing photo filters is contributing to teens’ body dysmorphia and that ‘psychologically manipulative’ features like displaying post ‘like’ counts, sending notifications, and using algorithms to curate content around a user’s particular interests are what’s keeping kids hooked, not the actual content on Facebook and Instagram. It’s a silly claim, since clearly there could be no ‘addiction’ to social media if not for the content or communications contained on these platforms.”

“The attorneys general and plaintiffs say that Meta’s algorithms trap its users in the infinite scroll, hours of time spent staring at half-naked influencers or malnourished celebrities, images that breed body dysmorphia, anxiety and depression,” reads a different Times article. This case was very explicitly built off of arguments and research found in Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation, which has enjoyed mainstream appeal. “Mr. Haidt met with some of the attorneys general on Zoom, briefing them on his research,” the Times continues.

“We’re now seeing the dark side of digital technologies in a way that makes it possible for a cultural rejection, a cultural awakening that we can’t live this way,” Haidt told the Times.

Brown smartly noted earlier this month that “no one can actually say whether social media use causes teen problems or whether excessive reliance on social media is simply a symptom of struggling socially or already suffering from mental distress.”

Regardless of where you come down on child-harm arguments, the real thing that should unite libertarians is the fact that Meta’s predictably interested in using the levers of the law to screw over its competitors:

after the initial shock of the settlement headlines yesterday, it took me a bit to see just how much Meta is putting the screws to its competitors https://t.co/yyxaxIMSig pic.twitter.com/rwHnjmGeRy

— rat king (@MikeIsaac) August 27, 2026

“In the sunlight of the next day, Meta’s settlement looks less like a child safety ‘win’ and more like a prosecutorial gun aimed at TikTok, Snap, and YouTube,” writes Adam Kovacevich, who works in tech messaging for Democrats, on X. “Meta’s contingent settlement payment is essentially a bounty: billions more for states if its rivals are brought into the settlement regime. Meta even admitted that teens restricted on Instagram will migrate elsewhere, so its goal is to make its competitors less engaging for teens too.”

Predictable, yes.

In an ideal world, the mechanisms through which we would curb teen’s social media use—which I feel awfully Haidt-aligned on, personally—would be smaller-scale and not enforced by the government: Parents would refuse to give children and teenagers phones until they have already developed both attention spans and a modicum of self-regulation; schools would aggressively crackdown on smartphone use during instructional hours; social-media time would be limited by families. There’s still such a thing as parenting, you know, and it’s kind of wild how (to borrow from Haidt), we’re dealing with “overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world” en masse, when this is a choice made by today’s parents. The companies aren’t forcing their hands.

That said, it’s a very difficult collective action problem: When schools and other parents aren’t adopting common-sense restrictions, it becomes more fraught for one single family to do so, thus relegating their teenager to years of pariahdom. Haidt understands this, and even cites research on how young adults say “they would PREFER to live in a world with no TikTok or Instagram,” that “they feel trapped” and feel like “they have to use these platforms because….everyone else is using them, and they would pay money to have everyone stop, which would allow them to stop.”

Scenes from New York: Former Reasoner Emma Camp is on fire right now:

Since everyone liked my rent control video so much, I thought you might enjoy another video I made about some maddening NYC housing policy.pic.twitter.com/mxVcWjmcfk

— Emma Camp (@emmma_camp_) August 27, 2026

• Another one bites the dust: “Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb general whose actions during the Balkan wars of the 1990s led to him being called the ‘Butcher of Bosnia’ and who was held responsible for Europe’s deadliest massacre since World War II, the killing of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995, has died in custody in The Hague. He was 83,” reports The New York Times.
• Look, if you’re “scromiting” then I think you have bigger problems than pot.
• “Federal aviation officials have found that two air-traffic controllers left work early before an Air Canada regional jet crashed into a firetruck at LaGuardia Airport in March,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “The Federal Aviation Administration is moving to fire the two controllers, who officials determined had left about an hour before their shifts ended on March 22, people familiar with the matter said. As a result, two controllers remaining at the LaGuardia tower didn’t have backup to assist with high workloads.”
• “The Trump administration acted illegally when it labeled the artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic a security risk and barred the company from working with the U.S. government, a federal judge ruled on Thursday,” reports The New York Times. “Judge Rita Lin of the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California wrote in her 59-page ruling that the government had unlawfully retaliated against Anthropic ‘for constitutionally protected expressive activities’ after the A.I. company spoke out about how its technology should be used. ‘The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics,’ she wrote.”

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