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Based upon a then recent study from the University of North Carolina, the gist of the article is in equal parts instructive and alarming:

‘The findings suggest that children who grow up checking social media more often are becoming hypersensitive to feedback from their peers,’ says Eva Telzer, a professor in UNC-Chapel Hill’s psychology and neuroscience department and a corresponding author, in a statement.

‘Social media platforms provide adolescents with unprecedented opportunities for social interactions during a critical developmental period when the brain is especially sensitive to social feedback,’ the study concludes. This longitudinal cohort study suggests that social media behaviors in early adolescence may be associated with changes in adolescents’ neural development, specifically neural sensitivity to potential social feedback.

It is not difficult to understand Big Tech’s venal motives for catering to customers’ psychology to increase their use of social media: the corporations’ already humongous profits. But the societal dimension of hardwiring youth to become hypersensitive to “social feedback”—i.e., “peer pressure”—within their network will have an immense and deleterious impact upon a free society.

Certainly, it is not lost upon the administrative state, who is hellbent upon controlling (often in conjunction with legacy/regime media) both the means and messages of citizens’ interactions on social media, be it censorship, pushing bogus, statist narratives, etc.

Per the paper published in JAMA Pediatrics, “students who look at social media at least 15 times daily were the most sensitive to social feedback.” While these students are the most at risk, their peers are not far behind them: “Previous research shows that 78 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds report checking their devices at least hourly each day and 35 percent look at the top five networks ‘almost constantly.’”

Understandably, the researchers assert that “further research examining long-term prospective associations between social media use, adolescent neural development, and psychological adjustment is needed to understand the effects of a ubiquitous influence on development for today’s adolescents.”

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Now, in 2024, through the deliberate, debilitating din of the Communications Revolution, we can glean the insidious aim of the administrative state, Big Tech, and a host of leftist institutions and minions: the erosion of individual liberty and the perverse inversion of subordinating sovereign citizens into subjects of the government. Doesn’t history instruct how, in attempted revolutions/coups, the cabal urgently prioritizes capturing and controlling society’s means of communication? Using social media to cajole, coerce, and inure citizens into conforming within the “collective” and its “hyper-socialism,” the Left’s first punishment for exercising non-state-sanctioned, independent thought and dissent is and will continue to be the ostracization from one’s social interactions. Other punishments, such as job loss, harassment lawsuits, etc., will follow. Frankly, what is being “cancelled” but being locked in a virtual gulag?

Thus, while the solutions may be simple, such as dismantling the administrative state, reforming their colluding leftist infested institutions, and offering hope to those addicted to “likes,” etc. – they will be decidedly difficult. But the future of our free republic requires an intervention. Inaction is not an option, especially given the speed AI is metastasizing within an already social media addled populace.

For those whose decisions are driven in whole or in part by social media, they may well refuse to admit the problem as they wheel and whistle past the graveyard of individuality and liberty. For those of us not driving under the influence of social media, as we peer out the windshield to the crossroad of freedom and serfdom ahead, one has the sensation of time slowing down as a collision unfolds.