As the New Year commences, I peeked into the rearview mirror and rediscovered an article that appeared in Lisa DePasquale's diurnal newsletter, Bright. Published on January 3, 2023, by StudyFinds [one word], the headline was a terse red flag for the future of our free republic: "The Social Disaster: Children Who Frequently Check Social Media Face Significant Brain Changes."

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.'"