In a recent issue of the NR print magazine, Christine Rosen had a compelling piece arguing that it should be illegal for children under the age of 16 to use social media. The entire article is fascinating, and I find myself mostly convinced by her argument, but I found this point from Rosen intriguing for other reasons:
The age limit of 13 that currently governs social-media platforms was arbitrarily chosen as part of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which came into effect in 2000 (four years before Facebook was created). It was meant to restrict how companies could use children’s data as well as requiring “verifiable parental consent” for those younger than age 13. . . .
Massachusetts senator Ed Markey, one of the original sponsors of COPPA, wanted to set the U.S. age at 16 but was thwarted by lobbying both from technology companies concerned about profits and from civil-liberties groups that, according to a Wall Street Journal story about COPPA, feared that “requiring teens to obtain parental permission might curtail their ability to access information about birth control and abortion.”
This little nugget reminded me, not surprisingly, of a topic that’s been at the forefront of my mind for close to a year now: my new book, co-written with Ryan Anderson and published today, Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing. In the book, Ryan and I make the case that abortion taken not only the lives of tens of millions of unborn children, but it has left every aspect of our society worse off. Indeed, it’s hard to identify a single element of our culture that has been improved by abortion.
As Rosen illustrates, even the desire to protect children from the harmful effects of social media has been thwarted by our pro-abortion culture, by the impulse to ignore or undo normal rules and oversight when it comes to abortion. Abortion and birth control, and now so-called “gender affirmation procedures,” are the only exceptions I’m aware of to our society’s general rule of allowing parents to have knowledge of and input into their children’s formation and choices. And, as Rosen demonstrates, that exception has made it more difficult to set up necessary guardrails around addictive and damaging digital technology.