Keeping Kids Safe Online: Guest Column

Social Media

If we’ve learned anything, parents are the only ones who can protect kids with their devices.

The clear takeaway from the U.S. Senate’s recent hearing, “Big Tech and the Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis,” is that social media is not safe for children. Senators from both sides of the aisle questioned social media CEOs about the harms their platforms cause to kids. Democratic Senator Dick Durbin noted, “As early as 2017, law enforcement identified Snapchat as the pedophile’s go-to sexual exploitation tool.” Republican Ted Cruz chided Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg for Instagram allowing users to view child sexual content.  

For years, social media companies have claimed that better parental controls would protect children, but as CEO of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation Dawn Hawkins argued in a Heritage Foundation panel after the hearing, “[T]he parental controls … do not work. … They’ve designed these platforms without parents in mind.” 

The conclusion is obvious. Tech companies cannot (and will not even if they could) protect kids. Parents have to. 

Copyright 2024 by the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Reprinted from BreakPoint.org with permission.

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Arkansas State Police Seize Nearly 200 Pounds of Illegal Marijuana

Marijuana
Above: ASP seized 94 lbs. of illegal marijuana during a traffic stop earlier this month.

Last week the Arkansas State Police reported that troopers recently seized nearly 200 pounds of illegal marijuana over the course of multiple traffic stops.

According to an official press release, the suspects apprehended and charged with drug possession were from Texas, Nevada, and Florida.

Stories like this one serve as a reminder that marijuana’s legalization in other states has actually fueled the black market and the drug cartels rather than weakening them.

For example, California’s Unified Cannabis Enforcement Taskforce seized nearly $162 million worth of illegal marijuana during the first half of 2023.

Oregon has been inundated by industrial scale marijuana cultivation sites operated illegally by organized crime and drug cartels. Some of these marijuana operations are tied to labor trafficking and violent crime.

If Arkansas had passed marijuana amendment Issue 4 in 2022, our marijuana laws arguably would be more lax than many states’. Fortunately, voters rejected that measure at the ballot box.

Contrary to popular belief, legalization does not decrease drug-related crime, and it does not alleviate drug abuse. If anything, it seems to make these problems worse.

Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.

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