Tech & Teens: Hidden Dangers; Community Interventions
This Great Idea is born from the synergy of two blog posts read on the same day.
The first is Paul Krugman’s America Has Become a Digital Narco-State: Social Media Giants Have Bought Our Government, and Are Trying to Bully Europe (Paul Krugman, Dec. 9, 2025).
What if heroin were legalized without restrictions?
What if its multibillionaire benefactors knew they were inflicting harm on US citizens, but didn’t care – and retaliated against anyone who attempted to intervene?
What if these multibillionaire drug dealers took controlled the US government Supreme Court with bribes and elected officials with campaign funds and kick-backs?,
What if, through these influences on the US government, those drug dealers expanded their influence and business overseas through ‘punitive tariffs against countries that try to limit and regulate heroin use’?
Paul Krugman writes, ‘If this story strikes you as extreme and implausible, here’s what you should know: replace “heroin” with “social media,” and this is a description of actual events.’
In a previous post, Krugman asserts that, ‘hostility to Europe is a central theme of the Trump administration’s recently released National Security Strategy. The driver of that hostility appears to be MAGA fury… [and] the tech broligarchy’s fury at the European Union’s Digital Services Act.’
He cites the US Surgeon General’s 2023 report, Social Media and Youth Mental Health (urging us to download it before it is removed from the site) to underscore the ‘the extensive evidence of mental health damage to children and adolescents who consume excessive amounts of social media’.
Church: We’ve known this for years – the harms of social media on the mental, social, and spiritual well-being of our young people (and an increasing number of adults and elders). This is one place in which our faith and politics must clearly intersect: unrestricted social media harms people – in personal health ways and in huge socio-political ways.
Long and short: please read the full post here.
And for the good of your soul, please listen to his Musical Coda, here.
Take immediate action as suggested by Robert Reich in his How Can Outrageous CEO Pay Be Stopped? Here’s One Good Answer (Substack, 12.09.25).
Then read Rev. Cameron Trimble’s beautiful An Anatomy of Fear and poignant When Fear Becomes a Crowd (both Piloting Faith, December 09 & 10, 2025, respectively).
In the latter, Trimble writes, ‘Fear rarely stays solitary. It looks for company… Collective fear is the most dangerous kind because it feels righteous. It turns insecurity into story… Once that narrative hardens, cruelty begins to sound like duty.’
The first soothes the soul and reminds us that fear is being weaponized and it doesn’t attack only those in the direct path of the terrifying: ICE, political violence, religious persecution, illegal war acts, etc.; these manifestations of violence are designed to make all people fearful.
Trimble reminds us that, ‘Spiritually, fear is what happens when our imagination of God shrinks. When the Infinite becomes tribal, when love is rationed, when we forget that belonging is not a zero-sum game. Fear is the failure to remember who we are: beings woven of dust and divinity, designed for connection, not domination.’
Her Reflection Questions, Prayer for the Day, and Spiritual Practice, ‘Mapping Fear’, are worthy of your time.
Trimble then invites us to participate in two upcoming events that are too timely:
- Protest and Action Chaplaincy Training
- live, online
- framework for providing compassionate, grounded spiritual care during protests, advocacy gatherings, and social movements
- January 6, 13, 20, 2026
- learn more here
~for leaders ready to develop skills for the streets, public halls, and neighborhood conversations.
AND
- When the Internet Hurts: The Hidden Online Dangers Facing Our Teens and How Faith Communities Can Respond
- FREE online webinar
- conversation with Sharon Winkler, survivor parent & nationally respected youth online-safety advocate
- help for parents, educators, and faith leaders to recognize online dangers and build safer communities for young people
- January 15, 2026 – 6:00-7:00 PM CT
- learn more and register here
~~~
Heedless of the harms of social media, our current administration is dismantling what few safety rails existed, lashing out at foreign countries who enforce their own laws, and seeking to further empower and ensconce a tech broligarchy.
A brave family seeking to shore up democracy in Minnesota’s Northwoods has a billboard in their yard that reads, ‘Regulations Save Lives’.
Our churches across Minnesota and beyond can join this conversation to ensure safer spaces – in church, at home, in our schools, and elsewhere – for our young people by striving for a government that puts the safety and well-being of all – especially our children – before personal gain and tech-bro power.
