How Spencer Cox was "radicalized" against social media companies
A conversation with the Utah governor about why he thinks algorithms are "evil," his addiction to Twitter, and his state's legal fight with the big-tech companies he accuses of wrecking the country.
I’m always fascinated to see how local political leaders choose to use their moment in the national spotlight when it comes. After Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September, Utah Governor Spencer Cox had a brief window of heightened visibility, when he knew the nation’s attention would be trained on him. Americans were locked in another bitter fight over who was to blame for our crisis of polarization and political violence, and the typical partisan recriminations had commenced.
But when his turn came to speak at a September 12 news conference, Cox devoted his time to calling out an unexpected culprit: social media companies.
Watching the news conference and his subsequent TV interviews, I remember being surprised. I’d known Cox for nearly a decade, and had interviewed him many times. (You can read two of those stories in The Atlantic, here and here.) He usually avoided harsh political rhetoric—it’s kind of his whole thing. But when he talked about these companies, he was uncharacteristically savage. He called social media a “cancer” on society, and described their algorithms as “evil.” His goal, it seemed, was to redirect populist anger— away from dead-end partisan scapegoating and toward the big-tech behemoths that have helped make this moment feel so dystopian.
This was not bad politics, of course. Cox was giving voice to a growing (and bipartisan) backlash, one that’s animated shows like Black Mirror and landed Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation on bestseller lists for 73 consecutive weeks. There is clearly a lane in American politics for anti-tech crusaders. But Cox, a self-described Twitter addict, insists that his outrage is genuine.
On this week’s episode of my new podcast, Deseret Voices, I talked to Cox about how he’s been “radicalized” against social media companies, which he accuses of using the “science of addiction” to hijack our attention and incentivize conflict. He also shared what he’s learned in Utah’s legal fight to rein in these companies.
I hope you’ll watch or listen to the whole thing, but here’s a snippet:
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 … 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.
…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 … we’ve seen examples like this in the past. We’ve seen it with the tobacco companies. We’ve seen it with 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 … the incentive structure is such that they just they can’t turn it off or walk away.
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Notes & Links
A few links to especially good recent pieces from my colleagues at The Atlantic. Are you a subscriber yet? If not, now is the perfect time to fix that!
‘A Recipe for Idiocracy,’ by Rose Horowitch (The Atlantic)
For the past several years, America has been using its young people as lab rats in a sweeping, if not exactly thought-out, education experiment. Schools across the country have been lowering standards and removing penalties for failure. The results are coming into focus.
Five years ago, about 30 incoming freshmen at UC San Diego arrived with math skills below high-school level. Now, according to a recent report from UC San Diego faculty and administrators, that number is more than 900—and most of those students don’t fully meet middle-school math standards. Many students struggle with fractions and simple algebra problems. Last year, the university, which admits fewer than 30 percent of undergraduate applicants, launched a remedial-math course that focuses entirely on concepts taught in elementary and middle school. (According to the report, more than 60 percent of students who took the previous version of the course couldn’t divide a fraction by two.) One of the course’s tutors noted that students faced more issues with “logical thinking” than with math facts per se. They didn’t know how to begin solving word problems.
The Rise of the ‘Sex and the City Conservative,’ by Elaine Godfrey (The Atlantic)
For a decade, something particular to Donald Trump—his agenda, his vibe—has united America’s libertines and religious traditionalists under the same red cap. But now that coalition is cracking. Young women drove Democratic wins in three states earlier this month; and as Republicans argue over how to win back female voters, MAGA women are engaged in an existential clash about what, exactly, it means to be a conservative woman in 2025.
(I thought this piece by my friend and colleague Elaine was incredibly insightful, but be warned that the opening paragraph is decidedly PG-13—which is perhaps appropriate for this strange era of American “conservatism!”)
The Age of Anti-Social Media Is Here, by Damon Beres (The Atlantic)
I quote this piece near the end of my conversation with Cox, but it’s really worth reading the whole thing. As I told Cox, I am not an AI “doomer”—the possibilities for this technology are obvious and incredible, and I’m still making up my mind as to the likelihood of the various AI apocalypse scenarios that are tossed around. But in the meantime, this part of Damon’s piece left me slightly startled and thinking about just how much of our lives could soon be infested by artificial intelligence if we don’t pay attention.
Children will also be affected by how—and how much—their parents interact with AI chatbots. I have heard many stories of parents asking ChatGPT to construct a bedtime story for toddlers, of synthetic jokes and songs engineered to fulfill a precise request. Maybe this is not so different from reading your kid a book written by someone else. Or maybe it is the ultimate surrender: cherished interactions, moderated by a program.