Electronic Frontier Foundation Executive Director Cindy Cohn touched on the toxicity of the social media space in a wide-ranging interview with “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart Monday night, in which she said Americans need to make X, Meta and the other, biggest social media companies “less important.”
Stewart expressed his concerns about the algorithm-driven nature of social media and the toxic information, behavior and abuse that it can subject users to without their knowledge or explicit consent. While the two differed on the correct way to combat that specific phenomenon, Stewart and Cohn ultimately agreed it is important for people — and particularly kids — to roam online spaces that feel safe and won’t subject them to toxic content.
“I look at it more like with cigarette smoking. Like social media to me is like secondhand smoke sometimes, in that I didn’t choose to do it, but because of the algorithm, it still shows up for me,” Stewart explained. In response, Cohn said that she believes the answer is to give users the ability “to leave.”
“If you shipped over to Bluesky, you don’t have an algorithm feeding you things,” Cohn argued, to which Stewart joked, “But if I shipped over to Bluesky, then the world no longer makes sense.” Cohn laughed, but returned to her original point.
“I think that the answer is more options for people,” she said. “I think that [in] a world in which there are five big media companies that decide everything that we see and how we see it, the answer isn’t to try to take a dictator and make them a better dictator, right? We’ve got these social media dictators. The answer is to get rid of the dictators and make them less important.”
During their conversation, Stewart and Cohn also briefly touched on the dangers of AI in regards to digital privacy and rights. Cohn noted that AI “supercharges things,” including the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s chief concerns about online privacy and metadata mining.
“It’s basically strip-mining the totality of human existence,” Stewart said of AI. “It basically takes everything that we have ever accomplished through chemistry and poetry and art and music, and it’s fed into it, and it gets to take everything that we are, almost our essence, and then if you ask OpenAI, ‘Well, what are you doing with it?’ They go, ‘That’s proprietary.’”
The “Daily Show” host asked what Americans can do to combat that.
“The first thing that you need to say is, ‘I want a comprehensive privacy law. I want a law that limits what these companies can track,’” Cohn offered. “We can do this. We don’t need a surveillance business model. You know, Moses didn’t come down from the mountain with stone tablets that says, ‘The only way to make money on the internet is by spying on everyone.’ So that’s the good news.”
You can watch the full “Daily Show” segment yourself in the video above.
