On June 15, UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer announced a social media ban for children under 16 in Britain. Beginning in early 2027, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, X, and other similar platforms will be prohibited for kids.
England isn’t the first country to take this measure: Australia already implemented a similar ban last December. And they certainly will not be the last: A dozen other countries are actively moving in the same direction.
The US has not yet joined the list or announced any intention to—even though a majority of Americans now support such a ban.
But a powerful passage on the issue in Magnifica Humanitas, the first encyclical of the first American pope, could be just the thing to awaken the consciences of US legislators and policymakers and inspire them to take action—and soon.
Many experts have been increasingly concerned about the corrosive effects of social media on society. Even the people behind the technology have been sounding the alarm on their own industry—the 2020 documentary The Social Dilemma being a striking example. Fake news, attention fragmentation, and political polarization are among the major concerns, but underlying them all is the sheer addictiveness of the platforms, which are carefully engineered to keep users on them as often and as long as possible.
But no one has felt the corrosive effects of social media more than Gen-Z.
The social media boom has ushered in a startling collapse in mental wellness in young people, particularly young girls; anxiety and depression levels have skyrocketed, as have reports of cyberbullying, self-harm, and exposure to graphic content at earlier and earlier ages. The AI boom has only added gasoline to the fire, allowing tech companies to carefully tailor feeds and ads to their users.
Anecdotal evidence of this collapse abounds, but it’s also been painstakingly studied by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Haidt has tracked the devastating impact of social media on young people and recommended “four new norms” in response: (1) no smartphones before high school, (2) no social media before 16, (3) phone-free schools, and (4) more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. His research has received bipartisan support in the US, inspiring phone bans in schools from Arkansas to New York. It was also a key motivator in Australia’s move to ban social media for kids altogether—a move Haidt has publicly applauded.
But when it comes to a US ban in the vein of the UK or Australia, pundits seem to agree: Even if it were desirable, it’s highly improbable. A US ban, the thinking goes, faces a steep uphill climb in the courts over free speech concerns. (Haidt rejects this First Amendment argument, since the law already draws a line in the sand at 13. “This isn’t about who can say what,” he says. “The laws are written about at what age you can sign a contract.”)
What’s more, social media, smartphones, and AI are all homegrown products—the fruit of American innovation, nurtured on American soil and managed by American companies. And there are undeniably a host of benefits that these technologies can and do give, including to young people.
A social media ban would thus cut against some of the deepest instincts of our liberty-loving culture. Indeed, some in the US are already calling the UK law a Trojan horse for censorship of speech and digital ID enforcement for adults.
The American government made its position clear in a statement on the UK law issued by the US embassy: “The best answer to challenges posed by technology is almost always better technology, not broad bans or blunt regulatory instruments.” The onus, the statement goes on to say, ought to fall not on tech companies but on parents, who are “the first and best line of defense”: “The United States favors parental empowerment over government mandates.”
Enter Pope Leo XIV. The pontiff’s recently released social encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, takes up the theme of human dignity with a primary focus on artificial intelligence. Tristan Harris of the Center for Humane Technology, a former Google employee who appeared in The Social Dilemma and who also supports the under-16 bans, met with the pope ahead of the encyclical’s release, and Tristan’s fellow cofounder Aza Raskin says that the document “marks a point on the human timeline of moral leaders standing up to push back against technological encroachment or overreach into our humanity.”
And in one of its most striking passages—paragraphs 141–142—Leo turns his attention to young people and social media. He begins by outlining the various negative impacts of “early and unsupervised exposure to digital devices and social media”: a loss of sleep, attention, and control of emotions; “easy access” to violent, pornographic, and corrupting content; the rise in “grooming, blackmail and the sexual exploitation of minors; “fake profiles” and AI-generated images and videos; isolation, cyberbullying, and the “pressures to share intimate images or sensitive information.”
But the pope then pivots to parents—the US embassy’s “first and best line of defense” against tech exploitation. And he begins with a trenchant observation: Parents are overwhelmed by the magnitude of this problem, and they need help. “It is difficult for parents by themselves,” Leo writes, “to resist the influence of business models that monetize attention and time. Therefore, it is essential to form an alliance among policy-makers, educational institutions and families that is capable of concretely supporting adults in this task.”
The issue, Leo seems to be suggesting, ultimately isn’t one of free speech or technology but the love of money—“a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Tim 6:10). And it has put parents between a rock and a hard place: Either succumb to crushing cultural pressures to digitize their child’s life, with all the attendant miseries that this entails, or become a kind of social pariah, swimming helplessly against the current. Thus, rather than “shifting the whole burden of control onto families,” the pope writes, legislators need to take concrete action to support them in protecting children: opposing “the immediate interests of platforms,” “holding service providers accountable,” and, yes, imposing age restrictions: “Interventions by legislators are appropriate for setting age limits.”
The pope, of course, is offering general principles for the whole world, not particular policies for one country. These two paragraphs alone speak of “young people,” “children,” “adolescents,” and “minors,” covering a broad range of possible ages—never mind the particular laws governments might enact.
But it would be difficult to harmonize this passage of Magnifica Humanitas with the statement of the US embassy, and much easier to do so with the bans in the UK and Australia. At the very least, it seems clear that, for Pope Leo, policymakers shouldn’t simply be leaving it to parents to sort it all out; to do so would be to fail the children “entrusted to our care”—socially, morally, and spiritually.
Is there another way forward—one that honors the concerns raised by the pope without resorting to a UK-style ban? Niall Gooch at First Things suggests an even more dramatic measure: Simply ban smartphones for under-sixteens, just like we do with nicotine and alcohol products. This would help keep social media out of children’s hands and pockets, but it would also ease fears about a government stranglehold on free speech online. (And after all, it’s not just social media that poses threats to young people, but also the easy access to the internet. Indeed, the pope himself introduces this crisis by speaking of both “digital devices and social media.”)
The editors of Newsweek, meanwhile, offer a more modest proposal: “Focus on age-appropriate design, safer defaults, limits on addictive features, privacy-preserving age assurance, better enforcement against harmful algorithmic recommendations, and statutory duties that place real burdens on platforms instead of symbolic burdens on parents.” A measure along these lines recently passed the state legislature in Minnesota, to the applause of the bishops there.
Either of these alternatives would certainly be preferable to the current laissez-faire state of affairs. But would either one be as viable and effective as a national ban on social media for kids?
The bottom line is that these technologies are causing great harm to our children on a massive societal scale. Something has to be done. But as Pope Leo exhorts, it can’t just be left to parents to do it.
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Should children under 16 (why not make it 18?) be allowed social media?
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No, probably. And I fully support parents buying their child a flip phone. Or the “Light phone” (Google it–they have one with ‘directions’ now). If parents don’t want their children to have social media, then they need to step up to the plate and be parents, not outsource that to everyone else.
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I do not support a gov’t imposed ban.
Flip phone is excellent idea.
The fact that we need a National Ban on Social Media to protect the innocence of children should be evidence enough that social media does not serve to respect the inherent Sanctity and Dignity of Human Life but rather as a means to objectify the human person and deny our inherent Sanctity and Dignity as beloved sons and daughters.
Technology is a tool to get information from point A to point B; it is the character of the people who input the information that determines whether the content will be used to promote human flourishing and thus respect our inherent Sanctity and Dignity as Human Persons or inhibit human flourishing, and thus deny our inherent Sanctity and Dignity as Human Persons.
In fact there was a Time when violent, pornographic, and corrupting content was considered inappropriate for all persons and not just persons of a certain age , but that was then, and this is now, so yes , let’s save the children, and while we are at it, save ourselves for “ When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker Himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being. The defence of the family is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man.” – Pope Benedict XVI
Our Call to Holiness, to be chaste in our thoughts, in our words , and in our deeds , and thus be Temples of The Holy Ghost in all our relationships and experiences, does not end in childhood, but continues throughout our life here on Earth, and affirming , promoting, and defending that self evident Truth , that our Human Dignity comes from God, in whose Image we are Made, is still the best way to protect our children from harm.
“Technology is a tool to get information from point A to point B”
It’s important to understand the difference between DATA and information. What we call “information technology” is really focused on DATA, specifically generation, transmission and storage.
Data is simply recorded assertions, accounts, facts, sounds, images, etc. Data needs to be processed to become information, for an informed, responsible user. Or cognitive limits require the ability to filter, collate and contextualize data to make it useful and not overwhelming,
A journal article on quantum mechanics is largely only understood by a select few with the intellectual prowess and training to consider it. Peer review is supposed to assure validity or at least plausibility.
There is some data (pornographic images) that can’t be used responsibly, but then again, we have Justice Potter’s difficulty in defining it. Whether something is art, a medical image or pornography resides primarily in the intent of the user.
Technology is ultimately, like a knife, it can be used as a tool or as a weapon. As a weapon, it can be defensive or offensive. There’s always the potential for misappropriation and misuse.
This distinction has important RELIGIOUS consequences. The Bible can be thought of as data, a series of accounts, instructions, prescriptions and proscriptions, statements and testimonies.
Luther made the leap that the Bible was information, asserting in 1525 what would be called the “perspicuity of Scripture” as a foundation for “Sola Scriptura”. He knew this was unworkable, and attributed operational failure to individual defect. In other words to erect one novel idea, he needed an ex nihilo foundation. Of course he was good exegetical excursions. The Book of James has a passage that’s a direct refutation of “sola fideism”, so he dismissed it as “an epistle of straw”.
Now while 2 Timothy 3:16 lists the utility of Scripture, “the perspicuity of Scripture”, requires an inferred subtext “by anybody and if you don’t get it, it’s your fault”. Of course if it were true, we wouldn’t have tens of thousands of denominations in wild disagreement about such things as soteriology and eschatology, Bible colleges, commentaries and concordances.
There is nothing under the sun humanity hasn’t abused or misused. Our digital architectures have produced amazing things, but they have been misused from the beginning, often in insidious ways (legislative enactments that are thousands of pages long, that no person has read in their entirety). There is no substitute for prudence.
Few would argue that social media do not have an overall pernicious effect on children. But, as with covid, one needs to think whether the remedy will ultimately be worse than the problem. If you can think of a way to restrict under-16 children from using social media without subjecting citizens to still more intrusive, but “legitimate” government scrutiny, by all means propose it. Otherwise, if you do not wish to slide yet further down that slippery slope to the authoritarianism that is already painfully obvious in much of Western Europe, you must concede that the overall problem must be approached from a different direction.
Please stop. We all accept controls on our behavior to protect children like restricting cigarettes and alcohol. This is not different at all.
First, they’ll have to get 16 year olds to make their bed in the morning.
LOL!
Quote from the article: “…a powerful passage on [this] issue in Magnifica Humanitas, the first encyclical of the first American pope, could be just the thing to awaken the consciences of US legislators and policymakers and inspire them to take action—and soon…”.
Seriously???
Why isn’t there an outcry against the Big Tech producers of all this horrible stuff, and notjust against the stuff itself? Why don’t media and others call out the self-serving moral vacuity and greed of these people in Silicon Valley? Idolatry of technology plays a part, obviously. And idolatry of profit, money/money. But it’s deeper than that. Our degenerate modernism is simply afraid of morality, of calling to account powerful people for ethically culpable conduct. Silicon Valley knows perfectly well all the appalling negative effects of its technical concoctions. But they pay effectively no attention. And society is scared of calling them out. It is cowardly, utterly shameful. So we are collapsing as a society.
Because Silicon Valley and government are symbiotes.
You haven’t noticed the outcry? That’s what his article and the comments here are part of. But we live in a democracy and more people don’t care.
It would just be so much easier if parents stopped buying their kids smart phones. My kids know we will not back down and they are not getting phones, but its so frustrating when almost every twelve year old we know has a phone! My husband and I try to lead by example and we don’t use social media. It’s toxic and a waste of time for everyone. The Anxious Generation is an excellent book. Every parent should read it.
Exactly. Don’t provide smart phones to children in the first place.
While parents arguably need the support of government and other organizations in this context, my hunch is that many parents themselves have a problem in using technology–read Smart phones–wisely and well. If so, they are hardly in a position to guide their offspring.
They are the ones who model techno behavior; they are also the ones who provide access to phones and, hence, social media for their children. As such, they may not, I’ll suggest, even see a problem here. At least, not until it is rather late in the day.
In short, until such parents undergo a techno metanoia, so to say, the problem(s) will only get worse.
“While parents arguably need the support of government and other organizations in this context”
This would be the same “government” (there are many, federal, state and municipal, but there is a binding intellectual hegemony) that allows and in some cases sponsors, things such as pride propaganda in grand schools, “grooming” of vulnerable children dealing with the confusion of adolescence, the exposure of children to adult nudity at “Pride” parades, the distribution of contraceptives to children, and the attempt to conceal solicitation of abortion by teenagers from parents- and of course the funding of sixty million plus deaths of children in the womb.
Why on earth would anybody look to government to protect children and not question how additional powers would be misused.
Not grand schools, grade schools. This is why I think AI is GS. (genuine stupidity).
The Government provides a floor of protection. Not all the niche problems that you and other parents may want to avoid. Those are a you responsibility it is true. Minimum standards are necessary to protect the vulnerable in a society that continues to care for its children after they leave the womb.
Your state idolatry is showing.
“Provides a floor of protection”. Ask Mark Houck. Ask Laken Riley. Ask Iryna Zarutska. Oh wait, the women are dead, you can’t. Ask my aunt, the military widow terrified by the IRS because of their loss of a document.
Sending your kid to school-under compulsion-where their morals are subjected to disordering attacks is neither protection or a “niche” problem.
But thanks for affirming that you remain (in some rather intense competition) the leading candidate for CWR VI.