SALT LAKE CITY — Long before he was Utah’s governor, Spencer Cox spent a lot of time on college campuses championing the rise of technology as a self-described “true tech optimist.”

“I was talking to young people about the Arab Spring, about how the rise of social media was going to solve all of our problems and bring us together as a nation, as a world,” Cox said Tuesday while addressing the crowd at the 2025 Utah AI Summit in Salt Lake City.

As he’ll tell you now, he couldn’t have been more wrong.

“In fact, it’s been the exact opposite. Those very tools that I believed would lead to human flourishing and human connection … have been used to manipulate us, to divide us and to do significant harm,” Cox said.

He called out social media specifically — something he has repeatedly done thr

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