. - [margaret] social psychologist, bestselling author, and nyu professor jonathan haidt is out with a new book, "the anxious generation," that sets out to explain why. haidt posits that the rise of the smartphone and social media, alongside shifting norms for parenting, have led to a dangerous rewiring of young people's brains. - this is about the worst thing you can imagine to give kids at the beginning of puberty, - [margaret] but given the ubiquity of smartphones, is there a way out? - everyone sees there's a problem. i just have to give them hope that, if we act together at the same time, we can actually change things. - [margaret] what does bestselling author and professor jonathan haidt say now? - [narrator] "firing line with margaret hoover" is made possible in part by robert granieri, vanessa and henry cornell, the fairweather foundation, peter and mary kalikow, and by the following. corporate funding is provided by stephens inc. - jonathan haidt, welcome to "firing line." - margaret, what a pleasure. - we've known each other for several years, and i have followed your work

jonathan haidt wrote in his new york times bestseller that since 2012, when smartphones with social mediabecame ubiquitous, we've seen the incidence of body image problems and self-harm in young women skyrocket. we've seen anti-social behavior in young men skyrocket. >> is that multifactorial? yeah, of course it is. >> but social media is certainly one of the biggest culprits. >> yeah. >> president elect donald trump, who previously supported a tiktok ban, has filed a brief urging the court to stand aside and let him make a deal with tiktok. is there a chance that once he takes office, he could overturn the law or extend the deadline once it's passed? i mean, if so, where would that leave your efforts? >> it would be illegal. the law is quite clear that that january 19th is the deadline, and i should just make this plain, as you did at the top of the segment. >> it is not a ban, it is a forced sale. >> tiktok is free to operate in the united states. >> it needs to be owned and controlled by a company that answers to the united states congress, not to the chinese politburo. >> because the

jonathan haidt has a book, anxious generation, that exposes all of that. and meta has been lobbying to block the kids online safety act, which passed the senate 68 votes. and someone needs to ask zuckerberg about that. >> you know what? i wasn't planning on taking it there, but i think it is such an important point. this is actually a huge distraction from the thing that he's probably under the most pressure about. i don't know that anybody was saying there's not enough free speech on facebook. first of all, i mean, not a lot of people, you know, younger than the age of 35 are using facebook anymore anyway. nobody wants facebook to be this free speech panacea. i just i'm curious. i'm i'm curious about where this is even coming from. outside of pleasing a trump focused narrative that there is a speech problem on social certain social media platforms. >> well, i'll tell you where it's coming from, from the right. and that is that these fact checkers brought this on themselves. they clown themselves. they're not fact checkers, they're partisan sledgehammers,

i think jonathan haidt talks about the the hive switch. right.become bees and we feel our hive is being attacked and we go crazy. one of the things we discovered in that is so much of the fear that's happening right now is a feeling that our system is just going to collapse if the wrong person is elected. and that goes on both sides and you know, what's i think so important and what is lacking, what she points out in her book is that, you know, we lack that knowledge of how this system works. and as a result, you know, i think we feel it's so much more fragile than it, in fact is. and that our founding fathers did a lot of study of history and the dangers of what, you know, tyranny of the majority and authoritarianism and all that kind of stuff. and they spent some time thinking about how to protect us from authoritarianism. and i think your book does that. and we just want to be supporting that. and with that, you're going to introduce and just go through the big pictures. i'm going to ask a few questions and then we're going to give an opportun