15 Days of Haidt (#3): Pass a new law....Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA not Bosa)
Hi friends. A. Quickie Recap:
I admire Jonathan Haidt’s Paul Revere-like efforts sound the alarm on Smartphones really messing up teen life.
Our first order of biz? Examine how Haidt’s Fix This agenda is going.
Day 1: Haidt wants to ban/reduce smartphones in schools.
“Input” side? Going well. Laws getting passed. Schools issuing rules.
Output side? Is typical teen “During School Day” minutes down from 90 per day? We don’t know. My guess: yes.
Day 2: Haidt wants to reduce EdTech in schools. Thanks commenters…
Commenter Dylan in the comments:
It might be the biggest qualitative difference in schools today. You teleport someone from 15 years ago into today's schools, they walk down the halls, the number of kids staring at Chromebooks might be the first thing they notice.
Commenter Ben:
I will never forget my visit several years ago to Summit Public Schools, then considered the nation's leading exemplar of tech-enables personalized learning. It was a complete debacle, classroom after classroom of kids doing nothing at all while the teacher sat behind the desk, also doing nothing.
Commenter Aungar:
I have ten thousand sheets of reading logs somewhere in my parents’ basement (from his teacher days) to remind us kids can escape non-screen homework too – but (overall) I agree, (tech free) is easier to monitor, and I bet parents would like hearing “your kid will never need their phone/computer when they’re doing this (thoughtfully crafted) homework assignment.”
I wonder about parent demand for Ed Tech free school.
Commenter Geordie:
Gauging parent demand for an edtech free school would be a relatively low lift / easy to do at this point and I bet ($1) it would tell you there's likely MUCH more demand for it than we think.
Now is Haidt’s wish - which I share - coming true?
No evidence I can find of schools doing that. If anything, trend is towards greater edtech.
B. Today (Day 3): Haidt’s Agenda includes a new law: KOSA.
Haidt and Zach Rausch write:
Imagine the following situation: There is a toy that kills dozens or hundreds of children every year1 and harms millions more.2 The toymaker makes the toy available for free to any child who can reach the Internet, so parents cannot stop their children from playing with the toy unless they tightly monitor and control their children’s access to the Internet, even at school. Because parents feel so powerless,3 the toy becomes their greatest fear,4 and the vast majority5 want the government to compel the toymaker to remove a few of the toy’s most dangerous features. Year after year, the government does nothing.
After more than a decade of mounting evidence of harm and rising parental concerns, Congress finally acts in a stunningly bipartisan fashion to craft a modest bill that would remove a few (just a few) of the toy’s most dangerous features, without restricting children’s continued access to the toy. The bill is designed and modified carefully over several years and many hearings to take into account every conceivable objection from the left and from the right.
Now back in September 2024, Haidt was optimistic. The link: 37 second Instagram clip. Haidt’s on Capitol Hill, smiling, wondering which version of the KOSA bill will become law, hopeful it will be the least diluted version.
By December, he’s bummed. He writes:
It passes the Senate by a landslide vote of 91 to 3 and is then sent to the House of Representatives, where it also enjoys strong bipartisan support. And then, after all that work and all that support, the House leadership kills the bill without giving any believable justification.
This situation would be a travesty of democracy and common sense, and yet it is exactly what is happening with social media and the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which has only one more week to be enacted. Speaker Mike Johnson said that he is killing the bill because he still has free speech concerns, but as we’ll show, this objection is not grounded in reality.
Things have gotten way worse for KOSA since December’s setback.
With tech titans aligned with Trump, particularly Zuck, I see low chance of KOSA.
C. Is KOSA a good idea?
I agree with Haidt on phone free schools, ed tech limited schools, and other parts of his agenda.
On KOSA, though, I’m less sure.
I’m interested in the respectful debate between Haidt and his longtime ally Greg Lukianoff. Greg writes:
Back in April, I wrote about my disagreement with my friend Jonathan Haidt on some of the potential solutions to the problems of the phone-based childhood that he proposes in his mega bestseller, “The Anxious Generation.” It’s worth noting that I spent most of the piece agreeing with him more than I disagreed. Given I co-authored “The Coddling of the American Mind” with him, that isn't a big surprise.
One of my points of disagreement though is simply that when you are trying to solve a problem that relates to expression or, as here, expressive platforms, you should exhaust every possible solution before focusing on top-down legislative solutions that will almost always have unintended consequences.
Greg’s 5 part critique of KOSA includes
It allows the government to impose punishment for the impact of ideas which leads to censorship.
and
Because “harmful to minors” can only be defined after the fact, platforms will over-censor and under-innovate to avoid liability.
Haidt replies:
KOSA places absolutely no restrictions on what any person can say on a social media platform—even if they want to say horrific things that promote eating disorders or suicide. KOSA also places no restrictions on what any child can search for—even if they are interested in finding horrific stuff about eating disorders or suicide. KOSA merely says, for the first time, that the platforms bear some responsibility for the content-neutral design choices they make. There are therefore no implications for free speech.15
I haven’t dug deep enough into KOSA to referee their back and forth discussion. Anyway, for now at least, seems academic: KOSA’s politically stuck for the foreseeable.