“Protect children” crusaders’ zeal to punish teenagers and social media now openly endangers young people

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| April 2026

The ban-teens-from-social-media movement has degenerated into rewarding violent real-life child abusers and officials who ignore predators.

The awkward Jungianism “enantiodromia” describes the bizarre progression of ideological movements into their polar opposites just as their success is peaking.

Until recently, my argument that the global movement to “protect children” by banning teenagers under age 16 (soon to be 18, then 21) from social media spearheaded by psychologists Jonathan Haidt, Jean Twenge, and allies actually endangers young people by distracting policy makers from real dangers while denying youths access to vital online connections, was largely over what scientific information shows.

For example, definitive Centers for Disease Control surveys and analyses along with decades of research amply document that in the real world, parents’ and adults’ abuses and troubled behaviors are the biggest cause by far of teens’ poor mental health and risks. Nothing else, social media use included, even comes close.

Figure 1 illustrates these shocking points for a population advocates claim is particularly vulnerable: girls under age 16.

Figure 1. Parents’ violent and emotional abuses and parents’ drug/alcohol problems are strongly linked to much higher rates of suicide and self-harm by girls. However, girls’ social media use is linked to lower rates of self-harm but is not linked to suicide attempt rates.

Source: CDC, 2023.

Of course authorities and interests analyzing the widely-cited CDC survey saw these unexpected life-and-death results just like I did – ones that call for reevaluation of the entire teenage “mental health crisis.”

Instead, all ignored them. Authorities from the far-Right Heritage Foundation to Haidt and colleagues to progressive Democrats tacitly agreed to pretend domestic abuse, violence, and dysfunction victimizing children and teens don’t exist in order to launch a crusade blaming teens’ use of social media.

Their escapism was bad enough. But I never expected this crusade would cross the line into directly endangering young people.

Now it has

The ban-teens crusade has become so obsessed with blaming social media “algorithms” and “messages” on computer and smartphone screens that they now openly celebrate recent court verdicts awarding millions of dollars to officials who ignore real-life predators and to grownups who physically and psychologically abuse real-life children and teens.

The New Mexico state court case: something has gone horribly wrong

The New Mexico Attorney General’s 225-page civil case against media giant Meta deployed fake profiles of purported “13-year-olds” on social media sites that drew “inappropriate” solicitations from “numerous” pedophiles.

So, did New Mexico’s top law enforcement officer open investigations to identify these evident pedophiles to refer them for prosecution in their jurisdictions?

He did not. He did nothing about real predators his own filing branded a major menace to children.

Instead, his lawsuit blamed the online platform for “addicting” children to virtual media screens where they might be contacted by pedophiles. He cited no cases of real child victims.

That a jury, even one constrained by narrow civil procedures, would award anything, let alone $375 million, to this political grandstander who displayed gross dereliction of duty to enforce laws to protect children is alarming.

Social media giants’ anti-social conduct indeed deserves huge fines, penalties, and strict measures to regulate and break them up – not slopping millions to child-endangering opportunists like New Mexico’s Attorney General.

The Los Angeles Superior Court verdict was even worse

Its jury awarded $6 million in “damages” to a brutal body-shaming parent who for years violently and psychologically tortured her daughters (one committed suicide; the other suffered extreme mental and physical distresses), then abandoned her surviving daughter.

Why? Because the surviving daughter, now allied with mom for the court case, testified that “addictive” online sites made her feel severely bad about herself. She and her mother argued the media platform owed them damages.

I’m not disputing that seeing Victoria’s Secret’s sleek pictures, instagrammers and snapchatters having fun, and slut-fat-ugly-kill-yourself posts and messages can be cruelly depressing, especially for vulnerable personalities. Just like fashion magazines, TV, movies, hallways, workplaces, harsh religions, sports cultures, corporate ads, and (especially) families, all of whom have cruelly body-shamed and bullied vulnerable individuals for decades – and still do, the Los Angeles trial proved.

But the utter insanity of a jury awarding millions of dollars to what court records revealed as an abusive, violent parent who made her daughters’ lives hell for years, then suddenly reconciled when the prospect of big bucks appeared, evidences deep societal sickness.

The still worse aftermath

Far from angrily denouncing these court travesties for grossly endangering children, ban-teens-from-social-media crusaders, political leaders, and media commentators celebrated the verdicts as “victories” for “protecting children.” Many lauded this mother whose abuses had a body count as a hero for “taking on Big Tech.”

By the plaintiffs’, jury’s, and celebrators’ logic, doesn’t the daughters’ father deserve a big court award as well? After all, his violence, abuse, and abandonment heavily contributed to his daughters’ years of distress now used to win court victories. Surely, he’s a hero, too.

Let us consider alternatives

Am I wrong that a child or teenager whose physical bodies are BEING beaten, molested, raped, berated, tortured, and abandoned in REAL LIFE suffers far more than a child or teen who SEES a bad word, pornographic picture, mean text, and/or distressing image on a detached computer or smartphone SCREEN?

I’ve asked this question a hundred times in various forums and have never received an answer, let alone a coherent one. I have come to suspect that advocates like Haidt really do see virtual bad words and images on a screen as worse than physical violence and abuse, but I would love to be proven wrong on that.

One possible explanation is stupidity and incompetence. I don’t buy that. The consensus that children/teenagers being virtually distressed by social media is apocalyptically damaging alongside the silence on vastly more children/teenagers being personally and physically abused in real life is too absolute, too universal across a broad spectrum of interests to just be a mob of pitchfork-waving dumbasses.

So, if not mass ignorance, we are left with a more troubling alternative: today’s self-anointed “protect children!” advocates who are fanatically triggered by rare, largely hypothetical online perils simply do not care about real abuses, violence, and rapes inflicted on children and youth by parents and favored institutions.

Sure, like the parent-victimized Los Angeles daughters in the civil trial, everyone is horrified by the 8 Louisiana children ages 3 to 11 brutally shot to death by a 31-year-old father as this is written (far more dead kids in one city in one day than all the dozens of civil lawsuits allege die from anything attributable to social media anywhere, ever) — incredibly sad tragedies.

But in practical fact, real abuses killing and victimizing real kids, when inflicted by popular institutions like families/parents, schools, churches, Scouting, sports, law enforcement, etc., however traumatic for localized sufferers, are of no sustained importance to broader interest groups and leaders. Nothing much will be done about them beyond lamenting.

Instead, these larger interests prioritize their own concerns and fears. “Porn” and “predators” are codewords for the pretense that the crusade is about “protecting children.” It is not.

It is about inflaming culture-war panics exploiting fears of new technology as justifications to grab more profitable information about users, and to shield elites from potentially dissident young people’s independent, uncontrolled access to global networks.

What Big Tech and allied powers care about is gaining more control over markets and individuals while quashing young people’s independent access to information and organizational networks not approved of by powerful entities – sources from which the young can learn challenging information on vital issues like climate change, the Middle East, social justice, and disturbing controversies.

Top-level researchers have learned go-along-to-get-along. Their studies, media reporters’ fawning articles, commentators’ substacks, op-eds, media interviews, and legislative testimony cascading every day clarion apocalyptic social media dangers while simply leaving out parental abuses, family troubles, and real-life concerns.

Philosophical interlude

These bizarrities radically extend philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s famed 1964 theory that “the form of the medium through which a message is conveyed is more important than the content of the message itself… the medium has a greater impact on human perception and behavior than the specific information it carries.”

McLuhan was considered out-there in the Sixties. Now, he seems mild. Today’s ban-teens-from-social-media crusaders have blown past his theory to announce that the medium is all that matters. Real events, valid information, truthful content (where these even exist any more)… all are irrelevant.

What unites moralistic and elite interests

Moralists like Haidt and elites like Big Tech and political acolytes effectively prioritize the well-being of parents/grownups and their institutions over those of the young. Both view children and teens as mere commodities whose welfare and rights can be manipulated and sacrificed. Both dismiss family and institutional abuses that really harm children. Both view the “crisis” as children/teens independently accessing social media-platformed information and contacts disapproved of by grownups, corporations, and authoritarian governments.

Moralists’ and elites’ unified strategy is to ban children/teens from social media. Shrugging off real-life violence, rape, and abuses against children and teenagers – concerns with the potential to derail their culture-war panic – has now emerged as an openly acceptable part of this repressive strategy. Why so many progressive leaders are going along with this elite power-grab remains a mystery.