The Social Illness

[Kamaji]

The Social Illness

On today’s social media, parents need help.

Clare Morell
Feb 22, 2023

Parents are not enough to protect kids from the harms of social media today. And current federal law is not up to the task either. The severity of the problem of social media to children and the inability of parents to effectively protect their kids necessitate a public policy solution. And as a new report shows, parents want help. Congress needs to step up and help them.

This is a winning issue. “Five Pro-Family Priorities for the 118th Congress and Beyond,” a new report co-released on February 16 by the Institute for Family Studies and the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), found that 80 percent of parents, regardless of political party, want parental consent required before a minor opens a social media account and 77 percent want parents to have administrator-level access to what kids are seeing and doing online.

We have a severe public health crisis on our hands. American teenagers are, quite literally, dying because of social media. Teens are more depressed and anxious than ever before. New data from the CDC show that nearly three in five teen girls felt persistent sadness in 2021, and one in three girls seriously considered attempting suicide. Depression, self-harm, suicide attempts, and suicide all have increased sharply among U.S. teens between 2011 and 2019, with similar trends worldwide. This was the same period in which social media use moved from optional to virtually mandatory among teens.

Beyond the youth mental health crisis social media is creating, both the kinds of content circulating on social media and other users on the platforms are very dangerous to children. TikTok and Instagram send teens down rabbit holes of eating disorder, drug, and sexual content. Pornography is everywhere online, and it is not just on Pornhub and other adult sites, but on YouTube, Spotify, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat.

Predators are also all over social media, trying to befriend and groom young people. A private study found that nearly one in three teen girls have been approached by adults asking for nude pictures on social media. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on the ways in which TikTok is a prime venue for child sexual exploitation.

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Source:  https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-social-illness/