THE EXPERIMENT MUST END. An entire generation has been subjected to an unregulated psychological experiment, and the results are horrifying. Federal and state authorities must move to end social media access for minors. The youngest and most impressionable members of our society are being overrun by cognitive sewage that is quite literally destroying their minds, souls, and futures.
The church cannot feign ignorance regarding the malevolent nature of the digital social ecosystem. We are not dealing with a neutral communication utility. Rather, an intentionally predatory algorithm has been designed to capture the market by capturing adolescent brains through carefully engineered hijacking of dopamine reward systems, leading to what can only be described as addiction. Children, with glowing screens feeding them a steady flow of short-form videos, are not being handed a useful digital library. Rather, their still-forming cognitive structure is being dismantled and rebuilt into a lack of attention span, a severely diminished capacity for linear thought, and full catechization into nihilism and humanistic moral relativism. Further, the world of social media has been shown to have demonstrable negative effects on mental health, exposes children to traffickers, and has even led to the death of countless teenagers. Enough is enough.
If an adult moved into your neighborhood and started hanging out near the middle school, handing out addictive chemical substances and distributing lewd images to seventh graders, the community would demand law enforcement intervene. Yet, when tech companies create the space where millions of adult strangers have access to children’s bedrooms through their devices, we celebrate it as a technological victory and an expansion of self-expression. We have allowed the protective walls of family and home to be scaled through the use of digital scaffolding. It should come as no surprise to see the weakest among us being victimized, but the proper legislation can repair the breaches and dismantle the tools that are harming our children.
Some would contend that barring minors from social media is a violation of free speech and is an overreach by the state. However, this position dismisses natural law and Christian ethics. Children are not autonomous moral agents with unrestricted liberties; they are immature beings entrusted to adult guardians. We do not allow ten-year-olds to purchase alcohol, enter binding contracts, view lewd materials, place bets at the local casino, or even drive automobiles because their cognitive capacity and moral imagination are not yet fully developed. Protecting the same age group from an algorithmic feed designed to induce addiction is a logical and ethically straightforward action. Claiming these feeds, and the algorithms behind them, are protected speech lacks common sense and is illogical to anyone who would not make the same argument regarding exposing children to pornography.
Some conservatives instinctually draw back from government intervention in any area regarding children based upon parents, not the state, having jurisdiction over their children. To be clear, the covenant responsibility of raising, protecting, discipling, and educating a child belongs primarily and non-delegably to parents (Deut. 6). However, the Civil Magistrate (Romans 13) operates under a divine obligation to punish evil, which would include restraining predatory industries that harm children and threaten the foundational structures of our society. When an industry deploys supercomputing power and scores of behavioral scientists to systematically exploit the psychological vulnerabilities of children, while bypassing parental authority, families are at a severe disadvantage in an asymmetrical war they cannot survive, much less win, alone. Telling parents they must take on a trillion-dollar tech cartel without the backing of the law is not conservatism; it is an affront to justice.
Some believe that the advance of technology is inevitable and that young people, who seem to be inherently tech savvy, will find workarounds to bypass any age verifications. This is a self-defeating position. Laws of morality are never negated by the difficulty of their enforcement nor by the level of certainty that some will break them. Imagine repealing drug laws because criminals have been able to innovate and evade detection. The law is more than a statutory reality; it is a pedagogue – a teacher that sets the standard for what is objectively acceptable in a society. Additionally, the law provides a path to legal recourse against predatory corporations and sends a clear message that the minds of our children are sacred space, not commercial territory.
You cannot preserve a civilization while allowing the youth to be systematically exploited, psychologically shattered, and spiritually occupied by the algorithm. Pastors, church leaders, and civil authorities must be bold enough to say “enough is enough.” Technology progressing is no excuse for the moral abandonment of our children. Although the particulars regarding ages, enforcement mechanisms, and other factors can be worked out through the legislative process, inaction is not an option. Our civil magistrates, the lawmakers we elect, must do their part to protect the vulnerable and move toward the common sense posture of helping parents protect our children from social media. We must not stop speaking up until they take appropriate action. Our children deserve nothing less
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