This is In Conversation from Apple News.

I'm Shemitabasu.

Today, how social media is wrecking our brains and what to do about it.

The social media grounds are shifting.

Just in the past few weeks, Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram,

announced its abandoning third-party fact checks and loosening restrictions around topics like gender and immigration.

TikTok got banned, went dark, and came back when President Trump signed an executive order delaying the ban, so the future of that platform remains unclear.

And Elon Musk, the owner of X, is now a serious power broker in the new Trump administration.

This is all happening at a time when the alarm bells from politicians, doctors, and researchers

about social media's harms are louder than ever. For many people, it feels like social media

is broken. But technology writer Nicholas Carr argues we need to change the way we're thinking about the problem.

The system is not broken. The system is operating exactly as it is meant to operate.

Nick has been writing about the human consequences of technology for decades.

In 2008, he came out with an Atlantic article that eventually became a book,

a Pulitzer Prize finalist, The Shallows, what the internet is doing to our brains. It was an early

warning of how the internet affects our thoughts and perceptions. Now he's out with a new book,

all about social media and its impact on society. It's called Superbloom, how technologies of connection

tear us apart. So I sat down with Nick to talk about how we got here and what might come next.

I think when we look at the problems, we tend to immediately blame the tech companies, the algorithms, the platforms.

And I'm not suggesting that they aren't to blame because I think they've done a good job of

exploiting the technology.

But I think the real source of the problem lies in the fact that human beings were very

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