Jonathan Haidt says 'any other product' and the sentence does its work not by inventing an analogy but by collapsing an exemption. If a toy harmed thirty percent of the girls who used it, the regulatory apparatus would not convene a panel; it would pull the toy from the shelf. If a food additive produced self-reported psychological damage at that rate, the manufacturer would not be permitted to redescribe itself as a 'community' or a 'space' and thereby slip the leash of accountability. The rhetorical precision here is in refusing the longest-running performance in Silicon Valley: that a digital product is not a product at all but an architecture, and that architecture bears no responsibility for the bodies moving through it. The analogy was always there.
It was simply unspoken because the industry had taught us not to speak it.
Section 230 was a casting decision. The state wrote itself out of the script in 1996 and sat in the audience for three decades. This was not negligence; it was a performance of absence—which is still a performance. The space left ungoverned did not remain empty. It was filled, immediately and profitably, by precisely the entities whose accountability the exemption had dissolved.
Engagement metrics rose and were applauded because they looked, if you squinted, like democratic participation. They were not. They were usage patterns refined by design choices that no one had been empowered to scrutinise.
But I notice something else in Haidt's framing, something that requires the kind of slower attention the platform itself is designed to prevent. He says 'girls' and not 'children,' and this is honest—the data does skew—but it is also dangerous in the old familiar way. Not hypothetically dangerous. Historically dangerous, with a specific address. In Ireland, we lived inside exactly this slippage for a century: the Magdalene laundries were justified by the language of protection, the Industrial Schools narrated as shelter, the mother-and-baby homes sold to the public as care for the vulnerable.
The girls were vulnerable. That was true. And the naming of that vulnerability became the instrument of their confinement—the wound genuine, the response to the wound a second wound dressed in the costume of concern. Sean McDermott Street. Tuam.
Bessborough. These are not metaphors for what could happen with platform regulation; they are the precedent any serious legislator must hold in mind while drafting. Haidt is careful—careful enough to specify 'girls' because the data specifies 'girls.' But carefulness does not survive contact with legislation the way it survives contact with a lecture hall. By the time the framing reaches a committee room, nuance has been shorn and what remains is the older, more comfortable story: these girls need to be kept from harm, and keeping requires walls.
The question is whether accountability can be aimed at the architect's blueprint—at the recommendation engine, at the infinite scroll, at the algorithmic amplification of appearance-based content—rather than at the body moving through the corridor.
The analogy holds. The exemption must end. But the ending must redesign the corridor—mandate chronological feeds, disable autoplay for minors, make the recommendation algorithm legible and auditable—not board up the door. We know the difference. We have Sean McDermott Street to remind us, in specific and terrible detail, what happens when protection forgets it is also a form of power.
