How Social Media May Lead to Lower Birth Rates

Love it or hate it, social media is an inescapable fact of modern life. Research shows nearly 5 billion people—or 85 percent of the world’s cellphone users—are connected to such platforms, relying on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and the like for an average of two hours and twenty-seven minutes a day for everything from communication, news, and shopping to entertainment and personal validation.  

Though our society has been saturated with social media for some time, the negative impact its ubiquity is having on our world is largely overlooked. In my forthcoming book, Woke-Proof Your Life, I detail the physical and mental-health problems excessive screen time causes, including how social media use is associated with online pornography addiction—a well-documented factor in the destabilization of marriage and family.  

Wokeness, an evil catalyst of all sorts of physical, mental, and spiritual disorders, lives and dies online. Wokeness didn’t exist before cell phones did, because without a way to broadcast bogus instances of discrimination and to manufacture outrage, the rest of us would have no idea any of the woke offenses were going on (because they aren’t).

If it weren’t for hashtags and the corporate media pushing the radical, woke narrative in the mainstream media and on social media platforms, nothing would be going on. It wasn’t until the advent of Covid, mandated lockdowns, and increased screen time that wokeness took hold. (In 2021, scientists declared smartphone overuse “a hidden crisis in Covid-19.”)   

Big Tech is a major weapon in the woke arsenal. Woke idealogues view fellow humans not as neighbors to cherish, love, and serve, but as objects (hence their focus on externalities like skin color, and on mutable “identities”). Because their goal is to stoke fear and to divide, isolate, and make vulnerable groups of people to use them for their own gain, social media is the perfect tool.

It’s a leading cause of loneliness, especially among young people. It leads to increased anxiety and depression. It’s also highly (and purposefully) addictive and effective at homogenizing our attitudes, thoughts, and behaviors. Pornography is all over the internet and on social media platforms, and research has shown a connection between social media addiction and pornography addiction.   

In Woke-Proof Your Life, I reference a conversation I had with Clare Morell, a policy analyst at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who coauthored a paper titled: “Big Tech is the New Big Tobacco.”  

“If we don’t take action soon, I do really think we’re going to see a public mental-health crisis among the teens and kids who are growing up on social media today,” Morell told me. She continued,

We’re going to see an epidemic—and it’s already starting—of online pornography addiction, and what that means for the future of our country is the destabilization of marriages and families. I don’t think it’s inappropriate to say without action, within a few years, within one generation, we could be headed toward a civilizational crisis, like in Japan, where the birth rate has fallen below replacement.  

“Pornography diminishes sex drive, thus mollifying the desire for an interaction with another person, isolating the user further, and becoming a long-term substitute for sex,” Medium.com reports. “These effects are particularly telling as Americans are having less sex than ever before, a trend driven particularly by young men (the primary consumers of porn), 28 percent of which report no sex in more than a year.” 

A 2014 study labeled online porn “low-cost sexual gratification,” noting how its pervasive use is “disrupting traditional family arrangements” and leading to declining marriage rates.  

In my book I also provide the insight of Rob Shavell, CEO of the data privacy firm DeleteMe, who expands upon the consequences of a tech-saturated society and offers strategies for protecting yourself and your kids from the potentially devastating consequences of social media.  

Keep in mind that to exist, wokeness relies on people leading predominantly online lives. As the average American spends more than eight hours a day in front of a screen, it’s no wonder wokeness has made such inroads in our culture. It is essential, then, that we reevaluate our relationships with technology—ensuring it’s a resource and not a recourse—and that we safeguard our ears, eyes, minds, and souls, and those of our children, from woke poisons that pervade the internet and objectify human beings. Our civilization’s future depends upon it.