Hey Parents — Facebook Isn't the Reason Your Kids Are Hot Messes

This column was kicking around in my head at the end of last week, but I decided to shelve it and ponder whether my initial reaction to the news was a bit too harsh. Upon much further examination, I am sticking with the immediate reaction headline I came up with last week. That should assuage the fears of any longtime readers who might be worried that I'm mellowing too much. 

It has become de rigueur for people in the 21st century to blame social media for pretty much everything. As a society, America went all-in on blame assignment when educators decided that feelings were more important than learning. That feel-good shift dealt an almost fatal blow to personal responsibility and put millions of people on the permanent hunt for scapegoats. One of the few things that people on the right and left agree on is now is that social media is the default root of all evil in the modern world. 

Personally, I think that social media has far more upsides than downsides, but my opinions on that could fill a couple of columns beyond the scope of this one. I want to focus on last week's news about social media monolith Meta. 

The New York Times:

Meta on Wednesday reached a landmark settlement with 47 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories, agreeing to pay up to $17.1 billion in penalties and make major changes to its products over claims it endangered children with addictive social media platforms.

In a dramatic capitulation, the owner of Facebook and Instagram agreed to the financial penalties for violating federal child privacy and states’ consumer protection laws, the states announced. Meta also agreed to limit how long teenagers can spend on its platforms and to bans on features that stoke mental health issues, striking at the heart of the company’s business of engagement for advertising.

“The focus of this case was to protect our kids: stopping notifications and alerts at night and when they are in school, encouraging them to take breaks from social media, protecting them against harmful features,” said Colorado’s attorney general, Phil Weiser, in a statement. The agreement exceeded what most courts might order, he added.

There's a lot to unpack there. Look, if there were laws on the books that the Meta platforms violated, sure, nail them for that. What I question is whether anything in this settlement will make children any safer in a digital environment that changes with blinding speed. I'm also skeptical of laws that are supposed to keep young people from making bad choices. Using an example that has been with us for a very long time, the legal drinking age has never done much to keep beer out of the hands and mouths of high school kids. 

I don't think it's really Mark Zuckerberg's responsibility to make sure that kids "take breaks from social media." That seems more like a parent thing to me. Meta's $17+ billion isn't going to help many of the kids who are vulnerable to any dark forces on Facebook, whether real or imagined. No amount of money or governmental oversight can replace parental involvement.

Sadly, there are a lot of people who don't want to hear that. 

The leftist obsession with using the public school system to indoctrinate the youth of America has made too many parents comfortable with ceding much of the responsibility for the care and development of their children. That's by design, of course. All of the studies that trumpet the benefits of getting kids away from the home and into pre-kindergarten programs are meant to weaken the influence of the family and home life as early as possible. Even worse, it's all supposed to make the parents feel good about their participation in the charade. 

There is a lot about social media that is potentially harmful for young people, to be sure, but it can all be greatly mitigated by parents who aren't indifferent and haven't become comfortable with the idea that parental responsibility can be delegated under the leftist "It Takes a Village" model of child-rearing. I would argue that the driving philosophy behind universal pre-K is fraught with far more long-term danger than Instagram. 

It's a shame that we can't get the teachers' unions to fork over billions of dollars for the damage that they've done and continue to do. 

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Editor's Note: President Trump is leading America into the "Golden Age" as Democrats desperately try to stop it.  

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