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from the moral-panics-are-profitable dept

We’ve been saying for years now that Jonathan Haidt’s crusade against social media and kids is a moral panic dressed up in academic robes, and that the evidence simply does not support the sweeping claims he’s been making. A new piece in the Wall Street Journal by Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff drives that point home with a framing that cuts straight to the absurdity of it all: this fear of new ideas “corrupting the youth” is literally as old as democracy itself.

In 399 BCE, Socrates was put on trial before a jury of some 500 of his fellow Athenians. The indictment accused him of impiety and added, “Socrates is…also guilty of corrupting the youth.” Despite the Athenian democracy’s commitment to free and equal speech, Socrates was found guilty and sentenced to death.

Two and a half millennia later, democracies are still deeply concerned about dangerous ideas corrupting the youth. This time, the target isn’t dangerous philosophy but an increase in teen mental-health issues blamed on social media.

Mchangama and Kosseff are particularly well-positioned to make this argument (and are both former Techdirt podcast guests). Mchangama’s prior book, Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media, traced the full arc of free speech battles across civilizations, and the two of them have a forthcoming co-authored book, The Future of Free Speech, on the global decline of free speech protections. Meanwhile Kosseff’s three previous books all cover related free speech territory: The Twenty-Six Words that Created the Internet, Liar in a Crowded Theater, and The United States of Anonymous. These are people who have spent their careers studying exactly these patterns — the recurring cycle of moral panic, political opportunism, and the quiet erosion of rights that tends to follow.

Their piece walks through the problems with both the evidence and the policy responses that have sprung from Haidt’s work. On the evidence:

In 2024, a review of the scientific literature by a committee at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine had found that despite some “potential harms,” the review “did not support the conclusion that social media causes changes in adolescent health at the population level.” A 2026 longitudinal study in the Journal of Public Health reached a similar conclusion. 

We covered these studies at the time, noting that they were far from the only such studies to go hunting for the alleged evidence of inherent harms to children using social media — and coming up empty. It is amazing how little attention these studies get compared to Haidt’s book. So it’s good to see Mchangama and Kosseff call them out.

They also highlight what gets lost when you reduce this to a simple “social media = bad” story:

“Social media has the potential to connect friends and family. It may also be valuable to teens who otherwise feel excluded or lack offline support,” according to the National Academies of Science report. It also highlights the possible benefits of online access for “young people coping with serious illness, bereavement, and mental health problems” as well as opportunities for learning and developing interests. 

That point is especially important for vulnerable teenagers whose offline environments may be isolating or hostile. This is why comparing social media to tobacco is questionable: The scientific consensus on smoking’s harms is unanimous and no one claims smoking has benefits. Neither is true for social media.

This is consistent with what experts told TES Magazine last fall — actual researchers in the field described Haidt’s work as “fear” rather than science, said they couldn’t believe a fellow academic wrote it, and pointed out basic logical flaws in his causal claims. It’s also consistent with what I found in my own detailed review of the book when it came out two years ago, where the cherry-picked data, the ignored contrary evidence, and the policy proposals based on gut feelings rather than research were all on full display.

What makes this even worse than a standard “well-meaning but wrong” situation is a study we wrote about earlier this year showing that the social media “addiction” narrative itself may be more harmful than social media. Researchers found that very few people show signs consistent with actual addiction, but every time the media amplifies stories about social media addiction, more people claim they’re addicted. And that belief makes them feel helpless — convincing them they have a pathological condition rather than habits they could simply change.

In other words, the moral panic is doing the exact same thing it accuses social media of doing: making people anxious, helpless, and convinced they can’t control their own behavior.

The cost of being wrong here is that parents, politicians, and schools ignore the real causes of teen mental health struggles: poverty, the closure of youth services, reduced access to mental health care, and the erasure of community support systems. And the cost is that kids who genuinely rely on online communities — LGBTQ+ youth, kids with chronic illnesses, kids in hostile home environments — lose a lifeline. Mchangama and Kosseff make the same point, and now we can see the policy consequences playing out in real time.

And it goes even further. As Mchangama and Kosseff note, authoritarian governments are already using the “protect the children” framework as cover for broader censorship:

Authoritarian and illiberal states provide a grim window into how the protection of children can be weaponized to suppress dissent. In 2012, Russia enacted an internet blacklist law, with the stated intention of protecting children from harmful content. The law laid the groundwork for Russia’s heavily censored “Red Web” that now entirely prohibits many foreign social-media platforms.

The same goes in Indonesia which this month announced a ban on social media for those under 16. But Indonesia is also a country that has used the pretext of child protection to block and censor gay social networking apps and content.  

It’s a remarkable blind spot for those pushing Haidt’s arguments. They never seem to consider that these are the exact same tools authoritarian governments use to silence marginalized voices. You would think that politicians championing this book — particularly Democrats who claim to care about civil liberties and LGBTQ rights — might pause when they see Russia and Indonesia deploying identical justifications.

And yet politicians across the spectrum continue to treat Haidt’s book like scripture, despite an overwhelming expert consensus that his claims don’t hold up.

Mchangama and Kosseff close with what should be obvious, but apparently still needs to be said:

Democracies have always worried about dangerous ideas corrupting the young. Intellectuals and lawmakers should absolutely be concerned about how and when our children navigate social media. But they should also be concerned about whether, in our rush to protect our children, we are building an infrastructure of surveillance and censorship that will ultimately threaten the hard-won freedoms we want future generations to enjoy.

Speech is powerful. Ideas have consequences. But we protect such speech from legal liability for that very reason. The power of speech to change minds and influence people is exactly why those in power are so often afraid of it and looking to tamp it down. It’s also why Mchangama and Kosseff can tie the urge back all the way to Socrates.

Every generation gets its moral panic. Every time, someone insists “this time it’s different.” Every time, the evidence eventually catches up and the panic looks ridiculous in retrospect. The tragedy is how much damage gets done in the meantime — to kids who lose a real lifeline, to free expression, to privacy, and to the actual causes of teen suffering that never get addressed because everyone was too busy blaming the latest app.

The verdict from the people who actually study this stuff has been clear for a while now. Maybe it’s time for politicians to put down Haidt’s book and pick up the actual research.

Filed Under: free speech, jacob mchangama, jeff kosseff, jonathan haidt, moral panic

An unknown technical problem caused a number of robotaxis owned by the Chinese tech giant Baidu to freeze on Tuesday in the middle of traffic, trapping some passengers in the vehicles for more than an hour.

In Wuhan, a city in central China where Baidu has deployed hundreds of its Apollo Go self-driving taxis, people on Chinese social media reported witnessing the cars suddenly malfunction and stop operating. Photos and videos shared online show the Baidu cars halted on busy highways, often in the fast lane.

A college student in Wuhan tells WIRED that she was stuck in a Baidu robotaxi with two friends for about 90 minutes on Tuesday. (She asked to be only identified with her last name, He, to protect her privacy.) The student says the car malfunctioned and stopped four or five times during the trip before it eventually parked in front of an intersection in eastern Wuhan. Luckily, it was not a busy road, and the group was not in immediate danger. The screen display in the car asked the passengers to remain in the car with seatbelt on and wait for a company representative to come “in five minutes,” according to a photo He shared with WIRED.

He says it took about 30 minutes to reach a Baidu customer representative on the phone. “They kept saying it would be reported to their superior. But they didn’t explain what caused [the outage] or let us know how long we needed to wait for the staff to come,” He says. But no one ever came, and after another hour of waiting, the three passengers decided to just get out and go home by themselves (the doors weren’t locked).

On Chinese social media, other passengers also complained about being unable to reach Baidu’s customer support. “I tried every way I could think of to call for help using the options the app showed, but the phone line wouldn’t go through, and when I pressed the SOS button it told me it was unavailable. So then what exactly is the SOS for?” wrote one person in a post on RedNote alongside a video showing the button not working. She said she had to force the door to open and get out of the car as traffic halted to a complete stop behind her robotaxi. “Apollo Go, you really owe me an apology,” she wrote.

Baidu didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Local police in Wuhan issued a statement around midnight in China that said the situation was “likely caused by a system malfunction,” but the incident is still under investigation. No one was injured and all passengers have exited the vehicles, the police added. It’s unclear how many of Baidu’s robotaxis may have been impacted.

One dash cam recording posted to RedNote shows a car passing 16 Apollo Go vehicles parked on the road in the span of 90 minutes. On several occasions, the video shows the driver narrowly avoiding hitting the robotaxis by braking or changing lanes at the last minute.

Others were apparently not as fortunate. In another RedNote post, a man claimed he crashed into one of the malfunctioning Baidu vehicles. The man wrote in the caption that he was driving over 40 mph on a highway when the car in front of him suddenly changed lanes to avoid the stopped robotaxi. He couldn’t react fast enough and ended up running into the self-driving car. Photos of the man’s orange SUV being towed away show that the car’s front-right fender was completely torn off, and other parts appeared to have sustained major damage.

Anthropic has built its public identity around the winning idea that it’s the careful AI company. It publishes detailed research on AI risk, employs some of the best researchers in the field, and has been vocal about the responsibilities that come with building such powerful technology — so vocal, of course, that it’s right now battling it out with the Department of Defense. On Tuesday, alas, someone there forgot to check a box.

It is, notably, the second time in a week. Last Thursday, Fortune reported that Anthropic had accidentally made nearly 3,000 internal files publicly available, including a draft blog post describing a powerful new model the company had not yet announced.

Here’s what happened on Tuesday: When Anthropic pushed out version 2.1.88 of its Claude Code software package, it accidentally included a file that exposed nearly 2,000 source code files and more than 512,000 lines of code — essentially the full architectural blueprint for one of its most important products. A security researcher named Chaofan Shou noticed almost immediately and posted about it on X. Anthropic’s statement to multiple outlets was nonchalant as these things go: “This was a release packaging issue caused by human error, not a security breach.” (Internally, we’d guess things were less measured.)

Claude Code isn’t a minor product. It’s a command-line tool that lets developers use Anthropic’s AI to write and edit code and has become formidable enough to unsettle rivals. According to the WSJ, OpenAI pulled the plug on its video generation product Sora just six months after launching it to the public to refocus its efforts on developers and enterprises — partly in response to Claude Code’s growing momentum.

What leaked was not the AI model itself but the software scaffolding around it — the instructions that tell the model how to behave, what tools to use, and where its limits are. Developers began publishing detailed analyses almost immediately, with one describing the product as “a production-grade developer experience, not just a wrapper around an API.”

Whether this turns out to matter in any lasting way is a question best left to developers. Competitors may find the architecture instructive; at the same time, the field moves fast.

Either way, somewhere at Anthropic, you can imagine that one very talented engineer has spent the rest of the day quietly wondering if they still have a job. One can only hope it’s not the same engineer, or engineering team, from late last week.