YouSaid · the spoken record

Kaitlyn Regehr

lines on the record: 30
first: 2025-05-22
most recent: 2025-05-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Doesn't have to be publicly funded, but we have to decide that they have a responsibility to their public, that they don't take any responsibility for what they publish on their platforms. That's the current model.”
2025-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Is Your Phone Controlling Your Life? With Kaitlyn Regehr (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, but it needs to exist with a different financial structure. It cannot be built on an attention economy. So we have to decide that it needs to look something closer to a broadcast model.”
2025-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Is Your Phone Controlling Your Life? With Kaitlyn Regehr (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think this, I'm sorry if I've been too negative, I think this is building a better future. I think as the public, we should come together and decide that we have power in numbers. I think we should say, again, policy follows the public will. I think we should say we want much more hard-hitting financial bans on tech companies. I think we should decide that we can come together because currently the system is to polarize us. And I think that there is power in that. I think there's great beauty and hope in that. And so I'm sorry if I seem too negative. No, I think that there is optimism to be had here because I think as the people we have power.”
2025-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Is Your Phone Controlling Your Life? With Kaitlyn Regehr (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Instead of debating them around the details of their specific belief, Try and step back and start to explain the attention economy to them. If we all did a little bit more of that, if we all started to focus on the structure more and less on the particulars of our specific narrow algorithmic feed. We then actually could gel together more around this. We could become a collective around this. And I actually think policy follows the public will and we could decide that we want something different.”
2025-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Is Your Phone Controlling Your Life? With Kaitlyn Regehr (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They are able to target people more and more effectively. And this is where I think depending on our politicians to make a change becomes really complicated because we know that it's an amazing propaganda tool. It's amazing propaganda tool. It's amazingly targeted. You can target people based on their own personal belief, so you'll have completely different Trump campaign ads running for one person than the next person based on their beliefs and their behaviors online. Yeah, that is alive and well, and in it's very polarizing too. Right? It's incredibly polarizing. And we haven't really gotten into older people or people who find themselves in echo chambers. One thing that I would say is that if you're sitting at your Christmas dinner table and you have a relative who is in an echo chamber,”
2025-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Is Your Phone Controlling Your Life? With Kaitlyn Regehr (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yes, in China, there's much more censorship, of course. And what is being fed to their young people is very different. You might query whether that is too narrow in terms of what they're allowed to consume, but yeah, it's very different. And it's a great example of that of regulatory might. I don't think we should go that far, but it is an example of how regulation can be utilized. The weaponization So I assume you're speaking about politics, yeah, and things like the Cambridge Analytica scandal and what continues. So Refined”
2025-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Is Your Phone Controlling Your Life? With Kaitlyn Regehr (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is why this content is coming to you, and this is what you need to be critical of. So that if we are using screens, we're using it holistically across all programs of the school, but it's not so much about the functionality, but actually the corporate structure behind it. Because screens are very good at being very easy to use now. And so I would, if you are kind of doing advocacy within your own school setting, be encouraging more of that and less around this is how you use a computer. I mean, unless they're doing programming, but I have to say. And I have colleagues who teach programming at UCL, and they would, I don't know if this is being recorded. But the question is whether in five years time we will actually need to know how to program. But what we will need to do is be hyper, hypercritical of what those programmers are doing.”
2025-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Is Your Phone Controlling Your Life? With Kaitlyn Regehr (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. I I haven't told you this. I was at a school, a very good school, a few weeks ago, and this question emerged. And it was if 10 years ago we didn't have the money. Would we have given every child an iPad? And they said, probably not. So I think within the education sector, we're in this interesting space where We used to define digital literacy. The need to learn how to use tech. We needed to teach how tech functions and that we actually had to learn how to use it. I don't think we need to learn how to use iPads. And so I think that when we do use screens now, we actually need to be moving away from that more traditional approach to digital literacy and into algorithmic literacy. Where we're not just talking about this is how you use a screen, but rather this is what the screen is doing.”
2025-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Is Your Phone Controlling Your Life? With Kaitlyn Regehr (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because they've lost confidence in their ability to communicate, they've become so used to using AI models to formulate their ideas and their sentences. And I think that that is a real shame. AI essays are terrible. And I think what we really need to do is encourage young people to use the tech where it is appropriate, but also really value their humanness. And I think those are the ones who value their humanness that will have jobs in the future.”
2025-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Is Your Phone Controlling Your Life? With Kaitlyn Regehr (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mean dangers of AI. I'm writing about AI at the moment. I think with AI, and this book isn't really about AI, but I think It's about actually encouraging the use of AI in productive ways, but also reminding people of the value of being human. Right now I run a master's program at UCL. And the amount of emails I receive that are clearly written by ChatGPT. Where I have to go through four paragraphs of a bot, basically, to get to one line at the end, I find so frustrating. And I tell them this was written by AI, I'm not answering it. And that is because my students have lost confidence in their ability to be human. They think that ChatGPT is going to be better at writing that email than they are. I have been in classrooms with high school students who have said, I get AI to write my text to my friend.”
2025-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Is Your Phone Controlling Your Life? With Kaitlyn Regehr (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interacting, calling your grandmother, if you're calling your grandmother in another city, pretty good. Passive viewing, viewing that encourages what we might call a Doom scroll or the switching off of one's mind. And we all kind of know that state, right? Less good. That's more like having a bag of crisps, or it could be far worse than that. And so what we want to look to do is look for engaged viewing, viewing that is building social skills, viewing that interactive, you might have times where there's actually there are different types of education applications. You want to encourage that for us all and try to minimize the amount of passive viewing.”
2025-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Is Your Phone Controlling Your Life? With Kaitlyn Regehr (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this book has a digital diet pyramid, like a food style pyramid. So that we can think about what healthy consumption all of us, what healthy consumption might look like. Educated content, generally pretty good.”
2025-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Is Your Phone Controlling Your Life? With Kaitlyn Regehr (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So by that, you could have one kid sitting having their hour screen time, watching a David Attenmurr documentary with their parent. It could be engaged viewing, which means you stop, have a little chat about it. You have what we call interactive viewing. And then you could have another kid sitting on the same sofa beside you with headphones on watching a tablet, watching YouTube. By that guidance, those would have been both appropriate uses of screen time. So, where we need to expand this guidance and what my work is working on at the moment is to expand that guidance away from simply a quantity approach to a quality approach. So if we are going to be using screens, Sometimes to switch off our young or to act as a babysitter. If we are going to do that, and obviously that is not the best form of childcare.”
2025-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Is Your Phone Controlling Your Life? With Kaitlyn Regehr (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so screen time, which a lot of people here will have heard about, screen time refers to limiting the dosage of screen consumption to about one to two hours a day for kids, but we also talk about it for adults too. We talk about I've had too much screen time today. To screen time guidance, which is often now considered to be outdated, emerged from some very good research around childhood obesity. So that is to say it's better for kids to run around outside than be on screens, so we should limit the dosage of their screen time so that they are more active. That's what that guidance was about. That guidance then came to be the kind of main guidance that we give to everyone But screen time only accounted for the quantity, not the quality of what was being consumed.”
2025-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Is Your Phone Controlling Your Life? With Kaitlyn Regehr (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yet, we should all be. I saw something that really upset me online, or we should encourage kids to be sharing things that scared them that they saw in a movie or in a television or on the TV or something that made them feel bad because that is getting us into a habit of opening up these silos. We want to open up these silos, move away from this idea that these are personal issues. This is not a personal problem. This is a community problem. We are all in this together. And so within your own home space, you want to be creating that as a normative means of communication. That is something you talk about.”
2025-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Is Your Phone Controlling Your Life? With Kaitlyn Regehr (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talking to your children about what healthy forms of social media are versus unhealthy forms of social media by way of a shoulder shove.”
2025-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Is Your Phone Controlling Your Life? With Kaitlyn Regehr (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They are not regulated in the way, so they exist by the community guidelines that are laid out by the social media company, which we somehow allow. So they make their own rules. So you might have tons of ads for junk food, let's say, on YouTube kids, which I think is a huge problem. You have short form, poorly produced content, which can lead to fragmented attention spans. And you have a lot of the same content again and again and again. So you're not getting kind of diverse content that you would have in a children's viewing hour. So I would really shy away from those. And instead, if you are going to move to online spaces, look for online spaces that are producing healthier content that is looking at long-form educative content. And you can start”
2025-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Is Your Phone Controlling Your Life? With Kaitlyn Regehr (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because you brought it up. So YouTube, even if you are on children's versions of social media, so like YouTube kids, What is happening there is these are still algorithmically driven platforms which are, I would say, grooming children into becoming used to these processes.”
2025-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Is Your Phone Controlling Your Life? With Kaitlyn Regehr (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's right, you need to begin to help them to understand that there is a space out there where harm might be seen So there's an old 90s approach, which was called shoulder surfing. So this was the guidance that came out in the 90s when people started to purchase their first home computers, which tended to sit kind of in the middle of a living room, right? And shoulder surfing was this idea that you, because there was just one computer in the house, you could sit and read your paper and surf over the child's shoulder. And that seems really laughable now because we have so many devices and every kid has a device in a different room. But I think where you can begin by implementing shoulder surfing, begin by implementing that if you are going to be online, we're going to do this together or I'm going to be in the same room is a really good place to start. I do want to touch upon YouTube.”
2025-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Is Your Phone Controlling Your Life? With Kaitlyn Regehr (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have conversations about the fact that it is not reflected of most normative loving relationships. And that it shouldn't be used as an educational resource. It's like Superman You tell them it's not real. And you do want to do that. Before they see it That's the IC one. Sorry.”
2025-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Is Your Phone Controlling Your Life? With Kaitlyn Regehr (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, pornography, the children's commissioner's report, which was an incredibly damning report from last year, suggests that by the age of 11, one in four boys will have consumed often violent pornography, and that there is a rise in domestic abuse in youth relationships as a result of this because they are using it as an education tool. You do want to get to your kid before that point. Now it might feel really hard to talk to your kid about porn. Like, yeah. So, what I suggest you do Is you use the marvel analogy. You tell them it's not real You tell them it's like a superhero film. That level of violence, because we know that pornography is getting increasing, it's within its own attention economy, right? So it's becoming increasingly increasingly more violent.”
2025-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Is Your Phone Controlling Your Life? With Kaitlyn Regehr (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that you can deeply understand these ideas so that in turn you can start to seed these ideas. So when you do want to introduce that device, do not do so without quite a background in digital literacy. And so if you're going to go with the smartphone free childhood route, which is you're going to hold off social media until 16, that's fine. But of course that day will come. And if you haven't given them sufficient digital literacy, When they turn 16, they will not have the tools to navigate this space. So we do also need to be seeding these things in age appropriate ways. There are, of course, some biggies like the porn talk.”
2025-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Is Your Phone Controlling Your Life? With Kaitlyn Regehr (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My husband is trying to source a blackberry right now because he wants that click again and there's a bit of kind of nostalgia I think that's coming back for people who just actually are starting to think about what do I need the device for and what do I not need it for and really trying to strip that back So I think this idea of getting your kid a smartphone should be queried and there are other options What I really really would caution you against is getting your kid a smartphone without yourself fully understanding this landscape so that you are able to have these discussions as a family and so much of this so much of what's in this book is so that you can understand these processes because of course as parents We're being asked to parent through something that we ourselves didn't grow up with.”
2025-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Is Your Phone Controlling Your Life? With Kaitlyn Regehr (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or they want their kid to be able to use maps, or because they don't have a phone, a landline in their house. And so if the kid is home alone, there's no way for them to be reached. There's this other thing, of course, that their friends might have devices and there's social pressures around that, which we can get to in a moment. But let's just talk about the logistics of all of this. There are lots of devices that are coming out now which allow you to have geolocation, which allow for calling capabilities but don't allow for social media, let's say. And I think we should be looking to devices that actually fit the need. What do we need them for?”
2025-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Is Your Phone Controlling Your Life? With Kaitlyn Regehr (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Introduce personal devices, it's really important to ask yourself, what do I want this device for? Most parents end up giving their kids a personal device because they want geolocation. They want to be able to locate their kid.”
2025-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Is Your Phone Controlling Your Life? With Kaitlyn Regehr (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We didn't used to have personal devices. We had devices that were attached to the home. They were household appliances. I mean, that's part of the reason why older generations tend to look at every ping on their phone. It's because when they grew up, there was a phone attached to a wall. And if you didn't pick it up, you missed the call. We had household televisions that weren't algorithmically fed. You had to watch what everyone else in the country was watching. And so what we liked the idea of holding on to the idea of a household device for as long as possible, that we don't have to move into personal devices so readily. When you do want to”
2025-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Is Your Phone Controlling Your Life? With Kaitlyn Regehr (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, first, I think that the act itself did not have the tooth that it needed to. It did not have the regulatory might that we hoped it would. But secondly, it is about the way that Ofcom has interpreted the Act, which is to say, you know, social media companies should limit the amount of harm that's fed to young people. There's also a lot of pressure put on age regulation and age verification, but there's very little to say that age verification will in fact be enforced by social media companies. I mean, when I'm in my master's students class at UCL, if I poll all the students, almost all of them are 10 years older on Instagram than they actually are. And that's because when they open the account, they lied. So we also have to deal with that. There's very little incentive. Incentive for social media companies to even enforce these things.”
2025-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Is Your Phone Controlling Your Life? With Kaitlyn Regehr (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were not permissible to be shown on broadcast television to adults, but they could be shown to a child. And that is down to the way that we classify these platforms differently. And I think it's time that we change that.”
2025-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Is Your Phone Controlling Your Life? With Kaitlyn Regehr (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think as the public, we need to start questioning this, and we do need to start, you know, we might not be the consumers of tech. Advertisers are, but we are the consumers of advertisers. And so while we work, while we wait for more robust regulation, which doesn't just assume that kids will see harm, That Continue to classify tech companies as glorified indexers. With no responsibility. Which is really different from what we have with other forms of media, where publishers and broadcasters have a responsibility to the public. We could classify them as something else. Do you know when Ian Russell went on this morning, he held an envelope full of images that Molly had seen that was fed to her on social media. But of course, he could not show them because”
2025-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Is Your Phone Controlling Your Life? With Kaitlyn Regehr (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it is really disappointing. And I've had conversations with the Molly Russell Foundation about this. The act was written on the back of that inquiry. Chickened And I don't know whether it's that they were just worried about the money. It's that politicians require social media in order to get elected. But I think it is a huge failure. I have asked if it might be ripped up or revised. I don't know if it will be. And so my new thing is whether we as the public need to start looking at advertisers who actually fund this system. And start to say, hey, do you know the content that was viewed by the Southport killer We can go back on that and look at what ads ran beside that content. Who funded that content? I don't want to do it.”
2025-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Is Your Phone Controlling Your Life? With Kaitlyn Regehr (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT