The problem with Haidt isn't with his diagnosis, but his recommended course of treatment. Haidt is a member of the camp that believes age-gating is the solution - the kind that involves users being compelled to perform facial scans or upload government-issued photo ID, which are both HUGE invasions of privacy.
47:30 is where they start diving into policy proposals
The way he feigns much difficulty to understand the baby & the steak argument is very revealing. Responsible kids deserve the chance to have fun and be taught by elders where the line of too risky play is. When he seems so indifferent to the slippery slope of the state picking up all the slack for the parents it can easily be taken for the main aim of his work.
We shouldn't prevent children from working in factories because that might be a privacy violation!
The problem isn't with the idea of keeping kids off social media, it's with the infringement of privacy that necessarily comes with one of the only ways society has figured out to effectively enforce that policy.
"We shouldn't prevent children from working in factories because that might be a privacy violation!" is an emotionally-charged straw-man of my argument. Please calm down and argue against the argument I'm actually making, not the much weaker argument that you wish I was making.
Are you sure about that?
Even so, there's no reason age verification online couldn't work similarly.
>Are you sure about that?
Yes. I am certain that the middle aged woman who half-glanced at my driver's license for 2 seconds 3 months ago did not memorize my driver's license number and enter it into the computerized list of all driver's license numbers displayed by customers who paid in cash and left on a bicycle without any kind of identifying plates, before proceeding to remember me as a customer and not ask for the ID anymore.
I'm not asserting there's no record of any kind of me being there - the cashier can attest to as much. What I'm so confident of is that I can do this and know with 100% certainty that my ID (ssn, drivers license number) did not get stored as a digital record, such as the database entry correlating to that purchase on that day at that time in that store.
The reason this cannot work similarly online is that the user has no way of knowing with certainty that their identifying information (IP address, facial scan data, photo of driver's license) is not being stored, whereas I do know with absolute certainty that my identifying information is not being stored for the purchases I do not want being tied to me in a database.