Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Social Media | June 20, 2024
I recently wrote about Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness and, notwithstanding some pushback the findings have received, I think most of it is common sense. Phones can be useful tools for teenagers, but they can also be destructive, and social media is messing with their brains.
Most schools already have some limits on phone use, but Governor Gavin Newsom is looking to legislate a ban on phones in California schools beginning this fall. Florida and Indiana already have similar legislation, and other states will soon follow suit. I have no problem with this. I have no idea what purpose having access to a phone during class even fulfills except to allow students to text their friends who are playing hooky.
Newsom also wants social media platforms to display warning labels. In his book, Haidt goes further. He wants social media companies to restrict the age of their users. Age restricting is possible, but doing so would run up against the problem that Pornhub is experiencing in a growing number of states that require age verification. Users have to provide private information to be age-verified. Teenagers might think little of handing over their personal information in exchange for access to Instagram, but Pornhub users don’t want their names associated with that website.
So, instead of complying with age verification laws, Pornhub is simply leaving the states that enact these laws. In July, they will leave five more states: Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, and Nebraska. The company has already left Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Utah, and Virginia. I doubt that it’s difficult to work around these restrictions with VPNs, but Pornhub claims that users are just going to deeper, darker, and less moderated sites.
I have no idea if that’s true or not. I also have a kneejerk reaction to anything that feels like censorship, but I understand why parents wouldn’t want their 10-year-olds surfing on Pornhub. Then again, that’s what parental controls are for. But I suspect most teenagers are sophisticated enough to work around them. Then again, how do they do that, and what can I do to prevent it?
It’s not just Pornhub that’s the problem. Back to the dangers of social media we were talking about earlier: According to The Wall Street Journal, Instagram is serving sexual content to users who say they are 13 years old. This is not a case where a kid is lying about their age; it’s an instance where Instagram doesn’t care. Once a teenager stares at a woman in a bikini for half a second longer than they look at a cooking video, the algorithm will slowly start feeding the kid more and more sexual content until they’re being recommended explicit material.
People posing as 13-year-olds were receiving sexual content — including “video after video about anal sex” — as soon as three minutes after they created their Instagram accounts. That’s not great! Maybe Governor Newsom should ban phones away from school, too.
