It’s Thursday, August 27. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Why Meta’s $18 billion social media settlement should be only the beginning. Was mass incarceration a myth? The woman behind the AI bot-turned-sorority star. And much more.
But first: Is America losing faith in capitalism?
As this year’s primary elections draw to a close, one question has loomed above all others: What is America’s ideal economic system? Over the past several weeks, members of the Democratic Socialists of America have scored victories from New York and Pennsylvania to Colorado and Florida, challenging the country’s long-standing faith in the capitalist system in a way rarely seen before.
But just how widespread are these sentiments? Is this socialist fervor reflective of a broader shift in Americans’ economic views—or something more limited to the fringe left?
That’s the big question we posed in the latest edition of The Honesty Project, our partnership with Populace, an opinion-research think tank that designs surveys to capture respondents’ “private” opinions—the views they may consider too sensitive to share publicly.
Today’s results suggest that while most Americans remain wary of full-blown socialism (with some notable exceptions), just one in three Americans have a positive view of capitalism.
That’s a striking finding in a country whose economic system has long been rooted in free enterprise—and it’s just the beginning of what the poll reveals. Today, Mene Ukueberuwa dives into these findings, and reports on where Americans are on one of the most consequential issues in politics.
—The Editors
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Meta’s Social Media Settlement Is Not Enough |
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On Wednesday, Meta announced a landmark legal settlement in a monster case over the harms of teen social media use. Under the agreement, the company will pay up to $18 billion and make significant changes to its platforms aimed at reducing teen addiction. But as technology writer and screen-time expert Emily Cherkin argues, these changes are just a start: The real culprit behind social media’s harms, she writes today, “is a business model that is fundamentally incompatible with healthy child development.” Read her piece to understand why she believes that until the underlying model changes, nothing else will. | |
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The End of the Mass Incarceration Myth |
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For much of the 2010s, the American left had one big enemy: mass incarceration. From Michelle Alexander’s book “The New Jim Crow” to DSA calls to abolish prisons, everyone seemed to agree that black people were unfairly targeted by the justice system, and that their rates of imprisonment were growing by the day. But a major new study says the assumptions behind this view are badly out of date. Charles Lane breaks down the story beneath the myth—and lays out what we actually need to do to keep this virtuous cycle going. | |
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How I Made an AI Sorority Girl Go Viral |
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Earlier this month, a 19-year-old named Janie went through “Bama Rush,” the University of Alabama’s annual sorority recruitment. Alongside 2,500 breathless recruits, she spent weeks dancing, vlogging, and shopping her way into the school’s top sororities, amassing tens of thousands of fans on TikTok. There was just one issue: Janie wasn’t real. She was an AI bot generated by tech investor Olivia Morris. “The goal of my experiment was to see how far an AI-generated girl could get inside one of the internet’s most visible attention economies,” Olivia writes today, “and what would happen when the illusion broke.” Read her piece to see what she found. | |
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The Case for Optimism in a Doomer Age |
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Feeling down lately? You’re probably not alone. From threats of an AI apocalypse, to the rising tide of socialism, to the specter of a global conflict, doomerism is all around—but Marian Tupy has an antidote. In a conversation with Lucy Biggers, he lays out the path to what he calls “supera |
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