Commentary
It would seem that there’s finally something a lot of Democrats agree with Republicans on: protecting children from addictive social media.
A bipartisan group of 42 state attorneys general, from historically red Tennessee and Louisiana to deep blue New York and California, are suing tech giant Meta for the algorithms it allegedly employs to keep kids’ eyes glued to Facebook and Instagram, and to keep them coming back again and again to the platforms.
Last year, the attorneys general of California, Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, Tennessee, and Vermont led an investigation into Meta and China’s TikTok for their alleged methods of luring juvenile users.
It all has the whiff, unfortunately, of the wicked Mr. and Mrs. Crutch showing off the kids living in their Happy Home Orphanage at the philanthropists’ garden party, while carefully keeping their gross mistreatment of the orphans hidden.
Unburying adolescents’ faces from the smartphones that make them ever more stupid is a laudable mission. But in August, California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued a San Bernardino County school district for its perfectly reasonable policy of notifying parents when a child starts using a name—or the bathroom—of the opposite sex, or shows other signs of confusion over, or rebellion against, their sex. Mr. Bonta called it an unconstitutional “forced outing policy”—though neglected to cite the Federalist Papers’ advocacy of transgenderism during the debates over ratification of the Constitution.
According to Mr. Bonta, refusing to keep it a secret from parents that their fifth-grader son thinks he’s a girl is “discriminating against and violating the privacy rights of LGBTQ+ students.”
In 2020, New York Attorney General Letitia James started letting transgender minors “correct” the sex on their birth certificates to match their preferred gender identity, ensuring that “transgender youth do not need to wait until they are 18 years old to make the change,” giving them “the right to make this deeply personal decision without the government’s unwarranted denial or without having their privacy violated,” ending “an outdated policy to stop us from providing every individual with equal dignity and respect.”
How many thousands of years has this now “outdated policy” been in effect? Apparently, what’s outdated is Western civilization, and Ms. James, Mr. Bonta, and their confreres are doing their bit to hasten its internal decay and collapse.
The left has for decades practiced the sleight of hand of claiming to act to help or save “the children” as they were saddling them (“they are our future”) with trillions of dollars in added national debt, championing the legal destruction of tens of millions of them within the womb, and sexualizing them in the taxpayer-financed classroom via explicit, amoral sex education courses.
In the 1990s, it took the form of President Bill Clinton’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) hounding to destruction what was touted to be the leading villain afflicting the youth of the United States—Joe Camel—while spending a fortune connecting every classroom to the internet—in retrospect a laughable policy now that the Internet is inescapable, and pupils need liberation from it so we can get them to enjoy reading books.
In an axe-grinding article in December 1991 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the suave cartoon character Joe Camel, who adorned many a billboard, was accused of getting kids addicted to tobacco. Even The New York Times, for more than a half-century as effective an enemy of Big Tobacco as any ambulance-chasing trial lawyer, at the time doubted that evidence pointed to Camel’s new poster playboy having been fashioned to appeal to children or adolescents.
“Just as you don’t blame General Motors for children who steal cars, nor should you say cigarette brands initiate kids smoking,” a spokesman for the Tobacco Institute said in 1994 in relation to another study on brand preference among young smokers.
Indeed the FTC had ended its probe of Joe Camel that year without filing a complaint, because of lack of evidence that the ad campaign encouraged underage smoking. But President Clinton in his second term appointed a new FTC chairman with guns blazing for the cigarette industry. Camel parent RJ Reynolds, under severe federal pressure, ultimately voluntarily banished Joe.
This despite that the accusations against Camel made no sense; rival cigarette brand Newport, with its pedestrian “Alive With Pleasure” ads featuring fun-loving couples almost out of Norman Rockwell, had at the time cornered a proportion of the teen smoker market identical to Camel’s.
No question, social media have more than picked up where addictive, anti-social video gaming left off as a scourge to the young; anyone who, say at a family gathering, has seen the isolated and obsessive behavior of kids whose parents refuse to place adequate limits on their use of devices can attest to this. Then add the fact of those communicating immoral influences to children and teens on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, almost certainly completely behind the backs of their parents.
But as destructive as mega-tech firms’ alleged child-targeting practices are, they pale in comparison to the child abuse some of these same state chief law enforcement officers are enabling—nothing less than the mutilation via gender reassignment surgeries of the innocent little ones among us in the name of “woke” ideology.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
