Will Banning Minors from Social Media Break the Internet?

 

Charles C. W. Cooke seems to think so.  Cooke, a writer for National Review whose opinions and style I have great respect for, opines in the April 2024 issue that using Federal power to keep minors off social media is a bad idea. 

 

He concedes there is a real problem:  bullying, pornography use, depression, and suicide are all results of teenagers and even younger people accessing social media.  He doesn't dispute that on balance, the harm that can happen is probably not worth the benefits that the youngsters gain.  The problem is acute enough to show up in strange places such as the comics page.  The strip "Baldo" by Hector Cantu and Carolos Castellanos portrays a nearly-nuclear Hispanic family that includes a precocious young girl named Gracie., who appears to be about 8.  Recently, the writers chose to show Gracie taking out a cigarette lighter, lighting up, taking a puff, and in the last frame she had a mobile phone in her hand instead of a cigarette.  The message, somewhat crudely but shockingly expressed, is that if you hand your eight-year-old a mobile phone, you might as well let her smoke too.

 

And the comparison between smoking and mobile-phone-mediated social media is apt in another way.  The social ostracism that many smokers now experience, at least in the U. S., came about as the U. S. government adopted severe restrictions on cigarette advertising and sales.  It's somewhat of a chicken-and-egg argument as to whether federal restrictions encouraged the change in social attitude, or the social attitude made the government's job easier.  But as the hypocrisy of the cigarette companies was exposed, revealing that they knew very well tobacco killed their customers but went right on selling it as though nothing was wrong, I think public opinion simply turned against them, especially among young people.  But the federal strictures helped the process along.

 

Cooke's main concern is that allowing the federal government to get its grubby, incompetent mitts on what is up to now almost a perfect example of the unrestricted free market of the Internet will ruin it for everybody.  He thinks that if we let the camel of government regulation of age for using the Internet get its head under the tent, the rest of the smelly animal will come too, and politicians will find some way to prevent their political opponents from accessing voters under the age of 90 ,or something.

 

Now I'll agree that the ingenuity of bureaucrats to expand their remits beyond all reasonable bounds is impressive and worth being concerned about.  But I haven't noticed any huge federal bureaucracy springing up around the subject of restricting tobacco use, unless you count the diversion of the huge pile of money extracted from the tobacco companies as part of class-action lawsuits by smokers toward uses that have nothing to do with smoking prevention.  And that was mainly the doing of states rather than the federal government, if I recall correctly.

 

Cooke says if the federal laws proposed go into action, you would have to send your private information over the Internet every time you want to access YouTube or Facebook.  Well, I do that every time I buy something online already—not only that, I send information that will allow a crook to steal from me, and now and then it even happens.  But the banks are vigilant enough to keep credit-card fraud down to a level that seems to be tolerable enough for most people, and we haven't had some giant federal bureaucracy arise because of it.

 

I agree that it may be premature to enact a federal law in this area.  But many states are currently experimenting with similar laws, and several have already gained some experience with them.  Some reports indicate that major porn outlets on the Internet are seeing their income drop substantially.  One report cited by the website of the Southern Baptist Convention says that as a result of an age restriction passed in Louisiana, traffic to the site Pornhub from that state has dropped by 80%. 

 

That may seem like a drop in the bucket, but one of the strengths of the federal system is that each state is a little political-science lab of its own.  After another year or two, federal legislators, if they are so inclined, can take a look at the many experiments in social-media regulation concerning minors that are going on right now, and take the best ideas from the successful ones. 

 

Then, it shouldn't be that hard to craft a law that would not only restrict social-media companies from preying on minors, but would also restrict the role of the federal government in the regulatory process.  Sen. Josh Hawley's proposed bill, nicknamed MATURE (for Making Age-Verification Technology Uniform, Robust, and Effective), would have as its primary regulatory feature the power granted to parents to sue Internet companies who don't comply.  In that aspect, it resembles the Texas anti-abortion law which empowers private citizens to sue abortionists.  No giant abortion-regulation bureaucracy sprang up in Texas after that law was passed.  But a lot of abortion clinics shut down immediately, which was the desired effect.

 

Cooke says that he is going to take the steps available to a responsible parent, which he is, to ensure that his own children don't get harmed by social media.  And that is fine if you are a responsible parent.  But we have plenty of irresponsible parents too, and we should have some concern for their children, who are even more vulnerable to the harms that social media can cause than the offspring of parents who are aware of the dangers and do something about them.

 

Cooke seems to be motivated by a libertarian impulse to leave the pristine unregulated nature of the Internet alone.  But as he points out, we have already seen inappropriate involvement of the government in censoring free expression on the Internet by means of the Twitter files released by Elon Musk's intervention.  And nobody passed any laws to let that happen.

 

Granted that there is currently a shortage of wisdom in Washington, we can still hope that a few public-spirited Republicans and Democrats can cooperate (!) on a bill that would take into account the successes and failures of various state laws in this area, make sure that any Federal involvement in the matter is minimized, and still accomplish the goal:  to keep children and teenagers from suffering the very real psychic harm that social media overuse and misuse can cause. 

 

Sources:  Charles C. W. Cooke's somewhat mysteriously titled "Chesterton's Internet" (he mentions the phrase twice but otherwise doesn't explain why he associates the Internet with G. K. Chesterton, who died in 1935) appeared in the April 2024 issue of National Review, pp. 34-36.  I also referred to an article on the website of the Southern Baptist Convention at https://erlc.com/resource-library/articles/the-new-state-laws-effectively-curbing-online-porn/.

Conservative Futurism and the Internet

 

In the Winter 2023 issue of The New Atlantis, lawyer and author John Ehrett points out that the bloom of enthusiasm that greeted the advent of the Internet has now faded from that particular rose.  There is now a consensus that the negative effects of social media in particular, and also the whole economic basis of "free" services that charge by taking time-slices of one's life, may have begun to outweigh the positive effects.  The question is, what to do about it?

 

Rather than simply parrot various policy ideas that are floating around—as he puts them, "prevention of censorship" or "limitation of corporate power"—he begins with the legacy of an almost completely obscure Russian thinker named Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov (that's the way Wikipedia spells him, anyway).  Fyodorov published almost nothing during his lifetime (1829-1903), but he knew or influenced a lot of people who were or became well-known for their writings and discoveries, including Leo Tolstoy and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the Russian scientist who discovered many of the founding principles of rocketry. 

 

Ehrett picks up one thread of Fyodorov's thought, which was saturated in a conservative Russian Orthodoxy that viewed God as the eternal constant presence behind the shifting sands of visible experience.  In Ehrett's words, "A conservative futurism must root itself in the principle of eternity, mirroring that divine timelessness where possible."  It's hard to think of a mindset more diametrically opposed to the "move fast and break things" motto of Facebook, and indeed of the entire software-centric Big-Tech world, which seems to be driving us toward a future that changes much too fast for us to get used to.

 

The proposal Ehrett makes that I'd like to examine concerns the Internet infrastructure, broadly defined:  not only the hardware (backbone, wired and wireless networks, etc.) but the software-based hosting, payment transfer systems, and everything else that makes the Internet work the way it does.  By now, the Internet has made a place for itself in modern society that has become well-nigh essential, just as essential as electric power, water, and sewer systems.  The latter three are regarded as public utilities. 

 

A public utility is like a similar category in the transportation regime, a "common carrier," in the sense that anyone with the money to pay for the service must be entitled to the service, regardless of the individual's particular characteristics.  My electric company doesn't inquire into my politics or religion before connecting my service drop.  But politics or religion have been the cause of many discriminatory actions by social-media operators against certain users. 

 

Suppose a miracle occurred, and there was universal agreement that we would henceforth treat the Internet as a public utility.  Local political units—towns, counties, states—get to regulate their public utilities.  So the nature of the Internet services provided in a particular locale might well depend on the sensibilities and inclinations of a certain region.  The Internet as viewed from Pocatello, Idaho, might look very different from the view it would present to a penthouse apartment in Manhattan.  Not better or worse, necessarily—just different.

 

We have gotten so used to the idea that everything on the Internet must necessarily be global—it's even built into the old name "the WorldWideWeb"—that it's hard to get one's mind around the idea of controlling it locally.  But hey—one of the boasts of software developers is that they can make their machines do virtually anything you can imagine, and we can imagine an Internet that is tied to geography, just as construction practices and architecture vary from locale to locale.

 

And that's another thing that Ehrett's conservative futurism would promote:  a renewed emphasis on the physical as opposed to the virtual.  The "slap together today, tear it down tomorrow" attitude that software developers seem to have taken an oath to enact has bled over into other areas of life, notably construction.  More and more parts of the world are beginning to resemble downtown Houston, where they put historic plaques on structures that have endured as long as five years (I exaggerate, but only a little).  Why have past cultures (Venice in the 1400s, for example) created structures whose beauty has endured to the present day, whereas the architecture and building practices of the twenty-first century seem determined to move us all closer to our origins in tent-dwelling nomadic tribes? 

 

All these ideas are good ones, but they rest on the foundation of a worldview that acknowledges the importance of eternity.  Historically, the leaders of a culture have had to embrace such a view for it to have much of an effect on the culture's direction.  For reasons too complex to go into here, we are going through a period in which the notion of eternity is ignored at best, and more likely scorned or mocked.  As philosopher Richard Weaver said in a book title back in 1948, ideas have consequences.  And the underlying beliefs of those who call the shots in the halls where important economic, political, and social decisions are made do not presently harbor ideas that are favorable to conservative futurism.

 

Nevertheless, the idea is out there, and I find it encouraging that Mr. Ehrett seems to be fairly young—he was in Yale Law School as recently as 2016.  If an idea doesn't appeal to young people in large numbers, it doesn't stand a chance.  As old duffers like me pass from the scene, the ideas that will survive are the ones that young people are attracted to.  And they are not bound by old habits of mind that are very hard to break out of. 

 

The obstacles blocking the progress of conservative futurism seem insurmountable.  Imagine the howls of outrage from Silicon Valley if the town councils of a thousand burgs all voted to restrict their Internets in the ways described above.  But there was a time back in the 1970s when Ma Bell seemed like the only possible way to do U. S. telecommunications, and we've managed to overcome that preconceived notion, despite AT&T's struggle to keep what it termed a natural monopoly.  So maybe it can happen.  But if it does, it will be because of the efforts of young people like John Ehrett and his ilk.

 

Sources: "Can There Be a Conservative Futurism?" by John Ehrett appeared on pp. 46-55 of the Winter 2023 issue of The New Atlantis.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov. 

Two Views of Porn, and What South Korea Does About It

Pornography is a big business, something that millions of people around the world indulge in, and while viewing it can get you into trouble if you hold a prominent corporate or political office or if you get involved in the child variety, it’s a private affair and not a big deal most of the time.

Pornography is exploitation that twists and defaces a type of relationship that is the earthly model of how Christ relates to his Church, and it can spiritually damage and enslave anyone who gets involved in it, crippling one's ability to relate to the opposite sex in the way God intended.

Which view do you agree with?  Probably most readers will incline toward the first view, which says that in most cases, viewing porn is a private decision that should be left up to the individual, and the legal system should get involved only in situations for which there is near-universal agreement that innocents are being harmed, such as the production or viewing of child pornography.  But the second view (which happens to be mine, more or less) is rooted in a Christian model of humanity which sees human sexuality as a gift from God, which men and women have a responsibility to use according to divine instructions.  In the second view, pornography exploits those who are involved in producing it as well as those consuming it, and debauches (a nice old-fashioned word) the users, accustoming their sexual responses to images which cannot be approached by the reality of any actual woman.  As such, pornography—especially the online variety, which is by far the most common nowadays—is worth opposing, restricting, and fighting with the legal system, even at the cost of one’s own well-being.

Over the past year or two, my views on the relationship between God’s law and human laws have changed.  When religious conservatives who are in the numerical minority in a democratic country manage to gain access to levers of power, they sometimes indulge a fantasy which goes something like this: “Pass a law against a popular but immoral thing, and people will quit doing it.”  This happened in 1919 when the amendment to the U. S. Constitution prohibiting the manufacture or sale of alcoholic beverages, which came to be known as Prohibition, was ratified by enough states to become law.  Prohibition was a long-term goal of the Anti-Saloon League, an organization supported by many Protestant churches but with its power base mainly in rural areas.  What did not happen was that alcohol abuse vanished overnight.  Instead, the consumption of alcohol went underground, leading to smuggling, bootlegger gang warfare, and a lowering of the respect for law, all of which finally led to the repeal of Prohibition in 1933.  The bottom line of this lesson is that law works better as a mirror of a society’s mores than it does as a bridle that tries to jerk the society in a direction it generally does not wish to go.  That is, laws against a so-called “private” sin such as pornography should be enacted only when a substantial number of citizens in a country think it should be illegal.  So, while I am personally unhappy that online pornography is as popular and successful as it is, my view is that passing lots of laws against it, at least in the U. S., would probably be a waste of time.  But not in South Korea.

According to a recent Associated Press article, a good many South Koreans not only dislike online pornography, they are trying to do something about it.  Making anything illegal on the Internet is a challenge because of the intrinsically global nature of the medium.  But that hasn’t stopped South Korean law enforcement officials from arresting about 6400 people in only six months for producing, selling, or posting pornography online. 

Almost a third of South Koreans are Christians (counting both Protestants and Catholics), which makes it the most Christian nation in East Asia by far.  And Christianity in South Korea tends to be taken seriously by its adherents, who now send more missionaries overseas than many Western countries do, including those which evangelized their nation in the first place.  Many of these Christians make up a cadre of about 800 volunteer Internet “Nuri Cops” who regularly spend time patrolling the Internet for South Korean porn, turning in the results of their searches to police for further investigation and prosecution.

About now, you may be wondering what kind of person would devote their spare time to viewing pornography with the sole purpose of wiping it out.  To some, it may sound suspiciously like a member of the Anti-Saloon League who insists on tasting all the wine and beer before pouring the rest into the gutter.  I would imagine it takes a particular type of person to do this work without being harmed by it, and perhaps no one is totally immune.  But you could compare this type of work to the religious orders during the Black Plague of the 14th century in Europe who devoted themselves to the care of the ill, although many of their number ending up catching the disease and dying of it themselves.

For some readers, this comparison will seem completely wacky.  What possible parallel can there be between caring for the innocent victims of a physical disease like the bubonic plague, and snooping around on the Internet for websites that seem to provide harmless (or at least, not very harmful) entertainment for people in the privacy of their homes? 

It boils down to whether one believes in the soul as well as the body.  If there is the death of the body, there can also be such a thing as the death of the soul.  Enslavement to sin—any sort of sin—is a road that leads the soul to death, and one way to help souls escape death is to make it harder to find opportunities to sin.  That is just what the Nuri Cops are trying to do. 

While I would like to see something like that take place in the U. S., we would first have to have a cultural shift of seismic proportions:  one that would involve a resurgence of authentic belief in Christianity at the highest as well as the lowest levels of society, in the cities, editorial offices, studios, and corporate headquarters as well as the farms and private homes of America.  In the meantime, all I can do is congratulate the South Koreans for acting on their beliefs, and hope that maybe they will return the favor that Western missionaries did for them by evangelizing us some day.

Sources:  The Austin American-Statesman carried the article “South Korea’s cyberporn vigilantes” on pp. F3 and F5 of its print edition of Dec. 16, 2012.  I referred to the Wikipedia articles on “Religion in South Korea” and “Prohibition.”