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Even under serious political pressure, the company insists its products aren’t inherently harmful for young users.

Following damaging internal leaks that showed Instagram can negatively impact teens’ mental health, Instagram said it would halt its plan to build a version of its app for kids. But on Wednesday, the company revealed it hasn’t ruled out making an “Instagram for Kids” one day.

At a Senate hearing on Instagram’s impact on children and teens on Wednesday, when Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) asked Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri if he would commit to permanently stopping development of Instagram for Kids, Mosseri responded:

What I can commit to you today is that no child between the ages of 10 to 12 — should we ever manage to build Instagram for 10- to 12-year-olds — will have access to that without explicit parental consent.

In other words, Mosseri was saying that Instagram may still build a product for kids, despite facing months of heavy public outrage and political pressure to abandon those plans.

The exchange reveals a deeper takeaway from the hearing: Instagram — and its parent company Meta (formerly Facebook) — do not seem to believe their product is harmful enough to children and teens that it needs radical change.

That’s in spite of internal company research leaked by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, which showed that one in three teenage girls who felt bad about their bodies said Instagram made them feel worse. The research also showed that 13 percent of British teenage users and 6 percent of American teenage users who had suicidal thoughts traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram.

While Mosseri struck a thoughtful and serious tone at the hearing when discussing topics like teen suicide, he minimized his company’s own research that showed Instagram can contribute to teenage depression and denied that Instagram is addictive.

His answers seemed to do little to reassure the remarkably bipartisan group of US lawmakers at the hearing, who say they believe Instagram is damaging teenagers’ mental health. These lawmakers say they are committed to passing legislation that could force Facebook and other tech companies to change their businesses to better protect children.

Instagram’s impact on teenage mental health has become a lightning rod in larger conversations about regulating social media, at a time when a growing proportion of the US public is increasingly distrustful of major tech companies.

But Facebook and Instagram continue to downplay this harm.

When Blumenthal asked Mosseri if he supports legislation to outlaw social media apps that are designed to be addictive for certain users, Mosseri replied, “Senator, respectfully, I don’t believe the research suggests that our products are addictive. Research actually shows that on 11 of 12 difficult issues that teens face, teens who are struggling said that Instagram helps more than harms.”

“We can debate the meaning of the word ‘addicted,’ but the fact is that teens who go to the platform find it difficult and maybe sometimes impossible to stop,” said Blumenthal.

Another illustrative moment in the two-and-a-half-hour hearing was a back-and-forth between Mosseri and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). While Cruz has used past hearings about social media to promote partisan concerns about alleged conservative censorship, this time the legislator stayed focused on the issue of children’s mental health.

When Cruz pressed Mosseri about the internal research about Instagram’s harm to teenagers with body image issues and suicidal thoughts, Mosseri again argued that on the whole, Instagram made life better for teens.

“If we’re going to have a conversation about the research, I think we need to be clear about what it actually says. It actually showed that one out of three girls who suffer from body image issues find that Instagram makes things worse, and that came from a slide with 23 other statistics where more teens found that Instagram makes things better,” said Mosseri.

In a later exchange, Mosseri said that social media platforms like Instagram have “helped important movements like body positivity to flourish. … It has helped diversify the definitions of beauty, and that’s something that we think is incredibly important.”

These defenses didn’t seem to soften lawmakers’ stances.

“I’m a mom; I’m a grandma. … I have a 12- and 13-year-old grandson. I’m talking to parents all the time,” said Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) at a press conference after the hearing. “And we know that [in] the vast number of stories that we are hearing, so many of the parents mentioned the adverse impact” of social media.

Blackburn called Mosseri’s assertion that Instagram does more good than harm to teen users “astounding,” and said that “really sounded removed from the situation.”

This all makes it clear that Facebook has lost significant trust with lawmakers. Whatever goodwill the company might have had on Capitol Hill a decade ago, when Facebook was still in its infancy and thought of by many as a universal social good, has been drastically diminished after years of controversy over the company’s struggles with privacy, hate speech, and other harmful content on its platforms.

“Big Tech loves to use grand, eloquent phrases about bringing people together, but the simple reality and why so many Americans distrust Big Tech is: You make money,” said Cruz.

It’s still too soon to say if Congress will actually pass legislation to force Facebook and other social media companies to fundamentally change their businesses to better protect teens and other users. Right now, there are several bills out to create stronger privacy laws, to establish penalties for Facebook if it allows damaging content to surface, and to mandate that Facebook must share more data with outside researchers to assess the harms of its products. So far, none of these bills have passed or are even close to passing.

But this hearing reaffirmed how Democrats and Republicans are in increasing lockstep that something must be done on the topic of how social media can harm teens.

Jim Steyer, the founder and CEO of the nonprofit Common Sense Media, which promotes safe technology and media for children and families, has long advocated for Congress to pass legislation that would better protect children on the platform by safeguarding their privacy and other measures. He said that even though Congress hasn’t moved quickly enough, he thinks Wednesday’s hearing is a sign that momentum is building for real legislation.

“We’ve seen this movie way too many times before when it comes to Facebook and Instagram — and it’s time for action by Congress on a bipartisan basis period, full stop,” he said. “But I do think it’s going to happen now.”

What has changed that Russia is building up troops on the Ukrainian border?

The current Ukraine-Russia crisis is a continuation of 2014, which itself was linked to a deep-rooted historical narrative in Russia held by Putin and many Russian elites.

“Their No. 1 objective is to reestablish as much of the old empire as it could — Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia,” said Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, the Pershing Chair in Strategic Studies at the Center for European Policy Analysis. “I think this is part of the legacy that President Putin sees for [himself].”

Ukraine is central to this vision. Culturally and economically, Putin sees Ukraine as tied to Russia. Putin used his hot vax summer to publish an article about how Ukrainians and Russians “were one people — a single whole,” according to an English translation posted on the Kremlin’s website. For him, the ex-Soviet Republic is not really a sovereign state but belongs to Russia, or at least would if not for the meddling from outside forces (read: the West) that have created a “wall” between the two.

“Step by step, Ukraine was dragged into a dangerous geopolitical game aimed at turning Ukraine into a barrier between Europe and Russia, a springboard against Russia,” Putin wrote.

This issue of Ukraine being a “springboard” for military action against Russia is also unacceptable to Putin. He wants to recreate a “sphere of influence” for Moscow, and Ukraine is the buffer between it and NATO. As Ukraine moves closer to the West, that buffer crumbles.

“The reason there’s a war in Ukraine has a lot to do with Russia’s perception of the post-Cold War order in Europe, this notion that Western states have been moving closer and closer to Russia’s borders, and indeed, gobbling up its natural sphere of influence,” Oliker said. “Ukraine’s the front line on that.”

Andriy Dubchak/AP

Ukrainian soldiers walk at the line of separation from pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine’s Donetsk region on December 7.

But recent political developments within Ukraine, the United States, Europe, and Russia help explain why tensions are flaring at this moment.

Among those developments are the 2019 election of Ukrainian president Zelensky. In addition to the other thing you might remember Zelensky for, he promised during his campaign he would seek a solution to the conflict in eastern Ukraine. He said that would include dealing with Putin directly to resolve the conflict. Russia, too, likely thought it could get something out of this: a potentially malleable Zelensky who might be more open to Russia’s point of view. That includes Russia’s desire to have Ukraine reincorporate separatist regions back into the country and hold elections, as outlined in the Minsk agreement. That sounds like something Ukraine would want until you recognize Russia has since effectively taken over those breakaway regions, and so it would really be, as one expert said, a “Trojan horse” for Moscow to wield influence and control Ukraine.

Such a concession would be politically untenable for Zelensky based on the current situation on the ground, which forced Zelensky to take a tougher line on Russia and turn to the West for help. Beyond partnerships with NATO, Zelensky has even talked openly about joining NATO. For Putin, pining for his estranged brothers, this confirmed his worst fears.

“In getting to the point [where] Zelensky was calling for outright membership in NATO and crossing what Russia has long viewed as one of their red lines — I think that does help to explain why Russians felt an impetus to threaten far greater and new use of direct military force,” said Zachary Witlin, a senior analyst with the Eurasia Group.

Just because Zelensky is asking when Kyiv gets itself into NATO does not actually mean Ukrainian membership is a realistic possibility. NATO and member states within NATO like the US and Great Britain are cooperating with Ukraine on security, they’re helping in training and reforms, and providing (or selling) military equipment. But a close partnership is not the same as membership, as it doesn’t come with the obligation of mutual defense, and the NATO countries don’t exactly want to sign themselves up for a potential war with Russia.

Of course, NATO will never say Ukrainian membership is off the table because this is what Putin wants. Putin asked President Biden for legal guarantees that NATO wouldn’t expand eastward or put weapons systems in Ukraine during their call Tuesday; US officials said they would never make such assurances.

Still, Ukraine’s closer cooperation with NATO is undeniable, said Ruslan Bortnik, director of the Ukrainian Politics Institute. “Putin and Kremlin understand that Ukraine will not be a part of NATO,” Bortnik said. “But Ukraine became an informal member of NATO without a formal decision.”

That may have left Russia feeling as though it had exhausted all of its political and diplomatic tools to bring Ukraine back into the fold. “Moscow security elites feel that they have to act now because if they don’t, military cooperation between NATO and Ukraine will become even more intense and even more sophisticated,” Pagung, of the German Council on Foreign Relations, said.

This is also not the first time Putin has signaled that he is prepared to ramp up pressure on Ukraine. In the spring of 2021, Russia began gathering forces and equipment near parts of the Ukrainian border under the guise of “readiness exercises.”

AP
People adjust a portrait of Russian President Vladimir Putin attached to a balloon during an anniversary celebration of the 2014 Crimean annexation in Sevastopol, Crimea, on March 18.

Experts said this current buildup is a continuation of that, though Putin’s troop buildup also looked very much like a signal to the new administration in Washington, with a specific message to the White House that it should not underestimate, or forget about, Moscow’s ability to cause mayhem.

Putin more or less got his wish, in the form of a summit in Geneva with the new US president. Not long after plans for the get-together were announced, Putin began drawing down some of the troops on the Ukrainian border. But Putin’s own perspective on the US has also shifted, experts said, with things like the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal (which Moscow would know something about) and the US’s domestic turmoil revealing signs of fragility. “Instead of being fear-driven by the fear that America is strong and will come after them, now they’re opportunity-driven: they think that America is weak, and maybe in the spring we have just missed the chance,” said Gustav Gressel, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

All of this may make Russia feel a bit opportunistic. The United States is distracted by its domestic agenda and wants to focus on China. Europe is dealing with its own internal crises, like a rebellious Poland, tensions with Belarus, a hangover from Brexit, and a surging coronavirus wave. Germany has a new chancellor; France has elections soon.

Those distractions, combined with Ukraine’s resistance and affinity for NATO, may embolden Putin. Some experts noted Putin has his own domestic pressures to deal with, including the coronavirus and a struggling economy, and he may think such an adventure will boost his standing at home, just like it did in 2014. “There may be a sense of now or never,” Motyl said. “We recapture this place, which shouldn’t have been independent in the first place. Perhaps they made a mistake, and we need to rectify that.”

So what happens now?

Biden and Putin didn’t come to a real resolution over Ukraine during their Tuesday meeting. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, said Wednesday that the two leaders did agree to talks to discuss this “complex, confrontational situation.” The White House readout said that the two sides would follow up, and the US “would do so in close cooperation with its allies.” Biden spoke to US allies after the Putin call, and is speaking Thursday to Zelensky.

Mikhail Metzel, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP
Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks with President Joe Biden via videoconference in the Bocharov Ruchei residence in Sochi, Russia, on December 7.

US and NATO officials have repeatedly indicated they’re not interested in a head-to-head military conflict with Russia over Ukraine, which means the US and its allies are most likely looking at some sort of economic pressure on Russia. Some reporting suggests that any Russian provocation would effectively kill Nord Stream 2, the gas pipeline connecting Russia and Germany that’s not yet up and running. Biden had waived sanctions against Nord Stream 2 in the spring, a concession, in part, to its ally Germany but something Russia also saw as a win. Experts said there are other sanction options that could put pressure on Russia, such as cutting Russia off from SWIFT, the international payments system.

“I will look you in the eye and tell you, as President Biden looked Putin in the eye and told him today, that things we did not do in 2014 we are prepared to do now,” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters Tuesday.

But tens of thousands of Russian troops are still at Ukraine’s borders, an undeniable threat. “The problem with these concentrations of troops is that this can come also as an embarrassment for Putin if he does not get anything of the sort out of it,” said Andreas Umland, a Kyiv-based analyst for the Stockholm Center for Eastern European Studies.

And that something is not necessarily all- out war. Russia has already invaded Ukraine and is supporting separatists in Donbas (though it denies it). The heightened tensions mean Ukraine is also on high alert, and its military may be stretched as it tries to fend off a possible attack. Russia could take advantage and try to expand the conflict in eastern Ukraine. “The fact is, Putin can try to destabilize the Ukrainians by inflicting more casualties and trying to escalate. And from there, I can see, ‘Okay, can I go further? Or will the West react?’” Gressel said.

This may even be the more likely scenario, and experts in the US, Europe, and Ukraine that I spoke to do not think war is inevitable, though it is undeniably a very dangerous situation. Putin’s ultimate goal is to get Ukraine to do what he wants, and what he wants is for Ukraine to come back under its influence and control. But even a large-scale evasion might not achieve that, and it would come with extreme costs for Russia. Russia could ultimately outmatch Ukraine’s military, but it would not be a bloodless fight. Russian soldiers would die — despite Putin’s propaganda that suggests Ukraine would welcome Russia as its liberator. A war with Ukraine could lead to an occupation, an insurgency, and the destruction of the country. No rational leader would attempt that, Motyl said. “And the answer to that is: But is Putin rational?”

Carson v. Makin appears likely to end in another transformative victory for the religious right.

At an oral argument held Wednesday morning, all six members of the Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority appeared likely to blow a significant new hole in the wall separating church and state.

The case is Carson v. Makin; the question is whether the state of Maine is required to subsidize religious education; and the majority’s answer appears, at least under certain circumstances, to be yes.

Under current law, as Justice Elena Kagan noted during Wednesday’s argument, the question of whether to fund religious education is typically left up to elected officials. Maine’s legislators decided not to do so when they drafted the state’s unusual tuition voucher program that’s at issue in Carson, and is meant to ensure that children in sparsely populated areas still receive a free education.

The overwhelming majority of Maine schoolchildren attend a school designated by their local school district. But a small minority — fewer than 5,000 students, according to the state — live in rural areas where it is not cost-effective for the state to either operate its own public school or contract with a nearby school to educate local students. In these areas, students are provided a subsidy, which helps them pay tuition at the private school of their family’s choice.

The issue in Carson is that only “nonsectarian” schools are eligible for this subsidy. Families may still send their children to religious schools, but the state will not pay for children to attend schools that seek to inculcate their students into a religious faith.

All six of the Court’s Republican appointees appeared to think that this exclusion for religious schools is unconstitutional — meaning that Maine would be required to pay for tuition at pervasively religious schools. Notably, that could include schools that espouse hateful worldviews. According to the state, one of the plaintiff families in Carson wants the state to pay for a school that requires teachers to sign a contract stating that “the Bible says that ‘God recognize[s] homosexuals and other deviants as perverted’” and that “[s]uch deviation from Scriptural standards is grounds for termination.’”

In the likely event that these plaintiffs’ families prevail, that will mark a significant escalation in the Court’s decisions benefiting the religious right — even if the Court limits the decision narrowly to Maine’s situation. Shortly after Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation gave Republicans a 6-3 supermajority on the Supreme Court, the Court handed down a revolutionary decision holding that people of faith may seek broad exemptions from the laws that apply to anyone else. But the Court has historically been more reluctant to require the government to tax its citizens and spend that money on religion.

That reluctance may very well be gone.

The Court’s conservative majority wants to redefine what constitutes religious “discrimination”

The purpose of Maine’s exclusion for sectarian schools, according to Christopher Taub, the lawyer given the unfortunate task of defending that exclusion against a hostile Supreme Court, is to ensure that the state remains “neutral and silent” on questions of religion.

For many years, the Constitution was understood to require this kind of neutrality. As the Court held in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), “no tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.”

Everson was effectively abandoned by the Court’s decision in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002), in which a 5-4 Court upheld a pilot program in Ohio that provided tuition vouchers funding private education — including at religious schools. But Zelman, as Kagan pointed out today, merely held that states “could” fund religious education if they chose to do so. Nothing in that decision prevents states from adopting the same neutral posture toward religion that was once required by cases like Everson.

On Wednesday, however, several members of the Court’s Republican-appointed majority questioned whether religious neutrality is even possible, and suggested that Maine’s efforts to remain neutral on questions of religion are themselves a form of discrimination against people of faith.

Chief Justice John Roberts, for example, proposed a hypothetical involving two private schools. One of these schools teaches its religious beliefs openly and explicitly, and it also teaches a particular set of religious values in the process. The other school might eschew explicit references to God or to a holy text, but it teaches a different value system that is motivated by religious beliefs. If the state funds the latter school but not the former one, Roberts asked, why is it not drawing “distinctions based on doctrine”?

Justice Samuel Alito, meanwhile, offered the Fox News version of Roberts’s argument. Maine’s law, Alito noted, does not contain explicit exemptions for private schools that teach white supremacy or critical race theory, but it does explicitly exempt religious schools from its tuition program. The implication was that Maine is discriminating against religion and in favor of critical race theory.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, meanwhile, offered the most direct version of this argument that neutrality toward religion is the same thing as discrimination. “Discriminating against all religions” is still unlawful discrimination, Kavanaugh told Taub — a position that is difficult to square with the text of the First Amendment, which prohibits laws “respecting an establishment of religion.”

It should be noted that Roberts and Kavanaugh are, while both very conservative, the most moderate members of the Court’s six-justice conservative bloc. So if both of these justices vote against Maine, it’s hard to imagine how the state finds five votes to sustain its law.

That said, there is an off chance that the Court will dismiss this case. Early in the oral argument, Justice Clarence Thomas pointed to the fact that his Court may not have jurisdiction to hear the Carson case.

Under Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife (1992), federal courts may not hear a lawsuit unless the injury alleged by the plaintiffs can be “redressed by a favorable decision.” But, according to Maine, both of the plaintiff families want to send their children to schools that might refuse state funds even if such funds are offered to them — because Maine forbids all entities that receive state subsidies from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation.

Even if the Court were to order Maine to provide tuition subsidies to religious schools, in other words, the plaintiffs in Carson might wind up with nothing, because their preferred schools could choose to keep their anti-LGBTQ policies intact instead of receiving state subsidies.

Nevertheless, even if the Court does ultimately decide to dismiss the case for lack of jurisdiction, that will only delay a reckoning over public funding for religious institutions. Eventually, some lawyer will find a school that is willing to accept state funding. And when that happens, there will likely be at least five votes on the Supreme Court to hand that lawyer a victory.

The justices are likely to place some limits on its decision in Carson, but it’s not yet clear how they will justify those limits

Although the six conservative justices showed little sympathy for Maine’s position — or for existing law — on Wednesday, some of them did suggest that there should be some limits on a decision forcing states to fund religion.

Roberts, for example, suggested that he might strike down a program that gave money directly to religious institutions in order to fund religious programs, rather than providing tuition grants to parents who then turn that money over to a religious school. Suppose that a state has a program that funds building construction at private schools, Roberts suggested at one point, but that also provides that the money cannot be used to build a chapel. He appeared to be suggesting that such an exclusion for chapel construction is permissible.

Similarly, Kavanaugh asked Michael Bindas, the lawyer challenging Maine’s program, whether religious families are entitled to tuition vouchers merely because their state funds ordinary public schools. Bindas denied that tuition vouchers are required under these circumstances, pointing to a line in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020) stating that “a State need not subsidize private education.”

But it’s hard to draw a principled line between a Court decision requiring Maine to fund religious education as part of its existing private school tuition program and a decision requiring all states with a public school system to fund religious education.

In his brief, Bindas argues that policies that require religious families to “choose between their religious beliefs and receiving a government benefit” are unconstitutional. But if the Constitution does not permit states to force families to choose between receiving a free education and a religious one, then then it’s unclear why this rule wouldn’t threaten any public school system.

Traditional public education, where students attend a government-run school for free, is a government benefit. All families who send their children to private, religious schools choose to forgo this government benefit. So, under the rule articulated in Bindas’s brief, every state may be required to pay for private tuition at religious schools.

In any event, the Court has previously drawn unprincipled lines that are difficult to square with legal texts and existing doctrines. So if five justices are bothered by the possibility that ordinary public school districts may be required to fund religious education, they could simply declare that such a thing is not required and leave it at that. Proponents of a wall of separation between church and state can take some minor comfort in that fact.

At the very least, however, the Court appears likely to hand down a transformative decision rethinking much of its approach to religion — and to force at least some states to fund religious education in the process.

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