The Haidt Era: Decoding Moral Psychology in Modern Culture

Did Jonathan Haidt turn out to be right after all? Readers of this newsletter—and contributors to Reason—are certainly split on that question. Earlier this week, reports emerged that Meta had agreed to a colossal $17.1 billion settlement with 47 states and the District of Columbia, compelled to compensate for alleged harm to minors linked to its social media algorithms and platforms.

“The proprietor of Facebook and Instagram consented to these monetary penalties for violating federal child-privacy laws and states’ consumer-protection statutes, the states announced,” the The New York Times reports. “Meta also pledged to cap how long teenagers can spend on its platforms and to ban features that worsen mental-health issues, addressing the core of the company’s business model built around engagement for advertising.”

“The settlement effectively closes a bellwether federal case in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in Oakland, where California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey were pursuing roughly $200 billion over allegations that Meta harmed children,” adds the Times. Meta, the owner of Instagram and Facebook, has at times invoked the Section 230 defense—the so‑called ‘First Amendment of the internet’ that shields platforms from liability for user posts—which Reason has repeatedly defended amid a media landscape that often fails to recognize 230’s value.

“After years of being barred from suing social platforms, state prosecutors have gotten creative,” wrote Reason‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown earlier this month about the California/Colorado/Kentucky/New Jersey suit. “They’re now claiming that this isn’t about user-generated speech but about tech companies’ product design. In this case, the states claim that providing photo filters is contributing to teens’ body dysmorphia and that ‘psychologically manipulative’ features like displaying post ‘like’ counts, sending notifications, and using algorithms to curate content around a user’s particular interests are what’s keeping kids hooked, not the actual content on Facebook and Instagram. It’s a silly claim, since clearly there could be no ‘addiction’ to social media if not for the content or communications contained on these platforms.”

“The attorneys general and plaintiffs say that Meta’s algorithms trap its users in the infinite scroll, hours of time spent staring at half-naked influencers or malnourished celebrities, images that breed body dysmorphia, anxiety and depression,” reads a different Times article. This case was very explicitly built off of arguments and research found in Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation, which has enjoyed mainstream appeal. “Mr. Haidt met with some of the attorneys general on Zoom, briefing them on his research,” the Times continues.

“We’re now seeing the dark side of digital technologies in a way that makes it possible for a cultural rejection, a cultural awakening that we can’t live this way,” Haidt told the Times.

Brown smartly noted earlier this month that “no one can actually say whether social media use causes teen problems or whether excessive reliance on social media is simply a symptom of struggling socially or already suffering from mental distress.”

Regardless of where you fall on the child-harm arguments, there is a notable point that should unite libertarians: Meta seems eager to weaponize the law to hurt its competitors.

after the initial shock of the settlement headlines yesterday, it took me a bit to see just how much Meta is putting the screws to its competitors https://t.co/yyxaxIMSig pic.twitter.com/rwHnjmGeRy

— rat king 🐀 (@MikeIsaac) August 27, 2026

“In the sunlight of the next day, Meta’s settlement looks less like a child-safety ‘win’ and more like a prosecutorial tool aimed at TikTok, Snap, and YouTube,” writes Adam Kovacevich, who handles tech messaging for Democrats, on X. “Meta’s conditional settlement payment is essentially a bounty: billions more for states if its rivals are brought into the settlement regime. Meta even acknowledged that teens restricted on Instagram will migrate to other platforms, so its objective is to make those rivals less appealing to teens as well.”

Predictable, yes.

In a perfect world, the tools we might use to curb teens’ social-media use—an approach I personally find somewhat aligned with Haidt—would be modest in scale and not imposed by the state: Parents would withhold smartphones from kids until they have cultivated sufficient attention spans and basic self-discipline; schools would rigorously limit smartphone use during class; families would cap social-media time. There remains a role for parenting, and it’s striking—echoing Haidt—that we’re facing a scenario of “overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world,” a dynamic driven by today’s parents rather than corporate compulsion. The platforms aren’t forcing any particular outcome here.

That said, it’s a vexing collective-action problem: when schools and other parents don’t adopt reasonable restraints, it becomes harder for any one family to implement them, leaving their teen at risk of long-term social ostracism. Haidt understands this dynamic and cites studies showing young adults would actually prefer a world without TikTok or Instagram, describing feeling trapped and pressured to participate because “everyone else is using them,” and saying they would even pay to have everyone stop so they could quit.

Scenes from New York: Former Reasoner Emma Camp is on fire right now:

Since everyone liked my rent control video so much, I thought you might enjoy another video I made about some maddening NYC housing policy.pic.twitter.com/mxVcWjmcfk

— Emma Camp (@emmma_camp_) August 27, 2026

QUICK HITS

• Another name to add to the obituary list: Ratko Mladic, the ex-Bosnian Serb commander whose actions during the 1990s Balkan wars earned him the moniker “Butcher of Bosnia,” and who was held responsible for Europe’s deadliest massacre since World War II—the killing of about 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995—has died in custody in The Hague at 83, according to The New York Times.
• If you’re dealing with scromiting, you probably have bigger issues than cannabis use.
• “Federal aviation officials found that two air-traffic controllers left early before an Air Canada regional jet slammed into a fire truck at LaGuardia in March,” reports The Wall Street Journal. The FAA plans to fire the two controllers, who officials say left roughly an hour before their shifts ended on March 22, leaving the remaining two controllers with no backup to handle heavy workloads.
• “The Trump administration acted illegally when it labeled the AI startup Anthropic a security risk and barred the company from working with the U.S. government, a federal judge ruled on Thursday,” the Times reports. Judge Rita Lin of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California authored a 59-page ruling in which she stated the government retaliated against Anthropic for its constitutionally protected expressive activities after the company spoke out about how its technology should be used. ‘The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics,’ she wrote.