I'm If you listen to this show with any frequency, you know that people like to freak out about the internet.

Like catchphrases and skirt lengths, the subjects of these freakouts change with the seasons.

Some of them might start out with a kernel of truth, them, but they tend to gain momentum simply as fads.

The Russians are brainwashing us. The algorithms are radicalizing us.

The platforms are censoring us. The platforms are censoring us.

The platforms are messing up the kids.

Some people start yelling.

Other people follow the crowd.

Next thing you know, lawmakers are rushing to do something,

quote, unquote, with big exclamation point.

If we home in on the last two things I mentioned, fears of censorship, fears for the children,

we can see how the core emotion here is often just hatred of social media,

as well as how the core desire is often just to

pass a law, any law, that hurts social media services somehow. On the one hand, a couple

years ago, we had a wave of must-carry bills, a couple of which passed into law and are currently

stalled in court.

If those laws went into operation, they'd force social media platforms to carry all sorts of

scary and extreme and potentially traumatizing stuff that, yeah, a lot of kids probably

shouldn't be seeing.

On the other hand, we've recently gotten a wave of bills aimed at protecting kids online.

So now suddenly that's all the rage, and what we're supposed to do is wall off social media

or sanitize it into a Disney version of itself to get all the scary and extreme and potentially traumatizing stuff

...