How the "sausage" of "protect the kids" is made the excuse to KYC everyone. The Gospel of the Anxious Generation

The myth of “social media addiction” has become a convenient moral shield for expanding digital ID systems, turning concern for kids’ safety ...

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment “kids and phones” stopped being a parental gripe and started sounding like a public health emergency. But if you trace the lineage of the panic, you land on a familiar face: Jonathan Haidt, the respectable father figure of the screen-time apocalypse. Haidt didn’t invent the idea that social media was melting teenage brains. He just made it sound like science. The Anxious Generation took a half-formed cultural suspicion, phones bad, kids sad, and gave it a bar graph and a bibliography. Before the book, “social media addiction” was the kind of thing you heard on morning shows, in lawsuits filed by opportunistic attorneys, or in the worried sighs of parents trying to confiscate an iPhone. After the book, it started to sound definitive, like gravity. That transformation mattered. Haidt’s pitch was simple enough to fit on a bumper sticker: smartphones plus social media rewired childhood and caused a mental health crisis. The argument ran on emotional fuel, addiction, loss of control, kids as collateral damage in a digital arms race. He described tech platforms as if they were running a lab experiment on adolescence. Even when he stopped short of saying children were chemically dependent, the imagery did the work for him. Kids were described as “hooked,” “trapped,” “compelled.” The appeal was obvious. It gave parents and policymakers a villain you could hold in your hand. The messy, complicated mix of parenting, culture, and economics collapsed into one easy story: Silicon Valley pushed digital heroin on our children. Once you buy that framing, the policy prescriptions practically write themselves. If it’s an addiction, you need enforcement, not education. Bans, not guidance. Monitoring, not trust. The debate gave way to a crusade. Then the book got its miracle: Bill Gates liked it and openly promoted it. Unfortunately, when Microsoft founder and digital ID proponent Gates calls a book “important,” it moves consensus as well as copies.