The conversation at my family dinner table this week was heavier than usual. After discussing Charlie Kirk’s tragic assassination, I asked my three sons a question I dreaded hearing the answer to: Did you watch the video?
The fact that I, and other parents, even have to ask this question demonstrates a troubling reality: Our kids are being regularly exposed to harmful, violent content online. Video of Kirk’s shooting was viewed millions of times across social platforms, and it’s virtually guaranteed that those viewers included many young people. With many experts concerned that political violence in our country is on the rise, this means that children are at ever-greater risk of encountering social media content that amplifies, normalizes, or even glorifies such acts.
If we want to prevent our society from becoming a place where political violence is the new normal, a critical piece of the puzzle is reducing the spread of such content online and limiting — ideally eliminating — our children’s exposure to it.
The increasing spread of dangerous, graphic, and violent content online is harming our children in countless ways. Childhood mental health problems rose steadily between 2010 and 2020, with suicide becoming the second leading cause of death for 10 year-olds in 2018 — and there is a broad consensus that social media is helping fuel this troubling trend. Since 2021, we have been in what the American Academy of Pediatrics and other groups declared is a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health.
We know that when young people encounter specific messages or content again and again, they often eventually view it as normal or true, and it can strongly influence their highly impressionable worldviews and their actions. If young girls with struggling with body image issues find content that glorifies eating disorders, that can lead them to engage in similarly unhealthy behavior. Many school shooters have left messages saying their actions were inspired by previous attackers, and they chose to become copycats in hopes of achieving similar notoriety.
The case may be the same when it comes to political violence: If young people constantly read about or witness such incidents, fed to them by social media algorithms, they might grow to believe this phenomenon as a normal or even acceptable part of life in America. We cannot accept this as inevitable or insignificant — we need to put a stop to it, and fast.
It’s true that political violence has been around for as long as our nation has existed. But reports of such brutality often came to us through the mainstream media or the classroom — not through a relentless stream of social media content that amplifies conflict and rarely separates fact from fiction.
The hard work of reducing political violence will not happen overnight. But there are steps we can take in the meantime to turn down the temperature and protect our kids from becoming desensitized to it. That starts with having honest, direct, and age-appropriate conversations with our children about the roots of civil unrest, and why assassinations like Mr. Kirk’s murder are tragic and always unacceptable.
As parents, we must also insist on safeguarding the information environment in a way that enables our children to become the future stewards of democracy. This means ensuring schools are places where learning happens — not venues for tech companies to try out unproven products. We need to keep our kids off unsafe social media platforms that allow and amplify self-harm content, hate groups, nihilism, sexual grooming and other horrors that erode wellbeing, and continue demanding our lawmakers take action to ensure firm standards and enforcement.
We can model good behavior for our kids by getting off social media ourselves. Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah was spot-on in his recent remarks around the assassination, calling social media “a cancer on our society” and urging people to “log off, turn off, touch grass, and hug a family member.”
We also need to make sure kids don’t see political violence as normal or just another form of “content” — and that means platforms prohibiting the sharing of murder videos and immediately taking them down.
Ensuring our kids grow up with their lives centered in the real world — and not online — remains our best hope for ensuring they develop a solid foundation to navigate society and build a future free of political violence.
This isn’t about sheltering our kids from any bad news or from the painful realities of our modern society. It’s about parents making sure we are always a bigger influence than Big Tech. It’s about exposing children to difficult topics in a thoughtful, responsible way, not leaving it up to social media algorithms to tell them what is normal, appropriate, and praiseworthy.
Despite my fears, my 15- and 20-year-olds said they had not watched the video of Kirk’s assassination and did not plan to. And while my 17-year-old, a senior in high school, acknowledged that he and his friends had watched it multiple times, their immediate reactions were to research gun laws and debate the merits of the Second Amendment. That’s A-OK.
For years, my husband and I have been teaching my children that the best way to stay emotionally healthy is to spend as little time online as possible and to avoid violent content. Our experience is a hopeful sign that our kids spending less time online — and more time at family dinners – will give them, and our democracy, a fighting chance.
Julie Scelfo is a longtime journalist and the founder and executive director of Mothers Against Media Addiction, or MAMA.
