Published October 15, 2024
Conservatives often like to extol the virtues of the self-regulating market. Too often, however, some market actors only seem willing to go to the trouble of regulating themselves when they are scared stiff of outside regulation. Meta’s recent announcement of “Teen Accounts” for its Instagram platform seems like a case in point. The new suite of features has been advertised as a way to put parents back in the driver’s seat of their children’s online lives and protect teenagers from Instagram’s widely documented harm.
The timing of the announcement, however, is striking. Earlier this year, Jonathan Haidt published his bestseller The Anxious Generation, which singles out Instagram for its outsized role in the tsunami of depression, gender dysphoria, and even suicides among teenage girls. In the months before and since, lawmakers in dozens of states have been emboldened to finally take action against Big Tech, passing laws that would require social media platforms to verify the age of their users and keep smartphones out of public schools. Even our slow-moving Congress got in on the act, with the Senate passing the Kids Online Safety Act in late July and the House currently debating the bill. And most recently, a federal appeals court ruled that social media platforms can be held liable for encouraging their users to harm themselves.
Meta has consistently opposed all such measures to date, arguing in numerous lawsuits that it has a First Amendment right to the speech of the minors whom it lures onto its platforms. Now, they seem to have adopted the motto, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”
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Brad Littlejohn was a Fellow in EPPC’s Technology and Human Flourishing and Evangelicals in Civic Life programs from 2022-2025. His wide-ranging research and writing encompasses work on the relation of digital technology and embodiment, the appropriate limits of free speech, the nature of freedom and authority in the Christian tradition, and the retrieval of a Protestant natural law ethic.
