Dear Santa:
I realize it’s a busy time for you, what with supervising elves and finishing toys. But I hope you can look at my letter because — and I don’t exaggerate — it concerns 46 million young people. And they all spend nearly five hours a day spinning through social media sites from Facebook to Instagram to TikTok.
Nearly 23 million of those kids have been cyber bullied, cyber stalked, hit on, lured, sent explicit photos, revenge porned, impersonated and trolled. Many are traumatized, depressed, lonely and anxious. It is bad, Santa. Not a ho-ho-ho moment.
These young victims have their own language to share their miseries -— when they harm themselves, it’s hash tagged #blithe or #secretsociety123. Eating disorders get a #thinspo or #proana. This harassed generation talks about doxxing, swatting, grooming, predation, sextortion and catfishing. If you have an elf-nerd, he can translate those. None of them are good.
An engineer who worked for Facebook for many years recently went public — he’s called a whistleblower — because he couldn’t stand it any longer. He told the U.S. Senate about the abuses he saw. He declared: “It is likely the largest-scale sexual harassment of teens to have ever happened, and one that clearly calls for action.”
A 14-year-old girl from Washington explains: “I have been bullied many times. It makes me not want to live in this world anymore.” A girl from Minnesota, also 14, writes: “I was bullied, stalked, and harassed, and began to cut myself.” I suspect these kinds of letters never come to you and the........