Will the Phone-Free Movement Work?

On the issue of kids, smartphones, and social media, a vibe shift is happening, and it’s happening on the left, right, and in the center. Here’s a survey of recent anti-phone discourse on the topic in politics and culture in recent weeks and months: The TikTok “ban” (don’t call it that) garnered bipartisan support in the House, and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill making it illegal for people under 14 to have social media accounts in Florida. “People are so unwilling to blame iPhones as one of the main culprits in a variety of social ills but graphs like [these] are revealing. It’s obviously the phones,” zillennial writer Magdalene Taylor tweeted, semi-virally, attaching that infamous “teens today aren’t hanging out” graph. Hosts of two podcasts enjoyed by Very Online left-ish millennials, TrueAnon and Time to Say Goodbye, devoted episodes to making freewheeling arguments against the use of social media by kids. (Tyler Austin Harper, a professor at Bates who has written for Slate, even suggested on the latter show that smartphones should be made illegal for use by people under 18. Tyler! A take!) A trend piece in the Daily Beast uncovered interviewees from Gen Z who said that when they had kids, they certainly wouldn’t be letting them be “raised by” iPads. “Get offline. It is not alcohol, it is not porn, it is not weed, it is not blah blah, it is being online. Get offline,” wrote a Reddit user on r/GenZ.