A growing number of conservatives are calling for Big Government censorship of social media speech platforms. Censorship proposals are to conservatives what price controls are to radical leftists: completely outlandish, unworkable, and usually unconstitutional fantasies of controlling things that are ultimately much harder to control than they realize. And the costs of even trying to impose and enforce such extremist controls are always enormous.

Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal ran a response I wrote to a proposal set forth by columnist Peggy Noonan in which she proposed banning everyone under 18 from all social-media sites (“We Can Protect Children and Keep the Internet Free,” Apr. 15). I expanded upon that letter in an essay here entitled, “Should All Kids Under 18 Be Banned from Social Media?” National Review also recently published an article penned by Christine Rosen in which she also proposes to “Ban Kids from Social Media.” And just this week, Zach Whiting of the Texas Public Policy Foundation published an essay on “Why Texas Should Ban Social Media for Minors.”

I’ll offer a few more thoughts here in addition to what I’ve already said elsewhere. First, here is my response to the Rosen essay. National Review gave me 250 words to respond to her proposal:

While admitting that “law is a blunt instrument for solving complicated social problems,” Christine Rosen (“Keep Them Offline,” June 27) nonetheless downplays the radicalness of her proposal to make all teenagers criminals for accessing the primary media platforms of their generation. She wants us to believe that allowing teens to use social media is the equivalent of letting them operate a vehicle, smoke tobacco, or drink alcohol. This is false equivalence. Being on a social-media site is not the same as operating two tons of steel and glass at speed or using mind-altering substances. Teens certainly face challenges and risks in any new media environment, but to believe that complex social pathologies did not exist before the Internet is folly. Echoing the same “lost generation” claims made by past critics who panicked over comic books and video games, Rosen asks, “Can we afford to lose another generation of children?” and suggests that only sweeping nanny-state controls can save the day. This cycle is apparently endless: Those “lost generations” grow up fine, only to claim it’s the  next generation that is doomed! Rosen casually dismisses free-speech concerns associated with mass-media criminalization, saying that her plan “would not require censorship.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Rosen’s prohibitionist proposal would deny teens the many routine and mostly beneficial interactions they have with their peers online every day. While she belittles media literacy and other educational and empowerment-based solutions to online problems, those approaches continue to be a better response than the repressive regulatory regime she would have Big Government impose on society.

I have a few more things to say beyond these brief comments.

First, as I alluded to in my short response to Rosen, we’ve heard similar “lost generation” stories before. Rosen might as well be channeling the ghost of Dr. Fredric Wertham (author of Seduction of the Innocent), who in the 1950s declared comics books a public health menace and lobbied lawmakers to restrict teen access to them, insisting such comics were “the cause of a psychological mutilation of children.” The same sort of “lost generation” predictions were commonplace in countless anti-video game screeds of the 1990s. Critics were writing books with titles like Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill and referring to video games as “murder simulators,” Ironically, just as the video game panic was heating up, juvenile crime rates were plummeting. But that didn’t stop the pundits and policymakers from suggesting that an entire generation of so-called “vidiots” were headed for disaster. (See my 2019 short history: “Confessions of a ‘Vidiot’: 50 Years of Video Games & Moral Panics“).

It is consistently astonishing to me how, as I noted in 2012 essay, “We Always Sell the Next Generation Short.” There seems to be a never-ending cycle of generational mistrust. “There has probably never been a generation since the Paleolithic that did not deplore the fecklessness of the next and worship a golden memory of the past,” notes Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist.

For example, in 1948, the poet T. S. Eliot declared: “We can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline; that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago; and that the evidences of this decline are visible in every department of human activity.” We’ve heard parents (and policymakers) make similar claims about every generation since then.

What’s going on here? Why does this cycle of generational pessimism and mistrust persist? In a 1992 journal article, the late journalism professor Margaret A. Blanchard offered this explanation:

“[P]arents and grandparents who lead the efforts to cleanse today’s society seem to forget that they survived alleged attacks on their morals by different media when they were children. Each generation’s adults either lose faith in the ability of their young people to do the same or they become convinced that the dangers facing the new generation are much more substantial than the ones they faced as children.”

In a 2009 book on culture, my colleague Tyler Cowen also noted how, “Parents, who are entrusted with human lives of their own making, bring their dearest feelings, years of time, and many thousands of dollars to their childrearing efforts.” Unsurprisingly, therefore, “they will react with extreme vigor against forces that counteract such an important part of their life program.” This explains why “the very same individuals tend to adopt cultural optimism when they are young, and cultural pessimism once they have children,” Cowen says.

Building on Blanchard and Cowen’s observation, I have explained how the most simple explanation for this phenomenon is that many parents and cultural critics have passed through their “adventure window.” The willingness of humans to try new things and experiment with new forms of culture—our “adventure window”—fades rapidly after certain key points in life, as we gradually settle in our ways. As the English satirist Douglas Adams once humorously noted: “Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

There is no doubt social media can create or exacerbate certain social pathologies among youth. But pro-censorship conservatives wants to take the easy way out with a Big Government media ban for the ages.

Ultimately, it’s a solution that will not be effective. Raising children and mentoring youth is certainly the hardest task we face as adults because simple solutions rarely exist to complex human challenges–and the issues kids face are often particularly hard for many parents and adults to grapple with because we often fail to fully understand both the unique issues each generation might face, and we definitely fail to fully grasp the nature of each new medium that youth embrace.  Simplistic solution–even proposals for outright bans–will not work or solve serious problems.

An outright government ban on online platforms or digital devices is likely never going to happen due to First Amendment constraints, but even ignoring the jurisprudential barriers, bans won’t work for a reason that these conservatives never bother considering: Many parents will help their kids get access to those technologies and to evade restrictions on their use. Countless parents already do so in violation of COPPA rules, and not just because they worry that their kid won’t have access to what some other kids have. Rather, many parents (like me) both wanted to make sure I could more easily communicate with them, and also ensure that they could enjoy those technologies and use them to explore the world.

These conservatives might think some parents like me are monsters for allowing my (now grown) children to get on social media when they were teens. I wasn’t blind to the challenges, but recognized that sticking one’s head in the ground or hoping for divine intervention from the Nanny State was impractical and unwise. The hardest conversations I ever had with my kids were about the ugliness they sometimes experienced online, but those conversations were also countered by the many joys that I knew online interactions brought them. Shall I tell you about everything my son learned online before 13 about building model rockets or soapbox derby cars? Or the countless sites my daughter visited gathering ideas for her arts and crafts projects when, before the age of 13, she started hand-painting and selling jean jackets (eventually prompting her to pursue an art school degree)? Again, as I noted in my National Review response, Rosen’s prohibitionist proposal would deny teens these experiences and the countless other routine and entirely beneficial interactions that they have with their peers online every day.

There is simply no substitute for talking to your kids in the most open, understanding, and loving fashion possible. My #1 priority with my own children was not foreclosing all the new digital media platforms and devices at their disposal. That was going to be almost impossible. Other approaches are needed.

Yes, of course, the world can be an ugly place. I mean, have you ever watched the nightly news on television? It’s damn ugly. Shouldn’t we block youth access to it when scenes of war and violence are shown? Newspapers are full of ugliness, too. Should a kid be allowed to see the front page of the paper when it discusses or shows the aftermath of school shootings, acts of terrorism, or even just natural disasters? I could go on, but you get the point. And you could try to claim that somehow today’s social media environment is significantly worse for kids than the mass media of old, but you cannot prove it.

Of course you’ll have anecdotes, and many of them will again point to complex social pathologies. But I have entire shelves full of books on my office wall that made similar claims about the effects of books, the telephone, radio and television, comics, cable TV, every musical medium ever, video games, and advertising efforts across all these mediums. Hundreds upon hundreds of studies were done over the past half century about the effects of depictions of violence in movies, television, and video games. And endless court battles ensued.

In the end, nothing came out of it because the literature was inconclusive and frequently contradictory. After many years of panicking about youth and media violence, in 2020, the American Psychological Association issued a new statement slowly reversing course on misguided past statements about video games and acts of real-world violence. The APA’s old statement said that evidence “confirms [the] link between playing violent video games and aggression.”  But the APA has come around and now says that, “there is insufficient scientific evidence to support a causal link between violent video games and violent behavior.” More specifically, the APA now says: “Violence is a complex social problem that likely stems from many factors that warrant attention from researchers, policy makers and the public. Attributing violence to violent video gaming is not scientifically sound and draws attention away from other factors.”

This is exactly what we should expect to find true for youth and social media. Most of the serious scholars in the field already note studies and findings about youth and social media must be carefully evaluated and that many other factors need to be considered whenever evaluating claims about complex social phenomenon.

While Rosen belittles media literacy and other educational and empowerment-based solutions to online problems, those approaches continue to represent the best first-order response when compared to the repressive regulatory regime she would impose on society.

Finally, I want to just reiterate what I said in my brief  National Review response about the enormous challenges associated with mass criminalization or speech platforms. Rosen seems to image that all the costs and controversies will lie on the supply-side of social media. Just call for a ban and then magically all kids disappear from social media and the big evil tech capitalists eat all the costs and hassles. Nonsense. It’s the demand-side of criminalization efforts where the most serious costs lie. What do you really think kids are going to do if Uncle Sam suddenly does ban everyone under 18 from going on a “social media site,” whatever that very broad term entails? This will become another sad chapter in the history of Big Government prohibitionist efforts that fail miserably, but not before declaring mass groups of people criminals–this time including everyone under 18–and then trying to throw the book at them when they seek to avoid those repressive controls. There are better ways to address these problems than with such extremist proposals.

Additional Reading from Adam Thierer on Media & Content Regulation :

• “Should All Kids Under 18 Be Banned from Social Media?”
• “Why Do We Always Sell the Next Generation Short?”
• “The APA’s Welcome New Statement on Video Game Violence“
• “Video Games and Moral Panic“
• Parental Controls & Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools & Methods, 4th Edition.
• “Technopanics and the Great Social Networking Scare“
• “More on Monkey See-Monkey Do Theories about Media Violence & Real-World Crime“
• “Video Games, Media Violence & the Cathartic Effect Hypothesis.”)
• “The Classical Liberal Approach to Digital Media Free Speech Issues“
• “Left and right take aim at Big Tech — and the First Amendment“
• “When It Comes to Fighting Social Media Bias, More Regulation Is Not the Answer“
• “FCC’s O’Rielly on First Amendment & Fairness Doctrine Dangers“
• “Conservatives & Common Carriage: Contradictions & Challenges“
• “The Great Deplatforming of 2021“
• “A Good Time to Re-Read Reagan’s Fairness Doctrine Veto“
• “Sen. Hawley’s Radical, Paternalistic Plan to Remake the Internet“
• “How Conservatives Came to Favor the Fairness Doctrine & Net Neutrality“
• “Sen. Hawley’s Moral Panic Over Social Media“
• “The White House Social Media Summit and the Return of ‘Regulation by Raised Eyebrow’“
• “The Not-So-SMART Act“
• “The Surprising Ideological Origins of Trump’s Communications Collectivism“

• “Why Regulate Broadcasting: Toward a Consistent First Amendment Standard for the Information Age,” Catholic University Law School, 15 CommLaw Conspectus (Summer 2007): 431-482.
• Testimony at FCC’s Hearing on “Serving the Public Interest in the Digital Era”, March 3, 2010.
• “FCC v. Fox and the Future of the First Amendment in the Information Age,”

Fred Vogelstein’s essay in Wired, “Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network’s Plan to Dominate the Internet — and Keep Google Out” describes the intensifying clash between Google and Facebook—a clash that focuses on the ability to target advertising:

Like typical trash-talking youngsters, Facebook sources argue that their competition is old and out of touch. “Google is not representative of the future of technology in any way,” one Facebook veteran says. “Facebook is an advanced communications network enabling myriad communication forms. It almost doesn’t make sense to compare them.”

Apart from noting that Facebook directs users to Microsoft’s Bing as its default search engine for the Internet at large, the most interesting part of the article is Facebook’s “4-Step Plan for Online Domination”:

1. Build critical mass. In the eight months ending in April, Facebook has doubled in size to 200 million members, who contribute 4 billion pieces of info, 850 million photos, and 8 million videos every month. The result: a second Internet, one that includes users’ most personal data and resides entirely on Facebook’s servers. 2. Redefine search. Facebook thinks its members will turn to their friends—rather than Google’s algorithms—to navigate the Web. It already drives an eyebrow-raising amount of traffic to outside sites, and that will only increase once Facebook Search allows users to easily explore one another’s feeds. 3. Colonize the Web. Thanks to a pair of new initiatives—dubbed Facebook Connect and Open Stream—users don’t have to log in to Facebook to communicate with their friends. Now they can access their network from any of 10,000 partner sites or apps, contributing even more valuable data to Facebook’s servers every time they do it. 4. Sell targeted ads, everywhere. Facebook hopes to one day sell advertising across all of its partner sites and apps, not just on its own site. The company will be able to draw on the immense volume of personal data it owns to create extremely targeted messages. The challenge: not freaking out its users in the process.

Facebook can’t keep losing money forever.  Indeed, investors are willing to keep sinking money into Facebook during Phases 1-3 because they think it will pay off in Phase 4—when Facebook really threatens to be a fGoogle-killer.  But rather the fact that investors are willing to subsidize the creation of a wonderful platform now used by 200 million people (one fifth of all Internet users worldwide), or that Facebook might finally provide a counter-weight to the fearsome Google, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Data (PETD) are appalled.  One commenter on the Wired story put it best:

I find it amazing that people will willingly post personal information to websites that will only use it for data mining and advertising revenue. They lay their entire life open to a corporation that’s only looking to profit from the information said corporation can gather for itself or it’s affiliates. When the government reads our emails, listens to our phone conversations, reads our text messages and monitors what we do online people are outraged at the invasion of our privacy. But then they log in to Facebook or Myspace or Twitter and reveal all. The Facebook “community”. Please. It’s a way for Big Business to pry into our private lives and exploit us in any way they can for the money they can make.

Such arrogant entitlement is astonishing—but hardly atypical: What makes this person (or his PETD comrades) so certain that they really know what’s best for everyone else and that Facebook users are poor, ignorant suckers being victimized by corporate greed?  As Adam Thierer and I have been saying, there is no free lunch! Do the PETD folks expect investors to pour hundreds of millions into building innovative social networks like Facebook out of… love?  As Adam Smith put it, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

While most in the PETD crowd are too young (or just historically deprived) to know the words to  The Internationale (my favorite line: “Masses, slaves, arise, arise!”), one can easily imagine them kicking off PETD meetings with a somewhat more recent anthem, Aquarius, from the hit 1967 rock musical Hair:

When the moon is in the Seventh House And Jupiter aligns with Mars Then peace will guide the planets And love will steer the stars This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius Harmony and understanding Sympathy and trust abounding No more falsehoods or derisions Golden living dreams of visions Mystic crystal revalation And the mind’s true liberation

Nothing better captures the spirit of that thankfully-bygone era of narcissistic self-indulgence than the beginning of the 1979 film version:

Yes, Virginia, the marijuana-induced socialist-utopian delusions of the Sixties live on in a new generation of Techno-Aquarians, who want to have their digital cake—and eat yours too.  Something for nothing, free lunch for everyone!  Down with profit, up with privacy!  The “vision” (as in “Golden living dreams of”) behind this frenzy of frustration with online capitalism and PETD’s demands for regulation is what Thomas Sowell has called the “Vision of the Anointed,” “the talented few” who consider themselves wiser than everyone else, and therefore seek to impose their preferences on others, as Adam Thierer and I have both discussed.

But back to Wired:

The drumbeat of controversy surrounding Facebook illustrates the catch-22 the social network faces: It has a massive storehouse of user data, but every time it tries to capitalize on that information, its members freak out. This isn’t an academic problem; the company’s future depends on its ability to master the art of behavioral targeting—selling customized advertising based on user profiles. In theory, this should be an irresistible opportunity for marketers; Facebook’s performance advertising program allows them to design and distribute an ad to as narrow an audience as they would like. (It has also developed a program to create ads that are designed to be spread virally.) But as the Beacon debacle showed, there is a fine line between “targeted and useful” and “creepy and stalkerish”—and so far, not enough advertisers have been willing to walk that line… In a way, Facebook’s dilemma extends from its success. Users see the site as sanctified space, a place to engage in intimate conversations with friends—not to be laser-beamed by weirdly personal advertising. But with initiatives like Connect and Open Stream, Facebook can sell ads beyond its own site. Just as Google’s AdSense program sells ads on any participating Web site, Connect and Open Stream will eventually push Facebook-brokered advertising to any member site or app. But unlike with AdSense, Facebook’s ads could be exquisitely tailored to their targets. “No one out there has the data that we have,” says COO Sandberg.

Better targeted ads?  More useful information for Internet users?  A strong competitor for Google that could provide an alternative channel for advertisers and help drive up advertising revenue for publishers of “free” content and services?  Sounds great for all concerned.  Oh, but some people find relevant advertising “creepy?”  Ah, well, let’s call the whole thing off!  I’m sure Facebook will get by just fine selling crudely targeted ads on its own site for pennies a click.  Maybe they could ask for donations or hold a digital bake-sale (including tie-dyed t-shirts, of course)? Or we could just have “the government” support the most popular social networks (along with newspapers, banks, hedge funds and car manufacturers). And while they’re at it, why not have wise bureaucrats use antitrust laws to cripple Google and thus make up for the lack of a competitive threat from Facebook and the other Google-killers-that-might-have-been?

Wired suggests that Facebook’s strategy played some role in causing Google to embrace Interest-Based (behavioral) Advertising, playing catch-up to No.2 Yahoo!:

Google has even shown a willingness to join Facebook in gingerly tapping the third rail of Internet marketing—behavioral targeting. The search giant has long assured its users that it would never use their personal information to deliver targeted advertising, relying instead on aggregate data or search activity that preserves anonymity. (“There is a line with users that you don’t want to cross,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in the wake of the Beacon controversy.) But in March, Google started its own behavioral targeting campaign—tracking users’ browsing to deliver more-customized ads. Users have the option to either edit their profiles or opt out entirely.

With Google in the game, the fight is on.  The grand prize is clear—tapping into the most lucrative advertising purchased by leading brands:

Today, global online brand advertising accounts for just $50 billion a year. Offline brand advertising, meanwhile, accounts for an estimated $500 billion.

But I doubt there will ever be any clear “winner” in this race.  Instead, we’re likely to see fierce competition and ongoing one-upsmanship over the coming decade (and beyond) for users, for user data, and for they ad dollars they bring, among a variety of paradigms for what the Internet of the future should look like.  Facebook has already started implementing its paradigm with  Connect (launched Dec. 2008) and  Open Stream API (launched April 2009):

Connect and Open Stream don’t just allow users to access their Facebook networks from anywhere online. They also help realize Facebook’s longtime vision of giving users a unique, Web-wide online profile. By linking Web activity to Facebook accounts, they begin to replace the largely anonymous “no one knows you’re a dog” version of online identity with one in which every action is tied to who users really are. To hear Facebook executives tell it, this will make online interactions more meaningful and more personal…  But you don’t build a competitor to Google with people alone. You need data. And Connect and Open Stream are intended to make Facebook a much more powerful force for collecting user information. Any time someone logs in to a site that uses Connect or Open Stream, they give Facebook the right to keep track of any activity that happens there—potentially contributing tons more personal data to Facebook’s servers. Facebook Connect and Open Stream are also designed to make each user’s friend network, which belongs to Facebook, even more valuable and crucial to the Web experience. Together, they aim to put Facebook users’ social networks at the center of all they do online.

I, for one, think this competition will create enormous value for users by driving innovation that improves the usefulness of the Internet and increases the amount of funding available for an ever-greater, ever-richer torrent of “free” (ad-supported) content and services.  But if the Techno-Aquarians at PETD succeed in imposing regulatory mandates on the collection and use of online data through legislation or creeping regulation at the FTC, the Internet of the future won’t look all that different from the Internet of today: online content and services will continue to attract a small share of all ad dollars (just 7% in 2008), search engines will reap the bulk of that (42% in 2008), and most online content-publishers and service-providers will continue to get literally pennies per click while only a few are able to meet evolving standards of quality with purely ad-supported business models.

Heaven forbid we should allow those who offer “free” content and services to extract… profit from the unwashed masses of helpless consumers who are either too stupid, too lazy or too ignorant to manage their own privacy, no matter how powerful the privacy management tools at their disposal! The better alternative is empower users to make their own decisions about privacy, rather than imposing top-down “Industrial Policy for the Internet” on the entire country through outright prohibitions or restrictive defaults concerning data collection and use for targeting advertising—as Adam and I have said:

The ideal state of affairs would be to create a system of tools and data disclosure practices that would empower each user to implement their personal privacy preferences while also recognizing the freedom of those who rely on advertising revenues to “condition the use of their products and services on disclosure of information”—not to mention the viewing of ads!

As Google and Facebook do battle with each other, Microsoft, Yahoo! and other upstart rivals as-yet-unknown, I only hope they all—particularly their government affairs departments—remember that their common enemy is the Techno-Aquarians who seek to impose their subjective preferences about privacy on everyone else, no matter the costs to innovation, consumers, culture or media. We’ll discuss these trade-offs at our upcoming PFF Capitol Hill Briefing on July 10.