In March 2023, Utah became the first U.S. state to limit social media access for minors under the age of 18.
On this episode of “Deseret Voices,” award-winning journalist McKay Coppins asks why Gov. Spencer Cox has the Beehive State at the forefront of this battle with Big Tech.
Cox shares his own efforts to break free from the addictive nature of the algorithms behind social media and how we can connect with others without technology.
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Note: Transcript edited by Steven Watkins
McKay Coppins: So we have actually known each other for a while. I feel like I’ve been interviewing you, reporting on you for almost a decade. As I recall, we met for the first time in Cleveland during the Republican National Convention when you were a lieutenant governor. Is that right?
Gov. Spencer Cox: That’s correct. We, I mean, we talked before that, and we certainly interacted before that, but in person was the 2016 GOP national convention. All roads lead to Cleveland apparently.
MC: Yes. That’s right. Strange times. So it’s been interesting to watch from my perspective, your kind of rise to political prominence over the past decade. But I think that, especially this year, you have been sort of involuntarily thrust into the national spotlight. And obviously that happened after Charlie Kirk was assassinated in your state.
And I want to ask you about this because you obviously had certain jobs to do during the kind of days and weeks after that shooting, especially that week, right? You were coordinating with law enforcement during the manhunt for the killer. You were working on public safety. But then there was this moment. Once the manhunt was over, the alleged killer was caught. You had this news conference where you knew that millions, maybe tens of millions of people would be paying attention to you.
Throughout my political journalism career, I’ve seen this happen repeatedly, right? There’s a moment of crisis. And a local political leader — a governor, mayor, maybe a police chief — will suddenly have all this attention on them, and they have to decide what they want to do with that attention.
And you could have talked about a lot of things in that moment. You could have talked about left-wing political violence. You could have talked about LGBTQ people or ideologies that you find dangerous. And you probably could have scored a lot of political points in the partisan press, but you made a deliberate attempt to lower the temperature and to talk about issues that you’ve been talking about for a long time, polarization and radicalization. And you know, how our politics feels like rage.
But you did identify one kind of sort of villain in this whole national drama. And it was social media. And social media companies. You called in this news conference, and then in interviews that followed, social media a cancer. You said it had directly contributed to all of the assassinations and assassination attempts of the last several years.
You called the algorithms that govern these social media platforms evil. And so I want to ask you why you decided in that moment to kind of single out this one problem, this one issue, when you had all this attention on you.
SC: Well, I don’t know that it was truly intentional.
MC: I was going to ask about this.
SC: Yeah, I had some notes, I had written down some ideas. Again, things were moving so quickly. I’ve got to give the details about what happened, how we got them, who’s going to speak, all of those things and then I didn’t know, you know, I have an opportunity to say something because this was kind of it. And a lot of this just happened in the moment, though, when I got there. I mean, I wanted to kind of reflect what Charlie had spoken about and the importance of engaging with people and having these conversations. I’ve been talking about depolarization for a long time, and I’ve been talking about the danger of social media and the algorithm for a long time.
I mean, I have to say, McKay, I don’t use this word lightly and I haven’t said things like this before, but over the past couple of years — and again, especially over the past few weeks — I’ve become pretty radicalized against these social media companies and against what they’re doing. And the evidence that we’ve seen. They’re profiting off of tearing us apart.
They’re profiting off of destroying the lives of our young people, and they know it. And they’re unwilling to do anything about it. And that’s the part that just sunk in through all of this, everything I knew and had been saying was just driven home. And it was deeply personal at that time.
MC: So when you say that you’ve been radicalized against these social media companies, is it your belief that the people who run these social media companies that create these algorithms actually know that what they’re doing is harmful to the country, to the people who are using social media, and they just don’t care or they feel like it’s worth the money and the influence that comes from it? Like, your position is not that they’re they’re kind of accidentally wrecking the country. You believe that they’re doing it knowing full well what they’re doing.
SC: Yeah. And again, that probably wasn’t the case back in 2012. But I certainly believe it’s the case now. I mean, there’s ample evidence and not just ample evidence from researchers and, you know, people like Jonathan Haidt and others who have put together the anxious generation.
MC: Yeah.
SC: All of the data that we’re seeing about how devastating the effects of these algorithms and dopamine hits and tribalism that is coming out of this. But we have leaked documents from people who worked at Meta and we’ve found things, in our own lawsuits against companies like Snap and others that have made it very, very clear that they know what’s happening.
And again, I don’t know that it was their intention to destroy our kids and destroy our country, but when you have trillion dollar market caps and you’re using science, the science of addiction, very clearly, I mean, down to the very colors of the “Like” button, the hearts that pop up. Using the science of our brains and the limitations of our brains, to hack our free will so that we spend as much time as possible.
I mean, if you’re you’re funding this on ad dollars, you have to get eyeballs. And in this attention economy, they’ve figured out how to do it in in brilliant ways. I mean, it’s truly incredible. But at what cost? And the ability of someone, anyone, I mean, this is human nature as well, to ignore the costs when there is a financial stake, is pretty pretty remarkable. And I think this is a great case for that.
Of course, we’ve seen examples like this in the past. We’ve seen it with the tobacco companies. We’ve seen it with the, you know, the opioid companies, the pain management companies. Again, they didn’t start selling opioids because they wanted to get people addicted and because they wanted to destroy the lives of millions of Americans.
They did it because they wanted to relieve pain. I mean, that’s a good thing, right? But when you when you get to that point where you realize that the thing that you’re selling is doing so much damage, but you’re also making more money than the wealthiest companies in the history of the world we’re talking about here. This isn’t just, you know, some side gig. This is it. These are the biggest, most powerful companies on earth. And the incentive structure is such that they just they can’t turn it off or walk away.
MC: You, like I, are a user of some of these platforms I think you and I both are, you know, Twitter addicts to a certain extent. Maybe we’ve both kind of worked on it a little. I’ve tried to limit my usage. But have you had that experience of kind of realizing what these algorithms are doing to you, when you’re on Twitter or other social media where you kind of suddenly realize like, oh, wow, I am literally losing my agency and I’m taking the bait. Because I think I have only recently, probably in the past year or two, started to notice how these algorithms are affecting me. And tried to kind of take active note of it.
SC: Yeah. For sure. I can tell you that I feel like I’m in an AA meeting right now. That I am addicted to Twitter, to X.
MC: It’s a safe space for you to admit that here. I appreciate your honesty.
SC: I know that. And yes, I’ve done some things personally, made some personal decisions to make changes there. I mute a lot of people. I block more people. I’m finding ways to take time out of my day where I’m not logged in.
I’ve done some things over the past, I guess three years now where I’ve gone with some friends and hiked into some of the beautiful places of Utah where I can’t be connected to my phone or my devices at all. Something I realized I hadn’t done for a long, long time. And even just that kind of three-day cleanse where I’m out in the middle of nowhere, you can feel it for the first 24 hours, you’re kind of reaching into your pocket instinctively, or just you find your mind wondering what’s happening out there.
And it takes a little while for that kind of cleanse to happen. But it’s absolutely real. It’s dangerous, I know it, you know, I’ve apologized to my kids. I probably didn’t spend as much time with them, at certain times as I should have. Haven’t been as present in the life of my family as I should have.
This job is — part of that is this job — it’s always on. It’s always taking something out of you. You have to kind of know what’s happening all around you all of the time. And that’s one of the reasons I justified it as well. But that effect, that dopamine hit, it’s real and I’ve certainly been a part of it.
MC: To me, one of the most dangerous things about social media and these algorithms in particular is that they are designed to maximize engagement. And because of that, they are designed to maximize conflict, right? One of the easiest ways to keep people engaging with a platform is to make them angry or outraged and draw them into fights with other users of the platform, right? I saw this actually, after the attack on the Latter-day Saint church in Michigan.
It was a really interesting experience for me because I feel like in the first 24 hours after the attack, most of what I saw on X and on Instagram was pretty sympathetic toward Latter-day Saints, as you would expect, right? It was, “This is a tragedy. This is really sad.”
And then, I don’t remember exactly when it turned, but it was sometime after that initial 24 hours, I started to get fed posts from people saying, “Well, hang on, let’s not call this an attack on Christianity because, you know, Mormons aren’t really Christian, right?” And then all of a sudden — it felt like within minutes — my entire feed was filled with people fighting over whether Latter-day Saints were Christians, having this kind of really, you know, fraught, angry, deeply personal theological debate.
And I was seeing these posts everywhere, and you could almost feel the algorithm making this calculation. Well, “McKay got a certain amount of engagement out of responding to sympathetic posts. But now he’s kind of withdrawing from the platform. We need to pull him back in by making him angry,” right? I really believe that that whole debate was kind of synthetic in a way. It was driven by algorithms that were just trying desperately to keep people on the platform.
It was not actually driven by rank and file evangelical Christians and Catholics and Latter-day Saints wanting to fight about theology in that moment. Do you feel like that kind of, algorithmic obsession with conflict is a big driving force in our politics right now?
SC: It’s the driving force and and I’m so glad you used a real-world example because I get to see it almost every day. And it is remarkable. You’ll post something that’s fairly benign and you’ll see it for the first couple hours, you just get kind of normal responses, and then it all falls apart.
MC: Yeah.
SC: But there’s a few things driving it. So I think those lessons were actually learned pretty early on. And a lot of it comes from, well, some of it comes from talk radio, especially sports talk radio.
MC: Yeah.
SC: You have a hot take and then that gets people riled up and engaged, and now they have to listen. And you have the back and forth. We certainly saw it with cable news.
MC: Yeah.
SC: But when you need content 24-7, cable news figured out — again using psychologists, psychiatrists, really bright people, brain scientists — that if they could bring in two people and have them argue and yell at each other, that’s engaging content. It keeps eyeballs on. It raises your blood pressure.
That’s been their formula for a couple of decades now. That’s really where it started. But social media has been able to take it to a whole new level, as they’re able to gauge and gather data on you, because TV is passive. So, I mean, you’d have to kind of have people in the room or you would have surveys about how long people were watching these things.
But social media, they can tell with everybody. And again, now with machine learning and AI, they know exactly how long your eyes are staying on each video right before you go to the next one. And then they can maximize that. And that’s what the brain does. Dopamine comes from lots of different ways. We can get it from things like sugar, we can get it from gambling, get it from pornography. And we can get it from contempt.
That’s part of this. So then what you do is you have these conflict entrepreneurs, right? Who know that they can make money and get eyeballs and get followers and get engagement. And so the incentive for them is to say something radical or crazy. So 24 hours, you know, after this horrific shooting, if I can say this, I know I’m going to get elevated.
MC: Yeah.
SC: Even bad news is better than no news. They just they just want attention. And that’s how they get their conflict entrepreneurs. They need the conflict. So they’ll throw something out out there. But here’s the important part that I want to get to. And that is, then you have foreign adversaries who want to tear us apart, who have office building after office building filled with with people and now machines, that do this. The bot piece of this can’t be overstated.
The anonymous bots who then see a little hint of conflict and come in and just attack rabidly and make it look like this crazy taker, this opposition or this fight is much, much bigger than it is. And we understand that Instagram and X and all of these places are not real life. That’s one of the most insidious things about all of this is we’ve just decided, and again, making money, right?
That it’s OK that we have these unverified — maybe not even human — people from China and Russia that we’re allowing to come in and pretend to be, just like us and having these arguments. And so it’s not the public square. We keep using this analogy that this is the public square.
This is where we have our conversation. And that’s only partially true. Imagine this public square where you let your worst adversaries from other countries come in and dress up and pretend they’re Americans, saying the worst things, trying to divide us and tear us apart.
MC: Yeah. When I talk to people in Big Tech — who are basically techno optimists — you’ll hear a variety of defenses of the social media companies and to varying degrees, they’ll be willing to, you know, concede problems.
One area where I’ve actually found something close to consensus, at least among people who are not directly profiting from it, is that there should be a way for these companies to figure out how to protect kids, right? That people under 18 should be shielded from some of the most toxic effects of social media.
And you signed a first-in-the-nation law in Utah trying to address this problem, specifically trying to help kids be protected from social media addiction and all the downstream effects of it. The social media companies sued to stop that.
And it’s been tied up in court since. Can you tell me where things stand with that law and how optimistic you are that eventually laws like this will be adopted not just in Utah, but across the country.
SC: Well, so, let me just begin by saying that I was one of those techno optimists. I’ve been a techno optimist my entire life. I worked for a technology company. This is where I come from.
I was giving speeches on college campuses about how social media was going to change the world and save the world. So I just want to state for the record that I’m not coming out of this as some some grumpy old man screaming at the clouds, who has always hated technology.
I was the exact opposite and encouraged that. But it’s these lawsuits and these laws that we’ve been trying to pass that have radicalized me because, there should be, this is an easy call. And by the way, some of the most popular legislation we’ve ever passed is our legislation around protecting kids from the harms of social media. I mean, there’s very little doubt in anybody’s mind that this is having a detrimental effect.
You can see the numbers. I’ve seen them anecdotally, personally and just writ large within my state, we know what we’re doing wrong and we know how harmful this is to our kids. And yet we know they have the technology to protect kids as well. And they’re suing us.
So these laws have not gone to effect even though it’s been a couple of years now, we’re still fighting with them. This is where the true evil comes from.
MC: Can you explain exactly what that law, what the law that you signed does, and what the objections are that you’re hearing from these companies?
SC: So basically all we did was, say you have to create kids accounts and, and these kids accounts there, there’s some things that they’re a little different. You have to turn off the most addictive features to these accounts. So you have to turn off, like, some of the notification pieces. The big one is you can’t collect their data, so there’s no algorithms. Which is, basically, you know, Facebook in 2012.
MC: Right.
SC: You can connect with the people you want to connect with, but you actually have to connect with them. And you can see whatever they post. But we’re not going to take your data and then feed you stuff that we think you want. We think that that’s where the most danger comes from. And so that I mean, that’s basically what we’re talking about. The problem comes in is that you then have to you have to figure out, I mean, the problem as they argue it is, that you have to do age gating. So you have to figure out how old the person is who is signing up.
MC: Right.
SC: There are third parties that can do this for them without making you give Meta your driver’s license and keep it on file. There are lots of very interesting technological ways that they can figure out how old you are, and you can prove how old you are to a third-party company that then doesn’t keep any of that, but certifies that you’re an adult.
And then you can still have your anonymity, if that’s important to you, on the actual platform. So that’s their main argument. And then, of course, they make a free speech argument that were inhibiting free speech. And there are some Supreme Court cases that are a little problematic. They go back to the early ’90s or, excuse me, the late ’90s when the internet was not the internet. None of it makes sense when you read those cases. We feel very confident that as these cases progress and they’re progressing in other states as well as they get to the Supreme Court, we’re going to get rulings that actually allow us, again, to protect young people. There’s pretty well-established jurisprudence when it comes to things like tobacco, when it comes to things like driver’s licenses and other things.
And the kids do have free speech, but it’s a little different. And we’re OK to put some protections around that, especially when we can prove the harms that we’re proving. So I’m optimistic that that’s going to happen. What I will say is this is not just a U.S. thing. It’s happening all across the world. We’re getting phones out of school. Half the states have done that. We’ve done that here in Utah. Huge step forward.
Every teacher will tell you it’s the best thing we’ve done. Even some parents and students who were opposed to it now recognize that yeah, this is this is a very good thing. We should have done this a long time ago. I’m more and more convinced, though, that just a ban kind of worldwide 16 and under is something that we absolutely need to do.
And then again, hold these companies accountable, make them implement age gating, which they can absolutely do, and and move forward from there. And hopefully we get the results from the Supreme Court that we need.
MC: So my colleague at The Atlantic, Damon Beres, recently published a piece titled “The Age of Antisocial Media Is Here,” in which he argues that the social media era is actually kind of coming to an end and that what’s going to replace it, the age of AI and chat bots and synthetic relationships, will actually be even worse.
And he ends the piece by writing about Mark Zuckerberg, whose company, of course, owns Facebook and Instagram and is now kind of plunging resources into its own AI development.
And I just want to read what he wrote and get your reaction to it. He said, “That Zuckerberg would be selling generative AI makes perfect sense. It is an isolating technology for an isolated time.
His first products drove people apart, even as they promised to connect us. Now, chat bots promise a solution. They seem to listen. They respond. The mind wants desperately to connect with a person and fools itself into seeing one in a machine.” And now, I’m not necessarily convinced of the kind of AI apocalypse scenarios that we’re hearing a lot these days. I’m not, like, a doomer.
But looking forward, how are you thinking about how I could address or potentially exacerbate these sort of existential political problems we’ve been talking about? And what should policymakers and just regular people kind of experimenting with these new technologies be thinking about as they, you know, kind of plunge themselves into this brave new world with yet another unprecedented technology that no one seems to know where it will lead.
SC: Well, your colleague is right. And that is my deepest concern right now that this social media, which in the beginning, again, I want you to go back and think about what Facebook was like in 2012. It’s absolutely incredible. Give me an opportunity to connect with my friends and family all over the world in ways that that I could never otherwise do.
It actually did bring us closer together, until it didn’t. Most people’s content — I saw something recently, like 90% of their content — is no longer, an actual friend or relative, right? It’s something else. It’s algorithm-driven. And AI is only going to make this worse — in the ways that you just mentioned — that terrify me. I mean, this actually predates social media a little bit. And if you go back, to Dr. Putnam and “Bowling Alone,” famous book now, 25 years ago, I think around there was around ’99, 2000 time frame. And this idea that we were already struggling to make connections and the desperate need for us to be able to make connections again, and that’s kind of where we are right now.
Then social media just made that a thousand times worse. I don’t have any real friends, but we’re wired for connection. We desperately need it, so at least we can, you know, hate the same people together and Facebook. And that’s where this tribalism comes from. And now that can be replaced with this sycophantic machine that just tells me what I want to hear all of the time. And I never have to connect with any real people again. And it makes it so much easier.
That dystopian piece scares me, as you know, and it’s different with young women and young men. We’re seeing a lot of problems with young men right now. They’re becoming more and more isolated. That’s incredibly dangerous for them.
As statistics, and again, research really, really points out. And, if you never have to go on an actual date again, I mean, think about demographic crisis we’re facing anyway because of those disconnections. Our job is as policymakers, and what gives me a little bit of hope is, it took us 10 years or more for some places to to realize how dangerous social media was and what it was actually doing to us. Our eyes are more open right now with AI than they were with social media.
The fact that you and I are having this conversation, nobody was having this conversation in 2012, 2013, 2014. We’re having it at the front end. And, we’re doing some things in Utah. We have an AI policy center, actually, we hired one of the brightest AI minds from from Brigham Young University to run this AI policy lab, we bring in actual companies, we sit down with them. One of the things that we’re working on at this moment right now is, legislation around chat bots for kids. We don’t think it should exist.
We think it’s horrible. It’s terrible. And we’ve got to make sure that we’re not doing more damage to an already frayed generation. And I’m hoping that we’ll be awake enough that we can put some parameters around this so that we can use it for the positive things. And there are lots of positive things.
I’m very, hopeful about the future of AI when it comes to medicine for example. I mean, there’s so many great places for this, but if we with our companions, if we start using this as a replacement for real people in the real world, the other piece of this that is so important in everything we’ve talked about is at a time when the real world is safer than it’s ever been, we’ve decided it’s more dangerous than it’s ever been. And then decided that the virtual world, which is more dangerous than anything in the real world, is safer.
That’s deeply problematic. And this will only drive that. So, we’ve got to get people back in the real world. The other part that scares me is just we stop thinking. If you’re not reading and writing and if you’re letting AI do that for you, even your first draft, maybe especially your first draft, is the last thing AI should ever do for you. This is the stuff that keeps me awake at night.
MC: Yeah. I think there’s a lot more to talk about. And I hope it’s safe to say that we will continue to talk in the future.
SC: I plan on it. I’m so grateful you’re doing these conversations.
MC: Thank you for coming on, Gov. Cox.
SC: Thank you.
