The Senate Hearing on the Danger of Social Media to Young People

 I didn’t watch the Senate hearing on social media, yesterday. I did hear some of the “gotcha” moments captured and broadcast on radio. I saw a brief interview with one of the committee members in which the senator was shamelessly political—go figure—but was also undeniably right. Social media, platforms like Tik-Tok and Facebook have created an incredible and frightening opportunity for harm to young people.

As parents, as grandparents, as leaders in the moral realm, we simply cannot ignore this.

This morning I read the transcript of Al Mohler’s daily podcast, “The Briefing.” You can listen to or read it here. (A brief disclaimer: Yes, Mohler does sometimes pull the fire alarm lever when he ought to pick up his phone and talk to someone, but I do find him generally helpful as one who watches what’s going on and helps put cultural matters in the grid of a Biblical worldview.) A couple of significant quotations and thoughts from his article:

·       The “Surgeon General of the United States, Vivek Murthy, reported just a matter of months ago . . . there is a massive mental health crisis among American young people.” I wrote about that here. This crisis is not solely the fault of social media, but social media is clearly involved.

·       “. . . social media has created a vulnerability, a danger, for young people that frankly has never existed before in human history.”

·       Those of us of a certain age need to realize that others much younger than we have never known a world without social media. They take it for granted.

·       “ . . . there is moral responsibility in every technology . . .. There's a moral dimension to the development of the wheel. [It] can be used to convey you somewhere . . . it can also be used to crush someone . . .. [E]ven as ancient technology comes with its own moral dimensions, modern technology comes with multiplied moral dimensions, because of the sophistication of the technology, and the immediacy, and the reach.”

So, who owns this moral responsibility?

Clearly in the case of children and teenagers, as in every other realm, parents are responsible. And, at
the risk of eye-rolls and objections I’ll just bluntly say that many parents are grievously avoiding that responsibility. Giving a child unsupervised access to the internet is a lot like letting them play soccer in a mine field.

Yet, even with allowance for the preening and pontificating that is part and parcel of a televised Senate hearing, I think the Senators are right. Those who created and profit from the technology, bear a responsibility as well. In this regard, Mohler observes a “fishy” phenomenon. Folks who usually aren’t all that interested in parental rights, suddenly acting like advocates for parents being responsible to fix the problem. Yes, parents bear the major responsibility for their children, but others in the community—and in this case the community is global—bear responsibility as well.

So what?

I’m not a Luddite. The fact that I’m using the internet to publish my thoughts is evidence of that. But, controls on the power of the web are appropriate. As someone who is well into his adult years, I personally need to reckon with the fact that such controls may sometimes be cumbersome. I think I ought to be willing to pay that price in order to protect the vulnerable.

I appeal to parents. Resist the relentless pressure our culture puts on you, not to mention the whining of your child. Decide when your child should have a cellphone not on the basis of what “everybody else” is doing, but on the basis of what you conclude is best for your child. Do some listening and research before you come to that conclusion. Think about Proverbs 29:15 on this one. Proper discipline gives wisdom, but a child left to himself brings his parent to shame. ( That’s the HM application paraphrase. Look it up in your Bible.)

A general awareness is appropriate. Somewhere between tinfoil-hat paranoia and clueless indifference there is a sweet-spot. We’ll disagree on exactly where on the spectrum that sweet-spot is, but isn’t that what responsible people of faith always do? (See Romans 14) Let’s help each other out. There is an invasion all around us. Sometimes the invader is pernicious. Let’s not act otherwise. Yesterday’s Senate  gallery was filled with parents of abused, and in some cases hounded-to-death children. That is strong encouragement for us to be convinced that we need to link arms on this matter. We should expect our leaders to do something. We need to be willing to endure some cost—be it listening to the teenage whining or jumping through the hoops of proving that I’m not something I haven’t been for more than fifty years, a teenager.

We can do better. We have to.