Remarks by Prof. Margaret Chon at the Gaia Bernstein event

Note:

The Technology, Innovation Law, and Ethics (TILE) Program at the law school recently invited Gaia Bernstein, the author of "Unwired: Gaining Control over Addictive Technologies" to speak at a September 30 event. The Technology, Privacy and Policy Professor of Law at Seton Hall University, Bernstein is also Co-Director of the Institute for Privacy Protection, and Co-Director of the Gibbons Institute for Law Science and Technology. Her research focuses on the harmful effects of social media over-consumption for teens, including increases in suicide, depression, and anxiety among kids with excessive screen time. During her presentation, she noted that social media sites are designed to "manipulate our deepest human vulnerabilities" and keep us online longer, and pointed out that the only way to protect future generations of kids is to regulate this technology through the law. “We have a duty to help this generation,” Bernstein said. “Many of us remember a different past, a different childhood, where people connected with each other differently. The longer we wait, the harder it becomes, and the fewer people remember how it is to live differently. This is an opportune moment for change, and it’s important to act before it’s too late.” 

Following up on this presentation, the Seattle University Law Review is planning a special spring symposium issue around the regulation of addictive technologies, which will feature an interdisciplinary group of scholars, including Caitlin Carlson of the Communication and Media Department of the College of Arts & Sciences.

Margaret Chon’s remarks

Thank you, Dean Varona. I echo our Dean’s thanks to you all for attending this event, whether you are alumni, students, staff, faculty, or friends of the law school. One of my major goals as the co-director of TILE is to acknowledge and continue building our already tremendous community in the Seattle region and beyond, centering especially around our hundreds of distinguished alumni working in the law and technology space, and in related areas.  So particularly to those alumni who made time in their busy schedules to attend, thank you for being here this evening and for the other ways in which many of you support the law school.  Let’s give our Seattle U Law alumni a round of applause.

Now it’s my great pleasure and privilege to introduce our keynote speaker for tonight, Dr. Gaia Bernstein, a brilliant and pathbreaking scholar and a globally recognized advocate for ethical applications of technology law.  You need only to “Google” her name to see the tremendous influence she has already, including a TED talk, so I will not repeat the details of her professional credentials, which are many and legion, to this audience this evening. 

Instead, I’ll start with what she wants you to know about her, which is that she is a parent of kids who grew up with screens, like many of us here in this room.  And as she documents in her highly readable book, Unwired: Gaining Control Over Addictive Technologies (I have my copy here if you’d like to browse through it after the keynote), the social media that surrounds kids amounts to a huge uncontrolled and unregulated experiment on all of our brains, but particularly those of developing children.  As the harms and costs of social media on children emerged and became highly visible to parents and educators, advocates like Dr. Bernstein started to organize against an already deeply entrenched, pervasive, and seemingly unassailable technology. 

Our local Seattle School District was the first school district in the country to file a lawsuit against Meta Platforms, in January of last year.  This path-breaking complaint was soon followed by hundreds of subsequent complaints filed by other school districts across the country.  Along with the complaint, the SSD stated that “The goal is not to eliminate social media, but to change how these companies operate and force them to take responsibility. We are asking these popular companies to maximize their efforts to safeguard students, who are their most vulnerable consumers. . . .  Young people across the nation are struggling with anxiety, depression, thoughts of self-harm, and suicidal ideation. This mental health crisis impacts the SPS mission to educate students by draining resources from schools.” This is a good example of what economists call externalizing the harms while companies internalize the benefits, i.e., the profits from social media.

A few months later, in May 2023, the Surgeon General issued an advisory about the harmful effects social media has on youth mental health. Then our Washington state Attorney General filed a complaint against Meta a year ago, in October 2023, alleging that the defendant knowingly released its products, despite the fact that its own research showed harmful effects on youth.  The AG’s press release stated that “[t]he original developer of the “infinite scroll” concept, Aza Raskin, noted to the BBC: “It’s as if they’re taking behavioral cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface” to keep users coming back and scrolling. This is just one of multiple state AG  lawsuits filed against Meta for harmful practices.

Guess what?  Dr. Bernstein’s book was published in 2023 just as all of these legal actions started to unfold.  She had her eye on this problem for many years before civil society and government began to respond, and was doing a deep dive on the scholarly and other literature to translate it to ordinary people. Although Dr. Bernstein is a prolific legal scholar, this book is intentionally written for a non-legal audience. She deftly takes the lessons from the fights against Big Food and Big Tobacco and applies them to Big Tech. And, importantly, she provides a clear roadmap for future action, which she’ll also share with you tonight.

I admire a lot of things about Gaia – including her intellectual brilliance combined with a deep humility and humanism, her uncompromising fearlessness in stating her views in the face of powerful forces to the contrary, her willingness to share what she has learned with others in an accessible and transparent way, and her commitment to working countless hours with community groups to address the problems.  But most of all, I admire her for giving us all permission to imagine the kinds of technology futures that we want, not the ones that are being forced upon us.  That is why she is a perfect speaker for this signature event of our Technology, Innovation Law, and Ethics (TILE) program, which is not just about technology law, as important as that is, but also about building a better future for all of us through ethical applications and uses of technology. 

So rather than listen to me, let’s listen to her. It is again with great pleasure that I ask Dr. Gaia Bernstein to deliver her keynote to us.