Superhuman - From Engineered Desire to Engineered Consent
A father’s search for answers and the century-long con that sold corporate freedom as our own.
When my son died, I started asking questions. The answers led me to places I never expected: a dinner party in Vienna, a railroad case nobody remembers, our constitutional rights hijacked as an excuse to look away while children die.
Superhuman is my search for what happened. Not just to my son, but to all of us.
Superhuman - From Engineered Desire to Engineered Consent
Wolves and Children
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
A bill can say “child safety” on the front and still protect the companies causing the harm. In Wolves and Children, Aaron traces how lobbying, legal misdirection, and manufactured public pressure shape the laws parents are told to trust. Featuring Brody Mullins, Julia Duncan, Sarah Gardner, and Lennon Torres.
Links and Resources
Brody Mullins
The Wolves of K Street Podcast
A companion podcast exploring lobbying, corporate influence, and power in Washington.
https://www.thewolvesofkstreet.com/podcast
The Deciders
A show about the people and forces shaping politics, business, and public life.
https://www.deciders.show/subscribe
Julia Duncan
American Association for Justice
The national organization representing trial lawyers and civil accountability work.
Sarah Gardner
HEAT Initiative
Advocacy focused on tech accountability and child safety.
Scrolling 2 Death
A podcast about social media harms and digital safety.
https://www.scrolling2death.com/
Lennon Torres
Diary of a Palatable Trans Woman
Lennon’s Substack and personal writing.
https://thediaryofapalatabletransgirl.substack.com/
More Links and Recommendations
Parents RISE
A parent-led group advocating for reform and accountability around online harms.
The Amazing Generation
A youth-facing guide to understanding persuasive technology and healthier digital habits.
https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/book/amazinggeneration
Overturned by Kelly Stonelake
Not mentioned in the episode, but one of my personal favorites by a close friend in the movement.
https://overturned.substack.com/
Chapters
00:00 Introduction: what keeps the truth buried
02:05 Brody Mullins on how lobbying really works
06:20 The 50-year rise of corporate influence
12:30 SOPA, engineered outrage, and the outside game
16:04 Julia Duncan on Big Tobacco, opioids, and Big Tech
19:39 Inside the KIDS Act markup
27:30 Sarah Gardner on pressure, app stores, and accountability
34:37 Section 230 versus product design
44:05 Lennon Torres on queer kids, grooming, addiction, and false tradeoffs
55:00 Why civil discovery still matters
1:01:33 Where parents go from here
Last episode, I told you about a dealer who sold drugs to children on Snapchat for years. About a platform that had proof of it and did nothing. About a police file that documented all of it. And a plea deal that compressed everything, the targeting, the scope, the platform's knowledge, into a single transaction. 34 months, no trial, no public record of what actually happened, no warning to the community where it happened. I found myself connected with hundreds of bereaved parents who, like me, feel we need to build these warnings ourselves. Because too often courtrooms aren't doing it. This episode is about why. Not why one prosecutor made one choice. That's a symptom. This is about what stands between a child's death and the public ever understanding what caused it. The lobbying, the money, the bills that get written before anyone reads them. The arguments that sound like principle, but function as protection. A child's safety bill passed the United States Senate with near unanimous support. It had a duty of care. It had state enforcement. Then it went to the House. And what came out the other side let the platforms write their own safety rules. This is how that happened. Brody Mullitz spent 20 years at the Wall Street Journal covering lobbying. He and his brother Luke wrote The Wolves of K Street, the most complete account of how corporate influence captured Washington. I was reading it in September of 2025, a month before I released the first episode of the series. It was the book that made me realize this podcast needed to exist. I asked Brody what most people don't understand about how Washington actually works.
SPEAKER_00I mean, so many things don't happen on Capitol because they're blocked by companies, industries, labor unions, individuals, you know, and their money and lobbies, and people just don't really know that exists.
SPEAKER_01That's the part that stops me. I didn't know it exists. Most people don't know it exists. We vote, we watch hearings, we see senators grill tech CEOs on camera, and we think that's the system. It's the visible part of the system. Most of the power runs underneath it.
SPEAKER_00One of the few rules is that companies have to disclose the number of lobbyists they have. And that's where the sort of funny business begins. The question is, you have to disclose what your who your lobbyists are, and the key is the word lobbyist. So what does the word lobbyist mean? Well, a lobbyist is someone who spends 20% or more of their time talking to a member of Congress or a public official, according to the law. But there are so many more people who spend all their time trying to influence legislation and policy in Washington who don't actually talk to members of Congress or who don't spend 20% of their time talking to members of Congress. So if Meta has 87 lobbyists, they probably have 10 times that in terms of other people, maybe even more than that, in terms of other people trying to influence legislation through advertising or grassroots tactics or other methods of trying to shape public policy. And that that's what we found interesting is that so much more of lobbying is that, what we call the outside game versus the actual inside game lobbyists. So when we are looking at these lobbying disclosure figures and trying to figure out how big the industry is or what how many lobbyists a company has, that's really just the tip of the iceberg. And we really have no insight into the full apparatus of these influence machines for companies or industries or labor unions.
SPEAKER_01Julia Duncan is the Deputy Chief of Public Affairs at the American Association for Justice. She represents the lawyers filing cases against big tech on behalf of parents and school districts. She had the 2025 numbers.
SPEAKER_03And ByteDance, um, the owner of TikTok, spent 8 million. And that's just in 2025. And again, that's just on lobbying the legislation. That's sort of separate from other expenditures they've made. Those are lobbying expenditures specifically. So that doesn't include sort of their lawyers who go to a courtroom or defend them in litigation. Those are just lobbying expenditures. Every organization that lobbies has to publicly report their lobbying expenditures each year.
SPEAKER_01Just these companies, not their litigation budgets, not their political spending, not the money that flows through trade groups and advocacy organizations and super PACs. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00Meta, you know, has started a super PAC where they're going to spend millions of dollars, according to the New York Times, you know, electing candidates that they support or defeating candidates they don't support. That's not considered lobbying at all. However, they're not spending millions of dollars on candidates because they support, you know, clean air. It's because they support Meta. That's like the most powerful lobbying ever, right? Electing someone who supports you or defeating an opponent, that's not considered lobbying anywhere. So that $20 million or whatever they're spending will be nowhere to be found in their lobbying disclosure, even though the whole point is to affect policy.
SPEAKER_01By the time the public sees a bill, the real contest has already happened. This is the environment that the child safety bill entered. Brody traces the modern lobbying industry back to the 1970s. For 50 years before that, the country built consumer protections, agency by agency, law by law. Then corporations launched a counterattack that hasn't stopped since.
SPEAKER_00After that Gilded Age era, the American people thought that some of these big companies had too much power and influence over the economy, over politics, and in society. And so we elected members of Congress who brought in the progressive era, which was a period where we reined in the power and influence of those big companies. We created the Federal Trade Commission and a lot of the antitrust laws, right? So these companies were called trusts. And then we had the antitrust laws, which sought to limit the abuse of corporate power and advance the interests of consumers. The size of the government and consumer protections grew and grew and grew. We created, you know, the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, and the FCC and the SEC. I mean, every single three-letter agency that exists was basically created in that era to help protect and advance the interests of consumers and reign in businesses. We sort of think of the Republican Party as anti-government, and the Democratic Party likes to create new government agencies and protections. But during that period that is talked about, it was sort of Republicans and Democrats who were generally supportive of the growth of the government. People forget that the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, which is the leading protector of our clean air and clean water, was created by Richard Nixon. So, you know, even Republicans were in on the act. Everything changed in the 1970s, which is kind of where a book picks up, when companies realized that they didn't have influence in Washington. In the 1970s, we had an economic recession, we had high oil prices, we had stagflation and inflation, and companies' profits sort of evaporated. And so companies said, What's going on with our companies and industries? They looked around, they realized they were spending so much money complying with the regulations in Washington that businesses for the first time decided to sort of launch a counterattack. That's where it started the deregulatory era. And from the 1970s to now, our country has been much more about deregulating than regulating.
SPEAKER_01Episode three covered the PAL memo and the legal architecture. Brody shows what it looks like as a profession.
SPEAKER_00If you're getting to tech, the tech industry has really never been regulated because when the tech industry started, the idea in Congress, supported by Silicon Valley, was like, hey, this is an American industry. This is a sh a sign of American might and ingenuity, and let's not regulate them. In fact, to the point of saying, giving them an exclusion from Section 230 of the Decency Act, saying that companies are not legally liable for the content put on their networks.
SPEAKER_01The playbook has two games. The inside game is what you picture. A lobbyist with access to a senator. That still exists. But the bigger game happens outside Washington. It's about shaping what regular people believe so that members of Congress follow. And here's what makes it so effective. When it's happening to you in real time, it doesn't feel like a campaign. It feels like common sense. It feels like something everyone just agrees on. The trick is that everyone was pointed in that direction by people you never saw. It's easier to see when you look at history because the pattern becomes obvious once the stakes have passed. Brody gave me two examples.
SPEAKER_00Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Bill Clinton's elected president in 1992. He comes into office in January. He's incredibly popular, as all presidents are when they first enter the White House, we call it the honeymoon period, where in the first hundred days in your first year, you can really pass most of your legislation before you get increasingly unpopular with both sides. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_01Popular president, unified government, public appetite for reform, it looked inevitable.
SPEAKER_00So Clinton chooses that he wants to pass a national health care reform bill, basically expanding health insurance to, you know, 40 million Americans who don't have health care or whatever the number is, just like Barack Obama did later. And Bill Clinton's idea is that I want to establish a legacy for myself as this huge liberal Democratic president who expands the federal safety net and Democrats will love me for all the time. And when he was elected, Democrats had the House, Democrats had the Senate. A poll said that something like 70% of Americans didn't like their health insurance plan. So it really looked like this is something that could happen. And in fact, many Republicans supported the same idea. The year before, something like a few dozen Senate Republicans had proposed their own health care reform. So it seemed like there was a deal could happen. And as soon as he announced the bill, the health insurance industry started fighting against it. The health insurance industry thought, well, if the government's going to create government-provided health insurance, then the private sector companies could lose money because they're competing against the government. So the health insurance industry starts this big lobbying campaign. They spend about $100 million trying to defeat the health care bill. And what they do is they go to the districts of important members of Congress on the key committees and persuade their constituents through advertising and through newspaper articles and even knocking on doors, convince people that this Clinton healthcare plan would be bad for them. Not only did they defeat the Clinton healthcare bill, but there's never even a vote on it. They blocked it in committees that didn't have votes. This one industry blocked the top priority of the president of the United States, which is just an incredible example of how powerful industries can be.
SPEAKER_01Nearly the entire Senate, then tech discovered something.
SPEAKER_00So I think on January 18th, 2012, all these social media companies and tech companies had a shut down the Internet Day where they put banners on their websites or they shut down for the day. They put a sign that said, call your member of Congress. Congress is about to pass a law that's going to shut down the Internet. You know, that was a wild exaggeration, but it turned out to be a great campaign motto. And millions of Americans said, What? Like Congress is going to shut down the Internet. This is crazy. And millions of Americans that day called their member of Congress and said, Don't shut down the internet. What are you doing? You know, get off this bill. And in one day, that bill that had the support of 99 out of 100 senators was dead. And the House bill was dead. It wasn't really one day, it was more like two weeks, but an incredible shift.
SPEAKER_01This was not just lobbying. This was engineered constituent pressure. Millions of people with real concerns about the Internet activated overnight by companies with the most to gain.
SPEAKER_00And what that showed is how powerful regular constituents are. No matter what kind of lobbies you have and what kind of campaign donations you have, if the American public wants something and can be mobilized and can convey that to members of Congress, you know, members of Congress will react. And that's because the number one thing a member of Congress wants to do is to get re-elected. So if their constituents are telling them, you know, we don't want this bill to be passed, they won't pass it. They won't vote for it. And that's, you know, that's great for democracy. That's how things should work. The question is, are companies manipulating public opinion, or is it true public opinion? And so often in sort of the modern lobbying with using grassroots tactics, it's it's manipulation. You know, you're your companies are out there trying to gin up support or opposition to policies that they support or oppose so they can show members of Congress, hey, 75% of your constituents don't want this tariff, or don't want this tax bill, or you know, want this regulation or don't want kids' online child protections, and therefore the member of Congress follows.
SPEAKER_01Julia sees the same logic from the courtroom applied across industries.
SPEAKER_03We could look back to big tobacco. This is exactly what the tobacco companies did. Big tobacco knew that if they could addict and hook kids before a certain age, they would be much more likely to have smokers for life. And so that's why they opposed warnings on package of cigarettes. They opposed regulations that would say we're not gonna sell cigarettes to kids, right? They did that because they knew if they could hook and manipulate and addict kids early, they would have lifelong human beings to make money off of, their health be damned. You fast forward a little bit, look at the opioid crisis. It's the same thing. Companies saying if we can push this product and market it in a certain way that it looks like here, we're helping you. Here we're gonna alleviate your pain. And in the meantime, internal company documents show again through court cases, that they knew how addictive their drugs were, that they knew that they were lying to doctors about the health effects and about the addictive nature of the drugs. Meanwhile, the communities all across the country, red state and blue state communities alike, are being ravaged. They said, oh, well, it's your fault. If you can't control yourself from smoking, if parents can't better protect their kids who want to buy cigarettes, that's not our fault. That's their fault. OPOA companies said the same thing. It's not our fault your child became an addict, it's the addict's fault. Or it's the parents' fault for not better protecting their kids from these drugs. The same level of manipulation and the same level of cover-up is a tale as old as time. It's just right now being perpetrated by tech companies who have, you know, cooler technology and fancier suits and messaging. But it's the same thing over and over again, which is we're gonna leave communities in the dark while we cover up and lie and make a lot of money. And then we're gonna use Congress to try and escape all accountability for what we've done.
SPEAKER_01Leave communities in the dark. Julia just told you, red state and blue state communities get ravaged the same way. Once you see how this works, the red versus blue framing starts to matter a lot less than one simple question. Who is your representative actually accountable to? Not which party. Which money? That's what last episode was about at the state level. A plea deal that varied the scope, a community that never learned. Now here's what it looks like when it's done to a federal bill that almost every senator supported. A few weeks ago I sat in a House Committee markup meeting with other parents. We were there because the Kids Act was being finalized. Eighteen separate pieces of legislation had been rolled into one package. The final language was released at the last possible moment. And what I watched in that room didn't look like deliberation. It looked like a process completing itself.
SPEAKER_03The markup you witnessed was the full committee markup meeting. Before then, there's a subcommittee markup meeting, which is just a smaller subgroup of that committee that should have some level of expertise in those issues. At that markup, there were 18 different pieces of legislation. That's a lot of pieces of legislation on one issue to be considered all at once. The Kids Act takes a lot of those 18 different proposals and rolled them into one. They took many different pieces of legislation, they squished them into one piece of legislation that they then entitled the Kids Act, right? And then it had different titles. It had provisions on COSA, the COSA title, the Kids Online Safety Act title. It had provisions on the Safer Gaming Act, which is legislation in supposedly intended to make kids safer online in the gaming context. They took all of those, they squished them all together, and then they didn't share the committee leadership, didn't share the final version of what would be considered, um, at least with the public, until very shortly. I mean, at the last possible moment that they needed to make it public, they did. So they left people with very little time to understand what was in this monster package called the Kids Act. And they made changes to several of the provisions. And so there was just not a lot of time allowed for people like me and people like you to really understand, well, what's in here, right? This is a really big piece of legislation and it's complicated. And how do all of these provisions work together? When you have those types of situations where there's an effort to just sort of jam something through, some members on the committee, I think, just didn't really understand what was in the legislation itself. And so they had no, I sound like I'm making excuses. For them, but in those types of situations, they sort of have to trust their leadership to tell them what's in them. And because these issues are really complicated, right? They involve issues of big tech regulation and accountability, and then really complicated issues of preemption, which is just a fancy way of saying what happens to all these different state laws that exist once the federal government is coming in and creating a law. What happens to those state laws? Are they wiped out? Are they protected? What happens to people's rights under those laws? Really complicated analyses of these different provisions have to be performed in a very short amount of time. Members of Congress serve on a number of different committees and they have to run back and forth to the floor. And so I think many of them didn't have a sense of what was really in the legislation and how it would really impact families. And I think one of the reasons you observed what you observed, Erin, is that for some people on that committee, not all, but some, um, who I agree with you would have wanted to do something really good in the name of kids' safety, just didn't realize or were misinformed about what was in the legislation. But by the time you're sitting there at a committee markup, it's sort of too late to decide what you think about it. And you're getting an immense amount of pressure from your leadership to sort of fall in line and vote a certain way. And I do think that's why it was sort of disconnected between the two sides. And I also think that's why there was a lot of confusion.
SPEAKER_01So what was actually in the bill? This is the part every parent needs to hear.
SPEAKER_03In the House, the Kids Act allows big tech to write its own rules. The only real requirement in the Kids Act in the COSA section, the only thing tech was required to do is write their own policies, practices, and procedures, and then to enforce them. So if you know nothing else about this monster package, you have to ask, who are we letting decide what is safest for kids? And in my mind, both as a parent and as an advocate on these issues, tech has proven themselves untrustworthy to write policies, practices, and procedures that are actually going to keep kids safe. So to write federal legislation that gives them the gift of policing themselves is wildly inappropriate and should be opposed by every parent and person who cares about these issues in the country.
SPEAKER_01In plain language, once those companies write their own policies, those policies can become shields against stronger state protections and against accountability from the families harmed by the products.
SPEAKER_03And then the second thing to look at is what happens when those policies, practices, procedures that they themselves have put in place don't work to keep kids safe? Well, nothing because they paired it with a preemption provision, which again, preemption is just a fancy word of saying what happens when something goes wrong, right? Who can seek accountability? What state laws will exist? And by virtue of writing legislation that allows tech companies to write their own rules, they can then use conflict preemption to write themselves out of having to comply with any more protective state laws or regulations or the cases of parents or school districts that come into conflict with any of the rules they've written for themselves. There's a lot of things in that package, but those two things being true, they are not true in the Senate bill, and they shouldn't be true of any piece of legislation that anyone is going to hold up as a reason to make kids safer. And they dressed it up, you know, with a lot of, we call it window dressing. There's a lot of window dressing in the Kids Act. And to be fair, there's some provisions in the Kids Act that are quite good and reasonable. But when the core provisions of the kids' online safety title only require that tech write their own policies, practices, and procedures, we haven't done anything except empower the same trillion dollar companies that got families into this situation to begin with.
SPEAKER_01Sarah Gardner runs the Heat Initiative, an organization built to apply public pressure on these companies. She's been thinking about what it takes to break this dynamic.
SPEAKER_04It's really kind of a dirty game, to be honest. And the question is really how much pressure we're willing to put on specific members who we know are holding things up or not. And one of the other things we've been talking a lot about is making tech money toxic. So even just a few years ago, having tech money on your side wasn't actually a bad thing. This is like a much more recent thing. I know it's like hard for us to remember because it feels so long ago now, but it really wasn't that long ago where these companies were delivering promise to the world. Zuckerberg's gonna lay all those lines of fiber optics in Africa and like connect everybody. And Tim Cook's gonna give us the most privacy-forward devices that also allow us to carry supercomputers in our pockets or in light iPads and make art uh wherever we want to go, right? I mean, they promised us this sort of like better future with technology, and so they they were not only not toxic, it was almost like positive to be aligned with them, or if you have them as sponsors of something, or if you and that's still true of Apple. I think Meta now is finally kind of bearing the brunt of this. Snap isn't a vulnerable place. So now we need to make it toxic to take their money so that you have to feel like it's a vulnerability to be aligned with them, not a positive or even a neutral. And until we get to that part, at least when it comes to politics, it's gonna be a hard hole to climb out of because we're we're never gonna win on just like dollar to dollar. I think we completely win on message, though. We completely win on who people want to align with, you know, when parents go to DC and stand there, like everyone is like, that's the side I want to be on. So it's like, why can't we pass sensible legislation? And it's just because we're being undercut in all these places. And so we need to force the moment is now for members, politicians to decide. They have to decide now, are you with us or are you with them? You can't play both sides, and that moment hasn't really been forced yet. And I think that's the next goal for us as a movement to create that force function.
SPEAKER_01Before an algorithm reaches your child, before any content hits their feed, before any stranger sends a message, a gatekeeper already made a decision. Apple and Google run the app stores. They decide what gets in, how it's labeled, and most parents trust them.
SPEAKER_04This is one of the largest failings in tech accountability in history, I would argue, that's happening right now at the app store level. So if you go to Apple's App Store, the headline is Apps You Love from a Place You Can Trust. And it's marketed with all its shiny Apple branding. And then further down on the page, it goes on and on about how much it vets the apps and what goes into making sure they belong there, etc. And yet, so many of the apps that our children are on blatantly violate the so-called rules that they have for their app store. Just so obviously, it's like there it is the wild west of access, honestly, and they are the gateway. More recently, I've been thinking about how much parents rely on the age ratings in the moment to make the decision about whether they give their kids access or not. I know that's a conversation like you and I have had at different moments about your process. It's a conversation I've had with Trisha from Pennsylvania, Levi's mom, who was like, I looked at that app store rating, you know, and I'm I do trust Apple, exactly to your point. They are a trusted brand in many people's eyes, so it's all the more damning than when they are basically lying or about how they vet it and the age rating they give it.
SPEAKER_01When Avery died, Snapchat was rated 12 plus. After everything we know the grooming, the dealing, the sex torsion, Avery once texted me asking if I could turn off the Snapchat notifications because they were distracting. I told him I didn't think I could do it from the parental controls, but he could try on his end. That's how thin the protection was. A kid asking his parent for help, the parental controls couldn't even provide.
SPEAKER_04There's a lot of sort of threads to pick up here in terms of the level of negligence going on, but I think the biggest ones are, especially when you saw, for instance, with what just happened with Grok this past winter, where Grok had an edit thing added to it where all of a sudden it was making child sexual abuse material and also nudifying people and all kinds of things. And Apple didn't take it out of the app store. Like, there's just literally no excuse for that. They've hidden behind and successfully hidden behind both their privacy branding, which there's a lot of things you can say about Apple in terms of user privacy. Sure, they have been sort of the gold standard. In terms of child safety, they get a big fat F. They have not acknowledged and been engaged in the reality that children use their devices and that children access social media platforms through their devices, and that they run one of the biggest ways all kids connect through messaging in America, which is iMessage, that has like zero protections or has bare minimum protections, I would say. So they have hidden behind their branding, they've hidden behind the fact that us as a society has focused on the apps themselves, which isn't wrong, but it was just the first step. And now we need to pull ourselves back and look at the whole sort of supply chain of how that app ends up in a kid's hand. If Apple and Google actually did their jobs at the App Store level in terms of putting a real safety rating on that app that also tells parents, this is our best guess, but your kid could encounter all these things and putting that up at the top in a big way that's like warning, sextortion happens on this platform. Like, don't download this until you've had those conversations and you've been really clear what that's about. They know if they do that, no one will download it, but if they did stuff like that, they would be saving lives. And so I'm I'm really grateful to you and others who are expanding the conversation to include those companies that are so a part of the system and the delivery mechanism, but have had none of the backlash and ugliness of how they've been complicit in harming kids and children losing their lives.
SPEAKER_01One of the most successful things the tech lobby has done is planned a belief that everything a platform does is protected by Section 230, that any attempt to regulate a platform is an attack on free speech. This belief is not an accident, it is a product. Sarah has spent years looking at what platforms actually build, feature by feature. I asked her to explain the difference between what Section 230 was meant to cover and what the companies are hiding behind it.
SPEAKER_04The original concept behind Section 230 was that if you were, say, hosting a message board and some user got on your platform and writes on the message board something incredibly racist or terrible, that you weren't liable for what that person wrote on your board because you don't control them. They got on there and they wrote it, and of course, maybe you take it down, it goes against your community guidelines, but legally you're not responsible for what they said. And I think that's where the discussion around free speech and also community rules and things like that can happen. What we're talking about is something completely different. We're talking about the way that the products are designed by product people and engineers to addict kids and keep them in an environment to connect them to stranger adults proactively. So let me give you an example. Like QuickAd. QuickAd is a feature on Snapchat that allows kids to very quickly add a whole bunch of people in their area all at once. And this was one of the first features that sort of came under scrutiny because it felt like why would you want to encourage a kid to connect with a whole lot of people that they don't know all at one time? Um, like that sort of goes against like stranger danger mentality. And also the reason they were so encouraged to do it too is it keeps their snap score high and all this because they have a lot of connections, et cetera. But I just want to point out this is a button in an application that people use to add a bunch of people at once. It has nothing to do with anything those people have said, with anybody writing a message, with anything any of those people posted, with any of the things the kid posted. So where is like the content? There's no content part of that, right? There's no user-generated content piece. That's what 230 is about. It's about people writing things and posting things, not how an app actually works. So one could argue that the quick add feature that's now been known to connect children with stranger adults who then have gone on either to sixth them, to try and sexually groom them and abuse them, to meet up with them and then physically hurt them in real life. People who are dangerous to children, gaining access to them through this feature has nothing to do with anything anybody's said or posted. And so it has to do with the feature itself. And this is the shift that has happened so successfully in the last year is we've realized we can go after the product design and how dangerously it's designed, not anything to do with content in Section 230.
SPEAKER_01This is not about comments under a YouTube video. It's about the built-in mechanics that connect, amplify, addict, and expose. Julia confirmed it from the legal side.
SPEAKER_03The good proposals, the the positive proposals, and there are various ones in Congress that are floating out there. That's what they're intended to do. They're not intended to abridge anyone's freedom of speech. They are intended to encourage or require tech companies to prioritize health and safety when they are making deliberate design decisions. These are design decisions. They are not speech. And what you see in the recent verdicts against social media companies is that distinction. The subjects of those cases did not have to do with speech. They had to do with what a company knew about how it was designing its product and how that design was being used to target, to manipulate, to exploit, and to hurt purely for the sake of profit. And there is a distinction, and there are thoughtful people that are working really hard to recognize that distinction in all types of different policies, but absolutely both can be done and both can be done well. Section 230 is section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. All of the legislative history leading up to it. And again, it was passed in 1996, which is the year I graduated high school. I got a flip phone for my 21st birthday, and I am 48 years old right now. So the notion that tech companies are currently relying on something that was enacted that passed when a 48-year-old was a senior in high school is absurd, just on any level, right? Social media did not exist, the smartphones did not exist. And so it's just completely outdated. But when you look at the legislative history behind that legislation, um, it was to protect well-intentioned tech companies who wanted to remove things that might be hurtful to kids. Which, like, who's not on board with that? That was the intention, right? It's called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The deliberate design decisions, which by the way, tech companies can only make because they've been without permission monitoring all of us online and our kids, harvesting that data, analyzing it in order to target, manipulate, and exploit kids. Can we carve out those deliberate design decisions from Section 230 without impacting speech or content? And the answer is a resounding yes.
SPEAKER_01What came out of discovery that the companies wanted kept quiet?
SPEAKER_04There were a lot. The two that just immediately popped into my head was the discussion between two employees that insinuates that Mark Zuckerberg had given some directive about starting to target kids younger than 13, like recruiting them to join Instagram or the platform, is super damning. And I believe there was an email exchange with Nick Clegg, who ran their policy from the UK at the time, that also said us alluding to that is basically indefensible because in in theory, we are holding a 13 plus age guideline to join. So how could anybody younger than 13 join? And he basically just points out what we've all thought and known forever, which is like, if you say it's only 13 plus, but a nine-year-old can just get on it by lying about their age, then it means nothing. So hearing them say that about themselves was just like wild. The employee saying the other employee, like, oh, kids need to, like, we need to add sort of more and more addictive features because they're tapping out, they're sort of getting bored, or we've we've addicted them so much, we need to sort of give them another thing and then equating that to like a high of a drug, and then him the employees saying we're basically pushers is really damning. And then on the YouTube side, there was parts of the documents that talked about the opportunity to put YouTube in schools uh to addict kids in schools, how like that was like really efficient, um, or like a great uh sales channel essentially for addicting kids to YouTube. We have to reject big tech's frame of we have to take the good with the bad now, and we have to demand that's not a frame that we're gonna live in. We want to live in a different frame where you're gonna give us something that is net net positive, that's safely designed, that isn't addictive, that doesn't have the bad stuff.
SPEAKER_01The 230 absolutionist defense isn't just protecting speech, it's protecting a business model. Sarah made the lobbying connection explicit.
SPEAKER_04Oh, absolutely. I mean it's what just happened with the trials. Content wasn't part of that trial or conversation at all, not one time. The reason the lobbyists are pushing it is because it's the only thing they have. They're trying to come up with reasons so that when their members that they're pushing on don't vote for something that's really reasonable and makes sense, they can say there has to be a reason, right? You have you can't just say, I'm voting against child safety because I want to side with Meta. I mean, even they know you can't say that, even though that's what's happening. So they have to give them a reason whether it's real or not that they can be like pushing back on said bill.
SPEAKER_01There are other arguments the industry deploys when others start failing. During the fight over COSA, some of the loudest opposition came from LGBTQ advocacy groups. Their argument safety regulations would be used to censor queer content. That fear has real history behind it. Legislation has been weaponized against queer communities before. But the question is who is amplifying that fear and for whose benefit? Lenin Torres is a transgender woman who grew up on these platforms. I want you to hear what actually happened to her.
SPEAKER_02When I was younger I joined a performing arts school and that was because I really needed to be around people that were going to be supportive. I was a a very unique, different kid and that posed challenges you know I I I didn't know at the time I didn't have the words but I was you know a growing transgender girl transgender woman and that presented itself in a lot of different ways and technology was a big part of that. I got my first iPhone when I was 13 years old and it was seventh grade everyone was on Snapchat everyone was on Instagram everyone was on Twitter back then and we watched a lot of YouTube and I really enjoyed it at first. I remember understanding the algorithms in the way that they were because they weren't engagement algorithms they were chronological feeds. It really was like at first there it was pretty fun and it was pretty harmless. I had hundred followers of you know people I knew and what I realized very quickly just as my public image grew because I started working professionally and dance on a TV show I had over hundred thousand followers and that was also at the same time that these companies were making different business decisions in regards to how they were going to operate their platform and it really became an attention farm or you know an intention extraction economy versus something chronological. I very much became obsessed with the digital nicotine that they were injecting into these products. The like counts the comments the direct messages the message requests the popular page used to be a thing on Instagram all of those things were essentially created to maximize my time on the platform and to equate that with feeling seen in the same way the same dopamine you get from walking around and seeing the world and seeing trees suddenly isn't working anymore because you expect it to come in this digital format. If I didn't get over a thousand likes in 10 minutes I used to delete my posts because I felt so embarrassed that I wasn't able to reach that level of status or reach a certain level of appreciation and and really it it became more than just how to do well on Instagram it became how to do well in life and that really bled into my formation as a young person because if you are putting yourself together and your core beliefs are based on external validation and not on what truly is like good for you and what you are feeling in your most personal state you end up creating what they want you to create if that makes sense. It became really hard to separate myself what was originally just like ooh fun to get a hundred likes or a thousand likes in 10 minutes became if I didn't get that then it was like a physical sadness and anxiety and in true shame to the point where I would delete my post. And even the last like two years three years I had Instagram I turned my like count off and all my friends were like why did you do that? And I was like because I don't like to look because even knowing all that I know now still not getting the same amount of likes I did when I was 13 hurt me as an adult which is crazy to think about you know but that's what they wanted the whole time because they want me to keep trying because when I tried they can sell ads and place it next to my content. I was very obviously a young queer kid like it was no secret that I was at least going to turn out gay and because of that so many predatorial older men would flock towards my content and most of the message requests I was getting were from grown adult men strangers that I had no idea who they were. They were grooming me some of them were really positive some of them were really creepy some of them were really violent some of them were really sexual. Once Instagram allowed photos to send I got a lot of photos through Snapchat as well I stopped making my Snapchat public for that reason at one point and so when I was 13 some of the ones that were really nice were really preying on my vulnerability as a young queer kid which was you know I wasn't getting that sort of feeling in real life and so I was turning to an online community to do that. That was what I was shown and so it shaped what I was supposed to think an online community looked like. They would you know off platform me. That's what we say in the space for like moving a kid to a different platform to evade you know security protections and so I often would end up on Skype or I would end up on these chat sites that would filter you through just different strange men very similar to like Omegol, which used to be really popular. I had sleepovers but you know for me it was like what I would do alone to try to connect with people and then would be met with really terrible adult men that would actively beg me to lie about my age so that I would say younger you know like are you sure you're not like 11 and I'd be like no I'm 15 or no you know and so you know before you know it you're just doing some things that I used to be really shameful of and thought was really on me. And I just don't pardon my French but give a fuck anymore. And I just think that we need to be really doing more to protect kids online especially queer kids and that's through holding big tech accountable and applying design that can create community that young people actually want and we can stop being gaslit by Instagram and Snapchat and YouTube that this is the best that they can do because I look back at my younger self and what that experience was and just see it for what it is which is just corporate negligence and Congress turning a blind eye to what we saw these companies doing every day.
SPEAKER_01That's what the platforms delivered to a 13 year old queer kid looking for community addiction by design predators by algorithm and then those same companies argued that protecting kids like Lenin would silence queer expression I asked her about that.
SPEAKER_02It is really convenient for them to argue that because one they haven't lived it and two it's convenient to evade any sort of changes or meaningful updates to their product that would cost them money. And so they spend a lot of money working with you know unfortunately incredible LGBTQ plus organizations and continue to feed them misinformation and piece by piece things that they want them to know and hear they like to cherry pick they often say oh you know you're cherry picking up they are cherry picking those types of statistics and that that fear because as queer people we are very used to legislation harming us and things coming out that we need to rally against and and fight and push back on we're organized and willing to do that. So all you have to do is tell us like hey this is gonna harm you and we're gonna make a really loud and big deal about it because we're very used to having to protect ourselves. And so it is advantageous for them to tap into a community that is already well organized and convince them that their incentive is their incentive as well. And so that they're both fighting it's like they're like using them. It's like it's like they're it's it's like their puppet in this big game and so it just has been my mission to scream as loud as I can and talk as many people as I can saying that yes queer kids need online spaces and they need to feel seen and heard and respected on those spaces. And if we don't regulate big tech and and make room for true platforms that design with safety in mind and you know have privacy preserving age assurance so we know who we're talking to and like if we don't fight for those things then queer people are going to continue to be harmed at an exponential rate. And so it's actually quite the opposite in my opinion.
SPEAKER_01I wanted to ask her what she'd say to the queer teenager listening who thinks they need these platforms to be themselves.
SPEAKER_02I'd say that I totally hear you and of course and of course you need those to to feel seen and heard and respected because you know the world we're living in is really hard for you. And I would encourage you to be aware of what is coming with the you know part of it that you really do value, which is connection and seeing you know yourself and other people but watch out for all the other stuff and stay informed about you know the fact that this is a you know digital version of nicotine and continue demanding better experiences. You know you can have uh really funny incredible clippable laughable cryable content but it not be fed to you through like a poison straw. So I would tell them that you know it's valid and it and you should you should know that I see you in that and that it's okay but know that us demanding and continuing to fight for better platforms is not at odds with what you are saying in that moment. They're not conflicting messages. You can need digital community and want social media reform. There those actually are hand in hand and they want you to think that they're opposite.
SPEAKER_03Last episode I showed you what happens when harm gets flattened into a criminal file a plea deal that buried the scope if local systems won't surface the truth where does the truth get in I have a fundamental belief that my son's car seat is safer because there was a case brought by a brave family way before I had a baby. I believe that his toys were safer because there were brave families who had the courage to file a case after something terrible happened to them. And I have a fundamental belief that when you allow ordinary citizens and regular people to challenge the practices and policies that would have corporations be allowed to prioritize profits over people's lives and safety that's how we make the world a better place. And that's how I came to this work originally and that's why I've been doing it for so long.
SPEAKER_01Civil litigation discovery the legal process that forces companies to turn over what they said when they thought no one was listening is the only reason we know what we know.
SPEAKER_03Whenever a company is saying one thing publicly right our product is safe and then privately they're comparing themselves to drug dealers, to drug pushers that's the kind of information that the American public needs and that policymakers really need to make informed decisions about how best to protect kids. You know I'm a lawyer I do this work I've done this work basically my whole career I have three teenage boys and I have to tell you until our lawyers were able to uncover this information they bought all of these ads showing look at how tech is protecting teenagers and look at all the things we're doing to empower parents so on the one hand they're telling the public and members of Congress that we're doing right by kids and families and we've always acted to protect them and their best interests. And in the meantime it was only through the social media trials and only through judges legally forcing through the process of discovery to companies to turn over internal company information that they never wanted to be made public. That the rest of us parents can learn what they were actually saying behind closed doors.
SPEAKER_04And I started the HEAT initiative with Lily Rhodes, my co-founder in 2022 because I got scared of what I was seeing from the tech companies. This was when I worked in an organization called that does incredibly impactful work building technology to combat online child sexual abuse. I started to see the companies make decisions about their product that would directly harm millions of children when we pushed them on why they had no answer other than it just wasn't a priority to do it. So when Meta made decisions to encrypt Facebook Messenger which was a place that we knew sextor was happening and we knew people were sharing child sexual abuse material at a very high rate. And so we said well what's gonna happen to those kids that are being sextored in Messenger or people who are sharing abuse material and they had no answer. It was just like it's not a sorry like we're just turning it off. We're blinding ourselves to it. So that really freaked me out and then another thing happened with Apple and and their decision to not detect child sexual abuse material and then saying something to the effect to me of well nobody cares about this and nobody's asking us to do anything and and so we're just not gonna do it. And that really freaked me out because it felt like these were human rights violations that were happening that nobody knew about or not many knew about it. The companies it was not part of the calculus that their decisions would harm millions of children.
SPEAKER_01Criminal cases can narrow harm into a charge.
SPEAKER_03That's the relationship between last episode and this one and the Kids Act as a preemption provision threatens exactly the process of forces that drew that out one of the reasons I believe in this civil justice system so strongly and why I believe that any time the US Congress is endeavoring to take rights away from ordinary people and parents and families to seek accountability through the courts. We have to view it for what it is which is an intent to cover up what corporate America and what big tech is wanting to perpetuate and doesn't want to be caught doing it.
SPEAKER_00The dirty little secret is that these members of Congress are playing a game. They know the tech companies are not popular. So in the hearing they want to bash you know the the CEO or you know look tough on them and once the cameras are off you know they're heading to the fundraiser and getting campaign donations and you know their staffers are getting hired by them and we don't see that part. So they sort of want it both ways.
SPEAKER_01What you've heard is how a bill with support from 93 senators gets rewritten until the companies it targets get to police themselves. How a legal defense built for message boards gets stretched over product design that harms kids. How real communities with real fears get used as shields for the people causing the harm.
SPEAKER_03Corporate America will tell you behind closed doors it is cheaper and faster to be able to do whatever you want and kill people. That is just what's true, right? It is you can make less safe products knowing people will die and you might bring something to market a lot faster but is that a price that we as a society want to pay?
SPEAKER_01I asked Sarah where people should go from here.
SPEAKER_04Go to heatinitiative.org and sign up for our newsletter so you can stay informed about actions you can participate in. I think you should support Parents Rise which is the incredible group of survivor parents who've come together to advocate and also have great connections into the policy world of making sure people know when there are bills and important policy decisions being made at the federal level and the state level. Podcasts also other podcasts scrolling to death the one that Nikki and I work on and that Nikki's really been so masterful in getting out into the world is a really great one-stop shop for parents to learn about all the different platforms and some of the harms that can happen. And also I know everyone's read Anxious Generation already but the amazing generation which is the second book that John Haidt and Catherine Price recently put out my son read it he's 10. He read it in one day I can't emphasize enough that giving it to younger kids for them to read it themselves and start to make sense of this issue for themselves. One of the things I'm most proud of with my own kids is when other kids ask them about big tech, you can imagine they have a lot of a lot of thoughts but what my kids say the most is that the companies are trying to take advantage of them and make money off of them which is like my biggest victory as a parent is like that's been their takeaway versus super scary stuff or anything. They're just like I don't want to be used. And so I think them forming those ideas early on is a really great thing that people can practice with their own families. We need everybody to participate and there are ways to get involved whether you have a minute in your day or you can even come on a trip and go march with us in DC one day. There's lots of ways to get involved and I encourage people to turn towards the issue instead of a way.
SPEAKER_01If you know a parent who needs to hear this send it to them not because it will make them angry because they deserve to know what's being done in rooms they were never invited into to bills they were never told were being written by companies whose names they see every time their kid picks up a phone
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