Digital Heroin
Social media doesn’t just harm children—it rewires them. It’s time to treat it like the drug it is.
If you want to understand the dangers smartphones and social media pose to children and teenagers, you don’t need moral panics or nostalgic rants.
You just need to listen to the tech industry itself.
When Apple founder Steve Jobs was asked by a New York Times journalist in 2010 whether his children were big fans of the new iPad, his answer was chillingly simple:
“They haven’t used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”
Read that again.
The man selling the future didn’t let his own children touch it.
In 2021, former Facebook data scientist Frances Haugen revealed just how well the company understood the damage its platforms were causing. Internal studies showed that 32 percent of teenage girls reported a worsening body image after using Instagram. In the UK, 13 percent of adolescents said their suicidal thoughts began after using Instagram.
This wasn’t ignorance.
This was knowledge.
And it was buried.
At this point, the evidence that smartphones and social media damage young brains is so overwhelming that only one real question remains:
Why didn’t politicians intervene years ago?
In the United States, the teenage suicide rate rose sharply between 2010 and 2019. Europe hasn’t seen increases quite as dramatic—but here too, especially among teenage girls, mental health has significantly deteriorated since 2010. The 2022 PISA education study revealed a decline in reading and math skills beginning around 2012—right after smartphones, high-speed internet, and social media became ubiquitous.
You don’t need a neuroscience degree to understand what happens to a child’s attention span when a smartphone sits next to their homework. Plenty of adults can’t resist the endless stream of absurd, grotesque, dopamine-engineered content. Why do we pretend children can?
This is why Australia banning social media accounts for under-16s is not authoritarian—it’s responsible.
This is why Emmanuel Macron’s proposal to ban phones from public schools and block social media for under-15s is not technophobic—it’s overdue.
These policies aren’t reactionary nostalgia. They’re the first signs that politics is finally grasping the cultural wreckage left behind by the American tech industry.
Social platforms were sold as the dawn of a new, egalitarian public sphere. Instead, they became machines designed to pulverize democratic discourse. It is no coincidence that the global rise of right-wing populism—from Donald Trump to the AfD—runs parallel to the rise of social media.
One of the hardest political challenges of the coming decade will be this paradox:
How do we defend free speech while preventing platforms from destroying liberal democracy itself?
The first step is obvious: protect children from a technology that makes them miserable and erodes their ability to concentrate.
Critics argue it’s impossible to keep young people off these platforms. That’s as true as saying fourteen-year-olds sometimes manage to steal beer from a supermarket or their parents’ basement. Yet we still regulate alcohol. We still impose age limits. We still punish violations.
If platforms are required to prove they have no users under sixteen—and violations come with severe penalties—it will suddenly be in their financial interest to enforce the rules.
Because let’s be clear: social media platforms are exquisitely engineered addiction machines.
It is well documented how precisely they activate the brain’s reward system. TikTok and Instagram already use algorithms calibrated to capture attention with frightening efficiency. Add AI-optimized personalization, and reality itself will start to feel boring by comparison.
Children may come to see the real world as an inferior substitute for a far more stimulating virtual one.
At that point, the comparison becomes unavoidable:
Social media functions like a drug. Like alcohol. Like cannabis. Like heroin.
And it’s time we treated it that way.
We Were Mocked for Loving the Eighties. Who’s Laughing Now?
They laughed at us for missing the 1980s.
No smartphones. No social media. No algorithm whispering into our skulls.
But we talked.
We argued.
We flirted.
We got bored—and boredom made us curious, creative, alive.
We weren’t optimized. We weren’t tracked. We weren’t dopamine-farmed.
Now look around.
Children who can’t read deeply.
Teenagers drowning in anxiety.
Adults who can’t finish a thought without checking a screen.
This is not progress.
This is regression dressed up as innovation.
So yes—go analog.
Ban phones in schools.
Delay smartphones until adulthood.
Rip social media out of childhood entirely.
Leave the American “we-make-you-dumber” business model in the dust.
Bring back libraries. Bring back conversation. Bring back silence. Bring back attention.
Bring back a world where being human wasn’t treated as a bug to be exploited.
The most addictive drug ever invented doesn’t come in a syringe.
It fits in your pocket.
And withdrawal is long overdue.
yours truly,
Adaptation-Guide
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