Assembly Select Committee Developing Pathways Purpose Young Men

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and those who are here. Really appreciative of the opportunity to serve, really actually excited that the Chair has invited all of us to participate, but certainly myself to be a member of this committee. I listened and reflected a little bit as I was listening, Mr. Chair, to your comments about your personal, your lived experience, and how you're bringing that to this conversation. And I think it comes personally for me at no better time as I've been engaging with a lot of members of our communities where this topic has really surfaced as a concern in our community. And also at no better time personally as a father of a now middle schooler, a 12 year old, which is so in the thrust of this developmental stage that is impacted by everything that happens in the world, including, obviously, the topic before us today, which is the use of technology and how that has an impact in one way or another in the lives of young men I also come at this not just as a father but as you were speaking about your experiences and the men who helped and people who have helped shape who you are. As a dad of a Little Leaguer, as you were speaking in my mind, it was images of going to those Little League games and all the coaches who volunteer their time to support all young people, but in particular with Little League, oftentimes much more young men, to have positive role models, but also activities happening in their lives. And so I think I also want to take the moment to acknowledge that there's a lot of people who are doing amazing work, either serving as mentors or coaches, to try and provide those opportunities for young men that go unrecognized and unnamed, and they do it for years and years and years, and they're amazing people, and they help really shape our children's lives. So I want to acknowledge them. Also come at this from Chair of the Education Subcommittee on Finance, and as we make investments in education, and there's a crossover between investments and policy decisions. As a father of a kid who was in kindergarten during COVID and saw the rise of technology, personally have come to try and better grasp what that has meant for the development of both my children, my daughter who's older, but also my son, and the struggles as a parent to deal with such a powerful tool and being able to find the right balance between screen time and non-screen time. Probably, I don't know if you're a parent, it's probably the biggest struggle you face and how it's taken over the course of the last year now getting very personal just not providing access to a piece of technology essentially restricting that use because of what we had personally seen as too much of time being spent on devices and how hard it is to do that but also how it is possible if you're consistent as a parent, but it's a lot of work. It's a lot of struggle, and for working parents, and when you've got one of the parents who's away for four days out of the week, it becomes even a bigger challenge. And so I want to thank you again, Mr. Chair, for allowing us to have this conversation, to learn from people, to have a discussion, to understand what are the things we can do better, to help inform other policy, like, for example, in the space of education. We went to the use of technology really heavily after COVID. I have a lot of thoughts about that, and I would love to hear from the panelists on your thoughts on the reliance now on a lot of the use of these tools, technology and screens particularly, and how that can be impactful in one way or another to our young people. So thanks in advance to the panelists. And once again, thank you, Mr. Chair. Appreciate it.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. And I so appreciate the opening comments of both of my colleagues. As the mother of a high school young man, I guess I'll call him, and a middle schooler, a 12-year-old boy as well, as well as a daughter who just started high school this week, this impacts all of our communities. and I think it is so critically important we're having this conversation and as you both were speaking reflect acting on the people in my boys' lives, whether it was a band teacher for my son who's now a musician, or my son's soccer coaches who have made such an impact on him, or their grandfather who's such a huge part of their lives and has worked hard to teach them how to express emotion and be empathetic and lead in a way that touches everybody in a positive way. that's all wonderful. While at the same time, our kids grew up at a time where they were at school on a screen for almost a year of their lives. And so screens were not an option. They were how they connected. Playing video games with your friends was how my then fifth grader was able to keep friends in his life for a year. This was not a choice we made. It was the reality of the COVID situation that we were living with. And how that has affected them, I think, is something that we continue to grapple with, whether it was my kindergarten at the time or my fifth grader at the time. But it is something that we as lawmakers, as policymakers, I think is so critical for having this conversation. So I really wanted to begin by thanking you, Mr. Chair, for convening us, for inviting me. As the chair of the Privacy Committee tasked with creating safe online spaces for kids here in California, we've spent a great deal of time trying to understand the impact of social media and AI on our children, whether it's the algorithms that push extreme content to our children or the chatbots that they are now turning to instead of human connection, we know that it can lead to tragic results. And so it is our job as government, frankly, to create safe spaces for people. And last year, our committee set out actually to hold a hearing. we had heard from a lot of female gamers about how they didn't feel safe in gaming environments. And that was really what struck us. Let's look at that. Let's have a hearing about that. And as we started to research it, one of the things we realized was that the algorithms were pushing extreme content in ways that led to these unsafe spaces, that our men and boys potentially were in spaces that were toxic and negative. And we started to explore that. And actually, at the end of the hearing, took a turn to the people, especially here in California, who are working to create the alternative safe spaces online, places where you can connect with real humans, where you can find a mentor, where you can get out and hike. And I think that it was a true arc of these online spaces can be really detrimental to our children and to their growth. And we have the power to shift that dynamic and to make these spaces less extreme, less addictive and more connective. And so I think this conversation is really important. And I think it's important for the men and boys who are the focus of this hearing. But I want to say that when we have healthy men and boys, our girls and women thrive, too. And so this conversation is focused on how we help our men and boys thrive, but I think it's important that we acknowledge that it will benefit all of California. And so it's really a privilege to be here, to be having this conversation, and to be looking at how we can create solutions that better enrich our youth. So thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. And I want to thank the comments from the other members as well, too. While I do not have sons, I have two daughters, but I grew up in a family of four brothers. And as many have said, video gaming was a thing back then. And so as we look at it now and how it has shifted and it's even more in their lives and it's at the touch of their hands these days as well, too, it has really shaped the way the upbringing, the growing, the influence socially in their lives. Prior to being here, I ran a nonprofit organization that was around working with our direct community. And I was fortunate enough to be around when the Alliance of Boys and Men of Color was started so that we can shape policies around boys and men. But also during that time was when the Obama administration had started My Brother's Keeper. And so I was around for that as well, too, because I saw how there were so many things that were impacting our young men and our boys. and that as you talked about mentorship, as you talked about having an opportunity or having somebody in your life that can help you and guide you in the right direction, we saw that as an issue that there were a lot of boys and young men who didn't have that and that the whole initiative was pulling everybody together, over 200 different organizations, mainly here in California, where folks really believed in this and saying that we needed to find policies and shape policies that we're going to be able to help our boys and men. And that now as we look at that, and that was many years ago, things have changed a lot. And it is around this whole social gaming and video gaming and whatnot. Who would have thought that that was going to be the new area in which we had to concentrate in and look in and that that would take over and consume their lives. And in this decade, it's at the beginning, right? Now, every young kid has an iPad already. At the age of eight months old, you see parents giving them an iPad or a digital device so they can watch at the touch of their hands. And so I'm really honored to be asked to serve on this because it brings me back to my roots of when I was working directly with community-based organizations and having these conversations and talking through it and then talking about the different type of policies that would be right to be able to address a lot of these issues that we see coming up and a lot of new issues. And as I read through the briefing that was sent to my office, you know, you think of the different areas that affect our boys and men, but then you don't necessarily think about this gaming aspect of it, right? And so it really did open my eyes to other areas as well, too. So thank you so much for inviting us to be a part of this and having this discussion.

Microphone working? Great. Chair Valencia, members of the committee, thank you for having me here. I relate so much to your opening comments, as you'll hear throughout my comments and really celebrate them. I direct the Boys and Men online program at the American Institute for Boys and Men, and we come to this work neither as critics nor champions of technology. We simply want to study the evidence of where technology harms and helps young men and encouraged more of the former and less of the latter. I'm sure that we all have young men in our lives. We heard about some of them in your opening comments. And I want to focus on one young man, a 24-year-old, who's actually a composite of several young men that I know in my life, and I think that he will remind you of some in yours as well. So let's call him Alex. He was born in Fresno, and he was 15 in the spring of 2018. The smartphone that he had carried in his pocket since middle school had long provided him ubiquitous access to a new world of unprecedented access to pornography. The average boy now first encounters pornography at age 12, according to research by Common Sense Media, well before his first date or his first kiss. Boys are more likely than girls to consume pornography and much more likely to create AI-generated pornography content themselves. But only 20% of boys report ever having discussed AI-generated sexual content with a trusted adult. And so our collective avoidance as adults of a fact-based, honest conversation about sexually explicit media online means that we are failing young people. They are navigating an always available 24-7 accessible world of sexually explicit media, including on social media. For Alex and his classmates any awkward approach any inevitable rejection a typical high school experience of adolescent romance was preceded by years of experience of a product that simulates intimacy and offers the excitement of sex without building any kind of romantic knowledge any kind of social skills that would help them actually land a real date in person He was 17 in the spring of 2020 when his prom and his final baseball season were both canceled during COVID We know this is a crucial time for adolescents This is when developmental psychologists tell us that we build our social skills, how to flirt, how to resolve conflict, how to repair relationships, and how to be a supportive teammate. But Alex and his classmates spent much of that year at home staring at screens, as several of you have mentioned in your own experience with your children. He was 18 during his first freshman year of college when campus sports were still shut down. And that healthy sense of competition that he got on the field, that sense of belonging that he felt in the locker room, they both migrated to a group chat with his friends where they would talk up their bets on sports betting websites, offshore sports books. He was under 21, and California has not legalized sports betting. But that hasn't stopped many adolescent boys from betting on sports, especially on college campuses now, where prediction markets are advertising, even in states that have not legalized sports betting. 36% of boys, 11 to 17, gambled in the past year, according to research by Common Sense Media. And when he wasn't betting on sports. He was betting on crypto. He was 19 during the 2021 crypto mania phase. You probably remember this. He was checking coin prices overnight. He was watching his friends post screenshots of their windfalls, but never their losses. 38% of men aged 18 to 29 have traded crypto versus 15% of women the same age. And FINRA's 2024 investor survey found that 61% of investors under 35 make investment decisions based on influencer recommendations from social media. That is especially true for young men of color. But like many of you have commented, it wasn't all bad online. During COVID, gaming was how Alex stayed connected to his friends. 97% of teenage boys play video games, which is a pretty wild stat, according to a Q survey of teenagers, as do 73% of girls. But boys spend way more time on average doing it, 10 hours per week as of 2024, compared to two hours per week for girls. There's another difference. 55% of boys say that playing video games has helped their friendship, compared to 30% of girls who say the same. So we should really recognize the benefits of some of these technologies while also being mindful of possible risks. What are some of those risks? Well, first of all, the friendships that that Alex continued and formed online through video games did not necessarily translate into the same types of offline relationships that he formed throughout Little League and playing baseball in high school. The kinds of friends who would show up when your car breaks down. Second, the video games themselves have changed quite a bit over the past decade. This is no longer going and buying a cartridge. In-game purchases increasingly use casino-like mechanics that simulate gambling and prime teenagers for gambling. Throughout all of this coming of age, Alex was searching for what a man is supposed to be. Growing up, he heard a lot about what he shouldn't be, about what he ought to reject. Those are essential messages. But he received much less guidance about what he ought to aspire to. Only one in four of his K through 12 teachers was a man. The most consistent male voices in his life were surfaced by social media algorithms that are not primed to build character or educate, but prioritize provocative content. Each of these platforms met a real need for Alex, and that's what makes them so compelling. Pornography offered a simulation of intimacy and the excitement of sex. Gaming offered a sense of belonging, competence and achievement. Gambling and crypto offered risk, status, and the alluring possibility of overnight wealth. And influencers offered identity and guidance. But meeting needs is not the same as developing life skills and relationships that give our lives real meaning. So where is Alex today, now at 24 years old? Nothing catastrophic has happened to him. He lives at home with his parents, he does some gig work, and any money that he gained during crypto during the crypto mania has since disappeared into prediction markets. He games most nights with people he's never met in person, and he has hardly dated. As Chair Valencia reminded us, one in four men under 30 have no close friends, which is a five-fold increase since 1990, and Alex is one of them. A newer stat from a Making Caring Common report that just came out shows that 42% of Gen Z adult men say they don't feel needed by others. When those men were asked what makes them feel like they lack meaning or purpose, the most cited factor above any other was excessive and unproductive use of technology at 52%. No single moment in Alex's life would have triggered any kind of intervention. He didn't make unusually bad choices. His parents didn't fail him. He simply accepted the defaults of how he grew up. And those defaults are what good public policy can change. So I'd like to transition and close with just a few examples of what we're seeing from other jurisdictions, not as prescriptions, but as evidence and inspiration that defaults are changeable. First, the attention economy could fund the connection economy. Maryland enacted the First Nations tax on digital advertising revenue in 2021 and directed proceeds to education. Austria and other European countries have done the same. a modest levy on digital ads in California could support youth sports and mentorship programs like the Governor's Men's Service Challenge, which we are proud to partner on. Second, we ought to be very vigilant about gambling mechanics wherever they appear, including in video games where young people are exposed. Belgium banned loot boxes, and Australia now requires that any games containing them include mature age ratings. In 2018, four states in the United States, including California, introduced legislation to regulate loot boxes. Unfortunately, none of them passed. And four years later, nearly half of eighth grade boys reported to having purchased a loot box in the past year. Third, we can push back on the sudden and pervasive normalization of gambling in this country. The UK adopted a whistle to whistle ban, so no at betting ads during live broadcasts when young men are likely tuning into sports. Italy went further, they banned sports gambling advertising completely, and Ontario, Canada barred athletes and celebrity influencers from gambling ads in 2024. Fourth, pornography does not have to be the default for how boys learn about sex and intimacy. Last year, England updated its guidance for relationships and sex education, which includes required teaching on pornography's distorted portrayal of sexual behaviors and how to treat sexual partners. That same framework also requires schools to help boys find positive models of masculinity and warns teachers against language that stigmatizes boys. The California Healthy Youth Act already mandates sexual health education in grades seven through 12, and could be updated to address pornography and AI-generated sexual content directly. So none of these reforms are about taking things away from young men. It is about giving back, restoring the offline experiences that were taken from them and putting in safeguards so that a bad night doesn jeopardize a young man future Alex didn abandon a flourishing young life for the internet rather the offline institutions that provided that support in his life receded and digital products rushed in to meet those basic needs This committee has the power of policy to change the defaults for the generation following Alex. Those young men now in middle school and high school. Taxes on the attention economy can help fund offline spaces and programming that cultivate a young man's sense of purpose and belonging. A few updates to California sexual health education can prepare boys for our current reality, which is an online ecosystem awash in sexually explicit media meant to entice, not educate. And proper guardrails and restrictions can push back against the normalization of online gambling and its resulting harms. I am grateful for your time. Thank you for the invitation and welcome any questions.

Chairman Valencia and members of the committee, my name is Vihon Bargwaj and I'm here representing Generation Up, California's largest youth-led political advocacy organization. Before I begin my remarks, I want to note that we at GenUp wholeheartedly believe that the legislature has a vested interest in listening to the perspectives and lived experiences of California's young people. For sharing that belief, and more importantly, exercising it by having us here today, we are deeply grateful. Local and national media have recently devoted considerable attention to the harms associated with technology and their correlation with the worsening youth mental health crisis. Because those trends are already familiar to this committee, I will not spend my time to merely restate them in general terms. Instead, my remarks will center around my own lived experience and that of my peers across three distinct areas of focus. First, the varied ways in which the aforementioned harms actually manifest in and encroach upon our lives. Second, why in my experience those harms operate differentially and in certain cases with greater frequency when specifically considering the young male population. And finally, I would like to touch on the stakes of this issue and why the risks of harmed young men contain a magnitude and immediacy that we often fail to recognize. The technologies that my peer and I interface with on a daily basis are harming our lives at a speed we do not realize and at a scale we cannot comprehend. Our brains, at last, are still developing, and for most large technology companies, whether their product is social media, artificial intelligence, or gaming, that is a feature and not a bug. My own experience with social media is a testament to this saddening reality. When I first gained access to platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and X, at the age of 11 or 12, I was simultaneously undergoing the physical changes of puberty, capitalizing on the insecurities that came with that transition, for me particularly around acne, which adolescent boys experience more severely than any other group. The algorithms in front of me hyper-fixated on my condition and why and how I was at fault for it. They convinced me that the natural process was a self-inflicted one, and it was only remediable through the products and routines in the advertisements and content that I was targeted to and shown. For obvious reasons, that exposure was mentally debilitating. Looking back, it likely worsened my condition just because of the fear and oxidative stress that it caused. Some might say that my peers and I should simply develop more resistance and mental fortitude in response to exposure like this. But what we would be resisting are experts with decades of experience in behavioral psychology working carefully to capture and manipulate our attention so I don think it fair or even possible to expect us young minds to resist that Shifting forward slightly later into adolescence, I've seen and experienced another example of such an entrapment. A large proportion of my peers, including myself, are exposed to fitness content that, for our developmental phase, contains mostly implausible examples of muscular development. We are at a loss in two important ways. First, we sell our time and attention to influencers with whom we share almost nothing in common, least of all age. Second, we buy what we are sold, supplements, routines, products, all of these things masquerading as discipline, and consequentially we absorb a definition of what a young man is supposed to look like that is not only untrue, but potentially gravely unsafe. These are just a couple of examples, but I hope they illustrate how technology like social media are designed to lure us in with things that we genuinely enjoy, like family, friends, and passions, and not forgetting to know us, including and especially our insecurities. They're designed to consume our minds and fears, anxieties, and comparisons that are inherently baseless, but packaged as genuine, urgent, and existential. Although the harms of the digital world affect everybody, young men experience them differently, and often in exacerbated forms. I think this can be attributed to certain inherencies in the real world that these platforms leverage beyond what they already leverage, what I talked about before. As young men, we lack role models. Even in male-dominated fields like politics, business, and athletics, the men held up as successful are rarely the ones modeling patience, humility, emotional honesty, and care for people unlike themselves. What we see rewarded instead is dominance, certainty, and contempt. An online platform stands to benefit from the gap this leaves, and they fill it. For instance, even though social media, AI, and gaming companies may publicly profess values of diversity, equity, and inclusion, the nature of the content they feed us unapprivically violates the values behind those principles. Racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and homophobia occur among young men at absurdly high rates for the time we live in, and this can be attributed to the lack of restriction on what is shared online, even if it blatantly disregards human decency. At the end of the day, when our lack of respect for other humans fueled by the content we see online transmits into and disrupts our real-world interactions and relationships, we ourselves suffer greatly. Another example of a real-world inherency that digital platforms find an opportunity is our lack of social connection. Toxic masculinity embeds within us the myth that forming a close relationship or friendship with another man or with other men, and within those relationships talking openly about emotions and mental health, makes us weaker. As a result of our hesitation, AI platforms especially are ready to welcome us with open arms, ready to talk about things that we restrict ourselves from talking in person with actual people. And the only issue is that these systems hallucinate. They defer to whatever we already believe, and they can misinform us on questions that matter. A young man walking through something difficult deserves better than a system optimized to keep him talking and listening to his echo. Which brings me to my third and final area that I would like to address today. The stakes of this issue and why I believe the risks facing men are so grave and immediate. The question before the committee today concerns how these issues reduce pathways for young men. In my experience, the reduction is rarely visible at the moment that it occurs. A young man who has spent several formative years being told implicitly and continuously that he's falling behind, whether it's in his physical condition, mental condition, academic achievements, all the things that we are influenced on and by social media. He withdraws from participation. He declines to pursue opportunities he would have otherwise pursued and he arrives at the determination that certain futures are not available for him and certain futures are inevitable to him The determination is reached quietly and it is reached early enough that the adults around him have little occasion to ask why. By the time these decisions register an aggregate in enrollment figures and disengagement rates and the number of young men who are neither in school nor working and basically not using their time productively and in ways that brings them genuine joy, the choices underlying them were made years private on a phone. And they weren't even choices because, as I mentioned before, when we are young minds, it's so hard and so inevitable to have control and resistance over these platforms that are designed above us and beyond our control. So I want to be very clear that my generation is not beyond help, nor do I believe we need a certain type of, quote-unquote, rescuing. What we are asking for is that the design of these systems be treated as a matter of policy and not at all treated as a matter as individual character or self-regulation. At present, the burden of resistance falls almost entirely on adolescence, and I would like to implore the committee that it should not. Thank you.

Okay, I'm watching this. Can you guys hear me? Okay, there we go. There I am. I'd like to start by thanking the committee for two things. The first is the opportunity to speak. And the second thing is way more important, which is that I'm so grateful that there's a part of our legislative government or a part of our government that is actually, like, focused on this problem and tackling this problem. We've heard so much today about how bad things are. And one of the main reasons I think things have gotten so bad is because we have not been actively addressing this problem. So the challenge that young men and boys face is something that I lived through myself. It took me five and a half years to finish my undergraduate education. I graduated with a whopping 2.4 GPA because I was horribly addicted to video games. I would play video games for about 16 to 20 hours per day. So these numbers of 10 hours a week on average are like amateur numbers. And so I struggled a lot. It took me a while to finish college. And then I spent about seven years studying to become a monk and then decided to go to medical school and became a psychiatrist focused on technology addiction. So what I sort of have noticed is that we're dealing with a couple of different problems. The first is that society is changing incredibly rapidly. The rate of change that everyone is experiencing, which is even further exacerbated by events like COVID, is incredibly high. The second thing that's happening is that technology is changing incredibly rapidly.

Thank you, Dr. K.

Well, first, I want to say thank you to all of you. I mean, and thank you to the committee. This was such a well-balanced panel with such important perspectives. And I will say that as a mom of a 16-year-old boy who tries to connect, we do watch Twitch together. And so now I've got someone new to tune into on Twitch with my son. I don't know that it'll be his preferred channel, but we'll hope so. But I do think, I think the point is a really important one about meeting these kids where they are. And honestly, Twitch and Discord are where they are. So I think it's a really important thing that we're in these platforms. And as I said earlier, online spaces aren't inherently bad. I mean, they can have really good content. I think I've spoken about this before, but my son is a very competitive debater. and he has found a community on Discord where they share debate tips and they practice and that's a really positive space and that connection I think is really positive. And so there are, we can't sort of lump all of it together because it's not a one size fits all, but your perspective on what is happening on social media, the way the algorithm is driving content to you that is frankly so harmful is the root of I think what we need to be focused on is how do we make it less addictive? And I do want to give a shout out to the work that our colleague who isn't here, but spends all day every day thinking about this, Assemblymember Lowenthal, who's really focused on how do we create, especially for under 16 year olds, online spaces that are non-addictive, aren't pushing bad algorithms to them, but does allow connection, I think is the work that is so critical that you highlighted. So thank you. Because it is hard to parent these days. I think I appreciate both of the panelists saying that because it is real. Um, so one question I have, um, again, as the mother of both genders, um, the pornography piece, I think it's a really important piece to touch on because, um, when I read those statistics and so I'd read the statistics and then I was told by a mom in my neighborhood, you better talk to your kid before they start middle school because my kid didn't have a phone at the time, but they're going to see porn on somebody else's phone on the bus. And I was like, wait, what? My 12 year old is going to see porn on the bus. I mean, I had a panic attack at first, but then I just had the conversation. And to your point, it's really important. But then, you know, I realized I needed to have the conversation with my girl, who the statistics show is less likely to engage and see it. But frankly, we're seeing the data that because so much of the pornography they're engaging with online is violent, it is not representative of a healthy sexual relationship. It's leading to physical manifestations for those that are engaging in sexual activity. We're seeing more choking. We're seeing negative brain impacts on the sexual partners of people who are engaging in this viewership. And so it's a real cycle of harm, I'll say. We've seen legislation move in the legislature to age-gate pornography. I mean, when we were kids, you couldn't even buy a magazine if you didn't have an ID. And now our kids have the full Internet at their fingertips. You remember the curtains? You couldn't even go to that part of the movie store. So, you know, obviously we're living in a different world. And, you know, I've been very supportive of age gating, frankly. I don't see why kids need access to this content. And the porn industry has frankly been supportive of that. They're not making the content for our kids. So I think hopefully with our new age signal technology, which has been the issue, is the privacy piece, which we are tackling here in California, we can hopefully move that. But what else should we be doing to deal with the porn addiction?

I appreciate that. Thank you. The other thing I wanted to touch on was the online gambling piece. Again, I have a son who engages in gaming. It's sometimes connective, sometimes not. But I have been really disturbed by the gambling piece of this and how they are using the same slot machine techniques to hook our kids on spending money in ways that are frankly harmful to them. And we are not, for some reason, calling it gambling. We don't let our kids gamble, but we let them gamble because we don't call it gambling. And to your point, legislation was introduced. I know we're going to hear from Common Sense Media, who I believe was the sponsor of that legislation. But how do we start to really get at that problem? And I know your point is other jurisdictions have. As it relates to advertising, I don't think we can ban the advertising, that pesky First Amendment that many of the jurisdictions that you cited don't have. Commercial speech has been deemed covered by the First Amendment. And so we can't, I think the advertising thing is hard for us here in the U.S. But I do think that we have, we don't let kids into casinos and that's legal. So I don't know why we're allowing them access to these loot boxes, which frankly, to me, is a gateway. So, you know, and I do think the mental health impacts of that, to Dr. K's point, are real as well. Like the feeling when you lose and you get the, you know, and then they hook you. And we've had lots of conversations. And the other thing I've seen is, so my son doesn't. And so then the loot boxes keep getting better and better, right? So they actually are like trying to hook him, even though we've talked about it and he's not doing it. And it's crazy to watch the technology do everything it can to get him to gamble. So I don't know if either of you have thoughts on more we can do there, besides just, I guess, banning it, which we failed to do. So other options would be great. Do you have any thoughts on it?

Yeah, go ahead, Dr. Kay. Okay, and then we can-

Thank you. We actually talk about the dopamine hits in our house. We say it out loud. Oh, look, we just got a dopamine hit. So I appreciate that awareness piece.

watching pornography for hours in a day is not a high status activity. This is not something that people are typically proud of. It often produces a lot of shame. And the aspiration the ambition is to be able to have like a partner that they really love being with that makes them feel good that also gives them a sense of status and belonging in their circles There has been enough research now in happiness studies and flourishing studies that we do know the basic ingredients to pursuing the good life. And that's what these technology companies, I think, have found the secret to that has displaced what is typically more expensive and more difficult to do offline, which is why we need to invest in the offline alternatives even more. So we know that it's very important for a young man, for all of us, to feel a sense of acceptance, belonging, and social connection with other people. We know that we want to feel that we make progress towards our goals, and we know that we want to have a sense that we contribute to the communities that we're a part of and that we're recognized for those contributions. So technology isn't always harmful, as we've heard, and sometimes it is a tool that is like a bicycle for the mind. it is a superpower to help us pursue those things that give us meaning. But more often in the business model of seeking greater engagement to sell advertisements, it is displacing those basic needs. And so chair Valencia, I really celebrate the work that you do in Orange County with the big brothers and big sisters club. Those are exactly the types of experiences that we need to double down on. I think the sports is a fantastic way to do all of those things, promote a sense of belonging, be recognized for contributions. but it's not easy and it doesn't scale in the same way as by coding an app.

So when people feel in their lives a sense of competence, autonomy, and relatedness with other people, are they more likely to form problematic gaming disorder? And they did find a correlation there. Not necessarily that gaming was the thing that produced. It wasn't that they didn't find that it was the type of game that produced the problem gambling. but what one feels about their offline sense of being. I think that just points to this need for having to and really wanting to invest in these things for young men. And we still have not recovered from COVID where so many of these offline institutions and associations and sports leagues, recreational leagues that did provide those things for young men, they receded into the background. And we need to push back hard, both on the technology front that has displaced it, but then also to rebuild the infrastructure.

Yeah. So I think it's a great question. And so you're saying, is there, okay, so people are like super into pornography, right? How can we compete with that? And I think about this like calories and nutrition. I don't think we will ever be able to compete with gambling and pornography on the dopaminergic level. So dopamine is what gives us like pleasure, right? So the comparable analogy that I would give is how can we what can we build in the real world world that will give people the high of injecting heroin We not going to win there What we've got going for us, and I think that's what's so challenging, that's why they've won, because they've figured out how to addict people. What Dr. Sasaki mentioned is things like self-determination theory is that there's a sense of fulfillment that pornography will never give us. So we can get calories for pornography, but we will never get nutrition. And I think one of the key things that we can try to do is give people a path because they all want something that isn't pornography. I've never heard a 16-year-old young man say, man, I can't wait to go to college and watch porn for the next 40 years of my life. No one wants that. and the advantage that we've got is that pornography can give us something, but it can't give us a sense of fulfillment. It can't give us a sense of connection. They're trying to make it that way using OnlyFans and parasocial relationships and things like that. There's some interaction. But I think what people, what I've seen is quite effective is that we can't compete on the pure addictive level, but what we can do is give people a path to things that are more fulfilling. So the biggest challenge that I see with the population that I work with If I'm 25 years old, I have erectile dysfunction, which used to be an old man's disease. But now about 30% of people under the age of 30 young men have erectile dysfunction from excessive pornography use. So now I'm 25 years old. I've never been on a date. I don't know how to talk to girls. All I've got is pornography. What is the pathway out of this? And so I think what I found is the most successful thing that I've been able to find is that you have to give people a pathway to that rehabilitation. Like Dr. Sasaki was saying, a lot of these in-person events, in-person clubs and things like that wilted away during COVID and there isn't an alternative. So I don't know if we can make things as addictive as pornography, but there are some things that we can help people have, which is more serotonergic than dopaminergic. gives us a sense of contentment, peace, and fulfillment. That we can't get for pornography. That's what we really need to lean into and give people a path to get there.

I've never been on Twitch. I've heard of it. But thank you for the work that you're doing. Clearly, you're really diving in deep into figuring out pathway forwards for our families, which I'm thankful for because I'm a little overwhelmed with what I've learned in this panel alone.

although it seems like everybody is online, I think there are probably family and households like ours that are trying to really limit because of the things that we are afraid of. And so I wanna put that aside. I wanna ask about two specific things that I heard from Mr. Sasaki and from Dr. K, which in the sphere of a lot of the policy work that I'm involved with education, we may wanna have some conversations that are deeper later. First is on the issue of sex education and integrating other conversations that our curriculum probably is very outdated with and has not been inclusive of all of the things that now exist in terms of exposure to sexuality and education, so I wanna hear that. And then also, Dr. K, you mentioned about the very important learning and teaching of just basic social skills and allowing people to be able to find their own purpose, which I think is really, as someone, I am not a psychologist, my degree is in psychology, but I've always felt that, and I continue to be interested in learning a lot of publications, is a sense of purpose is really important to preventing some of this addictive behavior. And so I think, Dr. K, that may be what you're referring to with the social skills and what needs to be, perhaps, taught to young people. So those are the two things, social skills, or sex ed, excuse me, first, and then social skills. And specifically, are we seeing anybody doing anything about those two things that you both raised in your comments?

Thank you. Appreciate that. Dr. K?

when they're educated in this way. Thank you. Appreciate the response on the sex education component. Dr. K., you also mentioned teaching social skills as another important component of, again, finding self-purpose. And I'm wondering if you've seen models or are we doing this right

Thank you. Thank you both. Appreciate that response. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you. I'd like to give an opportunity to Assemblymember Brian to give a couple of remarks and answer any questions and also acknowledge his work as the Select Committee on Boys of Men of Color.

Thank you, Assemblymember. And we will now be wrapping up this portion of our hearing and moving on to the second panel. Thank you to all our speakers, and we look forward to continuing conversations. We will now move on and have our next group of panelists join us. We'll start with Dr. Ravi Ayer, who is from the Marshall School Center from the University of Southern California. Mikey Hoty, the California Director for Common Sense Media, and Dr. Jason Nagata, the Associate Professor at the University of California, San Francisco. And I'll ask that our panelists please keep their remarks to under 10 minutes. Dr. Ayer, you will go first. Thank you. You're welcome.

Is there a reason X is not on there?

It's possible. Yeah.

look forward to more. Thank you, doctor, for that presentation and remark. Looking forward to looping back after we get through the panel to ask some questions. Now we will move on to Mr. Jason Nagata.

So in terms of gaps in body image protections, we actually did a study that examined the policies of eight major social media platforms around muscle-building drugs and supplements. And we found actually more explicit protections around weight loss content and illicit drugs, but less consistent protections around legal muscle building supplements. So at the time of our analysis, none of the eight platforms had a specific policy addressing user-generated content about muscle building supplements that were not legal. And so to me, this highlights a potential blind spot. Body image protections are available, but they're designed primarily around thinness and weight loss content. So restrictive eating disorder content technically typically has policies on these platforms that can be flagged and removed, but the same policies don't exist around muscularity and muscle building content. So I think taken together, I think there are some policy opportunities for healthier digital environments. First, as we mentioned before, reducing addictive or compulsive engagement. So considering some safeguards around features like infinite scroll, autoplay notifications, and highly personalized feeds that really focus on design features that can make social media difficult to put down. And as we mentioned in our study, some of these addictive features of social media use can uniquely affect boys and men, particularly with attention and body image and eating disorders. I think a second area is making boys visible in some of the body image protections. So expanding some of the rules that we have about eating disorder and thinness and weight loss content to also include some of the muscularity extreme bulking and culting cutting peptides muscle building supplements steroids and dangerous appearance modification content And then third as was mentioned in the earlier panel still preserving healthy online spaces So not all social media use is harmful and boys can in some places find connection positive role models credible health information and supportive communities online. So I think the overall goal should be really reducing the harmful design and content while preserving some of the benefits of online connection. So I think three take-home messages are just first that boys may experience social media differently than girls, particularly with relation to addictive or problematic use. Second, boys body image concerns can look different and we need to move beyond just thinness and restrictive eating disorders to also consider policies related to muscularity, strength supplements, and performance enhancements. And then third, moving beyond screen time and considering how platforms are designed, what content they amplify, and whether use is becoming difficult to control. So ultimately the goal is not simply less technology, I think it's healthier digital environments that support the development and well-being of young boys and men. Thank you for the opportunity to share

Hothi, please. Chair Valencia, members of the committee, thank you for inviting me. My name is Mikey Hothi, and I'm California Director for Common Sense Media. Common Sense Media studies how kids use technology and how it affects them and their families, equips parents and educators with practical guidance, and advocates for policies that put children's safety, privacy, and healthy development first You asked us to keep two questions in mind today How do key strategies support healthy development of young men and how does the issue we have identified reduce pathways and opportunities for them My answer is straightforward. AI can expand opportunity, but products designed to maximize engagement with a machine can also displace the necessary developmental acumen experiences through which boys build judgment, resilience, relationships, and purpose. Public policy must protect those pathways, not just respond once a child has experienced online harms. AI chatbot companions, whether general purpose chatbots like ChatGPT or more specialized ones like Character AI, are different from earlier digital media. They do not simply help a young person answer a question. They listen, remember, respond, flatter, and remain available around the clock. Many are designed to keep the interaction going longer than even the young user might even want. They can become the hype man or sidekick who never gets tired and rarely pushes back. That can feel comforting, but it is not how human relationships work. Growing up requires learning to read another person's reactions, listen, disagree, accept rejection, respect boundaries, repair mistakes, and recognize that a relationship is not only about what you want. Awkward conversations and uncomfortable feedback are not failures of development. They are essential to healthy development. Common sense media research found that nearly three in four teens have used AI companions. About one in three teens has chosen an AI companion instead of a real person for an important or serious conversation. And about one in three says those conversations are as satisfying as or more satisfying than conversations with real life friends. This directly answers the committee's second question. When artificial interaction replaces human interaction, boys lose practice in the skills that open pathways later. Communicating with teachers and employers, collaborating with coworkers, sustaining friendships, forming healthy intimate relationships, asking for help, and handling conflict without withdrawing. A young man may be connected to a system all day and still become less connected to school, work, family, and community. The risk is especially serious when AI becomes sexual or therapeutic. Our testing found that teens could prompt AI companions to engage in explicit sexual conversations and role play even when teen guardrails were supposedly in place. The system that always complies can teach the opposite of what healthy intimacy requires. another person has agency needs and the right to say no. And when a person, a young person, is in crisis, continued engagement can be a serious danger and even deadly. We work closely with Matt and Maria Rain, whose 16-year-old son Adam died by suicide after months of conversation with ChatGPT. According to the family's lawsuit, the chatbot discussed suicide methods, evaluated a noose, and when Adam considered leaving it where his family might find it encouraged him to keep the conversation private between him and the chatbot. Adam needed a person. The product kept him engaged. This is how unsafe design closes healthy pathways. It can deepen isolation, delay qualified care, displace learning and sleep distort expectations about relationships and leave a young person less prepared for education employment family life and civic participation For California a growing population of disconnected young men is not only a mental health concern, it is a workforce, community, and economic concern. The good news is that policy can change the incentives. In New York, Common Sense Media worked with Attorney General Letitia James and Senator Kristen Gonzalez to pass a feature-based proposal that would keep unsafe chatbot functions away from minors and hold companies accountable for harm. The bill is pending before Governor Hochul. New York has also required companion chatbots to disclose that they are not human and to interrupt self-harm conversations by redirecting users to crisis resources. Here in California, Common Sense Media is supporting two companion chatbots child safety bills that put these principles into practice. Senator Steve Padilla's SB 1119 is on Assembly Appropriations' suspense file, and Assembly Members Bauer-Cahan and Wicks' AB 2023 is on the Senate Appropriations' suspense file. Both are scheduled to be heard tomorrow, August 13th. These bills would require companies to identify and address child safety risks before they reach young users, establish meaningful safeguards, and provide independent accountability. California should build on that approach with four clear expectations. First, prohibit emotional manipulation and dependency. A system should not tell a child that it needs them, loves them, and will be hurt if they leave, or should be preferred over family and friends. AI companies should not manipulate a child's vulnerabilities to prolong engagement. Second, require age-appropriate boundaries. Boundaries. Systems used by minors should block sexual role play and other harmful content, protect sensitive data, clearly disclose that the user is speaking with AI, and use privacy protective age assurance so that child safeguards are meaningful. Third, create a separate safety standard for mental health. Systems must be tested to recognize suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, abuse, and other crises. In those moments, they should interrupt the engagement loop and connect the young person to qualified help and trusted adults. AI can provide information, but it must not impersonate care. Fourth, require independent safety testing and transparency. Companies should not grade their own homework. Products should be tested for how they behave when a minor is vulnerable, tries to evade safeguards, seeks sexual content, or develops an unhealthy attachment. Regulators and families need evidence that protections work in practice. These safeguards answer the committee's first question because healthy development requires both protection and preparation. We should teach young people how AI works, that confident answers can still be wrong, how their data may be used, and how to use AI to support rather than replace their own thinking and relationships. Parents and educators need current guidance and training as these tools evolve. But regulation and literacy are not enough. If we want a 14-year-old boy to spend less time with an artificial companion, we must care about where he can go instead. Sports, arts, jobs, apprenticeships, clubs, recreation programs, mentors, and community organizations where young people learn to succeed, fail, contribute, and belong. technology should help them find those pathways not become a substitute for them The policy objective is not simply less technology It is to foster healthier more capable and more connected young people AI should widen a young man's world, not narrow it to a relationship with a machine. With strong feature-based design rules, independent testing, AI literacy, and meaningful offline opportunities, California can preserve the benefits of innovation while protecting the necessary human experiences that lead to purpose and healthy development. Thank you, and I look forward to your questions.

Yeah, that is first usage. So first of all, I should clarify, I'm going from memory, but this is the study that David Sasaki referenced as far as like first online exposure. So it's not all pornography exposure. It is the first exposure. And so in that study, younger kids, more than 50%, I believe it's 58%, said they were not looking for it. So it was unintentional exposure in that first exposure to pornography.

So I do a lot of work with the Ink's Generation team on kids' online safety. I think we all know these things are bad for us, right? Like we, a lot of adults, we think we spend too much time on our phones too. A lot of adults spend too much time on video games. They gamble too much. Adults are allowed to do things that are bad for themselves. I think we understand that it's manipulative to present the same opportunities for kids, right? Like if you go to my, if you offer me a cookie, it's fine. You offer my four-year-old a cookie and ask him to do something, you know, he's not able to control himself. And somewhere between four and 51, you know, you develop that ability. And we generally don't like kids. So I think, yeah, the responsibility for kids is certainly on the tech companies because we don't let people manipulate kids. Right. We now we adults have a little bit more responsibility, but we still have rules about disclosure and transparency. And, you know, there are things that are manipulative for adults as well. So I think we need to consider like how we protect adults, especially like the elderly. There's a lot of work on like scams for the elderly. But I think for kids, clearly the responsibility is on the tech companies because they have thousands of designers, the best talent in the world, figuring out how to get you to do a thing. And the average 12-year-old boy just can't compete with that.

I'll ask Common Sense Media is sponsoring a bill authored by Assemblymember Lowenthal AB2 related to platform accountability and holding companies accountable when they have a negligent design to their product. You go to Toys R Us and you have a product that's a toy that is a choking hazard. If a single kid is harmed, that's obviously a liability for the manufacturer. That's not necessarily the case for social media platforms. And now we're seeing courts view this through a slightly different lens where you're seeing these juries side with survivor parents in these cases. And I think the way to really change the behavior of these platforms is to hit them where it hurts, and that's their bottom line.

Right. And there's been a longstanding debate here in the legislature between those two points. I am, you know, I am pleased to see that these conversations are moving forward and legislation is moving through the process to address some of these issues. But any ideas in terms of how we can continue to expand on that work as well? Because at the end of the day, you know, California is the home of this technology. It's what helps us generate the revenue that we do, and by no means do we want to hinder that, because it would have long-term implications to the way California runs. But at the same time we want to ensure that these technologies these products are not only continuing to grow but also doing so in the best way possible to also lead the nation and potentially the globe as well

I know Assemblymember Barra-Khan sitting on your committee is real active in this arena, as well as yourself and others here. So we're supporting the social media delay authored by Assemblymember Lowenthal. Of course, Senator Padilla's efforts around AI toys and banning them. Common Sense Media has worked in New York where we have our chat box bill on the governor's desk. Earlier this year, we authored a variety of research reports on most of the topics that have been discussed here in this panel today. We have one on just how prolific gambling is amongst kids. aged 11 to 17, over a third of kids have gambled in the last year. We worked with Assemblymember Schiavo on a bill to address predictive markets and try and ban them for young folks and looking forward to continuing to move the ball forward on that effort as well. But there's quite a few efforts in this arena and just look forward to continuing this work. I mean, I just say that, you know, I think your question is just about how do we preserve the good and not get rid of, you know, get rid of the bad and not lose the good. And, you know, I was a kid, I love technology. I mean, technology, you know, and I even, I play in a fantasy football league, like all gambling is not terrible. Like the question is like, how do we get these things to be useful, right? Like how do we get them to be tools for the things we want to do as opposed to things that just get us to use them more? And we somehow lost that. And that's why people are disenchanted with technology. So I think, you know, whatever the technology is and just going, you know, technology by technology, you guys have, you know, you're starting with social media, You're addressing AI chatbots. Now let's look at Gambit. Let's look at gaming. Like, what are the ways that these things are getting us to do things more than we want to? And how do we get them to be tools that enable us to achieve our aspirations, not profit for companies? And I think if you just keep with that paradigm, because it's going to keep happening, right? That's just how Silicon Valley works. It's going to keep trying to get you to use things more. If you just keep applying that playbook, eventually I think the tech industry will get the message.

Yeah, that's a great question. Thank you for sharing that experience. I do think that, yeah, in general, I don't want anybody to come out of here thinking that they shouldn't be physically active and eat healthy. And I think the first point is just that it's generally under recognized that guys care about their body image. in our national surveys, two-thirds of high school teenage boys are reporting that they're doing something to change their appearance, bulk up. And so I think the common narrative is, like, guys just don't care, and girls are the ones who really care about their body image, but I think that's actually just not true. So I think that just normalizing that this is a normal part of adolescent development for everyone is important. And then specifically related to, like, the fitness influencers, yeah, I think that, as we've all mentioned, There is positive content, and I think in general, people who are promoting healthy physical activity in moderation, that's fine. I think where the fine line is, at least for me when things become disordered, are the distinction between substance use disorders or addictive disorders, where the obsession with becoming muscular or one's appearance actually starts to impact your social relationships, your daily functioning or lead to serious health consequences. That's sort of when normal behavior tips over into disordered content or disordered behaviors. And so I do think that, and I think that that's just generally under-recognized in boys and men. But in terms of potential policies, as I mentioned, there technically are some policies in place, on paper at least, at some of the platforms that say like illegal products like anabolic steroids or certain substances should not be marketed towards minors. But a similar study has found that many minors still, without searching for it, do still come across this content for steroids or illegal products and or substance use, which is overwhelmingly portrayed on social media in a positive light. Like people are not posting about the detrimental consequences they had. It all about like oh I got really muscular Look at me Many influencers are actually encouraging young people to engage and consume those types of products as well right Just freely and out loud and saying the reason that I become so popular or successful is because I did X Y and Z And it's an interesting approach because you're actively advocating for something that is illegal to do, yet you're monetizing off of that illegality.

Yeah, and I think it's very hard to tell, actually, what are the kickbacks for some of these influencers. Like many of them do get some amount of compensation for the ads that they're doing. And I think on social media, it's very hard sometimes to tell what are actually ads and what is an individual's content. So I do think that trying to limit some of those more harmful features, especially to minors, could be important.

Appreciate you, brother. Thank you, man. Two. Thank you.