Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| March 2026<\/strong><\/p>\n In societies that actually cared about children and teenagers\u2019 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.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0scientifically, social media is a trivial factor in teens\u2019 mental health<\/a>. Even assuming\u00a0the very few but constantly highlighted tragedies<\/a>\u00a0occurred solely because teens went online, social media\u2019s danger to youths is vastly smaller than dangers elsewhere in society.<\/p>\n While these upside-down priorities are relentlessly promoted by psychologists\u00a0Jonathan Haidt<\/a>,\u00a0Jean Twenge<\/a>, and fellow crusaders, the fault lies with governments and powerful interests who elevate their blame-teens-and-social-media crusade \u2014 which conveniently serves as a distraction from their own derelictions.<\/p>\n Reciprocating, \u201cprotect our children\u201d crusaders like Haidt and Twenge observe Harpo-like silence* on the mammoth\u00a0Jeffrey Epstein scandal<\/a>\u00a0in which scores if not hundreds of elite predators credibly appear to have\u00a0victimized<\/a>\u00a0hundreds to thousands of children, teenagers, and young women \u2013 a zillion times more from this one scandal alone than anything attributable to social media.<\/p>\n Instead, Haidt, Twenge, and favored politicians break their arms patting their own backs for their \u201ccourageous attack against Big Tech\u201d to \u201csave our children!\u201d from lurking online predators and \u201caddictive algorithm\u201d corruptions.<\/p>\n Cue laugh track<\/strong><\/p>\n In truth, Big Tech, global elites, and governments, far from opposing these \u201cattacks,\u201d enthusiastically spend tens of millions of dollars pushing Haidt\u2019s teen social-media bans and \u201cage verification\u201d schemes.<\/p>\n Governments along with\u00a0Apple, Meta, X<\/a>,\u00a0Anthropic<\/a>\u00a0and 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\u00a0Heritage Foundation<\/a>\u00a0to promote passage of\u00a0KOSA<\/a>, the\u00a0App Store Accountability Act<\/a>, and \u201cage verification<\/a>\u201d mandates.<\/p>\n That is, the child-exploiting, child-corrupting, child-endangering Big Tech demons join saintly anti-social-media crusaders in Big Love for \u201cchild protection\u201d laws.<\/p>\n All just weird, don\u2019t you think?<\/p>\n Why on earth would Big Tech and AI agree to decimate the foundational internet law\u2019s\u00a0Section 230<\/a>, which shields online platforms from legal action for individual users\u2019 content? Why would they invite regulation on themselves?<\/p>\n Because, you see\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cChild safety\u201d legislation like KOSA actually protects Big Tech by shifting blame to teenagers depicted as so weak, corruptible, and\u00a0liberal<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(keep that last to a whisper) that they require authoritarian crackdowns to restrict what they see and do online.<\/p>\n To punish teens, KOSA and purported \u201cage-gating\u201d measures vastly expand the power of Big Tech, elite interests, and increasingly authoritarian governments to:<\/p>\n Metering the oxygen<\/strong><\/p>\n Epstein and institutional scandals also present a potential political problem for Haidt and \u201cban teens from social media\u201d crusaders.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Haidt has socially climbed from NPR interviews and TED talks to\u00a0World Economic Forum<\/a>\u00a0soirees. He has every incentive not to offend 10- and 11-digit billionaires at Davos, where Epstein is a bit of a\u00a0sore subject<\/a>.<\/p>\n So, Haidt and Twenge are silent* on mega-predator Epstein\u2019s decades of victimizations of teens while pushing a diversionary blame-social-media (translation: blame those leftist teenagers) tactic. Haidt\u2019s and big powers\u2019 mutual interest in burying attention to the Epstein predations expose the sinister underbelly of their joint \u201csave children!\u201d crusade.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n By \u201cinterrelated,\u201d I mean that family and third-party abuses like Epstein\u2019s are tragically connected. Epstein and his modeling-agency\/trafficker allies preyed on teens from disadvantaged and\u00a0troubled families<\/a>.<\/p>\n That, in turn, should be a\u00a0mammoth issue<\/a>\u00a0in the United States, whose teens tell our\u00a0leading health survey<\/a>\u00a0that 35% of the adults in their households are violent, 30% abuse drugs\/alcohol, 40% suffer \u201csevere\u201d mental health problems, and 20% have been jailed.<\/p>\n Again, cue laugh track.<\/p>\n The dilemma is more subtle<\/strong><\/p>\n Epstein\u2019s and high-level abusers\u2019 victimizations of children and teenagers definitely garner politician and media attention. Ordinarily, Epstein\u2019s predatory prominence should be threatening Haidt\u2019s and ban-teens crusaders\u2019 campaign to dominate headlines and declare social media as the big predatory threat to children.<\/p>\n Suppose \u2013 indulge my fantasy for a moment \u2013 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\u2019 mental health and safety.<\/p>\n Some logical authorities \u2013 I\u2019m really indulging fantasy \u2013 might even start questioning why we would cavalierly ban teens from social media when our own\u00a0major surveys<\/a>\u00a0show vulnerable and abused youth in families use social media more for contacts and health.<\/p>\nEven weirder: Haidt\u2019s crusade to ban teens from social media is enthusiastically backed by Big Tech, Big Money, and Big Government.<\/h5>\n
\u00b7 Exploit \u201cprotecting children\u201d as a smokescreen for stopping young people from\u00a0accessing information government and Big Interests disapprove of<\/a>, arbitrarily labeled \u201cadult content;\u201d<\/h4>\n
\u00b7 Suppress Gen Z\u2019s progressive young people from using social media to organize\u00a0activism<\/a>\u00a0around issues like\u00a0climate change, social justice, and Gaza<\/a>;<\/h4>\n
\u00b7 And the biggie: harvest vastly more\u00a0profitable data on users<\/a>, especially children, via \u201cage verification\u201d requirements mandating hugely expanded personal identification details.<\/h4>\n