Youth need protection from legislators – not social media

Texas’s dangerous legislation to ban those under age 18 from social media accounts is dead for now but sure to be back, there and elsewhere

No entity is more provably dangerous to Texas children and youth than the Texas state legislature and governor. The disturbing reality teens face across the nation is that aging leaders are incompetent to govern young people in changing times, irrationally malevolent, or both.

Until the clock ran out in the Senate, Texas lawmakers had seemed sure to pass by big bipartisan margins a draconian bill banning under-18s from social media accounts, just as lawmakers previously, also for no purpose, had restricted youths from downloading online apps, and banned cellphones in schools when simple school rules would have sufficed.

Texas is the leading edge but hardly the lone star of personal and policy insanity ideology-driven leaders are inflicting on young people. Is leaders’ destructive nihilism driven by the fact that young people are the frontline of racial change? Today, 52% of Americans under age 20 (including 70% in Texas) are Nonwhite, while 75% of Americans 50 and older (the leadership) are non-Hispanic White. Yes, the panics are that primitive.

Just take one biggie of many

In 2015, for no reason beyond in-your-face machismo, Texas legislators overwhelmingly approved a new addition to already weak gun laws that would let just about any yahoo carry a gun openly in public, with or without a license. (A Texas gun license? Get yours at Family Dollar.)

Gun deaths literally exploded. By 2024, 9,000 MORE Texans – a toll multiplying daily – had died from gunfire than if gun death rates before “open carry” had prevailed. (Santa Anna killed just 250 at the Alamo.)

And “our precious children”? Among Texans under age 18, gun deaths erupted a staggering 287% from before to after “open carry.” Some 1,000 MORE Texas children and teens under age 18 died from gunfire in the decade after the law than if their gun death rates had stayed the same as before “open carry.”

Prior to “open carry,” Texas youth suffered gun death levels only a little higher than California youth. In the 10 short years after, Texas’ youth gundowns soared to 3 times higher.

Let’s remember the ugly reality of who shoots kids that major authorities remain too squeamish to talk about. In Texas, three-fourths of the gun murderers of children and teens under age 18 are adults; nearly 40% are 25 and older. Texas has seen hundreds’ more grownups shooting kids.

Guns are just part of a terrible pattern. As Texas’s Gen Z grew up from the early 2000s to the early 2020s, drug/alcohol overdose death among parent-age adults (25-64) exploded by 250% to record peaks. Every year, 200 Texas children are murdered by parents and household adults and 60,000 are victims of substantiated violence, sexual abuse, psychological abuse, and criminal neglect in their homes. Deaths and substantiated cases are just the iceberg tip of what actually occurs.

You’d think…

Texas legislators, seeing these horrific results, would be alarmed that a child or youth was getting shot in their state every 6 hours, an atrocity their own legislation was blowing through the roof.

If you think that, consider a career in standup.

Instead of repealing their gun-happy fantasies and working night and day to help Texas children coping with erupting violence, shootings, drug/alcohol abuse, and troubled adults in their families – a bottom-line, minimal “grownup” response to protect kids…

… here’s what fires up Texas lawmakers

Social media! A draconian, bipartisan bill to severely restrict youths’ social media access whooped through the Texas House 116-25 but stalled in the Senate as time ran out. It will be back, worse than ever, backed by unreasoning silliness like the following sentiment expressed by legislator after legislator:

“Like so many parents across our state, I've watched my children grow up in a world that feels less and less safe, not because of where they go physically, but because of where they go online, in spaces that my wife and I cannot possibly monitor at all times,” said Sen. Adam Hinojosa, R-Corpus Christi. “… We confront the evil before us and boldly say, ‘You cannot have our children.’”

Are this and 115 other Texas representatives concocting a social-media chimera to justify ignoring their VERY “physical” gun and household violence carnage? That’s the opposite of “bold” and the definition of “evil.”

The real predator danger

Hinojosa et al’s bills – ramped-up feel-good nannyisms – would require parental consent for anyone under age 18 to obtain a social media account, allow parents to shut down youths’ accounts, and force young people to provide intrusive “age verification.”

The sensitive information required to verify age exposes young people to real predation by Big Tech, corporations, and government speech police. Given authorities’ record of bad faith, helping Elon, Zuck, Bezos, and greedy corporate campaign contributors corral more private youth data may be the real, unspoken motive for the legislation.

Washington Post technology reporter Drew Harwell explains on Taylor Lorenz’s excellent cybermedia podcast how age verification technology works (or, rather, doesn’t): “A lot of websites on the Internet and a lot of states in the US are starting to require age verification, where if you go onto a specific app or website, it asks you to stop and prove that you're an adult. It asks you to look into a webcam or your phone camera. And some AI in the software will scan your face. It'll either scan whether you match a government ID that you're holding, like a driver's license, or it'll just look at your face and make an AI sort of analysis of whether you're an adult or a kid.”

Age verification technology’s disturbingly large margin of error — big shocker: AI scans really can’t reliably tell if you’re one day, or even 3 years, over or under a certain age — widens for women, minorities, and persons with unusual body types. “If you're 21 or if you're 20, and it's saying that you're underage and can't access these websites that are really important to, like, modern life,” Harwell said, “I think that's a big problem.”

Legislators couldn’t care less, the Texas Tribune pointed out: “Lawmakers see this digital world as not an asset but a threat.” “We have countless research stories of peers your age, committing suicide and being bullied,” said Hinojosa to protesting teens.

Not true, as I’ve documented many times in these substacks. The overwhelming consensus of research and surveys is that teens are subjected to far more abuse, bullying, and severely troubled behaviors at the hands of adults in offline life, in churches, schools, Boy Scouts, police custody, sports teams, and especially families.

In contrast, the real problem anti-youth and -social-media activists face is not “countless victims” to cite as examples, but finding real teens conclusively victimized by social media. Teens who have trouble online tend to have worse troubles in their offline lives, as next week’s substack will show.

The case for youth defying social media bans

The Texas legislature is only one particularly egregious example of a larger crisis: aging generations are proving incompetent to govern a changing world and its young people.

Policy makers have shown they will cause great harm to the young while indulging easy scapegoats to justify restricting teens’ ability to secure help and organize new political initiatives – both of which heavily involve social media.

I’ve analyzed many times the appalling reality of authorities not only ignoring but covering up the worst dangers to children and teenagers while rushing to blame baseless pop-culture (now, social media) bogeys.

The dangers and repressions today’s authorities are forcing on youth – whether uncaring, irrational, ignorant, incompetent, downright hostile, or all the above – are so destructive that young people’s civil disobedience is more than justified; it is a survival imperative. Youths’ unrestricted social media access, especially to deal with the growing atrocities today’s adults impose on them, is a non-negotiable human right.

Young people should avail organizations and technologies to get around bans on their online access. Easy for me to advocate, of course, at least until I acquire the millions or billions necessary to join the political process.