Jonathan Haidt says 'any other product' and the sentence lands because it refuses the longest-running performance in American corporate life: that a digital product is not a product at all but a 'platform,' a 'community,' a 'space'—as though architecture bears no responsibility for the bodies moving through it. Thirty percent of girls say this has harmed me. If a toy did that, if a food additive did that, if a car seat did that. The analogy was always there; what Haidt does is not invent it but expose it, collapse the exception back into the rule. This is the move that matters, and it matters precisely because Section 230 was itself a theatrical gesture—the state writing itself out of the script in 1996 and then sitting in the audience for three decades, applauding occasionally when engagement metrics rose because engagement looked like democratic participation if you squinted hard enough.
The exemption was never neutral. It was a casting decision. And now, belatedly, someone is asking why the understudy was never given liability insurance.
But I notice Haidt says 'girls' and not 'children.' The data does skew. The honesty is real. And the danger is old.
We have centuries of practice protecting girls by constraining them. The corset was concern. The convent was care. The industrial school was salvation. The question Haidt's framing must answer—and has not yet answered—is whether accountability for the architect can be pursued without locking the inhabitants inside for their own good.
Whether the wound can be narrated without the narration becoming another enclosure. This is not an abstract worry. It is the history of every jurisdiction that responded to harm against young women by reducing the perimeter of their world.
Which means the liability must attach to design, not to use. To the recommendation engine that serves a thirteen-year-old escalating content about caloric restriction at two in the morning—not to the thirteen-year-old who opened the app. The product, not the consumer. The staircase that has no railing, not the child who fell. This distinction is not a refinement of Haidt's argument; it is the only path through which his argument survives contact with the history it invokes.
Because the moment 'protect the girls' becomes the operating grammar, the engineers will keep their algorithms and the state will simply narrow the door. We have seen that production before. We know how it ends. The radical act is not to declare the exception over. It is to hold the architect accountable while leaving the building open—which is to say, to do the thing we have almost never done.
