Outsourced parenting

I find it curious how quickly governments have decided they now need to raise our children. Austria wants those under 14 off social media. Indonesia is already shutting down accounts of users under 16.

Britain, that other bastion of democracy, now clings to the language of restraint, telling parents how long their children should be allowed to stare at screens, while quietly considering a ban of its own.

Different countries, different styles, but the same conclusion: something, somewhere between zeroes and ones, and algorithms, has slipped out of control. I don’t think anyone seriously disputes the problem.

Social media has never been a neutral space. It has been engineered to capture attention, to keep us scrolling long after we intended to stop — because our attention, after all, is money.

The longer we stay, the more we see. The more we see, the more we click. The more we click, the more someone earns.

Psychologists have been warning us about this for years — the dopamine loops, the anxiety, the disrupted sleep. A Los Angeles jury has even ruled that social media platforms can be held liable for “addictive design.”

Then there are the small, telling details. An 11-year-old in Jakarta casually admits to spending five hours a day on TikTok and has no idea what he will do when the ban takes effect.

A teacher talks about “brain rot,” from the kind of content that trains the mind to expect stimulation every few seconds and to lose interest just as quickly. We don’t need a study to see what that does.

If that were all there was to it, I would have little difficulty accepting the solution for us here in the Philippines. But that’s unthinkable for one whose bread is buttered by media, mainstream or social.

Limit access. Set boundaries. Give children back the ability to focus on something that does not move or flash or demand attention every few seconds. Yet, that is not all there is to it.

What unsettles me is how quickly the conversation has shifted from guidance to control. Governments are no longer simply warning parents. They are stepping in to decide.

Indonesia’s communications minister put it plainly: parents no longer have to fight alone. I hear something else, something Orwellian, in that statement.

Parents are losing. And when parents lose, the state takes over. That’s an improvement? I’m far from convinced. Because once governments begin deciding who gets access to what, the line between protection and control becomes difficult to draw.

Social media may be messy, even harmful, but it is also one of the few spaces where people can speak without needing permission, reined in only — as in the Philippines — by data privacy and cyberlibel laws, and, of course, public backlash and censure.

It is where opinions form, where arguments happen, where ideas circulate freely — sometimes badly, but freely nonetheless. Hand that space over to regulation, and something else begins to change.

Governments are never neutral actors. They have interests. They have preferences. They have versions of reality they would rather see prevail. It is not hard to imagine how a system built to protect children could also be used to decide what they should or should not be exposed to.

The platforms, of course, are hardly innocent. They offer parental controls and time limits, tools meant to manage a dependency they themselves designed — and monetized.

It is a neat arrangement: engineer attention into addiction, turn that addiction into profit, then offer features to soften the damage. When that fails, the government steps in.

Call it what it is: a Catch-22.