Jonathan Haidt: Why the Right should support the social media ban

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation must count as one of the most influential books of the decade. Within a year of its publication, countries across the Western world were moving to ban smartphones in school, and prevent access to porn and social media for under-16s. 

But the politics have been surprising. The Right is increasingly sceptical of these measures on the grounds that it risks moving us towards a “papers please” internet, with an end to anonymity and free discourse. In this groundbreaking interview with UnHerd‘s Freddie Sayers, Professor Haidt addresses their concerns directly, and makes the case why Right-wingers should support his campaign.

What follows is a transcript of their conversation, lightly edited for clarity.

Freddie Sayers: Many will be familiar by now with the concerns around social media usage among younger people — and most people share those concerns to some extent. Yet a lot of people, particularly on the political Right, are increasingly anxious that the kinds of measures you’ve been arguing for, and which are now finally being adopted, pose a threat to freedom of speech and the free internet. Are they wrong to be concerned?

Jonathan Haidt: This campaign has been bipartisan almost everywhere, but the Right has, in general, been a little more supportive. Here in the UK, it’s different. Why? Well, I think it’s because here you’ve had governments for many years now arresting people in mass numbers for tweets. We are in the country that gave us our liberal principles, the country that gave us John Stuart Mill. Your government has laws that are cracking down on what people say on content, and that is really a bad thing. And so I think many people on the Right — because they have been very much victims of that — are starting from that distrust of regulations. I want to acknowledge that that is a real risk.

Whenever people think about regulation, their mind jumps to “the government is going to judge speech and decide if this passes, or this does not”. Now that is a nightmare for free speech and that’s something that we almost never see in the US, because that is so clearly contrary to the First Amendment. But you don’t have the First Amendment here. So, the first thing to say is, when regulations focus on the content of speech, that’s a problem. There are a few very limited areas where we think it’s okay for the government to say, “You cannot post this, you cannot access this”, but that has to be very, very rare. In the UK, there are laws that focus on content — you can’t say something that will offend people in certain ways, you can’t say things that you know will cause upset — and that’s what leads to all the problems.

What I’m talking about are design-based solutions. When you say: here are the platform features that are causing the threats to children. Do they have to always be getting notifications, even at night? Is that a necessary feature? Do they have to be connected to anonymous strangers when they’re 12? There are design features that can be changed that would have a huge impact on child safety, and that have generally no impact on free speech. That’s where I want the UK to really focus: design-based, not content-based.

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation must count as one of the most influential books of the decade. Within a year of its publication, countries across the Western world were moving to ban smartphones in school, and prevent access to porn and social media for under-16s. 

But the politics have been surprising. The Right is increasingly skeptical of these measures on the grounds that it risks moving us towards a “papers please” internet, with an end to anonymity and free discourse. In this groundbreaking interview with UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers, Professor Haidt addresses their concerns directly, and makes the case why Right-wingers should support his campaign.

What follows is a transcript of their conversation, lightly edited for clarity.

Freddie Sayers: Many will be familiar by now with the concerns around social media usage among younger people — and most people share those concerns to some extent. Yet a lot of people, particularly on the political Right, are increasingly anxious that the kinds of measures you’ve been arguing for, and which are now finally being adopted, pose a threat to freedom of speech and the free internet. Are they wrong to be concerned?

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Jonathan Haidt: This campaign has been bipartisan almost everywhere, but the Right has, in general, been a little more supportive. Here in the UK, it’s different. Why? Well, I think it’s because here you’ve had governments for many years now arresting people in mass numbers for tweets. We are in the country that gave us our liberal principles, the country that gave us John Stuart Mill. Your government has laws that are cracking down on what people say on content, and that is really a bad thing. And so I think many people on the Right — because they have been very much victims of that — are starting from that distrust of regulations. I want to acknowledge that that is a real risk.

Whenever people think about regulation, their mind jumps to “the government is going to judge speech and decide if this passes, or this does not”. Now that is a nightmare for free speech and that’s something that we almost never see in the US, because that is so clearly contrary to the First Amendment. But you don’t have the First Amendment here. So, the first thing to say is, when regulations focus on the content of speech, that’s a problem. There are a few very limited areas where we think it’s okay for the government to say, “You cannot post this, you cannot access this”, but that has to be very, very rare. In the UK, there are laws that focus on content — you can’t say something that will offend people in certain ways, you can’t say things that you know will cause upset — and that’s what leads to all the problems.

What I’m talking about are design-based solutions. When you say: here are the platform features that are causing the threats to children. Do they have to always be getting notifications, even at night? Is that a necessary feature? Do they have to be connected to anonymous strangers when they’re 12? There are design features that can be changed that would have a huge impact on child safety, and that have generally no impact on free speech. That’s where I want the UK to really focus: design-based, not content-based.

FS: The current prime minister has said that he wants to bring in a ban on social media for under-16s. That includes Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, X, and Facebook. It is being described as “Australia plus”, so it’s a little bit stronger than what they brought in over there. Already the reaction from many people on the political Right has been that it’s somehow a stalking horse. Elon Musk says it’s “a wolf in sheep’s clothing”, designed to bring in a new era of censorship. Many people are also very anxious about this. The fear is that, if you have to prove your adulthood when you access the internet, it is the beginning of a registration process and the end of online anonymity.

JH: They are right to be concerned about a dystopic world in which you have to show papers to access the internet, and I can see some countries doing that. It’s not that that risk isn’t real. But what we’re doing in Western countries, and certainly what Australia did, is nothing like that. It’s not about accessing the internet, it’s about the moment of account creation. If Australian kids want to go to YouTube and search for videos on “how should I kill myself?”, they can do that still. There is no restriction on access to content in Australia.

At the moment of account creation — when you are signing a contract, with terms of service — the law at present says if you’re seven years old, but you say you’re 13, you’re in. You can give away your data to the company, and the company can take everything from you: they don’t need your parents’ consent, your parents won’t even know. That’s the status quo around the world right now.

What the Australia Bill says is that at the moment of signing a contract, the company has an obligation to verify that you are old enough to sign the contract. Otherwise, all children are on social media from the age of nine or 10.

We can all agree that signing a contract is a big deal. The moment you sign that contract, you are giving away everything to a company that is going to exploit it, sell it, and use it against you. The question is, at that moment, how do you feel about giving up one bit of information — “are you over 16: yes or no?” With device-based verification methods, if your device knows how old you are — if the Apple or Google operating system knows how old you are, as they do — if they simply say back to the platform “yes” or “no” at the moment of registration, there’s no privacy risk. It is a one-time check done just before you give away all your data for the rest of your life. That’s what the debate is about. It’s not “do I have to show a passport to access Wikipedia, or any other site?”, it’s “when can I sign a contract?”

FS: Aren’t device-based age checks ineffective, though, because many of these devices are shared between siblings. All of these platforms also have a normal-browser way of accessing them, so you just need to get a laptop in a family home and start typing in the URL, and bingo, you have access.

JH: The current situation is that each kid has one or two devices. By the time you’re 12, you probably have a laptop for school, and you have a phone or an iPad. Your parents don’t want you going to porn, they don’t want you setting up an Instagram account — but right now, they’re powerless. We cannot raise our kids the way we want, we cannot stop them from opening as many accounts as they want, unless we keep them always away from the internet. The companies have pulled our kids into a trap, surrounded them with technology that we can’t monitor. No matter how hard we try, we can’t really do a good job of it. Parents are crying out for help.

Let’s imagine the case where things pass in the UK, and let’s hope that quickly the verification methods move towards “device-based” rather than what’s happened in Australia.

Australia went first, and on most of the platforms you now have a face scan. That doesn’t work that well, but it’s okay as a first step, just showing proof of concept. The Australian law specifically says “platforms, it’s your job, but you cannot only ask for a government ID, you must provide a way to do it that does not involve an ID”. And so for now, most of the platforms are using Yoti, or you can go out to another platform and do a face scan to see if you’re old enough, and then come back with a signal, “yes or no”. So that’s how things have started, and if that was the way it was going to stay, then I would not be as enthusiastic. But here’s the really cool thing: the Australians have created a market for better age verification. The tech industry is nothing if not innovative and quick to meet a market need. And so once Australia announced that it was doing this, and once it was clear dozens of countries were following, many companies began competing to make better systems. Apple and Google have each come out with APIs that make it much easier for any platform to verify age. So it’s getting much better.

Let’s imagine I’m a parent: I’ve got a couple of kids, they each have one or two devices, and I don’t want them doing these things. Now I can set their devices, and I say “no, my kid is this old”, and he can’t change it. Now, when he uses that device, if he goes to Pornhub, he can’t use it. As you said, he’ll go to his older brother’s device, he’ll go to a friend’s device. Yes, that’s true. But you know what? That amount of friction would be a game-changer. Right now, every kid can check any site they want instantly: while they’re waiting for an elevator, while they’re sitting on the school bus, while they’re in class. It’s the constant access that’s really devastating their attention, their development. And so, if we can introduce any friction, that would be so great. Just as we do when we say, “you know what, you can’t buy alcohol, you have to find an older brother to get it for you”. That’s friction. Of course kids get around it, but drinking ages do work to at least lower the usage.

FS: Should you really have conceded that device-based is the only defensible way to do this, because there’s no point doing it if it doesn’t work. The other argument you hear a lot is: kids are so smart, they’re going to find ways around it. Not only borrowing their older brother’s hand-me-down iPhone. There’s VPNs, there will be new systems just as ingenious as the new age-verification solutions. What’s the argument against saying, “well, if we’re going to do it, let’s do it in a draconian way that actually works”?

JH: Consider the strategic question: would it have been better if the Australians came in really draconian? I think the answer is no, because, first of all, you have to remember where the world was two years ago when they passed this legislation. People thought this was impossible to do, or that it was too bold. People will be upset. The kids will riot. It’s going to be horrible. And in general, in a free country, governments should not be banning things that are popular, unless there’s a damn good reason. If the legislators get too far ahead of public opinion, there’s going to be a revolt.

The Australians went first. They probably assumed, as we all did two years ago, that this would be very hard to do, that there would be a lot of opposition. So they went in carefully. They are exploring new territory. If they had gone in draconian, saying, “Right, you just have to show us your passport, show us your driver’s license”, that would have been really bad. That would have been like a “papers, please” social media. And so the Australians decided to go in soft — they thought, let’s just first ask them to do something.

That made sense when they enacted it. But since they enacted it on 10 December, there’s been a global tipping point. That’s because when the Australian law went into effect, there was a lot of news coverage, which was overwhelmingly positive, and a lot of commentary on social media. People were saying, “Look what the Australians are doing. Hey, why can’t we do that?” And everybody saw that the Australian law was a good thing. This is why we saw so many countries follow in January, February, and March. In those three months, the world tipped. In those three months, we also had the trials in Los Angeles. Meta and Google were found guilty of designing for addiction, and the world saw the quotations from their staff, the quotations about how they were aiming for addiction. Grok put out the nudify button. So there was global disgust at what this is doing to kids. Now there is enormous public support from the Right and the Left: wherever you look, you find majorities of parents, often very large majorities, saying “yes, we want this”.

And now, whoever goes in next can be more draconian. So, as a strategic question, the answer is that the Australians did the right thing by going in soft, but every other country can go in harder and harder as the technology improves, and as the public support for it improves.

FS: A libertarian or civil liberties campaigner listening to this interview might be concerned by what you’re saying, because it implies that there is a gradually tightening noose. It’s exactly what the conspiracists most fear, which is that they will start gentle, and then, as Jonathan Haidt has just confessed, every year they’re going to get tighter and tighter. Fast forward five or 10 years down the line, and the free internet no longer exists.

JH: That’s a reasonable thing to think, because governments sometimes work that way. What I’m talking about is not tightening the noose on kids or people or speech. What I’m talking about is holding companies to a low standard at first, just to get started, and then raising the bar. You have to do better. As the technology improves, it should become more accurate, and more privacy preserving. That is the progress we’re seeing, and that’s why I’m so excited about device-based verification, because it poses zero privacy risk. Nobody wants to show a driver’s license to access pornography sites — there is a real risk that they would get hacked. Instead, Pornhub could just send down a ping — “This device? Yep, okay, you’re in.”

FS: Another argument that’s often made against you is that power should sit with the family, not with the government. Many conservative-minded people want solutions that are about empowering parents to better control what their kids see, rather than the word “ban”, which is a kind of anathema. Why can’t we find solutions that say, “this is a better way for mom and dad to raise their kids in the way they want”?

JH: If there was a way that parents could make these choices, and if most parents were successful in that, then I’d want to follow that route, because the great majority of parents don’t want their kids on Instagram or TikTok or Pornhub. But we’re 15 or 20 years into the social media age, no one has found that way. Even two married parents who have PhDs, understand tech, and try really hard to restrict their kids’ digital environment usually fail. A lot of people in Silicon Valley send their kids to schools with no technology. A lot of them keep their kids away from technology because they know the parental controls don’t work well. It’s a cat and mouse game once you go down that route. We’re talking about the most equipped families, with two parents, lots of money, and lots of time. And even they can’t do it.

Most kids are not growing up in that environment. Most kids are growing up with a single parent or in a working-class home where there’s not a lot in the way of resources, and mom says, “I’ve got to make dinner, here’s the iPad”. That’s the way kids are growing up. If you say, “Oh, parental choice”, you’re condemning most kids to a life in which their parents just can’t manage it, and they are basically at the mercy of all the companies.

So yes, in theory, the more parental choice you give, the better. I fully agree with that, but why is it that large majorities of parents on the Left and the Right want the government to set age limits? The same goes for cigarettes: do we think it should be the parents’ choice whether a kid can buy cigarettes in a store, or do we think the store should age check? Parents need help; they want an age limit, as on other dangerous products. If something is addictive, hyper sexual, or shows horrific violence, we put age limits on. Social media has all three of those properties.

I would add that what I’ve observed is that the social conservatives tend to be the quickest to see the threat and to want age limits. I think that’s because social conservatives are the most sensitive to threats to the family — commercial incentives, porn exploitation, sexualization of girls. These companies are brilliant, they’re rich, they’ve hired the best psychologists, whose goal is to addict your child. That’s what they’re trying to do. Do families want some help guarding their kids against predatory companies? Hell, yes.

FS: What’s interesting is that in the minds of some famous nominal social conservatives, this dilemma has played out in recent years, and the more pro-tech argument seems to have won. I’m thinking, for example, of JD Vance: this is someone whose whole political outlook is based on the idea that predatory companies have hollowed out the middle class, the industrial base, that big tech has been incredibly damaging. In fact, in 2022 he gave an interview to a Catholic magazine where he called for an outright pornography ban. Now, in 2026, the same person is spending a lot of his time criticizing things like the UK’s Online Safety Act and measures to control social media access as part of a stealth censorship program. What’s your analysis of what’s going on in that kind of political scenario?

JH:  The US has never done anything. We created this monster, we unleashed it on the world, and we said, as long as you say you’re 13, you’re in, and we haven’t done anything since 1998 to help. The one bill that almost made it through two years ago,  the Kids Online Safety Act [KOSA], was modeled partially on the British age-appropriate design code. It said companies have to do certain things if they’re going to serve children. It didn’t have an age limit, but said companies have to have age-appropriate features. And it was opposed in Congress by the Republicans. It passed the Senate 91 to three — overwhelming bipartisan support in the Senate. It goes to the House, the tech industry really concentrates on the House. The objection is, this might violate free-speech. So it gets stalled.

So, even though most House members were supportive, even though it passed through the first committee very strongly, it was never brought up for a vote. And the argument given by the House leadership was, “Oh, it has free-speech concerns.” Okay, so then what happened? Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of X, got involved and said that X was fine restricting it to over 16s. She got involved to try to address the free-speech concerns. She tweeted something strongly supportive of Kosa, and then Elon retweeted her, which we take to be a signal that X, Elon, Linda are supportive of protecting kids if you separate it from concerns about regulating speech. And then Donald Trump Jr. also tweeted in favor of KOSA, and then the First Lady, Melania, who was very active in supporting the non-consensual Deep Fake Porn Act – the Take It Down Act. So we have a lot of signs from the Trump administration that if we’re talking about protecting kids, we’re in, but if you’re going to pass a law that’s that says, like, “You can’t say this, you can’t say things that are offensive”, then we’re going to come down hard on you, because we know what we know what happens when you go down that road. So, again, it’s about keeping them separate: we want design-based solutions that will make it safer for kids, that will allow countries and companies to age-gate, that’s what we want, we don’t want speech regulation — and if you separate them, then I think Vance’s concerns will be satisfied.

FS: The strange thing, looking from outside America, is that this genius creation of social media and big tech came from there. It has conquered the world, and now it is countries outside America that are finally trying to restrict it: Australia, European countries, now the UK. Within the US it doesn’t seem to be happening at all. What’s the prospect inside America for your campaign to actually get somewhere?

JH: When I wrote The Anxious Generation, I thought: our Congress is broken, our politics is so easily corrupted by legal donations. I thought, okay, how do we solve this problem when we don’t have any support from Congress? And so I wrote the book focusing on norms, on four norms to roll back the phone-based childhood: no smartphone before high school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, and far more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world. Those were the four norms laid out in The Anxious Generation, and I thought we’ll have to do this without the government.

But the two things I didn’t fully realize are: one, we have 50 states, and those state governments mostly work. They jumped into action, the states have been amazing. More than 40 of our 50 states have, within a year and a half of the book coming out, passed legislation for phone-free schools. State governments have been amazingly active at trying to protect kids, and it’s totally Right-Left. There is no red-blue difference. So, other than Congress — which is partly bought — we are getting a lot of action in the US.

The other thing I didn’t fully appreciate was just how active the rest of the world would be. Beginning with Australia, but as soon as Australia went into effect, more than a dozen countries, France being the first European country — and then Spain, Scandinavia, Greece. There’s also a huge tech lash in the US now, especially around AI. Look, they fooled us once on social media, they took our kids. They’ve escaped responsibility, they’ve never been able to be sued until this year, they’ve behaved abominably towards our kids in social media. They did the same thing with ed tech. They pushed it into the schools, and now it’s damaging test scores. They tricked us on ed tech, and now people are pretty skeptical about AI in America. What I’ve seen is that, in the developing world, they’re more gung-ho about tech. In the West, we are much more negative, and, in America, especially about AI. So, I think two years ago I was thinking the way you just did, but I think the whole world has changed in the last two years.

FS: It’s also about money, though, isn’t it? Tech is a huge growth engine in the American economy. A lot of the lobbying, a lot of the diplomacy with the European Union is about American tech companies having access to these markets. And these kind of restrictions impact their business model.

JH: That’s right.

FS: How can you solve that? I mean, there is no American administration that is going to want to clip the wings of the best thing in its economy?

JH:  I don’t think that’s true. We were all techno-optimists in the Nineties. The reason that American law said that no one can sue these companies, you have complete freedom from liability, no one can sue you for what people post, which was interpreted broadly, is because we thought that way back then. “This is this new technology, it’s amazing.” When we all saw the internet the first time, I mean, it was incredible. And Congress basically said, “let’s not clip the wings, let it rip”. That was 25, 30 years ago. Things are really different now; a lot of people are crying out for regulation. A lot of people feel oppressed by these companies. A lot of people see the damage.

FS: Do you think the mood is changing against them?

JH: Oh, yeah. The mood is changing very fast against them, especially because of AI. The rollout of AI has been deeply threatening to people, as I think it should be. It’s not just the job apocalypse, which is coming, it’s many other threats.

FS: So you think an American administration would take a hit on the economy in order to introduce these restrictions on tech?

JH: It’s not clear to me that it’s a hit to the economy. Okay, those growth stocks, they might grow a little slower, so there would be some financial implication, but it’s not that it would slow down the economy. It can’t be good for the American economy to make our children stupider and stupider and sicker and sicker every year — that just can’t be a long-term growth strategy for the US. While China is able to say, “our TikTok is healthy, kids don’t get notifications”,  China is also able to regulate. It can’t be a growth strategy to let tech do what it wants to our kids.

Also, in terms of how we get out of it, the companies are in many ways more powerful than countries. I think the best analogy is the British East India Company, which basically was given a license to conquer, pillage, do what you want, start wars, kill people. That’s essentially what our tech companies have been given, and the Trump administration has been pretty aggressive in threatening countries: “if you do this, we’re going to put tariffs on you.” I don’t think that’s appropriate to do. I don’t think that’s historically been done to our friends, at least not to this degree, so I think whatever future administration, whether it’s Republican or Democrat, I don’t think they’re going to be as aggressive in threatening countries who try to pass child-friendly legislation. Now that it’s most of the developed world countries standing up at the same time, it’s a different game.

FS: Final question. You are talking to a somewhat conservatively-minded person. Imagine this person has been burnt over the last seven years. They went through the Covid era, they witnessed draconian curtailments to their liberty, all done using do-goody language about protecting public health. They saw a conspiracy between government and social media to censor what should have been perfectly legitimate political speech, and they are deeply skeptical of people using the word “ban” in connection with something that sounds virtuous in terms of helping people. They might agree with you, they might have kids that they’re anxious are on their phones too much, but they’re done with people coming in saying “we need to help you by banning this or restricting your freedom” — what is your message to them?

JH: What I’ve learned from thirty years of studying political psychology is that each side, the Right and the Left, the libertarians — each of them are wise to certain threats to society or the family, and in a well-functioning society, each one is voicing those concerns, and there’s a mechanism for balancing them or taking everyone’s concerns into account. So, conservatives and libertarians need to constantly be witnesses to the fact that whatever is proposed could be misused. You can’t just trust the government to do what it says, they need to be the watchdogs.

But I would also say: as conservatives, you are also the most sensitive to threats to the family. Even back in the Eighties and Nineties, it was conservatives who were saying that we can’t just have these sexually explicit lyrics surrounding our kids, we can’t just have porn everywhere. Conservatives are the canaries in the coal mine for the moral degradation of our children. Conservatives should keep speaking up for that, that we can’t be raising our children in a toilet, we can’t be having our government decide what anyone can say. Keep voicing those concerns, and that’s how you end up with a really good policy in your country.

This has to happen. The status quo is just completely unworkable. The climate that kids are being raised in is not just degrading, it’s not even good for free-speech. Kids are afraid to speak honestly on social media, it makes them lie, it makes them present a false self. The status quo is horrible for everyone. It has to change, and it’s going to change. The question is, are we going to do it well in ways that are privacy-preserving and that don’t give governments the right to judge who can say what, or are we going to do it badly?

I think the UK is really ground zero for this debate, because you do have a problem with government curtailing of speech, but you are also the founders of liberalism in the sense of individual liberty. So, I’m really hopeful that it works out well in the UK, and we need the conservatives to be voicing their strong concerns, their right to be concerned. But I’m confident, given what I’m seeing, and given the broad public support that we have to deal with this problem. I’m confident that we’re going to get it right — maybe not in every country at first — but let’s see how things go, and let’s learn from each other. I think we can do this, and I think we have to do this.