Home Screen Podcast

Renée DiResta studies online manipulation in all its forms: political propaganda, viral rumors, false information, scams, harassment, AI slop, harms to kids, and coordinated influence campaigns. These are usually treated as separate problems, but Renée looks at how they overlap, and how the same platforms and tools can be used both to help and to harm. She is now an Associate Research Professor at Georgetown’s McCourt School for Public Policy, and is the author of Invisible Rulers. I really enjoyed this conversation. Renée is clear-eyed, sharp, and practical. She understands how platforms are built, how they make money, and what motivates the people (including kids) who use them. Our kids are around the same ages, so I was extra eager to hear how she handles technology in her own home.In her work, Renée consistently looks past the technology to the incentives behind it. She sees a platform like a hammer: you can use it to build a house or as a weapon, depending on what people are motivated to do with it. She brings that same lens home. Renée is a mom of three, and while she uses parental controls, she assumes her kids will find a way around them. So her approach starts with understanding what motivates each kid, which, as anyone with more than one child knows, can vary wildly from one kid to the next. She pays attention to what each kid is drawn to, what they’re actually doing on their screens, and seems to focus her time on:* Making sure her kids understand how the technology works, why it works that way, and what can go wrong… from sextortion, to chatbots that confidently get math wrong.* Making sure they see her as a source of information and support, not just the person who makes the rules. As she put it: “… my son’s gonna go and figure it out and do it on his own somehow. So I may as well just be there as a resource and try to steer it in a productive direction.”I love this. Ok, enough from me. As always, I’ve pulled the highlights from our conversation below. You can listen to the full episode above (or wherever you get your podcasts), watch it on YouTube, and find short clips on Instagram.💡“Aha” moments* Assume your kids will get around the controls. Renée sets up parental controls, but she doesn’t count on them. Her kids are endlessly creative. She recounted the moment when she discovered that her eldest had found a way around blockers by accessing YouTube through Google Maps. So instead of relying on controls alone, she gives her kids the knowledge to stay safe when the safety features inevitably fail.* If you have more than one kid, the youngest is already online. Once older siblings have devices, keeping the little one off screens “went right out the window.” Renée’s approach is to find ways for her kids to use devices together. * Talk about online predators the way you’d talk about strangers. Renée talks to her kids openly about how manipulation works online, including what sextortion looks like. She thinks of it much like teaching kids not to take candy from a stranger in a van. * Kids know they are being sold to. Kids who grew up with YouTube understand that influencers are trying to make money off of them. They assume someone is selling to them at all times. Renée says she worries more about adults being fooled.* Think about screen time as active vs. passive. Not all screen time is the same. Renée sees coding classes active time. Scrolling is passive. She asks her kids: “Are you gonna feel good about yourself when you’re done with this?”* AI makes mistakes, and kids need to know that before they rely on it. Renée uses AI tools heavily in her own work. She is honest with her son that they are useful and that they make a lot of mistakes. * We are moving from search engines to “answer engines.” You’ve heard me say this before as well, but it was helpful to hear her take on it. Google Search is quickly shifting from giving you sources to explore, to giving you an answer. This has already affected SEO in a big way — instead of companies fighting to show up first in Google results, they are now fighting to be the source the AI pulls from. ✨Highlights“They’ve all had iPads for […] almost as long as I can remember, to be honest. You know, it’s hard. You must experience this when you have three, like the little one gets this very different style of parenting than the first one did. […] the littlest one could go and access anybody else’s device. So the idea that she was not going to be on a screen — that went right out the window.” — Renée DiResta“It’s very binary conversation. It’s either like you’re pro-surveillance or anti-child, you know… there is a middle ground people can walk, actually, on some of this stuff from a policy standpoint.” — Renée DiResta“Now I’m back to like, okay, we don’t need the laptop at the in the classroom. Because kids use it as a distraction. Like Google Docs becomes a live chat. I don’t know if you know this. Maps becomes a way to access YouTube, right? There’s just so many different workarounds that they have, that I would actually prefer they go back to pencil and paper in the classroom.” — Renée DiResta“Maps for YouTube is a new one. [...] it turns out you can go to maps and search for YouTube headquarters and then click through to the headquarters website, to the business website, which is YouTube.com. You know, and then you can just watch YouTube videos through maps and it just evades the domain block and the whole thing. It evades the app block. I mean, they’re so creative.” — Renée DiResta“But I do talk to my kids quite a bit about the risks that being online brings and how these particular forms of manipulation work and what sextorsion looks like, right? I see it almost as like telling them not to take candy from a man in an unmarked van, right? It’s it’s the same lesson that I teach them about how to engage safely in the real world. I think it’s important to teach them how to engage safely online. So we spend a lot of time again trying to put parental controls in place around chat on you know Fortnite or whatever. But ultimately they’re gonna get around that stuff.” — Renée DiResta“Kids who grew up with YouTube and things, they do understand that the incentive of that influencer is to monetize them. They 100% believe that people are selling to them at all times.” — Renée DiResta“I don’t let them show their faces on any platforms. I don’t post them publicly. I don’t even say their names a lot of the time publicly. You can find some of the places where I used to do that when I when I wasn’t so public and didn’t have so many trolls and stuff.” — Renée DiResta“When it comes to information, I do think that they are a little bit more innately astute. They’ve been getting media literacy lessons since like second grade, so I worry more about adults at this point than I do about them.” — Renée DiResta“I think about it more as like active versus passive. You know, passive is like the equivalent of […] don’t watch TV for six hours a day. But maybe you’re actually learning something if you’re watching a documentary. […] when my son’s on his laptop doing his latest Codecademy class or working on building something, I actually don’t have a problem with that. I see that as active time. I do say: are you gonna feel good about yourself when you’re done with this?” — Renée DiResta“I use Claude Code very, very heavily. I use Antigravity, Gemini, I have pro accounts on all of them. I use Codex now, for different projects and they make a lot of mistakes. You have got to be aware that it is going to make mistakes. That doesn’t mean that it’s not profoundly transformative from a productivity standpoint. It is. But it also requires… like the amount of hours I spend QAing something, sometimes I’m like, I probably could have just done that myself, you know? So I explain these things to him.” — Renée DiResta“I explained red teaming of chatbots. I was like, if you’re putting a chatbot on your site, you are responsible at that point for what it says… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thehomescreen.org

Damon Beres is a journalist who has been covering digital technology for over a decade, with a focus on how it affects people and the planet. He is currently a Senior Editor at The Atlantic, where he leads tech coverage and co-launched the AI Watchdog project in 2025. He is also writing a book called Easy Mode that digs into the interplay between digital technology and the human mind.I’m really excited to share this interview because Damon is at a different stage of parenting than my other guests. He has a 4-year-old son, which means he’s not yet wrestling with phones, social media, and AI chatbots in the same way that parents of older kids are. Instead, his focus right now is on something more foundational: building muscles and love for creativity, curiosity, dialogue, and critical thinking before screens enter the picture.We met online during the pandemic, and I’ve always appreciated his voice and perspective. Damon has increasingly been writing about how frictionless technologies are affecting our ability to think and engage with the world and each other, and as you’ll hear in this conversation, the stakes feel higher than ever.A few things that were referenced in our interview: Damon’s articles The Age of Anti-Social Media, and @Grok, Did Venezuela Deserve It?, and the LinkedIn post that I quoted.💡“Aha” moments* Chatbots aren’t designed to help you learn or find information — they’re designed to generate mediocre guesses that sound convincing. I can’t stop thinking about the implications here for kids who are learning how to do research, and find / analyze information. As my own kids do their first research projects, I watch them use Google, and they do not scroll past the AI overview unless I prompt them to and actively guide them through a discovery process. Without active guidance, these products are training them to accept whatever the algorithm serves them first.* The story of the internet has been about removing friction, and maximizing efficiency and convenience. We are at peak “efficiency brain” where as Damon says… “it is really easy now just to be in an endless conversation with yourself and your own mind.” * Generative AI didn’t come from nowhere… it is the latest chapter in the internet’s “convenience is king” ethos. It follows algorithmic social media, which in Damon’s words is essentially an “… automated process of discerning user taste and serving them content accordingly.” * Face-to-face conversations have friction (interruptions, disagreement, unexpected questions, nonverbal cues) and that friction is essential for childhood development. Digital technology is eliminating that friction at an increasing scale.* We’re living through a “mask off moment” where business and political elites have quietly accepted that CSAM, deepfake porn, and other horrors are just “the price of doing business.”* Platforms that once had some content moderation, some sense of a line and/or consequences, are abandoning even their minimal guardrails. ✨Highlights“There’s something about how things feel now that seems like it’s kind of the worst it’s ever been in a lot of ways. And I do feel like my feelings and opinions about all this are shifting a little bit. And I’m still resolving a lot of that.” - Damon Beres “This has been kind of a light bulb moment for me. Not in the sense that this kind of AI generated sex abuse material or AI generated harmful stuff is new [...] I’ve known all this stuff and I know how children—how all people, including children—can be victimized by this technology and by bad people who want to do bad things. There is something about the massive social contagion effect of this technology existing on X that has been really disturbing and new-feeling to me. And suddenly I’ve had this feeling of: oh, things can change quite rapidly [...] These massive platforms that at least nominally used to have content moderation and seemed like they used to care about the safety of their users, in the most extreme sense anyway… just may not anymore. And this has given me the feeling of, wow, maybe I should scrub everything about my child that’s ever existed online, private or not, because it is so easy to do the most heinous things with media now, with AI out there.” - Damon Beres[regarding a LinkedIn post that really resonated with me]“... [the author] says, ‘this isn’t a tech issue. It’s not even a regulatory issue. It’s a large portion of our ruling political and financial classes quietly accepting the necessity of CSAM, encouraging suicide and self harm, deep, deep fake porn, and a laundry list of other abhorrent things as the price of doing business.’ And even as I read it now, my hair is standing on end because I think for me, that’s exactly it… I didn’t have words for it. And then I read this and I was like, this is why it feels different. It’s this thing.” - Emily Tavoulareas“... it’s a mask off moment. And I think that this person is right to articulate it in that way. Perhaps it’s been true for a long time, but there was always this kind of veil of respectability […] there’s just this kind of feeling, I think, especially in this post-generative AI moment of kind of anything goes and the platforms really can’t control the technology fully. And so, a lot is being shrugged off right now, and it feels like kind of a dangerous moment for that reason. It’s different.” - Damon Beres “I think to many people, it feels exactly the way you’re describing… it is this open sewer. It’s one that we no longer have an option about. It’s being placed in our homes, in our devices, in our kids classrooms… there’s no opt out. And whether you’re interacting with Grok or not is almost irrelevant. The sewer is porous. That whole ecosystem is so porous that if that public sewer is full enough, it’s going to spill into everything else.” - Emily Tavoulareas“I do think that it’s not necessarily as simple as this product is just evil, right? Because sure, we wouldn’t say Photoshop is evil. I do think, however, what is clearly the case here is that there is an issue of scale that is just... profoundly different now. It is so easy to make so much of this material at such a high quality that I don’t really buy that this is just a pen thing… I do think that there is something very new here.” - Damon Beres“I think that the reduction of friction and the results of that, oftentimes problematic results, is kind of the story of the internet. [...] my sort of top-lined view on this is that the internet, speaking in very general terms, has been a pretty long story of making certain functions and certain behaviors easier and easier and easier. And I really think that there is sort of a lineage here. You look at generative AI, it didn’t come from nothing. It is situated within a context where we have algorithmic social media, which is an AI-driven technology of a different sort, but is fundamentally this sort of automated process of discerning user taste and serving them content accordingly. Algorithmic media emerged from earlier forms of social media where people connected to each other and built up these stores of data in a way that felt much more convenient than keeping an address book and business cards and calling people on the phone and sending emails and stuff. early social media emerged from an iteration of the internet where you had, you know, file sharing, Napster, LimeWire, BitTorrent, all that stuff, where there is this idea that, like, everything could be placed on the internet for free access and that the sort of convenience is king ethos like really sank in in those early years, right? So when it comes to friction, I think that the major thing is that all of these technologies have made it very easy to act without thinking critically.” - Damon Beres“When things become very easy, people want to take that convenience. And I think that this has profound effects on our ability to think, but also our ability to relate to one another and to understand other people. Because the … This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thehomescreen.org

Amanda Lenhart has been studying the relationship between kids and digital technology long before it was cool. She is a Senior Fellow at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and affiliate at the Data & Society Research Institute. She is also the former Head of Research at Common Sense Media.I’m really excited to share this interview not only because Amanda *really* knows this space, but because she is quite literally the only person I know who has parented through different micro-generations of the internet. She parents four kids, ranging from 13 to 30, in a blended family. Practically speaking this means that the internet and technology looked different when each of her kids came of age. Her eldest came of age before the ubiquity of smart phones, the two in their twenties came of age during peak social media, and her youngest just got her phone. As she said “... this isn’t my first rodeo, in fact… this is my last rodeo.”I absolutely loved this interview, as it sheds light on how Amanda shifted her approach with her kids, through the very same decades that the internet took over our lives.💡“Aha” moments* We talk about phones and social media as if they are a package deal, when they are not. We can separate them. (This takes *a lot* of time… ughhhh.)* The term “social media” is used to describe a lot of platforms that are very different from each other, from TikTok and Instagram, to Reddit and Discord, to streaming platforms. This complicates the discussion.* YouTube often flies under the radar, but is an entry point to all sorts of other media and social media platforms.* Generative AI is perfectly crafted for moments of embarrassment, which are a hallmark of early adolescence.* Parasocial relationships (when a person develops an emotional bond with a celebrity/fictional character) are not new, but chatbots are taking them to a whole new level — fast.* Some kids are more susceptible to algorithmically-fed content. Researchers are trying to understand what’s going on here.✨Highlights“I think it’s important to fast forward to my youngest. This is 10 years later. This is a totally different rodeo. It’s just different, right? The climate around cell phones, mobile phones, smartphones is different. What social media is and does and the algorithms on it… totally different…” - Amanda Lenhart“... one of the things that felt very important to us was that she in particular struggled to regulate unfettered access to video, particularly algorithmically fed video. And that we wanted to just lock that down from her, make the phone a little bit less exciting. So keep it as a really functional tool that handled basic important needs that are clearly a priority for early adolescents, but also try to help her grow a little grow up a little bit more before she was off diving into algorithmic content.” - Amanda Lenhart “I feel like we’ve alighted the conversation about getting a smartphone with getting social media. They’re not the same thing… you can disentangle them.” - Amanda Lenhart“... we should talk about whether we want to call YouTube a social media platform because [...] pretty much every single child in America uses YouTube and... right? It is sending your kids lots of information and is prioritizing short video and so it is a gateway to other forms of short video and other social media platforms for your kids.” - Amanda Lenhart“... when we say the word social media, we mean things that are so different, they should not actually be categorized together.” - Amanda Lenhart “TikTok is a short algorithmic video feed that is so optimized to what you like and watch that it basically knows what you like better than you do. It’s incredibly attention-holding, more so than pretty much anything else that we have in the market right now. [...] This algorithmically generated sort of hyper focused feed is sort of one aspect of social media. And then there’s the more social ones, right? Things like Snap, Discord, even Reddit. Though I think the fact that we might even include Reddit in that it’s really different, then where do we put Twitch? So Twitch is a streaming platform and there’s other streaming platforms that sort of sprang out of the game.” - Amanda Lenhart“... young people can also create really strong bonds and sort of what we call parasocial relationships, which is like, unidirectional, like emotional connection to people who don’t know that you exist, right? Like, a lot of times we think about it with celebrities, like your crush on, you know, Taylor Swift is a parasocial relationship. But young people can have those with influencers and other people who are sort of micro-famous online, and that also can be complicated.” - Amanda Lenhart“... what it’s doing is distorting reality for kids at a time that they are learning how to navigate the world, how to connect with each other, how to create relationships. And part of what’s been bugging me for a while, including things like even Snapchat, which everyone’s like “oh, Snapchat’s great.” Like, fine, yeah, they have all these security features, but they also literally stack rank your best friends and tell kids who your best friend is based on what? Based on Snapchat’s definition of what friendship is? But that intermediation, I think, has been really grossly overlooked because, probably because it’s so intangible.” - Emily Tavoulareas“... we are entering an era that I think is about to get really, really complicated around social and emotional relationships with non-human entities, right? We are less uncomfortable with you having a really, really strong relationship with your stuffed animal when you’re six. Cause again, we create these effective relationships with things we care about. Kids get attached to objects. But it’s a different kettle of fish when that thing responds back to you.” - Amanda Lenhart “... all of these things help people to reach out and connect to other folks. So I don’t want to eliminate that from the conversation. Similarly, AI has the potential to do a bunch of wonderful things in terms of extending and expanding learning. I think helping us to do our work more efficiently and better. But that said, right now it is an unfettered tool that has just been sort of splotted into our, into our communities and our neighborhoods and our kids’ lives. And, you know, I think sometimes we build things before we think about what’s really going to be the impact of them. And I think this is one of those things.” - Amanda Lenhart“... we had a whole conversation about like, ooh… these outputs are not trustworthy and you don’t necessarily know what you’re going to get. And it can be hard for you as somebody who’s a learner and just learning something new right now, right? If you’re asking it a question about something you don’t know anything about, how are you going to know whether to trust the output?” - Amanda Lenhart“... [Generative AI] is perfectly designed for that moment of deep embarrassment and importance of peers and the sense that you’re being watched by everyone. That’s the hallmark of early adolescence in particular…” - Amanda Lenhart“Is it necessary for kids who are 12 to be opted into this by having Google jam that technology right into Gemini? And ta-da, there it is. These are choices that companies are making, investors are making. These are choices. It doesn’t have to happen this way.” - Emily Tavoulareas“… a lot of the conversations are focused on a particular product. They’re focused on a product. They’re focused on a company. Oh, it’s OpenAI. Oh, it’s ChatGPT. Oh, it’s Meta. It’s TikTok. It’s the iPhone. No, it’s all of it. It’s all of it. It’s a whack-a-mole situation where you’re not solving a problem by addressing TikTok. All of these companies have different flavors of the same situation that you’re describing. What is your purpose as a company? And what is your primary incentive? And when the business model is such that, having my user, no matter how old they are, as many users as possible on my plat… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thehomescreen.org

Our first interview is out 🎉I’m thrilled that Deepti Doshi, Co-Director of New _ Public, was brave enough to be my first guest. It is fitting that Deepti kicks us off because throughout her career (which includes being a Director at Facebook/Meta) she has focused on building community and social trust — two things that shape how we show up in the world, and how we engage with technology. Ironically, community and social trust are two things that social media claims to strengthen, when the reality is that social media has eroded both community and social trust. Read her post on After Babel about how algorithms are affecting parenting / neighborhoods / communities. And a huge thank you to Anoush Tatevossian (from The Future Society) who joined me as a co-host for this inaugural interview, giving me courage that only a friend I’ve known for 3 decades could give me. ✨Highlights“… yes, we do need to be really thoughtful about kind of the exposure our children have to phones and screens and social media. But I think we also need to be reflective and deeply understand how it’s affecting us in our parenting.” - Deepti Doshi“Because if they can’t go out on the streets on their own, then they need to stretch their creativity by finding YouTube…”- Deepti Doshi“It’s not their fault that they don’t have the same kind of degrees of freedom that maybe we had growing up […] they become the data points of our loneliness epidemic because we’re not creating the context for them to build the relationships in the community that would be really healthy for them.” - Deepti Doshi“We are now like mainly dual income families, you know, where both parents are working. And in the absence of that kind of supervision, I think we need to then be reflective of like, we’re outsourcing that supervision sometimes, maybe it’s to a babysitter or summer camp in some cases, but some cases we’re outsourcing that supervision to the device. For me, I’d rather outsource that supervision just to the neighborhood.” - Deepti Doshi“I’ve started to notice, especially as I observe sort of kids in proximity to us, that they are mirroring their parents’ behavior in a lot of ways. And I think there’s a lot in here that I think we as parents need to also unpack about our own sort of reliance on either social media, but also just our devices.” - Emily Tavoulareas“… there’s something about both the impact of these mediated experiences on us and what we’re consuming and how we view the world, but then also our ability as parents to engage with the world the way we want our kids to. And if we can’t engage with the world around us, how are we expecting our kids to do that?” - Emily Tavoulareas“… my friend at one point said to me, the reason why I love coming to your house is because your bathrooms are never clean. And I took that as like a compliment that like our dirty toilets inspire her to also like keep her bar low too, you know? It like then makes it easier for her. And so it makes it easier for me. Like I don’t think about the toilets before people come over.” - Deepti Doshi“… okay, so my kids are coming of age in the AI era, not the social media era. So what are the things I have to instill in them? They are not even about boundaries and communication and social media. It’s what are the traits of a human being that I have to instill in them? Because 10 years from now, that even may be in danger, right? So one of those very human values is the thing of interacting with other people physically is important to us in our family.” - Anoush Tatevossian“I think it’s important that we give our kids the credit and the confidence, like they can understand the system. Like I think we need to talk to our children about the system. I was like, look, like, this is why I’m scared of chat GPT. This is why I ask you to do it in front of me. It’s not because I don’t trust you, it’s because you’re talking to a machine that is not in your control.” - Deepti Doshi“… we had a rule that you could do Minecraft, but you had to do it with a friend over. So that it was like, was not a isolate, it wasn’t an activity you did on your own, you had to do it on one screen with a friend over. So that means you had to be talking with your friend and negotiating with your friend about the world you wanted to build and where you wanted to kind of use your money and what you wanted to use your fire for. That has been a way to teach him that these are tools. It’s like a tool to play with your friend. It’s not in and of itself the thing to do. It’s a thing to do with your friend, because you want to be.” - Deepti Doshi❤️ Deepti closed our conversation with this… “I don’t know, we need wine, we need cheese, we need to get together, but this was, it really was because it allows us to engage our multiple identities, you know, our identity as parents, as professionals working in tech and thinking about it, and also as like friends and community members. Like there’s a reflection here around friendship.” I couldn’t agree more 💕And a question for you, listeners:Now excuse me while I commit this quote to memory, so I can remind myself as I try to do something new. (Seriously, I recorded this back in August and it’s taken me 2 months to muster up the courage to hit “post”…) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thehomescreen.org