By all accounts, Selena Rodriguez brought joy to those around her. The Enfield, Connecticut, native, known as Beena to her friends and family, loved to sing, dance, and make people laugh. 

She also loved to share her talents with those further afield. By the time she was nine, Beena had developed a robust online presence, posting constantly on social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat. What may have started as a way to connect with real life friends soon took on a life of its own. Fueled by lockdown-induced isolation during the Covid response, Beena spent even more time on Instagram and Snapchat. Before long, this social media use morphed into an addiction. Beena became so dependent on the platforms that she once ran away from home when her mother tried to confiscate her devices. 

The addiction took a dark turn. On numerous occasions, Beena was solicited for sexually exploitative content, often from adult men on the platforms. Snapchat was particularly ripe for these solicitations, due to the platform’s “disappearing” message feature. Eventually, Beena succumbed to the requests and sent sexually explicit images using Snapchat, which subsequently ended up in the hands of her classmates. Ridicule at school increased. So did Beena’s unexcused absences.

Beena’s mother, Tammy, sensed that something was wrong with her daughter. Tammy sought help for Beena on multiple occasions. An outpatient therapist who evaluated Beena remarked that she had never seen a patient as addicted to social media as Beena. Beena was experiencing severe sleep deprivation that was aggravated by her addiction to Instagram and Snapchat, and the constant 24-hour stream of notifications and alerts from the platforms. She had worsening depression, poor self-esteem, and eating disorders.

The therapy wasn’t enough. On July 21, 2021, Selena Rodriguez committed suicide by taking an overdose of Wellbutrin—which she filmed live on Snapchat. She was 11 years old. 

We know many of these details of Beena’s struggle from open court documents. In January 2022, Tammy Rodriguez filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Snap Inc., which runs Snapchat, and Meta Platforms Inc., the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. The lawsuit is the latest in an increasingly urgent reckoning with the effects of social media use. The sheer scale of the phenomenon is staggering: over 60 percent of the world’s population regularly uses social media, and that number approaches 80 percent when looking at the developed world. 

The trend shows no signs of slowing down, as Beena Rodriguez is far from the only child who got hooked young. A 2021 survey by the British authority Ofcom showed that 87 percent of 12 to 15 year olds are using social media apps, and 91 percent have their own smartphone. Many of these children started their online journey even earlier: 44 percent of 8 to 11 year olds—starting at third grade—use social media apps.

The 2021 Ofcom survey was “intended to provide a comprehensive picture of children’s media experiences in 2020/21 as a reference for industry, policymakers, academics and the general public.” But it seems that industry is the group that reaps the most benefits, as the data is frequently used as market research by firms looking to advertise to children. 

To Clare Morell, senior policy analyst at the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), this corporate interest in minors’ social media use is no coincidence. It’s intrinsic to the platforms. “These social media companies have just been extracting massive amounts of user data as their business model,” Morell told The American Conservative, “They’re both selling that data to advertisers, but then it’s also feeding back in to the design of the thing itself, so that these algorithms just become impossible for humans to resist.”

For Morell, these powerful algorithms are why the need to protect minors on the platforms is so urgent. “Kids’ brains are not mature enough to handle social media, because their prefrontal cortex—which handles impulse control, self control, emotional regulation, and decision making—that whole part of the brain doesn’t fully develop until around 25,” she told TAC. “We’ve set kids up for failure by just handing social media over to them.”

“Failure” may be an understatement. Jonathan Haidt, perhaps the leading scholar studying the effect of social media on the nation’s youth, first noticed that the platforms might lead to adverse mental health outcomes in his viral 2015 article in The Atlantic, “The Coddling of the American Mind.” At the time, Haidt and co-author Greg Lukianoff were hesitant to assert causality between social media use and the mental health issues they were observing among college students, but they noted a conspicuous correlation. “Facebook was founded in 2004, and since 2006 it has allowed children as young as 13 to join,” they wrote. “This means that the first wave of students who spent all their teen years using Facebook reached college in 2011, and graduated from college only this year.”

By 2018, Haidt had become convinced that there was a causal link between social media use and mental health issues. He told TAC that he credits his change of mind to Jean Twenge’s 2017 book iGen, one of the first detailed analyses of the lifestyles of Americans born after 1995. “Once she wrote that, it was clear that the evidence was in.” 

So Haidt and Lukianoff’s 2018 book, bearing the same name as the Atlantic article, included a tentative claim of causality between social media use and adverse mental health outcomes. In the five years since The Coddling of the American Mind, Haidt’s research has centered on exposing social media’s harm to America’s adolescents. “What I’m trying to convey is that the arrival of the iPhone and the move of social media onto mobile, which happened around 2011 or 2012, caused a great rewiring of childhood, creating childhoods that are not conducive to human development,” Haidt told TAC. 

The public seems to agree. According to a 2022 IFS/YouGov survey, 81 percent of parents favor requiring parental permission before their children create a social media account, and 77 percent support full parental access to minors’ accounts. 

At the same time, the Big Tech industry has become a popular target for public scorn. In May, an Axios Harris poll ranking the reputations of the country’s biggest brands found that, of the eight brands with the worst reputation, five were Big Tech companies, including three social media platforms, TikTok, Meta, and Twitter.

This broad consensus that social media is a problem is starting to translate into legislative efforts. In January, the Utah legislature introduced H.B. 311, which originally included an outright ban of children under age 16 from popular social media platforms and strict age verification requirements. 

On March 23, Utah governor Spencer Cox signed H.B. 311 and its senate companion bill, collectively known as the Social Media Regulation Act, into law. It is a first-of-its-kind effort to enact legislative guardrails on minors’ social media use. But it doesn’t include the age restrictions and verification requirements that were originally in the bill. 

Between January and March, lobbyists for Big Tech were all over Utah to oppose H.B. 311. Most notable was NetChoice, which represents—and is funded by—the biggest names in Silicon Valley, including Meta, Snap, TikTok, and Twitter. NetChoice released testimony against H.B. 311 on February 3, arguing that the bill would “counterproductively put children at risk” by “requir[ing] businesses to collect sensitive information about children” through age verification systems.

The Utah House of Representatives passed the version of the bill that was signed into law on February 9. It stripped out age restrictions, thereby maintaining a crucial segment of the social media companies’ customer base, and instead created a private right of action meant to make it easier for individuals to sue social media companies for knowingly causing harm. It seems Meta and Snap might not be so worried about Tammy Rodriguez’s wrongful death suit after all.

Industry lobbyists certainly play a big role in the fight over regulating social media platforms. In 2022, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft (which owns LinkedIn) set company records in their disclosed annual spending on Washington lobbying. Meta and Google’s spending didn’t fall off much, either, each maintaining a robust Washington presence with over $19 million and $13 million spent, respectively. It’s not uncommon to find operatives on the Big Tech payroll at even conservative movement meetings throughout Washington.

But lobbying is only part of the story. To understand the unique challenge posed by social media, one must understand what social media is. Is it a tool or a drug? Is it a neutral virtual gathering place, or an algorithmically controlled substance designed to addict and control? Is it a technological marvel or a banal distraction from real innovation?

For Morell, the EPPC analyst, it’s a novel and potent combination of more traditional vices. “I’ve said that [social media platforms] are almost like a substance and a place. It’s almost like a casino and a drug combined,” she told TAC. “It creates this online world, like a physical place, but then with notifications and likes and shares and retweets, it has a drug-like effect, with dopamine releases acting on the brain the way they do with more traditional drug addictions.”

Haidt sees these platforms as a new breed of technological progress. “Social media, more than most of the other recent internet technologies, is a sociological transformer,” Haidt told TAC, “It is different from everything else, in that it changes the very fabric of society and interaction and thinking in ways that make it hard for us to do things we are accustomed to doing.”

Some are less convinced that social media is a technological marvel. Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur and tech dynamist, has famously quipped, “We wanted flying cars. Instead we got 140 characters,” a reference to Twitter’s former character limit.

Thiel’s lament is shared by conservative columnist Ross Douthat. It served as the basis for Douthat’s 2020 book The Decadent Society, which argued that our society is suffering from a period of stalemate, stagnation, and decay. Douthat anticipates the obvious objection to this “tech-stagnationist” case, but maintains that the iPhone revolution is underwhelming when compared to prior technological advances and expectations of the future. From The Decadent Society:

We used to travel faster, build bigger, live longer; now we communicate faster, chatter more, snap more selfies… We hype the revolutionary character of our communications devices in order to persuade ourselves that our earlier, wider-ranging expectations were always unreasonable—that this progress is the only progress we could reasonably expect.

Here we see one of the most interesting emerging divisions on the political right, one which Douthat himself detailed in a 2021 Substack post. Douthat wrote that there’s a growing, if implicit and imperfect, division among conservatives between those who are primarily interested in acceleration and those who are interested more in regeneration. 

According to Douthat, the former camp “regards the growth-and-technology machine of the modern world as something that’s stalled out and needs to be restarted,” and “encompasses Silicon Valley libertarians (and ex-libertarians), Claremont Institute re-founders, Israeli political theorists, and a lot of the essays published in American Affairs.”

Meanwhile, the “regenerationists” are “more traditionally conservative, more skeptical of technology’s promise and effects, and more convinced that the West has reached not just a decadent lull in its development, but a grim terminus from which the only useful direction is back.” Douthat places longtime TAC writer Rod Dreher in this camp, along with Patrick Deneen, author of Why Liberalism Failed . 

Douthat writes that “where to strike the balance between the two impulses—up or back, dynamist or preservationist, techno-optimist or tech-skeptical—is a crucial question for the right today.” 

It’s also a crucial question for understanding the challenge posed by widespread social media use. 

If social media represents an underwhelming innovation, a detour from applying technology to improve human life, then Silicon Valley may well be the antidote to what its platforms have wrought. In this paradigm, social media is akin to the early days of the automobile, when motoring could be dangerous and safety was (and is) progressively improved through innovations like the seatbelt, traffic laws, and airbags. 

But if social media is rather a new frontier of innovation, one in which technology seeks to control human life, then the platforms may be the canary in the coalmine of technology’s increasingly awesome power—and reason to question its promise as an antidote.

Some in Silicon Valley are noticing the power of their creations. In April, Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, joined Tucker Carlson for a longform interview on the dangers of artificial intelligence. The billionaire entrepreneur warned that A.I. could soon become more powerful than the humans who created it. “If you have a super intelligent A.I. that is capable of writing incredibly well…and it’s constantly figuring out what is more convincing to people over time,” Musk explained, “then enter social media, for example Twitter but also Facebook and others, then [A.I.] potentially manipulates public opinion in a way that is very bad.” 

Musk concluded, “I think there should be some government oversight, because it’s a danger to the public.”

The irony is that the dystopian scenario Musk outlined has in many ways already been playing out on social media platforms like the one Musk now owns. Facebook founder Sean Parker already saw the grim future back in 2017. Facebook “was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’… It’s a social-validation feedback loop,” he told an interviewer. “Exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”

Parker warned: “God only knows what it's doing to our children’s brains.”

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Over a decade into the social media experiment, God is no longer the only one who knows. The results are in, and they’re not pretty. Social media has morphed into an algorithmically driven dopamine and insecurity dispenser, leaving the likes of Beena Rodriguez and millions of other teenagers—and some adults—in its wake. 

Three years on from The Decadent Society, Douthat remains a techno-optimist, albeit a nuanced one. “With every technology, there's a contest between whether it is likely to control us or whether we are likely to control it,” Douthat told TAC. “You should be a tech skeptic about what the internet is doing to us.”

What the internet is doing to us. If we are to escape the vise grip of social media, it will start with the recognition that the platforms are a new kind of technology, designed to prey upon our humanity. It’s past time man reassert control over his creations.