Lawmakers in Washington are once again focusing on kids, screens, and mental health. But according to Congress, Big Tech is somehow both the problem and the solution. The Senate Commerce Committee recently held a hearing on “examining the effect of technology on America’s youth.” Witnesses warned about “addictive” online content, mental health, and kids spending too much time buried in screen. At the center of the debate is a bill from Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Brian Schatz (D-HI) called the Kids Off Social Media Act (KOSMA), which they say will protect children and “empower parents.”
That’s a reasonable goal, especially at a time when many parents feel overwhelmed and nervous about how much time their kids spend on screens. But while the bill’s press release contains soothing language, KOSMA doesn’t actually give parents more control.
Instead of respecting how most parents guide their kids towards healthy and educational content, KOSMA hands the control panel to Big Tech. That’s right—this bill would take power away from parents, and hand it over to the companies that lawmakers say are the problem.
Kids Under 13 Are Already Banned From Social Media
One of the main promises of KOSMA is simple and dramatic: it would ban kids under 13 from social media. Based on the language of bill sponsors, one might think that’s a big change, and that today’s rules let kids wander freely into social media sites. But that’s not the case.
Every major platform already draws the same line: kids under 13 cannot have an account. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube, Snapchat, Discord, Spotify, and even blogging platforms like WordPress all say essentially the same thing—if you’re under 13, you’re not allowed. That age line has been there for many years, mostly because of how online services comply with a federal privacy law called COPPA.
Of course, everyone knows many kids under 13 are on these sites anyways. The real question is how and why they get access.
Most Social Media Use By Younger Kids Is Family-Mediated
If lawmakers picture under-13 social media use as a bunch of kids lying about their age and sneaking onto apps behind their parents’ backs, they’ve got it wrong. Serious studies that have looked at this all find the opposite: most under-13 use is out in the open, with parents’ knowledge, and often with their direct help.
A large national study published last year in Academic Pediatrics found that 63.8% of under-13s have a social media account, but only 5.4% of them said they were keeping one secret from their parents. That means roughly 90% of kids under 13 who are on social media aren’t hiding it at all. Their parents know. (For kids aged thirteen and over, the “secret account” number is almost as low, at 6.9%.)
Earlier research in the U.S. found the same pattern. In a well-known study of Facebook use by 10-to-14-year-olds, researchers found that about 70% of parents said they actually helped create their child’s account, and between 82% and 95% knew the account existed. Again, this wasn’t kids sneaking around. It was families making a decision together.
A 2022 study by the UK’s media regulator Ofcom points in the same direction, finding that up to two-thirds of social media users below the age of thirteen had direct help from a parent or guardian getting onto the platform.
The typical under-13 social media user is not a sneaky kid. It’s a family making a decision together.
KOSMA Forces Platforms To Override Families
This bill doesn’t just set an age rule. It creates a legal duty for platforms to police families.
Section 103(b) of the bill is blunt: if a platform knows a user is under 13, it “shall terminate any existing account or profile” belonging to that user. And “knows” doesn’t just mean someone admits their age. The bill defines knowledge to include what is “fairly implied on the basis of objective circumstances”—in other words, what a reasonable person would conclude from how the account is being used. The reality of how services would comply with KOSMA is clear: rather than risk liability for how they should have known a user was under 13, they will require all users to prove their age to ensure that they block anyone under 13.
KOSMA contains no exceptions for parental consent, for family accounts, or for educational or supervised use. The vast majority of people policed by this bill won’t be kids sneaking around—it will be minors who are following their parents’ guidance, and the parents themselves.
Imagine a child using their parent’s YouTube account to watch science videos about how a volcano works. If they were to leave a comment saying, “Cool video—I’ll show this to my 6th grade teacher!” and YouTube becomes aware of the comment, the platform now has clear signals that a child is using that account. It doesn’t matter whether the parent gave permission. Under KOSMA, the company is legally required to act. To avoid violating KOSMA, it would likely lock, suspend, or terminate the account, or demand proof it belongs to an adult. That proof would likely mean asking for a scan of a government ID, biometric data, or some other form of intrusive verification, all to keep what is essentially a “family” account from being shut down.
Violations of KOSMA are enforced by the FTC and state attorneys general. That’s more than enough legal risk to make platforms err on the side of cutting people off.
Platforms have no way to remove “just the kid” from a shared account. Their tools are blunt: freeze it, verify it, or delete it. Which means that even when a parent has explicitly approved and supervised their child’s use, KOSMA forces Big Tech to override that family decision.
Your Family, Their Algorithms
KOSMA doesn’t appoint a neutral referee. Under the law, companies like Google (YouTube), Meta (Facebook and Instagram), TikTok, Spotify, X, and Discord will become the ones who decide whose account survives, whose account gets locked, who has to upload ID, and whose family loses access altogether. They won’t be doing this because they want to—but because Congress is threatening them with legal liability if they don’t.
These companies don’t know your family or your rules. They only know what their algorithms infer. Under KOSMA, those inferences carry the force of law. Rather than parents or teachers, decisions about who can be online, and for what purpose, will be made by corporate compliance teams and automated detection systems.
What Families Lose
This debate isn’t really about TikTok trends or doomscrolling. It’s about all the ordinary, boring, parent-guided uses of the modern internet. It’s about a kid watching “How volcanoes work” on regular YouTube, instead of the stripped-down YouTube Kids. It’s about using a shared Spotify account to listen to music a parent already approves. It’s about piano lessons from a teacher who makes her living from YouTube ads.
These aren’t loopholes. They’re how parenting works in the digital age. Parents increasingly filter, supervise, and, usually, decide together with their kids. KOSMA will lead to more locked accounts, and more parents submitting to face scans and ID checks. It will also lead to more power concentrated in the hands of the companies Congress claims to distrust.
What Can Be Done Instead
KOSMA also includes separate restrictions on how platforms can use algorithms for users aged 13 to 17. Those raise their own serious questions about speech, privacy, and how online services work, and need debate and scrutiny as well. But they don’t change the core problem here: this bill hands control over children’s online lives to Big Tech.
If Congress really wants to help families, it should start with something much simpler and much more effective: strong privacy protections for everyone. Limits on data collection, restrictions on behavioral tracking, and rules that apply to adults as well as kids would do far more to reduce harmful incentives than deputizing companies to guess how old your child is and shut them out.
But if lawmakers aren’t ready to do that, they should at least drop KOSMA and start over. A law that treats ordinary parenting as a compliance problem is not protecting families—it’s undermining them.
Parents don’t need Big Tech to replace them. They need laws that respect how families actually work.
For years now, we’ve been repeatedlypointing out that the “social media is destroying kids” narrative, popularized by Jonathan Haidt and others, has been built on a foundation of shaky, often contradictory research. We’ve noted that the actual data is far more nuanced than the moral panic suggests, and that policy responses built on that panic might end up causing more harm than they prevent.
Well, here come two massive new studies—one from Australia, one from the UK—that land like a sledgehammer on Haidt’s narrative—and, perhaps more importantly, on Australia’s much-celebrated social media ban for kids under 16.
The Australian study, published in JAMA Pediatrics, followed over 100,000 Australian adolescents across three years and found something that should give every policymaker pause: the relationship between social media use and well-being isn’t linear. It’s U-shaped. Perhaps most surprisingly, kids who use social media moderately have the best outcomes. Kids who use it excessively have worse outcomes. But here’s the kicker: kids who don’t use it at all also have worse outcomes.
This isn’t to say that all kids should use social media. Unlike some others, we’re not saying any of this shows that social media causes good or bad health outcomes. We’re pointing out that the claims of inherent harm seem not just overblown, but wrong.
From the study’s key findings:
A U-shaped association emerged where moderate social media use was associated with the best well-being outcomes, while both no use and highest use were associated with poorer well-being. For girls, moderate use became most favorable from middle adolescence onward, while for boys, no use became increasingly problematic from midadolescence, exceeding risks of high use by late adolescence.
This seems like pretty strong evidence that Haidt’s claims of inherent harm are not well-founded, and the policy proposals to ban kids entirely from social media are a bad idea. For older teenage boys, having no social media was associated with worse outcomes than having too much of it. The study found that nonusers in grades 10-12 had significantly higher odds of low well-being compared to moderate users—with boys showing an odds ratio of 3.00 and girls at 1.79.
Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Manchester just published a separate study in the Journal of Public Health that followed 25,000 11- to 14-year-olds over three school years. Their conclusion? Screen time spent on social media or gaming does not cause mental health problems in teenagers. At all.
The study found no evidence for boys or girls that heavier social media use or more frequent gaming increased teenagers’ symptoms of anxiety or depression over the following year. Increases in girls’ and boys’ social media use from year 8 to year 9 and from year 9 to year 10 had zero detrimental impact on their mental health the following year.
Zero. Not “small.” Not “modest.” Zero.
The UK researchers also examined whether how kids use social media matters—active chatting versus passive scrolling. The answer? Neither appeared to drive mental health difficulties. As lead author Dr. Qiqi Cheng put it:
We know families are worried, but our results do not support the idea that simply spending time on social media or gaming leads to mental health problems – the story is far more complex than that.
The Australian researchers, to their credit, are appropriately cautious about causation:
While heavy use was associated with poorer well-being and abstinence sometimes coincided with less favorable outcomes, these findings are observational and should be interpreted cautiously.
But while researchers urge caution, politicians have been happy to sprint ahead.
The entire premise of Australia’s ban—and similar proposals floating around in various US states and across Europe—is that social media is inherently harmful to young people, and that removing access is protective. But both studies suggest the reality is far more complicated. The Australian researchers explicitly call this out:
Social media’s association with adolescent well-being is complex and nonlinear, suggesting thatbothabstinence and excessive use can be problematic depending on developmental stage and sex.
In other words: Australia’s ban may be taking kids who would have been moderate users with good outcomes and forcing them into the “no use” category that the study associates with worse well-being. It’s potentially the worst of all possible policy outcomes.
The UK study’s co-author, Prof. Neil Humphrey, reinforced this point:
Our findings tell us that young people’s choices around social media and gaming may be shaped by how they’re feeling but not necessarily the other way around. Rather than blaming technology itself, we need to pay attention to what young people are doing online, who they’re connecting with and how supported they feel in their daily lives.
That’s a crucial distinction that the moral panic crowd keeps glossing over: correlation running in the opposite direction than assumed. Kids who are already struggling, and who aren’t getting the support they need, might use social media differently—not the other way around.
This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who has been paying attention. We’ve covered study after study showing that the relationship between social media and teen mental health is complicated, context-dependent, and nowhere near as clear-cut as Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation” would have you believe. As we’ve noted before, correlation is not causation, and the timing of teen mental health declines doesn’t actually line up neatly with smartphone adoption the way the narrative claims.
But nuance doesn’t make for good headlines or popular books. “Social Media Is Complicated And The Effects Depend On How You Use It, Your Age, Your Sex, And A Bunch Of Other Factors” doesn’t quite have the same ring as “Smartphones Destroyed A Generation.”
No one’s beating down my door to write a book detailing the trade-offs and nuances. Instead, Haidt’s book remains on the NY Times’ best seller list almost two years after being published.
The Australian study also highlights something else that should be obvious but apparently needs repeating: social media serves genuine social functions for teenagers. Being completely cut off from the platforms where your peers are socializing, sharing, and connecting has costs. The researchers note:
Heavy use has been associated with distress, while abstinence may cause missed connections.
This is what we’ve been saying forever. These platforms aren’t just “distraction machines” or “attention hijackers” or whatever scary framing is popular this week. They’re where social life happens for a lot of young people. Cutting kids off entirely doesn’t return them to some idyllic pre-digital social existence. It cuts them off from their actual social world.
Both sets of researchers make the same point: online experiences aren’t inherently harmless—hurtful messages, online pressures, and extreme content can have real effects. But blunt instruments like time-based restrictions or outright bans completely miss the target, and are unlikely to help those who need it most. The Australian authors recommend “promotion of balanced and purposeful digital engagement as part of a broader strategy.”
That’s… actually sensible policy advice? Based on actual evidence?
Do you still want to cling to this pretense, Trump supporters? Do you still want to pretend ICE efforts are targeting “the worst of the worst?” Are you just going to sit there and mumble some incomprehensible stuff about “respecting the laws?”
Go ahead. Do it, you cowards. This is exactly what you voted for, even if it now makes you a bit queasy. Just sit there and soak in it. You are who you support, even if you never thought it would go this far.
“Worst of the worst,” Trump’s parrot repeat on blast. “This one time we caught a guy who did actual crimes,” say spokespeople defending whatever the latest hideous violation of the social contract (if not actual constitutional rights) a federal agent has performed. “Targeted investigation/stop” say the enablers, even when it’s just officers turning white nationalism into Official Government Policy. “Brown people need to be gone” is the end game. Full stop.
Here’s where we’re at in Minnesota, where ICE officers are being shamed into retreat on the regular, punctuated by the occasional revenge killing of mouthy US citizens.
Federal agents detained three workers from a family-owned Mexican restaurant in Willmar, Minn., on Jan. 15, hours after four agents ate lunch there.
Does that seem innocuous? Does this seem like some plausible deniability is in play here? Well, disabuse yourself of those notions. This is how it went down.
The arrest happened around 8:30 p.m. near a Lutheran church and Willmar Middle School as agents followed the workers after they closed up for the night. A handful of bystanders blew whistles and shouted at agents as they detained the people. “Would your mama be proud of you right now?” one of the bystanders asked.
Nice. Is this what you want from a presidential administration? Or would you rather complain ICE officers have been treated unfairly if people refuse to feed or house them, knowing full well that doing either of these things will turn their employees into targets.
An eyewitness who declined to give a name for fear of retribution, told the Minnesota Star Tribune that four ICE agents sat in a booth for a meal at El Tapatio restaurant a little before 3 p.m. Staff at the restaurant were frightened, said the eyewitness, who shared pictures from the restaurant as well as video of the arrest.
I’m not saying ICE officers shouldn’t be able to eat at ethnic restaurants. I am, however, saying that they definitely shouldn’t because everyone is going to think the officers are there for anything but the food. And I do believe any minority business owner should be able to refuse service to ICE officers who wander in under the pretense of buying a meal. The end result is going to be the same whether or not you decide to engage with this pretense. You’re getting raided either way. May as well deny them the meal.
El Tapatio Mexican Restaurant closed after WCCO confirmed agents visited the spot for lunch and later returned, detaining its owners and a dishwasher nearby after they had closed early due to the federal law enforcement’s previous appearance.
And here’s the DHS statement, which pretends ICE officers didn’t eat a meal at a restaurant and then return a few hours later to detain employees when they left the building:
“On January 14, ICE officers conducted surveillance of a target, an illegal alien from Mexico. Officers observed that the target’s vehicle was outside of a local business and positively identified him as the target while inside the business. Following the positive identification of the target, officers then conducted a vehicle stop later in the day and apprehended the target and two additional illegal aliens who were in the car, including one who had a final order of removal from an immigration judge.”
Nope. I don’t care what the ICE apologists will say about this. These narratives have places where they overlap but it’s impossible to believe this went down exactly like the government said it did. These officers picked out an ethnic restaurant, were served by an intimidated staff, and then hung around to catch any stragglers leaving the business that previously had graciously served them, despite the threat they posed.
Abolish ICE. It’s no longer just a catchy phrase to shout during protests. It’s an imperative. If we don’t stop it now, it will only become even worse and even more difficult to remove. Treat ICE like the tumor it is. Pretending its MRSA gives it more power than it should ever be allowed to have.
Dive into the world of robotics, programming, and electronics with the PiCar-X, an engaging and versatile smart car designed for learners from elementary school to advanced hobbyists. Combining powerful features, exceptional quality, and a cool design, this robot car kit delivers an engaging learning experience in robotics, AI, and programming. Beyond being an educational tool, its powerful Robot Hat provides abundant resources for you to design and bring to life your projects. Plus, it comes enriched with 15 comprehensive video tutorials, guiding you through each step of discovery and innovation. Embark on a journey of discovery and creativity with Picar-X, where young learners become budding innovators! Without the Raspberry Pi board, it’s on sale for $80. With a RPi Zero 2W + 32GB, it’s on sale for $110. With a RPi 4 2GB + 32GB, it’s on sale for $141.
Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.
Just a year and a half ago, Senator Rand Paul sponsored a bill that would make it illegal for federal government employees to ask internet companies to remove any speech. Now, in a NY Post op-ed, Paul proudly announces that he did exactly that—formally contacting Google executives to demand they remove a video he didn’t like.
The video apparently (falsely) claims Paul took money from Nicolas Maduro, the former Venezuelan President the US recently kidnapped. And Paul is furious that YouTube wouldn’t take it down for him.
But the straw that broke the camel’s back came this week when I notified Google executives that they were hosting a video of a woman posing as a newscaster posing in a fake news studio explaining that “Rand Paul is taking money from the Maduro regime.”
I’ve formally notified Google that this video is unsupported by facts, defames me, harasses me and now endangers my life.
Google responded that they don’t investigate the truth of accusations . . . and refused to take down the video.
Let’s pause here. Senator Paul—a sitting U.S. Senator—”formally notified” Google executives that they needed to remove content. Under his own proposed legislation, that would be illegal. His bill was explicitly designed to prevent government officials from pressuring platforms about speech. And yet here he is, doing exactly that.
This is also notably closer to actual government jawboning than most of what the Biden administration was accused of in the Murthy v. Missouri case—where the Supreme Court found no First Amendment violation because platforms felt free to say no. Paul, a Senator with legislative power over these companies, is “formally notifying” them of what he wants removed, and is now saying that Google’s refusal to do so means they should lose Section 230 protection. Remember, the “smoking gun” in the Murthy case was supposedly Biden officials (and Biden himself) threatening to remove Section 230 if the tech platforms didn’t remove content they didn’t like.
Rand Paul was furious about that and his bill was supposedly in direct response to the Murthy ruling, in which he wanted to make it clear that (1) no government official should ever demand content be taken down and (2) threatening to pass legislation to punish companies for their refusal to moderate content would also violate the law.
And here he’s doing both.
But it gets worse. Buried in the third-to-last paragraph of Paul’s op-ed is this remarkable admission:
Though Google refused to remove the defamatory content, the individual who posted the video finally took down the video under threat of legal penalty.
Wait. So the system worked exactly as designed? Paul threatened legal action against the person who actually created the content, and they took it down? That’s… that’s the whole point of Section 230. Liability attaches to the speaker, not the host. The creator is responsible. And when threatened with actual legal consequences, they removed the video.
So what, exactly, is Paul complaining about?!? He got the outcome he wanted through the mechanism that Section 230 preserved for him: the ability to bring legal action against the speaker. But instead of acknowledging that the law worked, he’s using this as his justification for destroying it.
Paul is a public figure. He has access to pretty much all the media he wants. If he wanted to use the famous “marketplace of ideas” he so frequently invokes to debunk a nonsense lie about him and Maduro, he was free to do that. If the video was actually defamatory, he could sue the creator—which he apparently threatened to do, and it worked! Instead, he wants to tear down the entire legal framework because YouTube wouldn’t do his bidding, even though the video was already taken down.
The Arbiter of Truth Hypocrisy
Here’s where Paul’s position becomes truly incoherent.
I asked one of Google’s executives what happens to the small town mayor whose enemies maliciously and without evidence, post that he is a pedophile on YouTube?. Would that be OK?
The executive responded that YouTube does not monitor their content for truth. But how would that small town mayor ever get his or her reputation back?
Just a few years ago, Rand Paul was apoplectic that YouTube tried to determine whether content—specifically about COVID-19—was true or not. He thought it was terrible that YouTube would dare to be the arbiter of truth, and he whined about it at length.
Now he’s demanding they be the arbiter of truth and remove one video because he says it’s false.
Paul even acknowledges this contradiction in his own op-ed, apparently without realizing it:
Interestingly, Google says it doesn’t assess the truth of the content it hosts, but throughout the pandemic they removed content that they perceived as untrue, such as skepticism toward vaccines, allegations that the pandemic originated in a Wuhan lab, and my assertion that cloth masks don’t prevent transmission.
Yes. And you screamed bloody murder about it. You insisted they should never do that. You built your entire position around the idea that platforms shouldn’t be deciding what’s true. And, with the re-election of Donald Trump, the big tech platforms all bent the knee and said they’d stop being arbiters of truth (even as it was legal for them to do so).
And so they stopped. And now you’re furious that they won’t make an exception for you.
Doesn’t that seem just a bit fucking hypocritical and entitled?
The “It’s Their Property” Problem
Paul’s real complaint—buried under all the high-minded rhetoric about defamation—is that Google makes its own decisions:
So, Google and YouTube not only choose to moderate speech they don’t like, but they also will remove speeches from the Senate floor despite such speeches being specifically protected by the Constitution.
Google’s defense of speech appears to be limited to defense of speech they agree with.
Yeah, dude. That’s how private property works. They get to decide what they host and what they don’t. That’s how it works. It’s also protected by their First Amendment rights. Compelled hosting or not hosting of speech you agree or disagree with is not a remedy available to you, Senator.
Paul continues:
Part of the liability protection granted internet platforms, section 230(c)(2), specifically allows companies the take down “harassing” content. This gives the companies wide leeway to take down defamatory content. Thus far, the companies have chosen to spend considerable time and money to take down content they politically disagree with yet leave content that is quite obviously defamatory. So Google does not have a blanket policy of refraining to evaluate truth. Google chooses to evaluate what it believes to be true when it is convenient and consistent with its own particular biases.
He says this as if it’s controversial. It’s not. It’s exactly how editorial discretion works. The company gets to make their own editorial decisions. You don’t have to like those decisions. But demanding they make different ones, and threatening to strip their legal protections if they don’t, is a government official using state power to coerce speech decisions.
You know, the thing Paul claimed to be against.
I think Google is, or should be, liable for hosting this defamatory video that accuses me of treason, at least from the point in time when Google was made aware of the defamation and danger.
Again: you already threatened the creator, and they took it down. The remedy worked. You used it successfully.
And if Paul’s standard is “Google becomes liable once made aware,” then anyone who wants content removed will just claim it’s defamatory and dangerous. How is this different from the COVID videos Paul was so mad they removed? People told Google those were false and dangerous, Google removed them, and Paul was furious that they acted after being “made aware” of allegedly false and dangerous content.
Now Google is doing exactly what Paul demanded—not removing content based on mere claims of falsity or danger—and he’s still mad at them.
The Section 230 Threat
So what’s Paul’s solution? Threaten to remove Section 230:
It is particularly galling that, even when informed of the death threats stemming from the unsubstantiated and defamatory allegations, Google refused to evaluate the truth of what it was hosting despite its widespread practice of evaluating and removing other content for perceived lack of truthfulness.
Remember when MAGA world insisted that Biden administration officials threatening platforms’ Section 230 protections was unconstitutional coercion? Remember how that was supposedly the worst violation of the First Amendment imaginable?
Rand Paul is now doing the same thing. A sitting Senator, using his platform and his legislative power, threatening to strip legal protections from a company because they won’t remove content he personally dislikes.
Paul literally told these platforms it wasn’t their job to determine truth or falsity. He literally sponsored a bill to prevent government officials from pressuring platforms about content. And now he’s doing exactly what he said was wrong—and threatening consequences if they don’t comply.
He didn’t “change his mind” on Section 230. He just revealed that he never had a principled position in the first place.
Paul supported Section 230 when he thought it meant platforms would leave up content he liked. He sponsored anti-jawboning legislation when he thought it would stop people he disagreed with from pressuring platforms. But the moment the system produces an outcome he doesn’t like—even though it worked exactly as designed and the video came down anyway—he’s ready to burn the whole thing down.
What is it with Senators and their thin skins? A few months ago we wrote about Senator Amy Klobuchar pressing for an obviously unconstitutional law against deepfakes after someone made an obviously fake satirical video about her. Now Paul joins the club: Senators who want to remake internet law because someone was mean to them online.
The video’s already down, Senator. You won. Maybe take the win instead of trying to burn down the open internet because Google wouldn’t do you a personal favor (the same favor you wanted to make illegal).
And even though CBS executives paid Trump a bribe to get their merger approved, and keep demonstrating they’re a loyal lapdog (like airing this extremely dubious story claiming that the ICE murderer of Renee Good suffered internal bleeding from being lightly bumped, which many CBS News employees doubted), the Trump administration feels compelled to remind CBS that they’re little more than an administration lap dog now.
“He said, ‘Make sure you guys don’t cut the tape. Make sure the interview is out in full,’” Leavitt told new “CBS Evening News” anchor Tony Dokoupil, relaying a message from the president ahead of the interview earlier this week. “He said, ‘If it’s not out in full, we’ll sue your ass off.’”
Dokoupil responded with levity: “He always says that!”
Both CBS and the Trump administration have pretended there’s nothing weird or problematic about this exchange. You’ll recall that CBS gave the Trump administration a $16 million bribe to settle lazy and false allegations the network unfairly edited an interview with Kamala Harris. At the same time, right wing agitprop media routinely faces no criticism for misleadingly editing stories every day.
CBS’ reward for its initial feckless appeasement to the Trump administration was utterly bogus lawsuits, baseless FCC “investigations,” and getting relentlessly attacked in the right wing media as some sort of leftist rag (when again, CBS, if anything, had spent much of the last decade pandering to the U.S. right).
Weiss then threw what was left of CBS’ reputation in the trash by turning it into a Trump apologist rag that grovels before Trump at every possibility, yet you’ll notice that’s still somehow not deferential enough for our mad, idiot king.
There’s a lesson here for anybody who strikes a partnership with this unpopular, extremist administration: there’s simply no bottom once you sell out your principles. And someday, when Trump is dead and gone, the stain will still be there and many people will remember how unprincipled and pathetic you were .
CBS will find it can never be extremist, conspiratorial, racist, or deferential enough to truly appeal to the MAGA base, who already have ample choices for their propaganda. And the rest of the public will simply avoid the network on principle, well aware it threw all ethics in the toilet when it really mattered. And when the “new CBS” collapses in an unwatched heap, its fate will have been truly earned.
This story was originally published by ProPublica.Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0license.There are additional (exceptional!) imagery in the original.
When SpaceX CEO Elon Musk chose a remote Texas outpost on the Gulf Coast to develop his company’s ambitious Starship, he put the 400-foot rocket on a collision course with the commercial airline industry.
Each time SpaceX did a test run of Starship and its booster, dubbed Super Heavy, the megarocket’s flight path would take it soaring over busy Caribbean airspace before it reached the relative safety of the open Atlantic Ocean. The company planned as many as five such launches a year as it perfected the craft, a version of which is supposed to one day land on the moon.
The FAA, which also oversees commercial space launches, predicted the impact to the national airspace would be “minor or minimal,” akin to a weather event, the agency’s 2022 approval shows. No airport would need to close and no airplane would be denied access for “an extended period of time.”
But the reality has been far different. Last year, three of Starship’s five launches exploded at unexpected points on their flight paths, twice raining flaming debris over congested commercial airways and disrupting flights. And while no aircraft collided with rocket parts, pilots were forced to scramble for safety.
A ProPublica investigation, based on agency documents, interviews with pilots and passengers, air traffic control recordings and photos and videos of the events, found that by authorizing SpaceX to test its experimental rocket over busy airspace, the FAA accepted the inherent risk that the rocket might put airplane passengers in danger.
And once the rocket failed spectacularly and that risk became real, neither the FAA nor Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy sought to revoke or suspend Starship’s license to launch, a move that is permitted when “necessary to protect the public health and safety.” Instead, the FAA allowed SpaceX to test even more prototypes over the same airspace, adding stress to the already-taxed air traffic control system each time it launched.
The first two Starship explosions last year forced the FAA to make real-time calls on where to clear airspace and for how long. Such emergency closures camewith little or no warning, ProPublica found, forcing pilots to suddenly upend their flight plans and change course in heavily trafficked airspace to get out of the way of falling debris. In one case, a plane with 283 people aboard ran low on fuel, prompting its pilot to declare an emergency and cross a designated debris zone to reach an airport.
The world’s largest pilots union told the FAA in October that such events call into question whether “a suitable process” is in place to respond to unexpected rocket mishaps.
“There is high potential for debris striking an aircraft resulting in devastating loss of the aircraft, flight crew, and passengers,” wrote Steve Jangelis, a pilot and aviation safety chair.
The FAA said in response to questions that it “limits the number of aircraft exposed to the hazards, making the likelihood of a catastrophic event extremely improbable.”
Yet for the public and the press, gauging that danger has been difficult. In fact, nearly a year after last January’s explosion, it remains unclear just how close Starship’s wreckage came to airplanes. SpaceX estimated where debris fell after each incident and reported that information to the federal government. But the company didn’t respond to ProPublica’s requests for that data, and the federal agencies that have seen it, including the FAA, haven’t released it. The agency told us that it was unaware of any other publicly available data on Starship debris.
In public remarks, Musk downplayed the risk posed by Starship. To caption a video of flaming debris in January, he wrote, “Entertainment is guaranteed!” and, after the March explosion, he posted, “Rockets are hard.” The company has been more measured, saying it learns from mistakes, which “help us improve Starship’s reliability.”
For airplanes traveling at high speeds, there is little margin for error. Research shows as little as 300 grams of debris — or two-thirds of a pound — “could catastrophically destroy an aircraft,” said Aaron Boley, a professor at the University of British Columbia who has studied the danger space objects pose to airplanes. Photographs of Starship pieces that washed up on beaches show items much bigger than that, including large, intact tanks.
“It doesn’t actually take that much material to cause a major problem to an aircraft,” Boley said.
In response to growing alarm over the rocket’s repeated failures, the FAA has expanded prelaunch airspace closures and offered pilots more warning of potential trouble spots. The agency said it also required SpaceX to conduct investigations into the incidents and to “implement numerous corrective actions to enhance public safety.” An FAA spokesperson referred ProPublica’s questions about what those corrective actions were to SpaceX, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Experts say the FAA’s shifting approach telegraphs a disquieting truth about air safety as private companies increasingly push to use the skies as their laboratories: Regulators are learning as they go.
During last year’s Starship launches, the FAA was under pressure to fulfill a dual mandate: to regulate and promote the commercial space industry while keeping the flying public safe, ProPublica found. In his October letter, Jangelis called the arrangement “a direct conflict of interest.”
In an interview, Kelvin Coleman, who was head of FAA’s commercial space office during the launches, said his office determined that the risk from the mishaps “was within the acceptable limits of our regulations.”
But, he said, “as more launches are starting to take place, I think we have to take a real hard look at the tools that we have in place and how do we better integrate space launch into the airspace.”
“We Need to Protect the Airspace”
On Jan. 16, 2025, as SpaceX prepared to launch Starship 7 from Boca Chica, Texas, the government had to address the possibility the giant rocket would break up unexpectedly.
Using debris modeling and simulations, the U.S. Space Force, the branch of the military that deals with the nation’s space interests, helped the FAA draw the contours of theoretical “debris response areas” — no-fly zones that could be activated if Starship exploded.
With those plans in place, Starship Flight 7 lifted off at 5:37 p.m. EST. About seven minutes later, it achieved a notable feat: Its reusable booster rocket separated, flipped and returned to Earth, where giant mechanical arms caught it as SpaceX employees cheered.
But about 90 seconds later, as Starship’s upper stage continued to climb, SpaceX lost contact with it. The craft caught fire and exploded, far above Earth’s surface.
A pilot on a flight from Miami to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, recorded video of space debris visible from the cockpit while flying at 37,000 feet. Provided to ProPublica
Air traffic control’s communications came alive with surprised pilots who saw the accident, some of whom took photos and shot videos of the flaming streaks in the sky:
Pilot: I just got a major streak going for at least 60 miles, all these different colors. Just curious but — it looked like it was coming towards us, but obviously because of the distance …. Just letting you know. Controller: Can you, can you give an estimate on how far away it is?
Another controller warned a different pilot of debris in the area:
Controller: Due to a space vehicle mishap — a rocket launch that basically exploded between our airspace and Miami — I’m going to give you holding instructions because there was debris in the area, so I’m going to keep you away from it.
Two FAA safety inspectors were in Boca Chica to watch the launch at SpaceX’s mission control, said Coleman, who, for Flight 7, was on his laptop in Washington, D.C., receiving updates.
As wreckage descended rapidly toward airplanes’ flight paths over the Caribbean, the FAA activated a no-fly zone based on the vehicle’s last known position and prelaunch calculations. Air traffic controllers warned pilots to avoid the area, which stretched hundreds of miles over a ribbon of ocean roughly from the Bahamas to just east of St. Martin, covering portions of populated islands, including all of Turks and Caicos. While the U.S. controls some airspace in the region, it relies on other countries to cooperate when it recommends a closure.
The FAA also cordoned off a triangular zone south of Key West.
When a pilot asked when planes would be able to proceed through the area, a controller replied:
Controller: The only information I got is that the rocket exploded so we need to protect the airspace, and Miami and Domingo stopped taking aircraft.
There were at least 11 planes in the closed airspace when Starship exploded, and flight tracking data shows they hurried to move out of the way, clearing the area within 15 minutes. Such maneuvers aren’t without risk. “If many aircraft need to suddenly change their routing plans,” Boley said, “then it could cause additional stress” on an already taxed air traffic control system, “which can lead to errors.”
That wasn’t the end of the disruption though. The FAA kept the debris response area, or DRA, active for another 71 minutes, leaving some flights in a holding pattern over the Caribbean. Several began running low on fuel and some informed air traffic controllers that they needed to land.
“We haven’t got enough fuel to wait,” said one pilot for Iberia airlines who was en route from Madrid with 283 people on board.
The controller warned him that if he proceeded across the closed airspace, it would be at his own risk:
Controller: If you’re going to pass through the DRA, you guys’re going to need to declare an emergency. That’s what my supervisor — if you’re going to land at San Juan, you need to declare an emergency for fuel reasons, that’s what my supervisor just told me. Pilot: In that case, we declare emergency. Mayday mayday mayday.
The plane landed safely in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Iberia did not respond to requests for comment, but in statements to ProPublica, other airlines downplayed the launch fallout. Delta, for example, said the incident “had minimal impact to our operation and no aircraft damage.” The company’s “safety management system and our safety culture help us address potential issues to reinforce that air transportation remains the safest form of travel in the world,” a spokesperson said.
After the incident, some pilots registered concerns with the FAA, which was also considering a request from SpaceX to increase the number of annual Starship launches from five to 25.
“Last night’s Space X rocket explosion, which caused the diversion of several flights operating over the Gulf of Mexico, was pretty eye opening and scary,” wrote Steve Kriese in comments to the FAA, saying he was a captain for a major airline and often flew over the Gulf. “I do not support the increase of rocket launches by Space X, until a thorough review can be conducted on the disaster that occurred last night, and safety measures can be put in place that keeps the flying public safe.”
Kriese could not be reached for comment.
The Air Line Pilots Association urged the FAA to suspend Starship testing until the root cause of the failure could be investigated and corrected. A letter from the group, which represents more than 80,000 pilots flying for 43 airlines, said flight crews traveling in the Caribbean didn’t know where planes might be at risk from rocket debris until after the explosion.
“By that time, it’s much too late for crews who are flying in the vicinity of the rocket operation, to be able to make a decision for the safe outcome of the flight,” wrote Jangelis, the pilot and aviation safety chair for the group. The explosion, he said, “raises additional concerns about whether the FAA is providing adequate separation of space operations from airline flights.”
In response, the FAA said it would “review existing processes and determine whether additional measures can be taken to improve situational awareness for flight crews prior to launch.”
According to FAA documents, the explosion propelled Starship fragments across an area nearly the size of New Jersey. Debris landed on beaches and roadways in Turks and Caicos. It also damaged a car. No one was injured.
Three months later, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which was evaluating potential impacts to marine life, sent the FAA a report with a map of where debris from an explosion could fall during future Starship failures. The estimate, which incorporated SpaceX’s own data from the Starship 7 incident, depicted an area more than three times the size of the airspace closed by the FAA.
In a statement, an FAA spokesperson said NOAA’s map was “intended to cover multiple potential operations,” while the FAA’s safety analysis is for a “single actual launch.” A NOAA spokesperson said that the map reflects “the general area where mishaps could occur” and is not directly comparable with the FAA’s no-fly zones.
Nevertheless Moriba Jah, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas, said the illustration suggested the no-fly zones the FAA activated may not fully capture how far and wide debris spreads after a rocket breakup. The current predictive science, he said, “carries significant uncertainty.”
At an industry conference a few weeks after the January explosion, Shana Diez, a SpaceX executive, acknowledged the FAA’s challenges in overseeing commercial launches.
“The biggest thing that we really would like to work with them on in the future is improving their real time awareness of where the launch vehicles are and where the launch vehicles’ debris could end up,” she said.
“We’re Too Close to the Debris”
On Feb. 26 of last year, with the investigation into Starship Flight 7 still open, the FAA cleared Flight 8 to proceed, saying it “determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental and other licensing requirements.”
The action was allowed under a practice that began during the first Trump administration, known as “expedited return-to-flight,” that permitted commercial space companies to launch again even before the investigation into a prior problematic flight was complete, as long as safety systems were working properly.
Coleman, who took a voluntary separation offer last year, said that before granting approval, the FAA confirmed that “safety critical systems,” such as the rocket’s ability to self-destruct if it went off course, worked as designed during Flight 7.
By March 6, SpaceX was ready to launch again. This time the FAA gave pilots a heads-up an hour and 40 minutes before liftoff.
“In the event of a debris-generating space launch vehicle mishap, there is the potential for debris falling within an area,” the advisory said, again listing coordinates for two zones in the Gulf and Caribbean.
The FAA said a prelaunch safety analysis, which includes planning for potential debris, “incorporates lessons learned from previous flights.” The zone described in the agency’s advisory for the Caribbean was wider and longer than the previous one, while the area over the Gulf was significantly expanded.
Flight 8 launched at 6:30 p.m. EST and its booster returned to the launchpad as planned. But a little more than eight minutes into the flight, some of Starship’s engines cut out. The craft went into a spin and about 90 seconds later SpaceX lost touch with it and it exploded.
The FAA activated the no-fly zones less than two minutes later, using the same coordinates it had released prelaunch.
Even with the advance warning, data shows at least five planes were in the debris zones at the time of the explosion, and they all cleared the airspace in a matter of minutes.
A pilot on one of those planes, Frontier Flight 081, told passengers they could see the rocket explosion out the right-side windows. Dane Siler and Mariah Davenport, who were heading home to the Midwest after vacationing in the Dominican Republic, lifted the window shade and saw debris blazing across the sky, with one spot brighter than the rest.
“It literally looked like the sun coming out,” Siler told ProPublica. “It was super bright.”
They and other passengers shot videos, marveling at what looked like fireworks, the couple said. The Starship fragments appeared to be higher than the plane, many miles off. But before long, the pilot announced “I’m sorry to report that we have to turn around because we’re too close to the debris,” Siler said.
Frontier did not respond to requests for comment.
The FAA lifted the restriction on planes flying through the debris zone about 30 minutes after Starship exploded, much sooner than it had in January. The agency said that the Space Force had “notified the FAA that all debris was down approximately 30 minutes after the Starship Flight 8 anomaly.”
But in response to ProPublica’s questions, the Space Force acknowledged that it did not track the debris in real time. Instead, it said “computational modeling,” along with other scientific measures, allowed the agency to “predict and mitigate risks effectively.” The FAA said “the aircraft were not at risk” during the aftermath of Flight 8.
Experts told ProPublica that the science underlying such modeling is far from settled, and the government’s ability to anticipate how debris will behave after an explosion like Starship’s is limited. “You’re not going to find anybody who’s going to be able to answer that question with any precision,” said John Crassidis, an aerospace engineering professor at the University of Buffalo. “At best, you have an educated guess. At worst, it’s just a potshot.”
Where pieces fall — and how long they take to land — depends on many factors, including atmospheric winds and the size, shape and type of material involved, experts said.
During the breakup of Flight 7, the FAA kept airspace closed for roughly 86 minutes. However, Diez, the SpaceX executive, told attendees at the industry conference that, in fact, it had taken “hours” for all the debris to reach the ground. The FAA, SpaceX and Diez did not respond to follow-up questions about her remarks.
It’s unclear how accurate the FAA’s debris projections were for the March explosion. The agency acknowledged that debris fell in the Bahamas, but it did not provide ProPublica the exact location, making it impossible to determine whether the wreckage landed where the FAA expected. While some of the country’s islands were within the boundaries of the designated debris zone, most were not. Calls and emails to Bahamas officials were not returned.
The FAA said no injuries or serious property damage occurred.
FAA Greenlights More Launches
By May, after months of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency slashing spending and firing workers at federal agencies across Washington, the FAA granted SpaceX’s request to exponentially increase the number of Starship launches from Texas.
Starship is key to “delivering greater access to space and enabling cost-effective delivery of cargo and people to the Moon and Mars,” the FAA found. The agency said it will make sure parties involved “are taking steps to ensure the safe, efficient, and equitable use” of national airspace.
The U.S. is in a race to beat China to the lunar surface — a priority set by Trump’s first administration and continued under President Joe Biden. Supporters say the moon can be mined for resources like water and rare earth metals, and can offer a place to test new technologies. It could also serve as a stepping stone for more distant destinations, enabling Musk to achieve his longstanding goal of bringing humans to Mars.
Trump pledged last January that the U.S. will “pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.”
But with experimental launches like Starship’s, Jangelis said, the FAA should be “as conservative as possible” when managing the airspace below them.
“We expect the FAA to make sure our aircraft and our passengers stay safe,” he said. “There has to be a balance between the for-profit space business and the for-profit airlines and commerce.”
A More Conservative Approach
In mid-May, United Kingdom officials sent a letter to their U.S. counterparts, asking that SpaceX and the FAA change Starship’s flight path or take other precautions because they were worried about the safety of their Caribbean territories.
The following day, the FAA announced in a news release that it had approved the next Starship launch, pending either the agency’s closure of the investigation into Flight 8 or granting of a “return to flight” determination.
A week later, with the investigation into Flight 8 still open, the agency said SpaceX had “satisfactorily addressed” the causes of the mishap. The FAA did not detail what those causes were at the time but said it would verify that the company implemented all necessary “corrective actions.”
This time the FAA was more aggressive on air safety.
The agency preventively closed an extensive swath of airspace extending 1,600 nautical miles from the launch site, across the Gulf of Mexico and through part of the Caribbean. The FAA said that 175 flights or more could be affected, and it advised Turks and Caicos’ Providenciales International Airport to close during the launch.
The agency said the move was driven in part by an “updated flight safety analysis” and SpaceX’s decision to reuse a previously launched Super Heavy booster — something the company had never tried before. The agency also said it was “in close contact and collaboration with the United Kingdom, Turks & Caicos Islands, Bahamas, Mexico, and Cuba.”
Coleman told ProPublica that the concerns of the Caribbean countries, along with Starship’s prior failures, helped convince the FAA to close more airspace ahead of Flight 9.
On May 27, the craft lifted off at 7:36 p.m. EDT, an hour later than in March and two hours later than in January. The FAA said it required the launch window to be scheduled during “non-peak transit periods.”
This mission, too, ended in failure.
Starship’s Super Heavy booster blew up over the Gulf of Mexico, where it was supposed to have made what’s called a “hard splashdown.”
In response, the FAA again activated an emergency no-fly zone. Most aircraft had already been rerouted around the closed airspace, but the agency said it diverted one plane and put another in a holding pattern for 24 minutes. The FAA did not provide additional details on the flights.
According to the agency, no debris fell outside the hazard area where the FAA had closed airspace. Pieces from the booster eventually washed up on Mexico’s beaches.
Starship’s upper stage reached the highest planned point in its flight path, but it went into a spin on the way down, blowing up over the Indian Ocean.
The Path Ahead
A map released by the FAA shows potential no-fly zones planned for future Starship launches that would cross over a portion of Florida. Air hazard areas — the AHAs on this map — are paths that would be cleared of air traffic before launches. Federal Aviation Administration
SpaceX launched Starship again in August and October. Unlike the prior flights, both went off without incident, and the company said it was turning its focus to the next generation of Starship to provide “service to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, and beyond.”
But about a week later, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said he would open up SpaceX’s multibillion-dollar contract for a crewed lunar lander to rival companies. SpaceX is “an amazing company,” he said on CNBC. “The problem is, they’re behind.”
Musk pushed back, saying on X that “SpaceX is moving like lightning compared to the rest of the space industry.” He insulted Duffy, calling him “Sean Dummy” and saying “The personresponsible for America’s space program can’t have a 2 digit IQ.”
The Department of Transportation did not respond to a request for comment or make Duffy available.
In a web post on Oct. 30, SpaceX said it was proposing “a simplified mission architecture and concept of operations” that would “result in a faster return to the Moon while simultaneously improving crew safety.”
SpaceX is now seeking FAA approval to add new trajectories as Starship strives to reach orbit. Under the plan, the rocket would fly over land in Florida and Mexico, as well as the airspace of Cuba, Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, likely disrupting hundreds of flights.
In its letter, the pilots’ union told the FAA that testing Starship “over a densely populated area should not be allowed (given the dubious failure record)” until the craft becomes more reliable. The planned air closures could prove “crippling” for the Central Florida aviation network, it added.
Still, SpaceX is undeterred.
Diez, the company executive, said on X in October, “We are putting in the work to make 2026 an epic year for Starship.”
The Trump administration’s penchant for announcing or celebrating its various dumbass policies via pop culture video game memes marches on, it seems. We talked about this sort of thing previously when the administration built an ICE recruitment video to mimic the intro to the Pokémon cartoon show (gotta catch ’em all… get it?), as well as ICE recruiting memes utilizing imagery from the Halo series of games (aliens… get it?). Despite the blatant and obvious use of imagery and IP from both games, both Nintendo and Microsoft were remarkably silent about it all. What’s wrong, guys? Fascist got your tongue?
But because they couldn’t be bothered to lift a finger over what is a pretty clear infringement of their trademarks and/or copyright, the administration was emboldened and has done it again. This time it’s in service of announcing something more tame, the reintroduction of whole milk into schools. And the administration did so by mocking up an image from beloved farming sim Stardew Valley.
So, here we have an undoubtedly AI mock-up of an image from Stardew Valley, a game I personally adore, with Trump inserted to celebrate this minor thing that RFK Jr.’s crew championed out of Congress. Is whole milk in schools some horrible thing? Look, I only have so much anger to spare, folks, and I’m not killing the budget by spending it on this. But I do have to wonder if developer Concerned Ape will do what Nintendo and Microsoft did not and voice some flavor of objection to the use of its IP by an administration busy doing the fascism elsewhere. While IP enforcement isn’t generally my kink, I sure as shit wouldn’t want my IP associated with Trump. On that, we’ll have to wait and see just how concerned the ape can get, I suppose.
But there’s also a nice little shitpost easter egg buried in that image. Take a look at the money counter in the upper right corner of the image.
Trump was the 45th President, claims he won the 2020 election and should have been the 46th President, he is the 47th President, and he’s flirted with the idea that he shouldn’t be bound by silly bullshit like our Constitution and should be allowed another term and become the 48th President. 45464748… get it?
I do, and it’s frightening rhetoric that is designed to do one of two things. The more innocuous option is that Trump and his cadre of imps enjoys upsetting more than half of the American population by scaring them into thinking he’s going to upend our rule of law and stay in office. It’s cruel. It’s designed purely to cause emotional reactions and “lib tears.” It’s on brand.
Or it’s a somewhat subtle nod that he’s not fucking around about that at all and intends to stay in power (again) despite how our system is legally designed to work.
Trump is the 45th and 47th president of the United States, and has held onto the debunked claims that he won the presidency against Joe Biden in 2020. He has also publicly said he’s open to a third term, which would be in violation of the 22nd amendment, but Trump doesn’t seem to think the law applies to him. Steve Bannon, the ex-chief-strategist of the Trump administration, has also said that Trump will have a third term, while also reportedly planning to run himself. So these numbers seem to be a thinly veiled threat that Trump wants to be president again in 2028.
These people aren’t funny, but they are dangerous. Even if this wasn’t meant to be taken seriously, there is no choice but to do so.
Meanwhile, we’ll see if Concerned Ape acts against the use of its IP, as I think it probably should.
The FTC remains politicized. One commissioner is leading the way—when it suits him.
The Federal Trade Commission under Lina Khan was not a well-run institution. I wrote about this at the time, often and at length, and I regret nothing. But wow—wow—would you be forgiven for thinking that the goal of new management is to make Khan’s tenure look good by comparison. There is plenty to say about this sorry state of affairs, but for now let’s focus on a single commissioner.
Why just one? Isn’t the FTC a multi-member body? Well, these days the agency is something of a husk. President Trump has purported to fire two commissioners—the Democrats, naturally. The FTC Act says he cannot do that, but the Supreme Court appears poised to bless the move on constitutional grounds (a serious mistake). A third commissioner, Melissa Holyoak, recently departed after a brief stint. And rumors swirl that the chair, Andrew Ferguson, will soon take on a second job overseeing a nationwide fraud unit at the Justice Department.
That leaves Mark Meador. He may soon be the lone commissioner who has not been defenestrated, jumped ship, or been pulled into a dual role.
Last week I saw Meador speak at an antitrust conference in the Bay Area. As a matter of policy, his remarks were not to my taste. He aired a familiar set of complaints about modern tech products. Apple’s “liquid glass” is confusing; Google’s AI overviews—that stuff that now appears above the search results—are annoying; AI-generated cat videos, and short-form video more generally, are bad for the soul. It is certainly true that tech companies have many bad ideas. It does not follow that Mark Meador knows better. Yet he spoke with complete confidence in his own superior vision for the tech industry. He knows what the social media market should look like. He knows how to “win the AI race the right way.” The man is, apparently, a prophet.
Some of Meador’s gripes were not really about products at all, but about people. People shouldn’t like short-form video. The government, Meador seemed to suggest, must protect them from themselves. You might say that Meador wants to replace the consumer-welfare standard, under which the FTC protects markets that work to give people what they want, with a moral-welfare standard, under which the FTC pushes markets to give people what they are supposed to want—as determined by Mark Meador.
Maybe people should be more virtuous. But what business is that of the FTC? The FTC Act makes commissioners competition regulators, not philosopher-kings or morality police.
One European lawyer I spoke with at the conference seemed rather taken with Meador’s speech. He wants to crack down on Big Tech, after all; what’s not to like? I tried to explain how Meador plainly judges companies by a moral code, and why that code should give any upstanding European pause. Meador is committed to “the just ordering of society that best facilitates human flourishing.” He speaks unabashedly of the need for “beauty and virtue,” “moral values,” and “tradition and custom.” He peppers his writing (yes, his antitrust writing) with theological language, referring to human beings as “embodied souls seeking communion with their fellow man and their Creator.” The undertone—the dog whistle, if you will—is not Brussels-style social democracy. It is national conservatism, if not flat out Christian nationalism.
Which brings me to my real objection to Meador’s appearance. In Palo Alto, he was mild, reasonable, even conciliatory. The speech itself was a little misguided but pleasant enough. The problem was what it concealed: the other Mark Meador, and the other FTC.
In his speech, Meador called for apolitical enforcement. Antitrust, he said, should not serve an “unrelated political agenda.” It should not target disfavored industries. He and the agency should not “make decisions according to how political winds are blowing.”
How rich. Maximally politicized enforcement has characterized the Trump administration at large, and the Trump FTC in particular. Consider the Omnicom–IPG settlement. The FTC allowed two major advertising firms to merge, but only after restricting the new entity’s ability to withhold advertising dollars based on a publisher’s viewpoints. The settlement is a transparent assault on advertising firms’ First Amendment right to boycott publishers on grounds of social or ideological principle. It is also a nakedly political effort to redirect advertising dollars toward right-wing outlets.
Or consider the FTC’s hapless social-media “censorship” inquiry. This move, too, is an attack on First Amendment rights—this time, platforms’ right to moderate content as they see fit. And this move, too, is aimed at helping the right, specifically those right-wing speakers who insist—baselessly, by and large—that platforms have “silenced” them. Take also the FTC’s foray into debates over gender medicine. The FTC is not a medical regulator; it has no expertise in this area. But transgender issues are at the center of the culture war, so the agency could not resist weighing in, thumb firmly on the scale for the political right.
For Meador to sit in Palo Alto and sermonize about ignoring political winds was an insult to anyone paying attention to his agency or the administration it serves.
Equally striking was the contrast between Meador’s tone inside the conference room and the tone he and the FTC adopt elsewhere. In his remarks, Meador urged listeners not to “draw up battle lines.” Washington and Silicon Valley, he said, should root for each other’s success. During the Q&A, he endorsed a “just the facts, ma’am” approach. He expressed distaste for heated rhetoric from private parties—inflated claims about the stakes of litigation or boasts about whipping the FTC in court. Such talk amounts, he complained, to “melodramatic atmospherics.”
But Mark Meador and the Trump FTC do melodramatic atmospherics with the best of them. Last year, for instance, the FTC convened a conference titled “The Attention Economy: How Big Tech Firms Exploit Children and Hurt Families.” The title was all too fitting: the whole event was slanted, overheated, and self-righteous. Meador led the charge. He likened “the battle over the ‘attention economy’” to “the fight against Big Tobacco.” He argued that social media companies sell an addictive and harmful product; that they must keep children hooked, “craving the next fix, the next puff, the next notification”; and that they peddle lies in their defense.
No doubt this jeremiad resonates with some. I think it’s nonsense. But the point here is not whether Meador is right or wrong. It’s that he is two-faced. In Silicon Valley, he presents himself as mildly uneasy about short-form video. Elsewhere, he portrays social media companies as irredeemable reprobates, scarcely distinguishable from cigarette manufacturers. The Meador we saw projected reasonableness. In reality, he is a fanatic.
What Meador concealed about himself pales, though, beside what he concealed about the FTC. Excuse me, commissioner, did you just say you oppose overheated rhetoric? Where were you after the FTC lost its antitrust case against Meta?
The defeat was not surprising. The case was weak from the outset, failing to grapple with competitors such as YouTube and TikTok. It was dismissed in a careful opinion written by an able judge. That judge, James Boasberg, also ruled against the Trump administration’s reprehensible efforts to hustle men, without due process, to a prison in El Salvador. In response to that ruling, some GOP lawmakers launched a campaign to impeach him. The case for impeachment is risible. But that did not stop the FTC from exploiting it. After the Meta loss, an FTC spokesperson, Joe Simonson, sneered: “The deck was always stacked against us with Judge Boasberg, who is currently facing articles of impeachment.”
This statement is an embarrassment. Everyone at the FTC should be mortified by it. But there it is. Mark Meador has no standing to lecture others about decorum.
Nor should we expect this to be an isolated lapse. The second Trump FTC has been staffed with people who are terminally online. In a sense, they are the dog that caught the car: they have memed their way into an amount of power they are neither competent nor responsible enough to wield.
This became obvious when the FTC set out to punish Media Matters. The organization had published a study finding that ads appeared next to hate speech on the alt-right-friendly platform X. The agency then launched a sweeping investigation (another example, contra Meador, of the FTC’s overtly political posture). The courts blocked the probe, finding it to be retaliation for constitutionally protected speech. Evidence of a retaliatory motive included, almost comically, some FTC staffers’ big fat mouths. Before joining the agency, a cadre of young edgelords had been spending their time spouting off on social media. Joe Simonson (he of the appalling comment after the Meta loss) had mocked Media Matters for employing “a number of stupid and resentful Democrats.” Another staffer had called the group “scum of the earth.”
This is the backdrop to Meador’s calls, in Palo Alto, to lower the temperature. Spare us, commissioner.
The word at the conference was that the FTC is in disarray. Many experienced attorneys and economists accepted one of the Trump administration’s buyout offers. Others concluded, after a return-to-office mandate, that if working for the FTC was going to be a hassle—don’t forget those “five things you did this week” emails!—they might as well leave for higher pay. I heard this from a former government official who had himself recently decamped to private practice. When I asked this refugee about the FTC’s ambitions to police social media or wade into gender medicine, he said he would not be surprised if the agency ultimately accomplishes very little. Who knows. But the intuition is sound: you cannot decimate and demoralize an agency and then expect it to move regulatory mountains.
When Meador was appointed, Tyler Cowen summed things up nicely, concluding that he “is just flat out terrible,” including for his inability to maintain “a basic level of professionalism.” Is he lonely at the top? With the agency hollowed out, Meador may be a king without a throne. One can only hope that his capacity for mischief will be constrained by the wreckage below.
Corbin K. Barthold is Internet Policy Counsel at TechFreedom. Republished with permission from Policy & Palimpsests
