Welcome back to the tech policy podcast.

I'm Corbyn Barthold.

I've hosted more than 50 episodes of this show. And aside from my esteemed colleagues

at Tech Freedom, I've yet to welcome a return guest. That changes today. Elizabeth Nolan Brown is

here. She's a senior editor at Reason. Moreover, she's a fantastic writer on tech policy.

If you follow her work, as you should, you'll see why I'm so pleased to have her back.

Today we're going to be discussing two of Elizabeth's recent pieces for Reason.

One is on screen time and youth mental health.

Elizabeth dove into the most recent research on how, or rather, whether, television, social

media, and video games affect young people's well-being.

She's got some bad news for anyone who likes stoking moral panic.

The other item is Elizabeth's December cover story for Reason Magazine on the costs and benefits,

mainly benefits, it turns out, of algorithms.

That piece, too, gives the pearl clutches, if I may use that term, a good kick in the

shins. As Elizabeth explains, a lot of the criticism that the algorithms, quote, unquote, receive

these days stand on nothing more than vibes. Elizabeth, welcome. Hi, thanks so much for having me back on. It's so good to have you.

I really do mean it to our listeners, follow Elizabeth's work. She, in addition to just being a

good writer, you pick good topics. So let's start with the research on young people and screens.

We've got very young children and television, and then pre-teens and smartphones.

We've got teens and social media, and we've got children and video games.

So we're covering the landscape.

Yeah. Yeah, go ahead. We published this piece of reason the week after Christmas because we were

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