You might think a moral panic has peaked, but things can always get worse.

I've opened the show before with over-the-top quotes about what social media is supposedly doing to young people.

I didn't think you could

top the claim made by many people who should know better that social media is killing our kids,

but I'll be damned. It's possible to go further. I ran into one piece recently that framed the

fight to keep children off social media as basically a

holy war. It is a matter of, quote, the free and social development of the human spirit.

The ultimate problem we're told is, quote, civic and even spiritual in nature.

Welcome back to the tech policy podcast. I'm Corbyn Barthold. My guest today is Alice Marwick.

She is an associate professor and the co-director of the Center for Information, Technology, and Public

Life at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Along with co-authors from Princeton and Duke,

she has just published a paper called Child Online Safety Legislation, a primer. Her and her

collaborator's work is deeply informed, very digestible, and perhaps most importantly, the opposite of demagoguery.

Mental health and well-being is complicated, the authors, right?

And tied to many different social and contextual factors.

Solutions that exclusively focus on technology address only a very small part of this picture. Indeed. I've lost track of all the

child online safety legislation that's floating around. Some of it is now in the courts. Some of it

has just been enacted. Some of it is still being worked on. There is a lot going on in this area, and frankly,

a lot of people seem to have gotten way out ahead of themselves. Alice's paper is an important

corrective. It is essential reading for anyone involved in these debates, and I look forward to

discussing it with her today.

Alice, welcome.

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