Device bans, screentime restrictions, and age limits for social media are deeply misguided attempts to address intrusive and ineffective tech, says User Mag’s Taylor Lorenz in this new interview.
“How it’s being discussed is pretty bad, I would say,” she says about the current backlash. “I think we’ve lost the plot on so many issues.”
“We need to take back control — and that means passing comprehensive federal data privacy regulation — really cracking down on big tech’s business model,” says Lorenz.
“But a lot of people are just falling for this tech propaganda,” by which she means screentime limits, device bans, and age screening.
Watch the interview or read the transcript above (or on YouTube).
Listen to the conversation on Spotify or Apple.
Key quotes
“I think we’ve lost the plot on so many issues. It’s really frustrating.”
“I think it’s a topic that inspires a lot of emotion. And so I think sometimes it’s hard to talk about.”
“I think there can be a place for technology. I just think we also have a lot of bad actors in this.”
“It’s just a lot of actors, a lot of different incentives at play. And I think anytime you’re talking about sort of technology that affects children, emotions are running high.”
“The people that are usually worth listening to are the ones without the big social media presence, without the the newsletter that they’re trying to sell… "You kind of want to find not not the loudest voices in the room, which makes makes things harder, of course.”
“I’ve reported extensively on technology bans. I’ve written even about the pager bans back in the nineties, which these laws are modeled on. We know what happened.
“We know what happened with the beeper bans: it led to kids of color being targeted, hundreds of kids ending up with criminal records because they were actually arrested for having beepers on school campuses.”
“I was talking to a mom in Los Angeles recently whose child goes to a sort of more urban school here, and a lot of the kids do shift work, a lot of the parents do shift work and not being able to communicate has been a complete disaster. These kids are missing shifts, their parents are missing shifts, it’s caused a lot of problems. And so I think we just have to find, you know, more tailored solutions.
“Cell phones exist in the world. So we can’t go back to the nineties, right? Cell phones exist and they’re integrated into our world. And so I think we need to find smart ways to ensure that low-income students are not missing shift work, that they can check a message if their parents are gonna pick them up at a different time without having the them sort of able to sit and scroll all day during class.”
“These companies profit off harvesting our data. They want to harvest data on children… These companies, they are tracking your children from the time they are in your womb — I am not kidding. They are building data profiles on your children, and that data will be used against you, your family, against your child.”
“If you think your kids are addicted, quote unquote, to social media, that is because these companies have been harvesting massive and massive amounts of data to hyper-target them with the most engaging content.”
“I think it’s even worse than the recycling example. It would be like if we were saying, ‘Hey, recycling is really bad. So now we’re actually mandating that in order to drink water, you have to purchase it in disposable plastic bottles’.”
“These are always far-right policies that actually groups like the Heritage Foundation or Morality and Media, now known as as ENCOS, have been trying to push since the internet began. But only in the past few years have liberals got on board, primarily through Heritage Foundation collaborator Jonathan Haidt, who has said very horrible things about LGBTQ people but has been able to position himself in liberal circles and has gotten liberals on board with these policies that I would argue are sort of antithetical to democracy. I mean, Western leaders were very against this stuff until recently. and now I think they’ve, yeah, gotten on board.
“They give a lot of self-interested answers and a lot of them have not been able to point to benefits. You know, are are there benefits to their technology? I think a lot of it we’re seeing probably maybe no.”
Previously from The Grade
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