Jonathan Haidt, globally acclaimed expert and policy guru on teenagers, mental health, and predators, never mentions Jeffrey Epstein. That’s weird.
Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| March 2026
Even weirder: Haidt’s crusade to ban teens from social media is enthusiastically backed by Big Tech, Big Money, and Big Government.
In societies that actually cared about children and teenagers’ safety and mental health, politicians, professionals, academics, and commentators would focus 99% of their attention and policy energy on preventing (a) family abuses, addiction, violence, mental disturbance, etc., and (b) institutional abuses in schools, churches, sports, youth programs, and international rings often run by elites. These affect millions of young people and kill thousands.
Instead, 99% of attention is fixated on social media and smartphones, which a mountain of studies and every analyst from psychologist-statistician Christopher Ferguson to independent researchers to blame-social-media activists themselves agree that scientifically, social media is a trivial factor in teens’ mental health. Even assuming the very few but constantly highlighted tragedies occurred solely because teens went online, social media’s danger to youths is vastly smaller than dangers elsewhere in society.
While these upside-down priorities are relentlessly promoted by psychologists Jonathan Haidt, Jean Twenge, and fellow crusaders, the fault lies with governments and powerful interests who elevate their blame-teens-and-social-media crusade — which conveniently serves as a distraction from their own derelictions.
Reciprocating, “protect our children” crusaders like Haidt and Twenge observe Harpo-like silence* on the mammoth Jeffrey Epstein scandal in which scores if not hundreds of elite predators credibly appear to have victimized hundreds to thousands of children, teenagers, and young women – a zillion times more from this one scandal alone than anything attributable to social media.
Instead, Haidt, Twenge, and favored politicians break their arms patting their own backs for their “courageous attack against Big Tech” to “save our children!” from lurking online predators and “addictive algorithm” corruptions.
Cue laugh track
In truth, Big Tech, global elites, and governments, far from opposing these “attacks,” enthusiastically spend tens of millions of dollars pushing Haidt’s teen social-media bans and “age verification” schemes.
Governments along with Apple, Meta, X, Anthropic and other tech and AI moguls eagerly champion the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) that Haidt pushes. These biggies contribute millions of dollars to front groups like the Meta-funded Digital Childhood Alliance and join with far-right lobbies like Heritage Foundation to promote passage of KOSA, the App Store Accountability Act, and “age verification” mandates.
That is, the child-exploiting, child-corrupting, child-endangering Big Tech demons join saintly anti-social-media crusaders in Big Love for “child protection” laws.
All just weird, don’t you think?
Why on earth would Big Tech and AI agree to decimate the foundational internet law’s Section 230, which shields online platforms from legal action for individual users’ content? Why would they invite regulation on themselves?
Because, you see…
“Child safety” legislation like KOSA actually protects Big Tech by shifting blame to teenagers depicted as so weak, corruptible, and liberal (keep that last to a whisper) that they require authoritarian crackdowns to restrict what they see and do online.
To punish teens, KOSA and purported “age-gating” measures vastly expand the power of Big Tech, elite interests, and increasingly authoritarian governments to:
· Exploit “protecting children” as a smokescreen for stopping young people from accessing information government and Big Interests disapprove of, arbitrarily labeled “adult content;”
· Suppress Gen Z’s progressive young people from using social media to organize activism around issues like climate change, social justice, and Gaza;
· And the biggie: harvest vastly more profitable data on users, especially children, via “age verification” requirements mandating hugely expanded personal identification details.
Metering the oxygen
Epstein and institutional scandals also present a potential political problem for Haidt and “ban teens from social media” crusaders.
Public outrage at the burgeoning Epstein scandal embroiling global elites in an expanding web of predation and corruption is causing shamings, resignations, and arrests afflicting tech, corporate, academic, political, and royal luminaries, even threatening to topple entire governments.
Meanwhile, Haidt has socially climbed from NPR interviews and TED talks to World Economic Forum soirees. He has every incentive not to offend 10- and 11-digit billionaires at Davos, where Epstein is a bit of a sore subject.
So, Haidt and Twenge are silent* on mega-predator Epstein’s decades of victimizations of teens while pushing a diversionary blame-social-media (translation: blame those leftist teenagers) tactic. Haidt’s and big powers’ mutual interest in burying attention to the Epstein predations expose the sinister underbelly of their joint “save children!” crusade.
In turn, power elites celebrate and reward silence on interrelated institutional abuses, an alliance that effectively reverses what governments should be doing to truly protect children.
By “interrelated,” I mean that family and third-party abuses like Epstein’s are tragically connected. Epstein and his modeling-agency/trafficker allies preyed on teens from disadvantaged and troubled families.
That, in turn, should be a mammoth issue in the United States, whose teens tell our leading health survey that 35% of the adults in their households are violent, 30% abuse drugs/alcohol, 40% suffer “severe” mental health problems, and 20% have been jailed.
Again, cue laugh track.
The dilemma is more subtle
Epstein’s and high-level abusers’ victimizations of children and teenagers definitely garner politician and media attention. Ordinarily, Epstein’s predatory prominence should be threatening Haidt’s and ban-teens crusaders’ campaign to dominate headlines and declare social media as the big predatory threat to children.
Suppose – indulge my fantasy for a moment – conscientious leaders who actually cared about young people were shocked by the Epstein scandal into looking at the larger picture and concluded: why are we wasting all our energy on social media? We need to prioritize real-life family, institutional, and global-predator abuses as the big threats to youths’ mental health and safety.
Some logical authorities – I’m really indulging fantasy – might even start questioning why we would cavalierly ban teens from social media when our own major surveys show vulnerable and abused youth in families use social media more for contacts and health.
That is, attention to real threats to children and teens potentially risks slamming the brakes on the raging hegira to blame social media for endangering children and to punish teens with restrictions. Worse, it would put officials’ and institutional derelictions front and center.
That, of course, can’t be allowed.
Unfortunately for young people but fortunately for culture-war crusaders and government and private elites, no one important is interested in opening the worm-can of comparing the mammoth dangers of family, institutional, and related real-world predations to the trivial dangers of social media. Instead, these issues are kept separate while popular “protect children!” schemes are designed to increase government and Big Interest power even more.
That is my theory of the web of otherwise mysterious silences and alliances governing teens, safety, mental health, social media, predators, and Epstein. Figuratively speaking (well, occasionally, literally), no one wants to be pushed off the back of their yacht or found hanging in a cell.
*Repeated searches turn up no cases in which Haidt or Twenge spoke up – even casually – on Epstein. I tried different word combinations. Nothing. If anyone has a citation to the contrary, please forward to me.