Roni Hirsch

When I was at the FTC, I heard from various people that social media companies were hiring tons of psychologists. So I asked our law clerk to go on LinkedIn to try to figure out how many they had. She came back to me and told me there were too many to count. She suggested I focus on PhDs, and I said sure let's try that. A day later she came back and told me that just three or four companies had 180 or 190 PhD psychologists and brain scientists, and that one company, alone, had around 150. So I then asked her to figure out what these people were doing. For that, we looked at job postings. And the sad fact we saw was that while a minority of the open posts were for jobs that would mitigate or prevent addiction and other harms, the large majority of those posts were aimed at maximizing "engagement" -- at keeping people hooked for longer. So, with the support of Chair Khan, we started building the first behavioral team at the FTC, and hired on our first pediatrician, our first psychologist, and a human-computer interaction specialist (a technologist). This was the scrappy, brilliant group that was starting to help us assess the public allegations against these companies. I always wished that more of my parent friends could talk to -- and learn -- from Dr. Radesky, the pediatrician and youth development expert who was the anchor of that group. And now she has generously agreed to field questions from @thefairfightpod listeners -- details on how you can submit a question are below. If you have a question about your kids, teens (or yourself) and AI chatbots and social media, this is a rare chance to get that answered by a top expert in the field.