Mendez is a PhD candidate in population health sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a public voices fellow of The OpEd Project and Academy Health.
In a heated Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Jan. 31, a bipartisan group of lawmakers berated the leaders of Meta, TikTok, Snap, X and Discord about the harms that children have suffered on their platforms — threatening to regulate them out of business and accusing them of killing people.
I want this moment to be a precursor to meaningful policy change. But I’m pessimistic; we’ve been here before. Past congressional hearings on social media have covered a lot of ground, including election interference, extremism and disinformation, national security, and privacy violations. Though the energy behind this latest hearing is encouraging, the track record of inaction from our elected officials is disheartening. We’re doomed to repeat the same harms — only now the harms are supercharged as we enter a new era of artificially generated media.
One bill gaining attention in the wake of this hearing is the Kids Online Safety Act, which would require social media platforms to provide minors the chance to opt out of personalized recommendation systems and a mechanism to completely delete their personal data. Congress must aim higher than simply shielding people from these practices until they’re 18. Our elected officials must be willing to follow through on the bold assertions they’ve raised on the national stage. Are they actually willing to regulate Meta and X out of business? Are they actually willing to act like people’s lives are on the line?
If that sounds extreme, I invite you to reflect on the past few years. In 2020, hydroxychloroquine was unscientifically promoted as a Covid-19 treatment on social media, contributing to hundreds of deaths in May and June 2020 alone. Between May 2021 and September 2022, 232,000 lives could have been saved in the United States via uptake of Covid-19 vaccines, too many people succumbed to the spread of false information on social media. In August 2022, Boston Children’s Hospital faced a wave of harassment and bomb threats following a social media smear campaign. Surely protecting children from the harms of social media includes addressing the harms of medical disinformation that leads to death and violence.
As a public health researcher, I’m attuned to prominent medical disinformation. But the harms of its spread go beyond physical health, threatening the wellbeing of our democracy. Anti-science is now a viable political platform that distracts from the needs of politically marginalized groups. Debunked Covid-19 conspiracy theories took center stage in a House of Representatives hearing last summer that sought to cast doubt on leading virologists’ research practices. Rehashing these conspiracy theories does nothing to address the long-term impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, including the economic costs of long Covid and the higher Covid-19 death rates in rural and BIPOC communities. The mainstreaming of anti-vaccine movements in U.S politics threatens to exacerbate current disparities in other viral illnesses, such as increased flu hospitalizations in high poverty census tracts.
While medical disinformation fuels political distractions, it also overlaps with voter suppression. This means that the communities experiencing the downstream negative impacts also have less of a voice in holding elected officials accountable. Many rural voters rely on early voting, mail-in ballots and same-day registration, which have all come under attack in recent years. Stricter voter ID laws disproportionately impact communities of color. This is on top of a baseline relationship between poor health and low voter turnout.
As such, maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise that this latest social media hearing does not promise a shift in the current balance of social media profit over care. Potential voters most impacted by these issues already have less of a voice in electoral politics. Thus these interconnected issues seem likely to balloon over the coming years, as artificial intelligence tools promise to flood our social networks with an even more unfathomable scale of content hypercharged for algorithmic discoverability. We are entering an era of robots talking to robots, with us humans experiencing the collateral damage for the sake of ad sales.
There are troubling echoes in the recent rise of a ChatGPT app ecosystem, reminiscent of the central issues of social media companies. One ChatGPT plugin offers local health risk updates for respiratory illnesses in the United States. Another helps users search for clinical trials, while another offers help to understand their eligibility criteria. Still others offer more general medical information or more personalized nutrition insights. Never mind that we don’t know the sources of data driving their responses, or why they might include some pieces of information over others. Or that we have no idea how the information they give us might be tailored based on our chat history and language choices. It’s not enough that the ChatGPT prompt window warns, “ChatGPT can make mistakes. Consider checking important information.”
But tech leaders want to have their cake and eat it too, and our elected officials seem fine with this status quo. Social media and artificial intelligence are framed as transformative tools that can improve our lives and bring people together through sharing information. And yet tech companies have no responsibility for the information people encounter on them, as if all the human decisions that go into platform design, data science and content moderation don’t matter. It’s not enough that social media companies occasionally put disclaimers on content.
Tech companies are changing the world, yet we’re supposed to believe that they are powerless to intervene in it. We are supposed to believe that we, as individuals, have the ultimate responsibility for the harms of billion-dollar companies.
It’s only a matter of time before we see a new flood of influencers, human and artificial, pushing out content at an even faster rate with the help of AI-generated scripts and visuals. A narrow focus on shielding children from these products won’t be enough to protect them from the harms of extreme content and disinformation. It won’t be enough to protect the adults in their lives from the intersecting issues of medical disinformation, political disinformation and voter suppression.
As multiple congressional hearings have reminded us, the underlying design and profit motives of social media companies are already costing lives and getting in the way of civil discourse. They are already leading to bullying, extremism and mass disinformation. They are already disrupting elections. We need and deserve a sweeping policy change around social media and AI, with an intensity and breadth that match the emotional intensity of this latest hearing. We deserve more than the theater of soundbites and public scolding.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.