‘No One Paid Me to Disagree With Jonathan Haidt’

danah boyd, like Andrew Gelman and Candice Odgers, says she was not paid by Meta or anyone else to disagree with Jonathan Haidt’s conclusions about social media: What kills me in the contemporary teens-and-tech debate is that there’s no space for actual research or critical nuance. You’re either opposed to the tech companies or in their pockets. And this week’s absurd discovery reinforces this infuriating polarity, painting those of us who are critical of Jonathan Haidt as being corporate shills. I find this especially frustrating because I did work in tech for a lot of my career. I played the role of friction inside many companies (although never Meta). I repeatedly got threatened by tech executives for challenging corporate mantras or providing research that contradicted their interests – and yet I persisted. Cuz many tech companies are far more complicated than people realize. I had been meaning to link to a piece by Mizuko Ito, writing in the MIT Press Reader, for weeks; I think…