Helpless to Resist

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | May 16, 2026

Our country has a long and unfortunate history of blaming external influences for the bad behavior of our children. Banishment was once the preferred solution, now replaced by lawsuits.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the villains were an emerging genre of comic books focusing on crime and horror. These comics, some parents and authorities crowed, were leading directly to an increase in juvenile delinquency and its accompanying crime. This even led to the creation of the Comics Code Authority and its 41-point rule book in 1954. It outright banned violence, sexual suggestions, and alleged “subversive” content. They even went so far as to ban words like “horror” and “terror” from titles.

There was no evidence linking comic books to increased crime, and eventually the courts reminded us there was something called the First Amendment that protected this kind of speech.

In the 1950s and 1960s, we moved from comic books and cartoons to music with the emergence of rock & roll, or as some called it, “the devil’s music.” It was easy to understand the shock when Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” shot to No. 1, replacing the rather tame “The Poor People of Paris” by Lex Baxter.

Santa Barbara, California, went so far as to try to ban rock music and “suggestive” dancing altogether. The rationale was one we had heard before, but this time it was the music and dancing corrupting our youth and increasing the crime rate. But those same, pesky First Amendment protections applied to music that saved comic books, and dancing is also protected speech.

Those same hyper-sensitive folks were also upset about the Beatles until rap music came along, about which they became absolutely apoplectic. To be fair, the language in what was then known, unflatteringly, as “gangsta rap” could be rough and offensive to many, but it was just as protected as the previous music. It wasn’t the music that increased the violence in the 1980s and early 1990s but the cocaine wars in urban America resulting in murder rates much higher than they are today.

A rating system was developed for music in an attempt to keep the more violent and explicit lyrics away from younger ears and minds, though it isn’t clear that helped at all as it would have required parents to pay attention, an ongoing problem we’ll discuss in a bit.

We tried the same sequence with violent video games—first trying to connect them to crime including mass shootings, then condemning them, then developing a rating system to which people may or may not pay attention.

With the creation of social media and other various internet platforms, we’ve discovered a new villain to blame for children’s aberrant behavior; not content but access to content.

In March, a civil jury in California found YouTube and Meta (Meta is the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads) negligent and liable for $6 million in damages for creating “addictive platforms” that harmed users and specifically contributed to the mental health and anxiety issues of the young woman who was the plaintiff.

She claimed, because of their clever algorithms, she was addicted to YouTube at the age of six and addicted to Instagram at the age of nine. Let’s repeat that for effect: YouTube addicted at six, Instagram addicted at nine.

This comes on the heels of a recent verdict in New Mexico for $375 million against Meta for allegedly “harming” children. Plus European regulators assessing fines in the billions of dollars against Meta, YouTube, Google, and X for various alleged offenses involving monopolistic company policies and, again, those darned algorithms, addicting and trapping people on their sites.

You might be wondering at this point if these children being so harmed have parents and if those parents are exercising any kind of oversight of their children’s online habits. The defendants have mentioned that in each trial, but jurors seem to believe parents are helpless in the current online and social media environment, and the companies running them have figured out numerous ways of apparently tricking our children into using their sites to the child’s detriment.

It may well be that some of these companies have found a magic bullet that attracts us to and keeps us on their various platforms. But, so far, no company has found a way that forces parents to allow a six-year-old to have their own, or access to, electronic devices with such frequency they become “addicted.” Their addictive algorithms do not work unless you buy the devices and access the programs which both require conscious decision-making.

The precedents having been established, individuals and governments will now add to the already bulging court dockets of suits filed against the big tech companies as we are helpless to resist them. We have identified the enemy, and, as always, it’s not us—it’s “them.”