In defense of Quibi

Quibi was a bad idea , poorly executed .
Now it ’ s dead , just six months after it debuted .
• Hollywood legend Jeffrey Katzenberg raised $ 1.75 billion to launch a service that promised to deliver subscribers “ quick bites ” of “ premium video ” to their phones .
Even though there was no shortage of video , premium or otherwise , that people could watch on their phones or any other devices .
• Quibi launched in April , during the first swell of the pandemic .
And even though every other video service saw @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shutdown , Quibi couldn ’ t find an audience — let alone paying customers .
• Last month , Katzenberg started trying to sell the company .
Today , he ’ s shutting it down .
It was easy to be skeptical about Quibi before launch because ... see above .
The real surprise is that it failed so quickly .
And even that surprise is a little bit couched .
Once news got out that Katzenberg was trying to sell , the only question was whether he ’ d find a buyer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wrote last month , you don ’ t try to sell your startup five months after launch if things aren ’ t going terribly , even though Katzenberg insisted otherwise in sales pitches .
But , that said : I would like to see more Quibis in the future .
Not the concept or the execution ( again , see above ) but the model : Running a media business the old-fashioned way , where you ask people to make something , pay them for it , and then try to re-sell that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s another version of running a media business — what YouTube , Twitter , and Facebook do — and I don ’ t feel great about that one in 2020 .
To recap : Katzenberg and Meg Whitman , the CEO he hired away from Hewlett Packard , paid Hollywood studios , TV networks , and digital shops like Vox Media ( which owns this site ) to make short videos .
Then they tried selling subscriptions to those videos to you .
That ’ s one way — the old way @ @ @ @ @ @ @ There are lots of variants , and you can debate the right way to scale those companies and how much money you need to make them work , etc .
The model includes everything from your local newspaper ( if it still exists ) to TV networks to Spotify to Netflix .
But they ’ re all using the same basic playbook .
There is also the new — and often much more successful way — to run a media business : Get people to give you stuff for free , get people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and sell their attention to advertisers .
You may not want to call yourself a media business — for strategic , valuation , or legal reasons — but you are most definitely in the media business .
This has worked really , really well for YouTube , Twitter , and Facebook .
But as we spend a lot of time discussing these days , it ’ s not clear that the model that YouTube , Twitter , and Facebook use — which is dependent on ingesting as much free content as possible , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ possible , with as little input from the people who run those businesses as possible — is good for the rest of us .
And at the core of all the proposals to fix those businesses is the idea that they should act a lot more like ... traditional media businesses .
These proposals call for the people who run these platforms to pay attention to what they distribute , and even make judgment calls about whether that stuff should be distributed .
And , yes : It also involves paying people who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
I don ’ t want to belabor this thought , and I don ’ t want to oversell it .
Quibi would have likely struggled using any model because it didn ’ t have stuff people wanted to see , and it didn ’ t have the distribution it needed to get it in front of them , anyway .
And while the Facebooks of the world run on free content , they certainly have to spend money on lots of other stuff .
TikTok , for example , spent $ 1 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in order to get its free videos , uploaded for free by its users , in front of people around the world .
But if you ’ re going to dunk on Quibi for failing so big , so fast , at least give them this : They failed the old-fashioned way .
Which still has an upside .
Help keep Vox free for all Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what ’ s happening in the news , from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ election of our lifetimes .
Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment : to empower you through understanding .
But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources .
Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers , your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work .
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Quibi was a bad idea, poorly executed. Now it’s dead, just six months after it debuted.
Here’s a quick timeline of its short life:
Hollywood legend Jeffrey Katzenberg raised $1.75 billion to launch a service that promised to deliver subscribers “quick bites” of “premium video” to their phones. Even though there was no shortage of video, premium or otherwise, that people could watch on their phones or any other devices.
Quibi launched in April, during the first swell of the pandemic. And even though every other video service saw a huge leap in engagement during the shutdown, Quibi couldn’t find an audience — let alone paying customers.
Last month, Katzenberg started trying to sell the company. Today, he’s shutting it down.
It was easy to be skeptical about Quibi before launch because ... see above. The real surprise is that it failed so quickly. And even that surprise is a little bit couched. Once news got out that Katzenberg was trying to sell, the only question was whether he’d find a buyer or have to shutter. As I wrote last month, you don’t try to sell your startup five months after launch if things aren’t going terribly, even though Katzenberg insisted otherwise in sales pitches.
But, that said: I would like to see more Quibis in the future.
Not the concept or the execution (again, see above) but the model: Running a media business the old-fashioned way, where you ask people to make something, pay them for it, and then try to re-sell that work to someone else. Because there’s another version of running a media business — what YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook do — and I don’t feel great about that one in 2020.
To recap: Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, the CEO he hired away from Hewlett Packard, paid Hollywood studios, TV networks, and digital shops like Vox Media (which owns this site) to make short videos. Then they tried selling subscriptions to those videos to you.
That’s one way — the old way — to run a media business.
There are lots of variants, and you can debate the right way to scale those companies and how much money you need to make them work, etc. The model includes everything from your local newspaper (if it still exists) to TV networks to Spotify to Netflix. But they’re all using the same basic playbook.
There is also the new — and often much more successful way — to run a media business: Get people to give you stuff for free, get people to consume that stuff for free, and sell their attention to advertisers. You may not want to call yourself a media business — for strategic, valuation, or legal reasons — but you are most definitely in the media business. This has worked really, really well for YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook.
But as we spend a lot of time discussing these days, it’s not clear that the model that YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook use — which is dependent on ingesting as much free content as possible, and distributing as widely and quickly as possible, with as little input from the people who run those businesses as possible — is good for the rest of us.
And at the core of all the proposals to fix those businesses is the idea that they should act a lot more like ... traditional media businesses. These proposals call for the people who run these platforms to pay attention to what they distribute, and even make judgment calls about whether that stuff should be distributed. And, yes: It also involves paying people who make some of the stuff they distribute.
I don’t want to belabor this thought, and I don’t want to oversell it. Quibi would have likely struggled using any model because it didn’t have stuff people wanted to see, and it didn’t have the distribution it needed to get it in front of them, anyway.
And while the Facebooks of the world run on free content, they certainly have to spend money on lots of other stuff. TikTok, for example, spent $1 billion on marketing in a single year in order to get its free videos, uploaded for free by its users, in front of people around the world.
But if you’re going to dunk on Quibi for failing so big, so fast, at least give them this: They failed the old-fashioned way. Which still has an upside.


vox--2020-10-21--What the FCC can and can’t do to Section 230

The Trump administration is once again trying to force social media platforms to do its bidding .
This time , the Federal Communications Commission ( FCC ) has been tapped to use a law called Section 230 to prevent websites from moderating content in a way that many conservatives believe is biased against them .
Despite the law being designed to prevent FCC intervention — and the FCC itself using that as justification not to regulate the internet just a few years ago — it appears the agency is going to try .
This comes after Trump and many conservatives @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be punished after the platforms suppressed links to the New York Post ’ s questionably sourced story about Hunter Biden .
This prompted another all-caps demand from Trump to repeal Section 230 and the Republican-led Senate to prepare to subpoena Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey , accusing the company of election interference .
The very next day , FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced that his agency would “ move forward with a rulemaking to clarify ” the meaning of Section 230 , which gives internet platforms like Facebook and Twitter immunity from lawsuits over @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to say , if someone defames you in a tweet , you can sue the Twitter user but not Twitter itself .
This 25-year-old law is what allows websites that rely on third-party content to exist at all .
It also allows those sites to moderate that content as they see fit , which has been a source of ire for conservatives who believe they are being censored when Facebook bans them , YouTube demonetizes them , or Twitter appends fact-checks to their tweets .
Trump has been particularly upset about this in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ down on the misinformation he spreads .
In May , he went so far as to issue an executive order calling for the FCC to come up with rules that would prevent websites from moderating content based on a perceived anti-conservative bias , which is the basis for the FCC ’ s actions now .
But legal experts — former FCC commissioners and staff among them — don ’ t think the FCC is allowed to regulate the internet in this way .
“ I don ’ t think the FCC has the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler , Pai ’ s predecessor and no fan of Section 230 himself , told Recode .
Wheeler added : “ The Trump administration practices government by performance .
They come out and they beat their chests and they say we ’ re gon na do this on 230 , and we ’ re gon na do that on the digital divide .
But it ’ s chest-pounding , not policy .
There ’ s a difference between showbiz and substance.
” Pai has claimed that the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ M. Johnson Jr. , told him that the FCC has the legal authority to interpret Section 230 .
When asked to elaborate on where that legal authority comes from , FCC spokesperson Brian Hart told Recode , “ We don ’ t have anything to add at this point.
” Johnson later issued a statement citing Section 201 ( b ) of the Communications Act , which says that the FCC may “ prescribe such rules and regulations as may be necessary in the public interest to carry out this Act.
” Many @ @ @ @ @ @ @ applies only to common carriers .
And the section does , in fact , fall under Title II of the Communications Act , which is titled “ Common Carriers ” — defined as entities that provide “ telecommunications services , ” like phone companies .
But Johnson ’ s interpretation of 201 ( b ) is that it should apply to everything covered by the Act and that this includes social media companies .
This is despite the fact that the FCC said in 2017 that it was “ misguided and legally flawed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ telecommunications service under Title II .
“ 201 ( b ) is inside Title II of the Communications Act , and Pai has gone out of his way to say that ISPs are not subject to Title II , ” Wheeler said .
“ If the ISPs are not subject to Title II , how in the world can you make the stretch that those that transmit over the ISPs are subject to Title II ?
” Harold Feld , senior vice president at open internet advocacy group Public Knowledge , said in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the FCC to regulate Section 230 was just a rumor — that this was both a “ bad idea ” and that he couldn ’ t see any way that the FCC had the authority to do it .
“ The FCC can not rewrite acts of Congress to suit its whims , ” Kate Ruane , senior legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union , said in a statement .
“ Section 230 is critical to protecting free speech online and the FCC has no authority to change it , especially @ @ @ @ @ @ @ expression.
” “ There ’ s nothing in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that gives the FCC authority either to interpret it or , even more importantly , set rules , ” said Gigi Sohn , a distinguished fellow at the Georgetown Institute for Technology & Law Policy who was counselor to Wheeler from 2013 to 2016 .
“ In fact , the legislative history is completely to the contrary.
” The law ’ s bipartisan co-authors , Sen. Ron Wyden and former Rep. Chris Cox , have said they intentionally @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from having this authority in the first place .
Back in 1995 , when the Communications Decency Act was being considered , there was some debate over what the FCC ’ s role in regulating the internet should be .
Wyden and Cox thought FCC oversight would be a barrier to internet innovation and development .
As Cox said in the House at the time , Section 230 “ will establish as the policy of the United States that we do not wish to have content regulation by the federal government of what @ @ @ @ @ @ @ do not wish to have a ‘ Federal Computer Commission ’ with an army of bureaucrats regulating the internet.
” He continued : “ If we regulate the internet at the FCC , that will freeze or at least slow down technology .
It will threaten the future of the internet.
” That ’ s a vision that Pai himself agreed with back in 2017 , when the FCC — under his chairmanship — repealed net neutrality , citing Section 230 ’ s provision that the United States ’ policy is not to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with federal or state regulation as justification for taking a “ light-touch approach ” to “ burdensome regulation that stifles innovation and deters investment.
” Because of this , Sohn said , the FCC would essentially have to reverse its own decision — one that has become emblematic of the FCC ’ s anti-regulatory approach under Pai and the Trump administration — in order to make the case that it has any authority over Section 230 at all .
To this argument , Johnson said in his statement that “ none of these @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of whether the FCC has the authority to interpret Section 230 , and that doing so would not be regulation but “ clarifying a legal standard.
” Johnson admitted that , while the FCC once used Section 230 to guide its actions when repealing net neutrality , it “ need not rely ” on it here and can instead use 201 ( b ) as he interprets it .
Put simply , Johnson believes that the FCC can pick and choose which statute to apply and which to ignore depending on what it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ If the FCC does decide to try to make rules for Section 230 , it will need the majority of the five-person commission to agree on them .
Pai is clearly in favor , and fellow commissioner Brendan Carr is , too .
Democratic commissioners Geoffrey Starks and Jessica Rosenworcel are not .
That leaves the fifth commissioner as the deciding vote .
Right now , that ’ s Republican Michael O ’ Rielly , who has signaled that he is not in favor of regulating Section 230 in this way .
But @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who Trump nominated last month to replace O ’ Rielly .
And Simington appears to be in favor of regulating Section 230 through the FCC , which is likely part of why Trump nominated him in the first place .
After that , it will probably take several weeks or months to issue those rules .
It ’ s already taken nearly five months between Trump ’ s executive order calling for its action for the FCC to get to this point .
Depending on how the election goes , Trump may no @ @ @ @ @ @ @ could control both branches of the legislature , in which case executive orders and FCC interpretations under the Trump administration will almost certainly come to an end .
But let ’ s say that Trump does win the election — what then ?
There ’ s still no guarantee that what Trump wants to happen will happen , or that it would happen anytime soon .
Congress can overturn FCC rules , and it likely would if it has a Democratic majority in both houses .
While Democrats have their own problems with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on eliminating immunity protections for websites that feature child sex trafficking and child sexual abuse images .
Changing Section 230 ’ s content moderation policies has become a partisan issue — Republicans are the ones writing bill after bill opposing Section 230 and decrying perceived censorship on social media platforms — and that makes it much less likely that Democrats will pick up the Republicans ’ cause .
If Congress doesn ’ t reject the FCC ’ s rules , then it ’ ll be up to the courts , which has become @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to accede to laws until it absolutely has to .
A number of organizations already have sued the Trump administration over the executive order , citing First Amendment and regulatory policy violations .
And that litigation will likely come with injunctions that prevent any regulations from taking effect until the courts can rule on them .
“ This is going to be tied up in litigation forever and a day , ” Sohn said .
Courts have typically ruled in Section 230 ’ s favor , but there ’ s at least one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas recently said that he thinks courts have gotten Section 230 wrong , and the protection from lawsuits its provides has been granted too liberally .
But he said this in the court ’ s denial to hear a case about Section 230 , which indicates that the majority of justices aren ’ t interested in reconsidering Section 230 right now .
So how likely is it that the FCC will be the one to make Trump ’ s dreams of an internet that doesn ’ t put fact-checks @ @ @ @ @ @ @ very , and certainly not anytime soon .
But the administration has already gotten its way just by threatening to do so : Twitter changed its rules a few hours after Pai issued his statement .
The next day , it allowed the Post story on the platform .
Open Sourced is made possible by Omidyar Network .
All Open Sourced content is editorially independent and produced by our journalists .
Help keep Vox free for all Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what ’ s happening in the news , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reckoning to what is , quite possibly , the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes .
Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment : to empower you through understanding .
But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources .
Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers , your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work .
If you have already contributed , thank you .
If you haven ’ t , please consider helping everyone make sense of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from as little as $ 3 .

The Trump administration is once again trying to force social media platforms to do its bidding. This time, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been tapped to use a law called Section 230 to prevent websites from moderating content in a way that many conservatives believe is biased against them. Despite the law being designed to prevent FCC intervention — and the FCC itself using that as justification not to regulate the internet just a few years ago — it appears the agency is going to try.
This comes after Trump and many conservatives have called for Twitter and Facebook to be punished after the platforms suppressed links to the New York Post’s questionably sourced story about Hunter Biden. This prompted another all-caps demand from Trump to repeal Section 230 and the Republican-led Senate to prepare to subpoena Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, accusing the company of election interference.
The very next day, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced that his agency would “move forward with a rulemaking to clarify” the meaning of Section 230, which gives internet platforms like Facebook and Twitter immunity from lawsuits over content their users provide. That is to say, if someone defames you in a tweet, you can sue the Twitter user but not Twitter itself. This 25-year-old law is what allows websites that rely on third-party content to exist at all. It also allows those sites to moderate that content as they see fit, which has been a source of ire for conservatives who believe they are being censored when Facebook bans them, YouTube demonetizes them, or Twitter appends fact-checks to their tweets.
Trump has been particularly upset about this in recent months, as platforms have cracked down on the misinformation he spreads. In May, he went so far as to issue an executive order calling for the FCC to come up with rules that would prevent websites from moderating content based on a perceived anti-conservative bias, which is the basis for the FCC’s actions now.
The FCC isn’t the thought police
But legal experts — former FCC commissioners and staff among them — don’t think the FCC is allowed to regulate the internet in this way.
“I don’t think the FCC has the authority to be thought police over platforms,” former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, Pai’s predecessor and no fan of Section 230 himself, told Recode.
Wheeler added: “The Trump administration practices government by performance. They come out and they beat their chests and they say we’re gonna do this on 230, and we’re gonna do that on the digital divide. But it’s chest-pounding, not policy. There’s a difference between showbiz and substance.”
Pai has claimed that the FCC’s general counsel, Thomas M. Johnson Jr., told him that the FCC has the legal authority to interpret Section 230. When asked to elaborate on where that legal authority comes from, FCC spokesperson Brian Hart told Recode, “We don’t have anything to add at this point.”
Johnson later issued a statement citing Section 201(b) of the Communications Act, which says that the FCC may “prescribe such rules and regulations as may be necessary in the public interest to carry out this Act.” Many have argued that 201(b) applies only to common carriers. And the section does, in fact, fall under Title II of the Communications Act, which is titled “Common Carriers” — defined as entities that provide “telecommunications services,” like phone companies.
But Johnson’s interpretation of 201(b) is that it should apply to everything covered by the Act and that this includes social media companies. This is despite the fact that the FCC said in 2017 that it was “misguided and legally flawed” to classify broadband internet as a telecommunications service under Title II.
“201(b) is inside Title II of the Communications Act, and Pai has gone out of his way to say that ISPs are not subject to Title II,” Wheeler said. “If the ISPs are not subject to Title II, how in the world can you make the stretch that those that transmit over the ISPs are subject to Title II?”
Harold Feld, senior vice president at open internet advocacy group Public Knowledge, said in 2019 — when an executive order commanding the FCC to regulate Section 230 was just a rumor — that this was both a “bad idea” and that he couldn’t see any way that the FCC had the authority to do it.
“The FCC cannot rewrite acts of Congress to suit its whims,” Kate Ruane, senior legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. “Section 230 is critical to protecting free speech online and the FCC has no authority to change it, especially not in ways that will undermine free expression.”
Section 230 was designed to prevent FCC interference
“There’s nothing in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that gives the FCC authority either to interpret it or, even more importantly, set rules,” said Gigi Sohn, a distinguished fellow at the Georgetown Institute for Technology & Law Policy who was counselor to Wheeler from 2013 to 2016. “In fact, the legislative history is completely to the contrary.”
The law’s bipartisan co-authors, Sen. Ron Wyden and former Rep. Chris Cox, have said they intentionally wrote the law to prevent the FCC from having this authority in the first place.
The FCC does not have the authority to rewrite the law, and Ajit Pai can't appoint himself commissioner of the speech police. Read my comments with former-Rep. Cox on why this process is so deeply flawed. https://t.co/7JxSSKNmRR — Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) October 15, 2020
Back in 1995, when the Communications Decency Act was being considered, there was some debate over what the FCC’s role in regulating the internet should be. Wyden and Cox thought FCC oversight would be a barrier to internet innovation and development.
As Cox said in the House at the time, Section 230 “will establish as the policy of the United States that we do not wish to have content regulation by the federal government of what is on the internet — that we do not wish to have a ‘Federal Computer Commission’ with an army of bureaucrats regulating the internet.”
He continued: “If we regulate the internet at the FCC, that will freeze or at least slow down technology. It will threaten the future of the internet.”
That’s a vision that Pai himself agreed with back in 2017, when the FCC — under his chairmanship — repealed net neutrality, citing Section 230’s provision that the United States’ policy is not to interfere with the growth of the internet with federal or state regulation as justification for taking a “light-touch approach” to “burdensome regulation that stifles innovation and deters investment.”
Because of this, Sohn said, the FCC would essentially have to reverse its own decision — one that has become emblematic of the FCC’s anti-regulatory approach under Pai and the Trump administration — in order to make the case that it has any authority over Section 230 at all.
To this argument, Johnson said in his statement that “none of these observations bear on the central question” of whether the FCC has the authority to interpret Section 230, and that doing so would not be regulation but “clarifying a legal standard.” Johnson admitted that, while the FCC once used Section 230 to guide its actions when repealing net neutrality, it “need not rely” on it here and can instead use 201(b) as he interprets it. Put simply, Johnson believes that the FCC can pick and choose which statute to apply and which to ignore depending on what it hopes to accomplish.
What happens next
If the FCC does decide to try to make rules for Section 230, it will need the majority of the five-person commission to agree on them. Pai is clearly in favor, and fellow commissioner Brendan Carr is, too. Democratic commissioners Geoffrey Starks and Jessica Rosenworcel are not. That leaves the fifth commissioner as the deciding vote. Right now, that’s Republican Michael O’Rielly, who has signaled that he is not in favor of regulating Section 230 in this way. But it could soon be Nathan Simington, who Trump nominated last month to replace O’Rielly. And Simington appears to be in favor of regulating Section 230 through the FCC, which is likely part of why Trump nominated him in the first place.
After that, it will probably take several weeks or months to issue those rules. It’s already taken nearly five months between Trump’s executive order calling for its action for the FCC to get to this point. Depending on how the election goes, Trump may no longer be in office and the Democrats could control both branches of the legislature, in which case executive orders and FCC interpretations under the Trump administration will almost certainly come to an end.
But let’s say that Trump does win the election — what then? There’s still no guarantee that what Trump wants to happen will happen, or that it would happen anytime soon. Congress can overturn FCC rules, and it likely would if it has a Democratic majority in both houses. While Democrats have their own problems with Section 230, those have mostly focused on eliminating immunity protections for websites that feature child sex trafficking and child sexual abuse images. Changing Section 230’s content moderation policies has become a partisan issue — Republicans are the ones writing bill after bill opposing Section 230 and decrying perceived censorship on social media platforms — and that makes it much less likely that Democrats will pick up the Republicans’ cause.
If Congress doesn’t reject the FCC’s rules, then it’ll be up to the courts, which has become the norm for an administration that refuses to accede to laws until it absolutely has to. A number of organizations already have sued the Trump administration over the executive order, citing First Amendment and regulatory policy violations. And that litigation will likely come with injunctions that prevent any regulations from taking effect until the courts can rule on them.
“This is going to be tied up in litigation forever and a day,” Sohn said.
Courts have typically ruled in Section 230’s favor, but there’s at least one judge who seems to feel differently: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas recently said that he thinks courts have gotten Section 230 wrong, and the protection from lawsuits its provides has been granted too liberally. But he said this in the court’s denial to hear a case about Section 230, which indicates that the majority of justices aren’t interested in reconsidering Section 230 right now.
So how likely is it that the FCC will be the one to make Trump’s dreams of an internet that doesn’t put fact-checks on his tweets come true? Not very, and certainly not anytime soon. But the administration has already gotten its way just by threatening to do so: Twitter changed its rules a few hours after Pai issued his statement. The next day, it allowed the Post story on the platform.
Open Sourced is made possible by Omidyar Network. All Open Sourced content is editorially independent and produced by our journalists.


vox--2020-10-21--How The Vow’s directors went past the “sex cult” headlines to tell NXIVM’s deeper story

How does a successful , self-aware , well-adjusted person get sucked into a cult ?
And once they get out — if they even can — how do they live with themselves ?
Those are the questions that HBO ’ s documentary series The Vow seeks to tangle with , and it does not give easy answers .
The show is a look into NXIVM , a “ company ” that provided self-improvement classes but also spiraled into something more , leading to the indictment of its founder and several members ( including Smallville actor Allison Mack ) for sex @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for women , dubbed DOS , is at the center of the allegations , especially since news reports revealed that part of the group ’ s initiation involved branding the initials of the group ’ s leaders onto the women ’ s pelvic areas .
The series primarily follows former NXIVM members Mark Vicente , Bonnie Piesse , Sarah Edmondson , and Anthony “ Nippy ” Ames , along with Catherine Oxenberg ( whose daughter India Oxenberg was in NXIVM ) , as they recount their experiences and grapple with their futures .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ season of The Vow concluded its run with a bang , with characters who had only been seen in video footage — like NXIVM leader Keith Raniere , who ’ s currently held in Brooklyn ’ s Metropolitan Detention Center ahead of his October 27 sentencing hearing — finally talking directly to the filmmakers .
A second season seemed imminent .
And so a part two is , unsurprisingly , in the works .
HBO announced just days before the finale that there would be another season of The Vow next year .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ cases and verdicts happening as the show was airing , there seemed to be more to the story than what the first season covered .
Curious about what comes next and the mechanics of making a series like this , I spoke with the series ’ directors , Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer .
Nominated for an Oscar for their 2013 film The Square , the pair have made it a habit to explore the ways people become committed to ideas and then to radical action , whether it ’ s the Egyptian @ @ @ @ @ @ @ action in last year ’ s The Great Hack .
We spoke by phone the day after the series finale aired about their goals in making The Vow , Noujaim ’ s own involvement with NXIVM , and how the pair ’ s backgrounds as Egyptian Americans prepared them for this work .
Our conversation follows , lightly edited and condensed for clarity .
Going into the project , did you have a sense of how it was going to end ?
Or were you flying blind ?
Absolutely flying blind .
And @ @ @ @ @ @ @ films .
That ’ s what ’ s exciting about making a vérité film — we follow the story as it unfolds .
Often , you imagine where it might go , but you really don ’ t know .
So you ’ re learning things as the characters are learning things , as the subjects .
Our job is to follow as closely as possible .
This story started as a very personal story about a crisis of faith that my friend Mark Vicente was having in his relationship with [ his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it just blew up , and we hung on for the ride .
We were following the story before the New York Times , before anyone knew about it .
We had just found out about the branding .
I had just finished a class [ with NXIVM ] ; I had taken ESP [ Executive Success Program , a NXIVM foundational course ] in 2010 , and I had tried to make a film about the organization at that point in time .
I spoke to all of the leadership at that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ get the kind of access that I needed to get multiple perspectives on things .
Soon after that , I went back to Egypt , and the Egyptian Revolution started .
So , I made The Square with my husband Karim .
I met Karim during the Egyptian Revolution .
I was jailed at that time .
So , I was living a completely different life .
[ But I ] got out .
We then got married .
Got nominated for an Oscar , got married , had three kids , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to finish the ESP class , because I never finished it .
Mark Vicente said that there was a class happening in Venice , [ California , ] which was a couple minutes away from my house .
So I finished the class this time , and had a party at my house [ for my classmates ] .
I invited Mark , and Mark didn ’ t show up , and didn ’ t return my texts or calls .
I was very confused as to why because this was something that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to do and he was so excited about me finishing , for such a long time .
It just didn ’ t make any sense to me .
And then , a couple of weeks later , he told me that he didn ’ t really understand what was going on , but that he had been hearing rumors of things [ happening in NXIVM ] .
We started filming at that time .
One thing that people sometimes question is whether a documentary has to be “ objective , ” or whether @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at a fairly minimal level , actually enhances the filmmaking process and the final product .
How do you think about that ?
There is no way that I would have been able to build the kind of trust and access with people who were , in real time , questioning all the decisions they had made over the previous 10 years .
They were questioning the trust that they had in themselves .
The most important relationship that you have is the relationship with yourself .
For people who are questioning themselves @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in in real time , as they ’ re going through it , is an incredible leap of faith .
In order to do that , they have to trust the person filming , and trust their intentions .
In this case , it was very important that the people I started filming with actually knew me , and knew I had taken the introductory class .
A number of films about NXIVM entered production after the news came out because of that “ sex cult ” headline .
When I started this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It was a story about people ’ s crisis of faith and questioning what they believed .
It was not a salacious story .
My intention was , and still is , to understand how this all happened , rather than to flash another salacious story across the television set .
But I know what you ’ re asking .
Of course , having taken the classes , I have a perspective [ on NXIVM ] .
I think it ’ s a good perspective to have — I took the classes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Ivy League graduates .
I understood how enticing it was , and how much people got out of it .
This is not just a sex cult story .
It ’ s a story about our times .
But to understand it journalistically , I think it ’ s very important to understand it from a number of different perspectives .
I ’ ve always had the dream of making a Rashomon-type project .
It ’ s a gift , it ’ s magic , when you ’ re able to do a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ both journalistic and artistic integrity .
I also think it ’ s the way you ’ ve made all your films .
Like with The Square — we lived that story .
We didn ’ t show up and say , “ Hey , let ’ s go make a film.
” We were protesters .
We lived the story .
For three years of our lives , we lived 50 feet from Tahrir Square .
So this kind of vérité storytelling , which takes place as something unfolds , it ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ doing interviews with a range of people ... After the fact .
That ’ s not to discredit that kind of filmmaking — the majority of documentaries are made that way — but that ’ s just not the style that we ’ ve ever embraced .
So we work within the parameters of our form .
Are we journalists ?
We do journalistic work , but we ’ re not journalists .
We ’ re filmmakers , and we do journalistic work at times within our work .
But we serve the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the characters .
So , to us , it ’ s about honestly representing the emotional truth of the characters .
That ’ s what we ’ re after .
The characters give us insight into what it was like to be them in that period of time , for us to observe that , and come to our own perspectives .
Some [ audiences ] love that , and some people want more of a traditional kind of explainer .
That ’ s just not what we do , and we ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ film .
With The Vow , it ’ s not about everything that happened to these characters in NXIVM .
It ’ s only about them and their relationships , to make sense of NXIVM during this period of time .
This isn ’ t a biography of Mark and Bonnie and Sarah [ Edmondson ] and Nippy [ Ames ] .
Nor is it a biography of NXIVM .
That ’ s just not what we do .
Since it ’ s a personal story , for this project , it was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had taken the introductory class .
Absolutely .
It was very different for people to speak to us , because Jehane ’ s introduction to the world wasn ’ t seeing it as a sex cult .
For years , NXIVM was just a company that sold classes .
It didn ’ t have that association .
It ’ s very different to have a relationship with people in that world — before that headline and after .
Was there a point at which you wondered whether you should be part of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ couple of editors on the project very much felt that I should be a part of the story , but I did not feel the story was about me .
I had taken an introductory class , like 17,000 others had .
But I never lived in Albany .
I ’ d taken two weeks of classes .
It wasn ’ t part of my life .
But some of the subjects that we follow devoted decades of their lives .
Everybody that we followed devoted at least seven years of their life @ @ @ @ @ @ @ deeper understanding than I did .
So I never felt that it would be the right thing to do to be a part of it .
So , thinking about the finale episode , how much of what transpired was a surprise for you ?
Obviously Keith and the others knew , by the time you were working on the last few episodes , that the documentary was airing and you were making it .
He called you .
Did you anticipate any of this ?
Was there a point at which you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ weren ’ t talking to you might start talking to you ?
Our job as vérité filmmakers is to follow the story and where it takes us .
So the trial was something that we knew we were [ going to film ] .
I know it ’ s been framed in the media as , “ Oh , HBO renews The Vow for Part Two.
” But that ’ s kind of a media thing — that ’ s not what happened .
We always knew it was going to be in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about getting out [ of NXIVM ] .
The second part was the trial .
That was always the way it was going to be .
We shot the trial story last summer , so that was something we ’ d been working on for a while , with HBO ’ s participation .
They just announced it , recently .
But now , we just continue to see where the story takes us .
When people who are central to the story and have been talked about immensely throughout the story are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an obligation to hear from them .
That process , of getting access to different participants , is a delicate and complicated one and has taken a lot of work with their legal teams to figure out the parameters of what ’ s accessible .
But did we know what the ending of episode nine was ?
No , we always knew we were ending the end of this episode with the arrest .
We just didn ’ t know what was going to happen right after .
So that was a surprise @ @ @ @ @ @ @ believe that there is no way to tell this deeply complex , fascinating story without understanding it from a number of different people .
So , from the beginning , I think it sounded crazy to many of my team that we would ultimately be able to sit down with various people .
But I am the endless optimist , and so I did believe that we would ultimately sit down with NXIVM insiders .
One thing to remember is that , because we are both Middle Eastern American , Egyptian American , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the War on Terror , we have traversed people who have a weaponized , hostile relationship with each other , and have had to speak to all sides .
We ’ ve had to hang out with Trump supporters and Islamists , you know what I mean ?
All my life .
So being with different people who are diametrically opposed to one another , as uncomfortable as it is , is a space that we ’ ve had to embrace in our own identity as filmmakers of color who are immigrants and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ West , that have been at war with each other for so many years now .
I ’ ve had to tell my American friends that people in the Middle East who look like me don ’ t all want to kill them .
And I ’ ve had to tell my Egyptian friends that people who are white and American don ’ t all want to bomb the Middle East for their oil .
Those conversations are ones I ’ ve , unfortunately , grown up with .
I know that seems @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to do such a thing .
But it ’ s something that ’ s come with our life experience .
And so , I think it ’ s allowed us to be open .
Yes .
My father ’ s last name is Noujaim , and he ’ s from Egypt .
My mom ’ s maiden name is Watson .
So as you can imagine , during the War on Terror , the Kuwait wars , in the Iraq War — I ’ ve sat at dinner tables in the Middle East @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that I love dearly , who have completely different perspectives on what ’ s happening in the world .
When you grow up with that from a very young age , you learn that the most important thing to do is to keep an open mind to different people ’ s truth — whatever that truth is .
That ’ s our ultimate goal : to learn for ourselves , and to be able to share that learning and that understanding of the subject .
I ’ ve seen people try to describe @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on NXIVM , but it ’ s obviously not that — it ’ s about the people rather than the organization .
But you also described it , Jehane , as a Rashomon-like project , which is fascinating .
In Rashomon , the same story is told from different viewpoints in a way that calls the whole idea of “ truth ” into question .
It makes us wonder if we can ever really understand the truth .
Is that what this project really is about ?
What would you like people to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
This project is 10 years in the making , for me .
And I think that what I hope people would get out of it has changed along the way .
What do we want people to get out of it ?
It ’ s interesting for me , having made The Great Hack and The Vow — both companies , ESP and Cambridge Analytica , described themselves as behavior change companies .
There have been so many skeptics about both stories .
People were like , “ Oh , what Cambridge @ @ @ @ @ @ @ work on me .
What happened with NXIVM — that wouldn ’ t work on me.
” We like to think that we have this impenetrable psyche , that we ’ re in full control of everything we do .
This story can make us pause and realize that our minds are a lot more vulnerable than we think they are .
That vulnerability isn ’ t necessarily something that we should shun , and be cynical and close up , because that vulnerability is where we access our humanity .
But at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be exploited and can be taken advantage of and can be compromised by another agent .
That situation can happen to anybody .
It doesn ’ t matter how smart you are .
It doesn ’ t matter how you were raised .
People like to say , “ Oh , you have to have low self-esteem.
” I asked all those people , “ Do you wake up every morning with the same exact amount of self-esteem ?
If you do , let us know , because I haven ’ t met @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that our self-esteem fluctuates , then we know that our receptivity to certain ideas and norms , who we think we are and what we think we ’ re capable of , fluctuates as well .
I hope this can inspire people to have radical empathy for each other .
Especially in a time like now , where we ’ re in a once-in-a-century pandemic .
We ’ re living in a time in American history where I don ’ t think Americans have been more scared of each other than we are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what I think , and hope .
The first season of The Vow is available to stream on HBO and HBO Max .
The second season is set to air on HBO in 2021 .
Help keep Vox free for all Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what ’ s happening in the news , from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is , quite possibly , the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes .
Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
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How does a successful, self-aware, well-adjusted person get sucked into a cult? And once they get out — if they even can — how do they live with themselves?
Those are the questions that HBO’s documentary series The Vow seeks to tangle with, and it does not give easy answers. The show is a look into NXIVM, a “company” that provided self-improvement classes but also spiraled into something more, leading to the indictment of its founder and several members (including Smallville actor Allison Mack) for sex trafficking. A “secret society” for women, dubbed DOS, is at the center of the allegations, especially since news reports revealed that part of the group’s initiation involved branding the initials of the group’s leaders onto the women’s pelvic areas.
The series primarily follows former NXIVM members Mark Vicente, Bonnie Piesse, Sarah Edmondson, and Anthony “Nippy” Ames, along with Catherine Oxenberg (whose daughter India Oxenberg was in NXIVM), as they recount their experiences and grapple with their futures. On October 18, the nine-episode first season of The Vow concluded its run with a bang, with characters who had only been seen in video footage — like NXIVM leader Keith Raniere, who’s currently held in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center ahead of his October 27 sentencing hearing — finally talking directly to the filmmakers. A second season seemed imminent.
And so a part two is, unsurprisingly, in the works. HBO announced just days before the finale that there would be another season of The Vow next year. It makes sense; with the court cases and verdicts happening as the show was airing, there seemed to be more to the story than what the first season covered.
Curious about what comes next and the mechanics of making a series like this, I spoke with the series’ directors, Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer. Nominated for an Oscar for their 2013 film The Square, the pair have made it a habit to explore the ways people become committed to ideas and then to radical action, whether it’s the Egyptian Revolution in The Square or American political action in last year’s The Great Hack.
We spoke by phone the day after the series finale aired about their goals in making The Vow, Noujaim’s own involvement with NXIVM, and how the pair’s backgrounds as Egyptian Americans prepared them for this work. Our conversation follows, lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Alissa Wilkinson
Going into the project, did you have a sense of how it was going to end? Or were you flying blind?
Jehane Noujaim
Absolutely flying blind. And that’s how we make our films. That’s what’s exciting about making a vérité film — we follow the story as it unfolds. Often, you imagine where it might go, but you really don’t know. So you’re learning things as the characters are learning things, as the subjects. Our job is to follow as closely as possible.
This story started as a very personal story about a crisis of faith that my friend Mark Vicente was having. And then it just blew up, and we hung on for the ride. We were following the story before the New York Times, before anyone knew about it. We had just found out about the branding. I had just finished a class [with NXIVM]; I had taken ESP [Executive Success Program, a NXIVM foundational course] in 2010, and I had tried to make a film about the organization at that point in time. I spoke to all of the leadership at that time, but I couldn’t get the kind of access that I needed to get multiple perspectives on things.
Soon after that, I went back to Egypt, and the Egyptian Revolution started. So, I made The Square with my husband Karim. I met Karim during the Egyptian Revolution. I was jailed at that time. So, I was living a completely different life.
[But I] got out. We then got married. Got nominated for an Oscar, got married, had three kids, and moved to LA. I always wanted to finish the ESP class, because I never finished it. Mark Vicente said that there was a class happening in Venice, [California,] which was a couple minutes away from my house. So I finished the class this time, and had a party at my house [for my classmates].
I invited Mark, and Mark didn’t show up, and didn’t return my texts or calls. I was very confused as to why because this was something that he had been trying to get me to do and he was so excited about me finishing, for such a long time. It just didn’t make any sense to me.
And then, a couple of weeks later, he told me that he didn’t really understand what was going on, but that he had been hearing rumors of things [happening in NXIVM]. We started filming at that time.
Alissa Wilkinson
One thing that people sometimes question is whether a documentary has to be “objective,” or whether your involvement in the group, even at a fairly minimal level, actually enhances the filmmaking process and the final product. How do you think about that?
Jehane Noujaim
There is no way that I would have been able to build the kind of trust and access with people who were, in real time, questioning all the decisions they had made over the previous 10 years. They were questioning the trust that they had in themselves. The most important relationship that you have is the relationship with yourself. For people who are questioning themselves and feeling very vulnerable to allow you in in real time, as they’re going through it, is an incredible leap of faith.
In order to do that, they have to trust the person filming, and trust their intentions. In this case, it was very important that the people I started filming with actually knew me, and knew I had taken the introductory class.
A number of films about NXIVM entered production after the news came out because of that “sex cult” headline. When I started this, though, it was much more. It was a story about people’s crisis of faith and questioning what they believed. It was not a salacious story. My intention was, and still is, to understand how this all happened, rather than to flash another salacious story across the television set.
But I know what you’re asking. Of course, having taken the classes, I have a perspective [on NXIVM]. I think it’s a good perspective to have — I took the classes with actors, doctors, lawyers, Ivy League graduates. I understood how enticing it was, and how much people got out of it.
This is not just a sex cult story. It’s a story about our times. But to understand it journalistically, I think it’s very important to understand it from a number of different perspectives. I’ve always had the dream of making a Rashomon-type project. It’s a gift, it’s magic, when you’re able to do a project like this, where it has both journalistic and artistic integrity.
Karim Amer
I also think it’s the way you’ve made all your films. Like with The Square — we lived that story.
Jehane Noujaim
Right.
Karim Amer
We didn’t show up and say, “Hey, let’s go make a film.” We were protesters. We lived the story. For three years of our lives, we lived 50 feet from Tahrir Square. So this kind of vérité storytelling, which takes place as something unfolds, it’s very different from sitting people down and doing interviews with a range of people ...
Jehane Noujaim
After the fact.
Karim Amer
After the fact. That’s not to discredit that kind of filmmaking — the majority of documentaries are made that way — but that’s just not the style that we’ve ever embraced. So we work within the parameters of our form. Are we journalists? We do journalistic work, but we’re not journalists. We’re filmmakers, and we do journalistic work at times within our work. But we serve the story, and the story is about the characters.
So, to us, it’s about honestly representing the emotional truth of the characters. That’s what we’re after. The characters give us insight into what it was like to be them in that period of time, for us to observe that, and come to our own perspectives. Some [audiences] love that, and some people want more of a traditional kind of explainer. That’s just not what we do, and we’ve never done it, on any film.
With The Vow, it’s not about everything that happened to these characters in NXIVM. It’s only about them and their relationships, to make sense of NXIVM during this period of time. This isn’t a biography of Mark and Bonnie and Sarah [Edmondson] and Nippy [Ames]. Nor is it a biography of NXIVM. That’s just not what we do.
Jehane Noujaim
Since it’s a personal story, for this project, it was absolutely necessary that that one of us had taken the introductory class.
Karim Amer
Absolutely. It was very different for people to speak to us, because Jehane’s introduction to the world wasn’t seeing it as a sex cult. For years, NXIVM was just a company that sold classes. It didn’t have that association. It’s very different to have a relationship with people in that world — before that headline and after.
Alissa Wilkinson
Was there a point at which you wondered whether you should be part of the documentary, too?
Jehane Noujaim
Yes. A couple of editors on the project very much felt that I should be a part of the story, but I did not feel the story was about me. I had taken an introductory class, like 17,000 others had. But I never lived in Albany. I’d taken two weeks of classes. It wasn’t part of my life. But some of the subjects that we follow devoted decades of their lives. Everybody that we followed devoted at least seven years of their life. They had a much, much deeper understanding than I did. So I never felt that it would be the right thing to do to be a part of it.
Alissa Wilkinson
So, thinking about the finale episode, how much of what transpired was a surprise for you? Obviously Keith and the others knew, by the time you were working on the last few episodes, that the documentary was airing and you were making it. He called you. Did you anticipate any of this? Was there a point at which you thought, some of these people who weren’t talking to you might start talking to you?
Karim Amer
Our job as vérité filmmakers is to follow the story and where it takes us. So the trial was something that we knew we were [going to film].
I know it’s been framed in the media as, “Oh, HBO renews The Vow for Part Two.” But that’s kind of a media thing — that’s not what happened. We always knew it was going to be in two parts. The first part was about getting out [of NXIVM]. The second part was the trial. That was always the way it was going to be. We shot the trial story last summer, so that was something we’d been working on for a while, with HBO’s participation. They just announced it, recently.
But now, we just continue to see where the story takes us. When people who are central to the story and have been talked about immensely throughout the story are potentially willing to speak, we have an obligation to hear from them. That process, of getting access to different participants, is a delicate and complicated one and has taken a lot of work with their legal teams to figure out the parameters of what’s accessible.
But did we know what the ending of episode nine was? No, we always knew we were ending the end of this episode with the arrest. We just didn’t know what was going to happen right after. So that was a surprise to us, as well.
Jehane Noujaim
I believe that there is no way to tell this deeply complex, fascinating story without understanding it from a number of different people. So, from the beginning, I think it sounded crazy to many of my team that we would ultimately be able to sit down with various people. But I am the endless optimist, and so I did believe that we would ultimately sit down with NXIVM insiders.
Karim Amer
One thing to remember is that, because we are both Middle Eastern American, Egyptian American, and have lived between both cultures during the War on Terror, we have traversed people who have a weaponized, hostile relationship with each other, and have had to speak to all sides. We’ve had to hang out with Trump supporters and Islamists, you know what I mean? All my life.
So being with different people who are diametrically opposed to one another, as uncomfortable as it is, is a space that we’ve had to embrace in our own identity as filmmakers of color who are immigrants and live between two worlds, East and West, that have been at war with each other for so many years now. I’ve had to tell my American friends that people in the Middle East who look like me don’t all want to kill them. And I’ve had to tell my Egyptian friends that people who are white and American don’t all want to bomb the Middle East for their oil. Those conversations are ones I’ve, unfortunately, grown up with. I know that seems weird for people who have not had to do such a thing. But it’s something that’s come with our life experience. And so, I think it’s allowed us to be open.
Jehane Noujaim
Yes. My father’s last name is Noujaim, and he’s from Egypt. My mom’s maiden name is Watson. So as you can imagine, during the War on Terror, the Kuwait wars, in the Iraq War — I’ve sat at dinner tables in the Middle East and in the West, with people that I love dearly, who have completely different perspectives on what’s happening in the world. When you grow up with that from a very young age, you learn that the most important thing to do is to keep an open mind to different people’s truth — whatever that truth is.
That’s our ultimate goal: to learn for ourselves, and to be able to share that learning and that understanding of the subject.
Alissa Wilkinson
I’ve seen people try to describe The Vow as an “exposé” on NXIVM, but it’s obviously not that — it’s about the people rather than the organization. But you also described it, Jehane, as a Rashomon-like project, which is fascinating. In Rashomon, the same story is told from different viewpoints in a way that calls the whole idea of “truth” into question. It makes us wonder if we can ever really understand the truth. Is that what this project really is about? What would you like people to come away with from watching The Vow?
Jehane Noujaim
This project is 10 years in the making, for me. And I think that what I hope people would get out of it has changed along the way.
Karim Amer
What do we want people to get out of it? It’s interesting for me, having made The Great Hack and The Vow — both companies, ESP and Cambridge Analytica, described themselves as behavior change companies. There have been so many skeptics about both stories. People were like, “Oh, what Cambridge Analytica did — that wouldn’t work on me. What happened with NXIVM — that wouldn’t work on me.”
We like to think that we have this impenetrable psyche, that we’re in full control of everything we do. This story can make us pause and realize that our minds are a lot more vulnerable than we think they are. That vulnerability isn’t necessarily something that we should shun, and be cynical and close up, because that vulnerability is where we access our humanity. But at the same time, that vulnerability can be exploited and can be taken advantage of and can be compromised by another agent. That situation can happen to anybody. It doesn’t matter how smart you are. It doesn’t matter how you were raised. People like to say, “Oh, you have to have low self-esteem.” I asked all those people, “Do you wake up every morning with the same exact amount of self-esteem? If you do, let us know, because I haven’t met anybody who does.”
If we know that our self-esteem fluctuates, then we know that our receptivity to certain ideas and norms, who we think we are and what we think we’re capable of, fluctuates as well. I hope this can inspire people to have radical empathy for each other. Especially in a time like now, where we’re in a once-in-a-century pandemic. We’re living in a time in American history where I don’t think Americans have been more scared of each other than we are right now. So that’s what I think, and hope.
The first season of The Vow is available to stream on HBO and HBO Max. The second season is set to air on HBO in 2021.


vox--2020-10-21--Young people have a stake in our future. Let them vote.

Around the world , almost every country bars people under 18 from voting .
The reasons vary — they won ’ t be informed enough , they don ’ t pay taxes yet , they can ’ t serve in the military yet , they tend too liberal , they tend too rebellious .
Yet the rule persists , even though many 16- and 17-year-olds do pay taxes , even in the face of a generation of passionate , smart , and informed teenage activists , and even as it becomes obvious that our current political system is failing our @ @ @ @ @ @ @ there ’ ve been encouraging signs that we might rethink this .
Democratic candidate Andrew Yang argued for a voting age of 16 , and a bill proposing a voting age of 16 died in the US House in March 2019 with a majority of Democratic representatives supporting it .
In my state of California on November 3rd , voters will consider whether to let 17-year-olds vote in the primary if they will be old enough to vote in the general election , which 18 other states and Washington , DC , already @ @ @ @ @ @ @ do them one better : The United States should consider eradicating the voting age entirely and letting every American citizen who can successfully fill out a ballot be counted in our local , state , and national elections ( and yes , this goes for felons too ) .
My colleague Matt Yglesias made the case for this five years ago .
Since then , it ’ s only become more apparent that our current system is failing kids — and that they ’ re competent to fight for a better one .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ right thing to do , and there ’ s some evidence suggesting it ’ ll lead to a more engaged , more informed electorate that can at last do right by some of its most vulnerable constituents .
American democracy got off to a rough start .
At first , the vote was only extended to white land-owning men .
Gradually , property requirements to vote were abolished , and then , with the Civil War , racial restrictions were struck from the books ( though still enforced in practice ) .
It @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Amendment granted women the right to vote , and not until the Civil Rights Movement that many Black Americans could meaningfully exercise their voting rights .
Many of these expansions of voting rights were bitterly opposed at the time .
In hindsight , they are all clearly moral and necessary .
Decreasing the voting age to let more of our citizens have a vote isn ’ t a new idea .
We ’ ve actually lowered the voting age before without any problems .
The voting age in the United States was 21 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 1968 , several states had lowered it to 18 , 19 , or 20 , and in 1971 the 26th Amendment prohibited any state from setting the voting age higher than 18 .
States may still set the voting age lower than 18 for state or local elections , and a few cities have taken steps in that direction : Takoma Park , Hyattsville , and Greenbelt in Maryland have lowered their voting age to 16 , and Berkeley , California lets 16-year-olds vote in school board elections .
Eighteen is the most @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , too , but a few countries — including Brazil and Austria — permit 16-year-olds to vote , and until 2007 the voting age in Iran was 15 .
Each of these decreases in the voting age may have been controversial at the time , but they ’ re uncontroversial in hindsight .
Virtually no one wants to go back to denying 18- , 19- , and 20-year-olds the vote .
And granting them the vote was simultaneously a reflection of their full citizenship and full personhood under U.S. law , and an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ take their interests more seriously .
When people become able to vote , politicians work harder to cater to them .
Politicians working harder to cater to young people would be a good thing , given the devastating recent rise in child poverty .
4 reasons why we need to get rid of the voting age There are a host of good reasons to give children the vote .
Here are four I want to highlight : 1 ) The whole concept of a voting age is kinda unprincipled The US Constitution holds @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be abridged on the basis of race , color , previous condition of servitude , sex , or age ... if you ’ re older than 18 .
It ’ s an awkward exception we ’ ve carved out to the admirable general principle that just government requires fair and free elections in which everyone can participate .
We are signatories to the UN Declaration of Human Rights , which demands that elections be held “ by universal and equal suffrage.
” We ( and pretty much every other country ) fall short @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , but the 75 million Americans denied the right to vote because they are younger than 18 are definitely the largest group of people systematically excluded from the franchise .
The arguments against universal suffrage have taken a few forms .
When women wanted the vote , for example , people argued that they weren ’ t as educated as men , weren ’ t as smart , and wouldn ’ t vote as well .
They also argued that they ’ d just vote however their husbands told them , so there @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
All of these arguments turned out to be false , but they ’ d be objectionable even if they were true .
We ’ re founded on the principle that people , as people , deserve a voice in their government .
What universal suffrage aspires to is a society where you get a voice not because you ’ re a member of the right group or rich enough or worthy enough , but just because you ’ re a person and a member of this society with a stake in its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be happy about the voting age being lowered to 16 as some have proposed — and such a plan is far more realistic than mine — it still falls short of our obligations to our fellow citizens .
The most principled democratic stance is that suffrage should be universal .
2 ) The case for democracy can ’ t rest on voters being rational informed agents .
Indeed , there ’ s a strong case for democracy that doesn ’ t .
Research suggests that voters are not very informed .
They don @ @ @ @ @ @ @ policy positions .
They don ’ t even know what the executive can and can ’ t do .
They don ’ t reliably vote for the candidate who they agree with more on the issues .
Does that mean that democracy is a failed experiment ?
Not at all .
Democratic societies work surprisingly well , considering that voters don ’ t seem very informed .
They are more peaceful than non-democratic societies , have better human rights records and stronger economies , and they are more likely to protect the environment @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for all its frequent and costly flaws — does , actually , do better than any other system of government .
The secret sauce of democracy must be something other than “ informed voters rationally selecting the candidates most aligned with their nuanced policy views.
” In fact , much of what democracy does is secure buy-in from the population .
There ’ s a strong relationship between satisfaction with democracy and political institutions and generalized social trust — and social trust is very important to functioning societies .
Right now , young @ @ @ @ @ @ @ democracy and whether our society cares about them .
It ’ s worth some work to build democratic institutions they have more confidence in .
So , will adding some less-informed voters make democracy fall apart ?
Not likely .
First , there are a lot more adults than kids — you can ’ t get elected just by carrying the kid demographic .
Second , a lot of people underestimate how informed kids can be .
Like , I ’ m fairly embarrassed by the formulaic writing and lack of nuance in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and how it transformed the role of government that I wrote for the History Day competition when I was 12 .
But I think the person who wrote it would ’ ve been a pretty responsible voter , or at least no less capable than the average citizen .
( And I don ’ t think I was unique , either , except in the educational opportunities I had access to . )
Third , if you want more informed voters , giving kids the opportunity to vote will also likely give them @ @ @ @ @ @ @ engage seriously with it .
In the long run , I ’ d expect that an electorate that nourishes its youngest participants ends up more informed .
3 ) Voting as kids will turn young people into better citizens and likely increase participation their whole lives Young adults don ’ t vote much .
Some researchers have looked into why not and found a mundane explanation : They lead unstable lives that our voting system accounts for poorly .
Many young adults are in short-term housing situations , off at college or trade @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or apartment .
They are disproportionately more likely to move , and to not know where their polling place is , and to not be sure if they ’ re registered to vote .
Navigating that bureaucracy for the first time , when you ’ re also navigating your degree or first job , lease , student loan repayments , etc.
, is daunting .
Lots of people don ’ t succeed .
Researchers have found that voter turnout is a habitual behavior : The best predictor of whether you ’ ll do @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have a pattern of doing it .
People who vote in the first three elections when they ’ re eligible will likely vote for the rest of their life .
And the chaotic years from 18 to 21 are a terrible stage to acquire a new habitual behavior , because they ’ re full of so many life changes .
If everyone registered to vote as kids and voted as kids , they ’ d have a decade or more of practice at their civic responsibility by age 18 .
Realizing these benefits @ @ @ @ @ @ @ help students register and , on the day of the election , helping them to vote .
Schools are well-equipped to do that ( many do it for fake mock elections in class anyway ) .
But between schools and parents , children would have more supports in making it to the polls than young adults living alone in college or their first full-time jobs .
Lowering the voting age does seem to help ( at least a little bit ) to create a population of high-participation , civically engaged voters — or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ when Austria tried it .
In 2007 they became the first country in the EU to lower their voting age from 18 to 16 .
The 16- and 17-year-olds were more likely to turn out to vote than 18-21 year olds , and researchers found that they were no less informed and were as likely as older voters to make choices that reflected their values .
Takoma Park , Maryland , saw promising results too .
Turnout among 16-17 year olds in the first city election after they were extended the franchise was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ up .
And research from Denmark suggests that parents whose children have a vote are themselves more likely to vote .
The researchers studied this by comparing children who turned 18 just in time for the election to children who turned 18 a day too late .
The parents of the newly minted voters were more likely to show up at the polls — likely because they wanted to take their child to the polls or model civic engagement .
Of course , this raises an important question : Did the last big @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more democratic ?
Someone who wanted to argue that the 26th Amendment strengthened our society might point out that there hasn ’ t been a wartime draft since , and that the socially liberal values younger people are more likely to hold have won some definitive cultural victories since then .
But a critic could easily argue that our democracy doesn ’ t really seem to be stronger than ever and voter participation is no higher .
On the whole , the evidence from the change in voting age from 21 to 18 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Kids have the same — or even a greater — stake in political issues that adults do A frequent justification for denying kids the franchise is that voting should be attached to the obligations and responsibilities of citizenship .
Kids mostly can ’ t open a bank account under their own name , work a job , or pay taxes .
They can ’ t serve in the military .
Therefore , they shouldn ’ t get to vote .
There ’ s a problem with this line of logic .
First , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the fact that kids are excluded from participation in many corners of society gets used as an excuse to exclude them from the civic sphere as well .
Yes , kids typically can ’ t open bank accounts without their guardian ’ s approval .
They can ’ t apply for benefits — even if they need them — and they don ’ t have the right to make many medical decisions for themselves .
That ’ s not a reason to give them even less of a voice in shaping the society @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Voting should not be a final responsibility you earn only once you ’ ve taken on all of the other responsibilities of society ; it should be one of the first core rights you exercise as a member of society .
Second , kids shoulder the consequences of the decisions our politicians make .
They ’ re the population most affected by food insecurity and by air pollution .
In failing to address climate change , we ’ re damaging the world they will live in .
We have made financial commitments that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to pay back , and we ’ ve started wars that they are only a few short years from being sent off to fight in .
If you earn the right to vote alongside the burden of responsibility , we ’ ve burdened kids with responsibilities without extending the rights .
We typically don ’ t think about the fact that kids have very few rights as a moral issue .
Why not ?
Perhaps because the people who are currently experiencing it get fewer platforms to talk about it , have less @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stereotyped as bratty , entitled , and ignorant — especially if they complain about their lives .
Perhaps that may be because we all lived through it and it can take time to notice that an experience that was universal in your life is actually harmful .
But the restrictions on the rights of children that are commonplace around the world often aren ’ t justified and often leave kids vulnerable .
Giving them a vote would be a first step toward addressing that .
Two reasons why we shouldn ’ t do @ @ @ @ @ @ @ common counterargument to giving children the vote : Won ’ t a lot of parents use this to effectively just get their kids to vote the way they do ?
If their kid is going to vote for the “ wrong ” presidential campaign , won ’ t they scold or threaten them ?
I think this will absolutely happen ; it happens to adults .
It happened to an adult friend of mine who turned 18 shortly before the 2016 election and whose parents bullied him into voting for their preferred candidate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It ’ s obviously a problem when it happens , and in a world where kids voted , it would happen — no arguing that .
But there ’ s something perverse about denying someone the right to vote to stop other people from denying them the right to vote .
And as my colleague Matt Yglesias argued , even if letting kids vote results in more influence for their parents , that doesn ’ t really seem like a terrible outcome : “ A family of five contains more human beings @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if the result of children voting were that the political system started giving more weight to the interests of five-person families than to the interests of two-person families , that would be a sensible outcome , not some shady sleight of hand.
” There ’ s another objection .
Some people might say , “ Okay , I ’ m with you for all of that , but surely kids younger than , say , 8 , would just be filling in bubbles at random , right ?
Don ’ t we have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ As a political compromise , sure ; a voting age of 12 might be more achievable than universal suffrage is .
It is probably more pragmatic to draw a line somewhere .
But I don ’ t think it ’ s necessary as a matter of principle .
If everyone is allowed to vote , then very young kids will likely spoil their ballots ( that is , they won ’ t be able to successfully indicate one and only one candidate for each office that they prefer , so their vote won @ @ @ @ @ @ @ some point — a point that ’ s determined by the capabilities of each individual child — they ’ ll be able to fill out a ballot successfully .
Of course , they should have access to the same accommodations as adults , like accessible voting machines with audio ballots if preferred .
I think this is more desirable than a law banning them from voting until they ’ re presumed competent to fill out a ballot .
First , it ’ s fairer to young children who are capable of voting successfully @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rights because of the assumption they ’ re too unskilled to exercise them .
Second , I think voting would be an exciting and meaningful exercise even for children too young to fill out their ballot validly , and it ’ s a great chance to develop the habit early — just like we have young children brush their teeth even though they ’ ll lose those teeth in a few years anyway .
I don ’ t expect that enfranchising all children will solve all our problems .
There are some very @ @ @ @ @ @ @ enfranchising everyone will make the electorate less informed on average .
I don ’ t have any idea whether it ’ d be a win for my preferred policies .
But I think the moral case for enfranchising children overwhelms these concerns .
In a democracy , the default ought to be that the people can vote — even if we think they ’ re not very smart or not very informed or not worthy of the privilege .
Much of the promise of democracy is that giving people power over their government @ @ @ @ @ @ @ seriously means extending the vote as far as we can .
Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter .
Twice a week , you ’ ll get a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling our biggest challenges : improving public health , decreasing human and animal suffering , easing catastrophic risks , and — to put it simply — getting better at doing good .

Around the world, almost every country bars people under 18 from voting. The reasons vary — they won’t be informed enough, they don’t pay taxes yet, they can’t serve in the military yet, they tend too liberal, they tend too rebellious. Yet the rule persists, even though many 16- and 17-year-olds do pay taxes, even in the face of a generation of passionate, smart, and informed teenage activists, and even as it becomes obvious that our current political system is failing our children.
In the last year, there’ve been encouraging signs that we might rethink this. Democratic candidate Andrew Yang argued for a voting age of 16, and a bill proposing a voting age of 16 died in the US House in March 2019 with a majority of Democratic representatives supporting it.
In my state of California on November 3rd, voters will consider whether to let 17-year-olds vote in the primary if they will be old enough to vote in the general election, which 18 other states and Washington, DC, already allow.
Well, let’s do them one better: The United States should consider eradicating the voting age entirely and letting every American citizen who can successfully fill out a ballot be counted in our local, state, and national elections (and yes, this goes for felons too).
My colleague Matt Yglesias made the case for this five years ago. Since then, it’s only become more apparent that our current system is failing kids — and that they’re competent to fight for a better one.
Enfranchising 75 million American citizens is the right thing to do, and there’s some evidence suggesting it’ll lead to a more engaged, more informed electorate that can at last do right by some of its most vulnerable constituents.
The expanding voting-rights circle
American democracy got off to a rough start. At first, the vote was only extended to white land-owning men. Gradually, property requirements to vote were abolished, and then, with the Civil War, racial restrictions were struck from the books (though still enforced in practice). It was not until 1920 that the 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote, and not until the Civil Rights Movement that many Black Americans could meaningfully exercise their voting rights.
Many of these expansions of voting rights were bitterly opposed at the time. In hindsight, they are all clearly moral and necessary.
Decreasing the voting age to let more of our citizens have a vote isn’t a new idea. We’ve actually lowered the voting age before without any problems. The voting age in the United States was 21 for most of our history. By 1968, several states had lowered it to 18, 19, or 20, and in 1971 the 26th Amendment prohibited any state from setting the voting age higher than 18.
States may still set the voting age lower than 18 for state or local elections, and a few cities have taken steps in that direction: Takoma Park, Hyattsville, and Greenbelt in Maryland have lowered their voting age to 16, and Berkeley, California lets 16-year-olds vote in school board elections. Eighteen is the most common voting age elsewhere in the world, too, but a few countries — including Brazil and Austria — permit 16-year-olds to vote, and until 2007 the voting age in Iran was 15.
Each of these decreases in the voting age may have been controversial at the time, but they’re uncontroversial in hindsight. Virtually no one wants to go back to denying 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds the vote. And granting them the vote was simultaneously a reflection of their full citizenship and full personhood under U.S. law, and an instrument by which the law came to take their interests more seriously. When people become able to vote, politicians work harder to cater to them. Politicians working harder to cater to young people would be a good thing, given the devastating recent rise in child poverty.
4 reasons why we need to get rid of the voting age
There are a host of good reasons to give children the vote. Here are four I want to highlight:
1) The whole concept of a voting age is kinda unprincipled
The US Constitution holds that the right to vote cannot be abridged on the basis of race, color, previous condition of servitude, sex, or age ... if you’re older than 18. It’s an awkward exception we’ve carved out to the admirable general principle that just government requires fair and free elections in which everyone can participate.
We are signatories to the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which demands that elections be held “by universal and equal suffrage.” We (and pretty much every other country) fall short of that in a lot of ways, but the 75 million Americans denied the right to vote because they are younger than 18 are definitely the largest group of people systematically excluded from the franchise.
The arguments against universal suffrage have taken a few forms. When women wanted the vote, for example, people argued that they weren’t as educated as men, weren’t as smart, and wouldn’t vote as well. They also argued that they’d just vote however their husbands told them, so there was no need for them to vote.
All of these arguments turned out to be false, but they’d be objectionable even if they were true. We’re founded on the principle that people, as people, deserve a voice in their government. What universal suffrage aspires to is a society where you get a voice not because you’re a member of the right group or rich enough or worthy enough, but just because you’re a person and a member of this society with a stake in its future.
So while I’d be happy about the voting age being lowered to 16 as some have proposed — and such a plan is far more realistic than mine — it still falls short of our obligations to our fellow citizens. The most principled democratic stance is that suffrage should be universal.
2) The case for democracy can’t rest on voters being rational informed agents. Indeed, there’s a strong case for democracy that doesn’t.
Research suggests that voters are not very informed. They don’t know the differences between candidate policy positions. They don’t even know what the executive can and can’t do. They don’t reliably vote for the candidate who they agree with more on the issues.
Does that mean that democracy is a failed experiment? Not at all. Democratic societies work surprisingly well, considering that voters don’t seem very informed. They are more peaceful than non-democratic societies, have better human rights records and stronger economies, and they are more likely to protect the environment. So somehow, this system — for all its frequent and costly flaws — does, actually, do better than any other system of government. The secret sauce of democracy must be something other than “informed voters rationally selecting the candidates most aligned with their nuanced policy views.”
In fact, much of what democracy does is secure buy-in from the population. There’s a strong relationship between satisfaction with democracy and political institutions and generalized social trust — and social trust is very important to functioning societies. Right now, young people express breathtaking cynicism about the U.S. democracy and whether our society cares about them. It’s worth some work to build democratic institutions they have more confidence in.
So, will adding some less-informed voters make democracy fall apart? Not likely. First, there are a lot more adults than kids — you can’t get elected just by carrying the kid demographic.
Second, a lot of people underestimate how informed kids can be. Like, I’m fairly embarrassed by the formulaic writing and lack of nuance in this 11-page essay on the New Deal and how it transformed the role of government that I wrote for the History Day competition when I was 12. But I think the person who wrote it would’ve been a pretty responsible voter, or at least no less capable than the average citizen. (And I don’t think I was unique, either, except in the educational opportunities I had access to.)
Third, if you want more informed voters, giving kids the opportunity to vote will also likely give them more motivation to learn about politics and engage seriously with it. In the long run, I’d expect that an electorate that nourishes its youngest participants ends up more informed.
3) Voting as kids will turn young people into better citizens and likely increase participation their whole lives
Young adults don’t vote much. Some researchers have looked into why not and found a mundane explanation: They lead unstable lives that our voting system accounts for poorly. Many young adults are in short-term housing situations, off at college or trade school, or in a first job or apartment. They are disproportionately more likely to move, and to not know where their polling place is, and to not be sure if they’re registered to vote. Navigating that bureaucracy for the first time, when you’re also navigating your degree or first job, lease, student loan repayments, etc., is daunting. Lots of people don’t succeed.
Researchers have found that voter turnout is a habitual behavior: The best predictor of whether you’ll do it in the future is whether you have a pattern of doing it. People who vote in the first three elections when they’re eligible will likely vote for the rest of their life. And the chaotic years from 18 to 21 are a terrible stage to acquire a new habitual behavior, because they’re full of so many life changes. If everyone registered to vote as kids and voted as kids, they’d have a decade or more of practice at their civic responsibility by age 18.
Realizing these benefits might require schools to actively work to help students register and, on the day of the election, helping them to vote. Schools are well-equipped to do that (many do it for fake mock elections in class anyway). But between schools and parents, children would have more supports in making it to the polls than young adults living alone in college or their first full-time jobs.
Lowering the voting age does seem to help (at least a little bit) to create a population of high-participation, civically engaged voters — or, at least, it did so when Austria tried it. In 2007 they became the first country in the EU to lower their voting age from 18 to 16. The 16- and 17-year-olds were more likely to turn out to vote than 18-21 year olds, and researchers found that they were no less informed and were as likely as older voters to make choices that reflected their values.
Takoma Park, Maryland, saw promising results too. Turnout among 16-17 year olds in the first city election after they were extended the franchise was nearly double turnout for voters 18 and up.
And research from Denmark suggests that parents whose children have a vote are themselves more likely to vote. The researchers studied this by comparing children who turned 18 just in time for the election to children who turned 18 a day too late. The parents of the newly minted voters were more likely to show up at the polls — likely because they wanted to take their child to the polls or model civic engagement.
Of course, this raises an important question: Did the last big change in voting age make our society more democratic? Someone who wanted to argue that the 26th Amendment strengthened our society might point out that there hasn’t been a wartime draft since, and that the socially liberal values younger people are more likely to hold have won some definitive cultural victories since then. But a critic could easily argue that our democracy doesn’t really seem to be stronger than ever and voter participation is no higher. On the whole, the evidence from the change in voting age from 21 to 18 is a mixed bag.
4) Kids have the same — or even a greater — stake in political issues that adults do
A frequent justification for denying kids the franchise is that voting should be attached to the obligations and responsibilities of citizenship. Kids mostly can’t open a bank account under their own name, work a job, or pay taxes. They can’t serve in the military. Therefore, they shouldn’t get to vote.
There’s a problem with this line of logic. First, it’s kind of perverse that the fact that kids are excluded from participation in many corners of society gets used as an excuse to exclude them from the civic sphere as well. Yes, kids typically can’t open bank accounts without their guardian’s approval. They can’t apply for benefits — even if they need them — and they don’t have the right to make many medical decisions for themselves.
That’s not a reason to give them even less of a voice in shaping the society that makes those decisions for them. Voting should not be a final responsibility you earn only once you’ve taken on all of the other responsibilities of society; it should be one of the first core rights you exercise as a member of society.
Second, kids shoulder the consequences of the decisions our politicians make. They’re the population most affected by food insecurity and by air pollution. In failing to address climate change, we’re damaging the world they will live in. We have made financial commitments that they’ll be on the hook to pay back, and we’ve started wars that they are only a few short years from being sent off to fight in. If you earn the right to vote alongside the burden of responsibility, we’ve burdened kids with responsibilities without extending the rights.
We typically don’t think about the fact that kids have very few rights as a moral issue. Why not? Perhaps because the people who are currently experiencing it get fewer platforms to talk about it, have less practice articulating their perspectives, and are stereotyped as bratty, entitled, and ignorant — especially if they complain about their lives. Perhaps that may be because we all lived through it and it can take time to notice that an experience that was universal in your life is actually harmful.
But the restrictions on the rights of children that are commonplace around the world often aren’t justified and often leave kids vulnerable. Giving them a vote would be a first step toward addressing that.
Two reasons why we shouldn’t do this, debunked
There’s a common counterargument to giving children the vote: Won’t a lot of parents use this to effectively just get their kids to vote the way they do? If their kid is going to vote for the “wrong” presidential campaign, won’t they scold or threaten them?
I think this will absolutely happen; it happens to adults. It happened to an adult friend of mine who turned 18 shortly before the 2016 election and whose parents bullied him into voting for their preferred candidate. It happens within marriages, too.
It’s obviously a problem when it happens, and in a world where kids voted, it would happen — no arguing that. But there’s something perverse about denying someone the right to vote to stop other people from denying them the right to vote.
And as my colleague Matt Yglesias argued, even if letting kids vote results in more influence for their parents, that doesn’t really seem like a terrible outcome: “A family of five contains more human beings than a family of two, so if the result of children voting were that the political system started giving more weight to the interests of five-person families than to the interests of two-person families, that would be a sensible outcome, not some shady sleight of hand.”
There’s another objection. Some people might say, “Okay, I’m with you for all of that, but surely kids younger than, say, 8, would just be filling in bubbles at random, right? Don’t we have to draw a line somewhere?”
As a political compromise, sure; a voting age of 12 might be more achievable than universal suffrage is. It is probably more pragmatic to draw a line somewhere. But I don’t think it’s necessary as a matter of principle. If everyone is allowed to vote, then very young kids will likely spoil their ballots (that is, they won’t be able to successfully indicate one and only one candidate for each office that they prefer, so their vote won’t be counted). At some point — a point that’s determined by the capabilities of each individual child — they’ll be able to fill out a ballot successfully. Of course, they should have access to the same accommodations as adults, like accessible voting machines with audio ballots if preferred.
I think this is more desirable than a law banning them from voting until they’re presumed competent to fill out a ballot. First, it’s fairer to young children who are capable of voting successfully; it doesn’t deny them rights because of the assumption they’re too unskilled to exercise them. Second, I think voting would be an exciting and meaningful exercise even for children too young to fill out their ballot validly, and it’s a great chance to develop the habit early — just like we have young children brush their teeth even though they’ll lose those teeth in a few years anyway.
I don’t expect that enfranchising all children will solve all our problems. There are some very real drawbacks here. I expect that enfranchising everyone will make the electorate less informed on average. I don’t have any idea whether it’d be a win for my preferred policies.
But I think the moral case for enfranchising children overwhelms these concerns. In a democracy, the default ought to be that the people can vote — even if we think they’re not very smart or not very informed or not worthy of the privilege. Much of the promise of democracy is that giving people power over their government is a good thing. Taking that seriously means extending the vote as far as we can.
Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter. Twice a week, you’ll get a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling our biggest challenges: improving public health, decreasing human and animal suffering, easing catastrophic risks, and — to put it simply — getting better at doing good.