New York is pioneering a new approach to children and social media. Under the state’s recent SAFE for Kids Act, social media companies will be required to restrict algorithmically personalized feeds for minors unless they receive parental consent. The law also limits overnight notifications and establishes age-verification requirements for platforms.
The law raises legitimate concerns about privacy, government overreach, and the proper role of parents. But it also raises a more difficult question: When families, communities, cultural norms, and institutions fail to provide necessary guardrails, is it appropriate for government to provide them instead?
The Transformation of Childhood
This topic hits close to home for Contributor Jonathan Haidt; his research on the transformation of childhood makes a conversation on government intervention increasingly difficult to avoid.
In The Anxious Generation, Haidt argues that childhood underwent a dramatic transformation with the widespread adoption of smartphones and social media. A play-based childhood characterized by face-to-face relationships, independence, physical activity, and real-world risk was increasingly replaced by a phone-based childhood.
His recommendations consequently involve boundaries: no smartphones before high school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, and more independence and unsupervised play in the real world. Underlying those recommendations is a recognition that children are not simply autonomous consumers making choices in a marketplace. They are being formed. Their habits, desires, attention, relationships, and capacity for self-control are still developing.
Yet many of the cultural guardrails that once assisted that formation have weakened.
A Society Without Guardrails
Contributor R. R. Reno, editor of First Things, described this broader problem in our conversation with him: “There’s no train ride to get young people from station to station to station and there are no guardrails. And so in the twists and turns of life, we get a lot of wreckage.”
For Reno, this lack of guardrails extends well beyond technology. Modern society has increasingly dismantled inherited norms and expectations in the name of individual freedom. The individual is left to construct his own identity, values, relationships, and trajectory through life.
“It was sold to them as greater freedom,” Reno says. Yet that freedom can be experienced as “an exhausting effort of self-invention.”
Social media offers a particularly vivid example. A teenager may be “free” to spend hours scrolling through an algorithmically curated feed, remain online late into the night, encounter virtually unlimited content, and construct an identity before an audience of strangers. But does the absence of restraint necessarily make that teenager more free?
Freedom “From” vs. “To Be”
Contributor Os Guinness provides a useful framework when considering what it means to be truly free. In his Praxis Circle interview, Guinness draws upon Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between negative and positive freedom. Negative freedom is “freedom from”—freedom from coercion, oppression, addiction, bullying, or unnecessary government interference. It is indispensable, but Guinness calls it “only preliminary.”
Positive freedom asks another question: What are we free for?
Guinness calls this the “freedom to be.” And genuine freedom, he argues, ultimately requires self-restraint.
“There is a paradox about freedom,” Guinness says. “Freedom’s greatest enemy is freedom.”
Freedom requires a framework. Ideally, that framework is self-government: individuals possessing enough character and self-restraint to use their liberty responsibly. But Guinness identifies the paradox: freedom itself can erode self-restraint when it becomes unrestrained permissiveness.
When Self-Restraint Fails
A society built around self-government should rightly hesitate before asking government to regulate every harmful behavior. Ideally, the guardrails surrounding children would be erected much closer to home—by parents, families, schools, churches, and communities. Our guiding values as an organization strongly support this.
But the current state of our society begs the question: What happens when those organic guardrails disappear?
What happens when parents are attempting to establish boundaries against technologies specifically engineered to capture attention? When schools normalize smartphones and other devices? When cultural expectations encourage children to join social platforms because nearly everyone else is already there? When technology companies profit from maximizing engagement?
As Contributor Brad Wilcox explains below, the market is not an “unvarnished good” for children and families, and technologies that are hurting the basis of society should be taken seriously:
If the observations and collective wisdom from Haidt, Reno, Guinness, and Wilcox are correct, then maintaining the status quo is itself a choice. Whether New York’s choice is the right one remains up for debate, but we can safely conclude that simply invoking a libertarian notion of freedom is not an adequate response to the harm Big Tech is causing.
This may be the uncomfortable choice facing a highly individualistic society: the more incapable we become at a corporate and individual level of establishing guardrails, the stronger the argument for government intervention becomes. That should concern advocates of limited government rather than reassure them.
Perhaps the best defense against excessive government intervention is therefore not simply demanding that government leave us alone—it is rebuilding the institutions and habits that make government intervention less necessary in the first place.
But are we willing to do this? Are we willing to, from the ground up, create protections and foster restraint in our families, teach it in our schools and churches, and promote it in our communities? Cultural renewal is hard but necessary work, and it’s the only way forward to preserve true human flourishing in our great nation. I close with the words of Edmund Burke,
“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites… Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.”
