When truth catches up

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday, March 27th. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. 

Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. 

It’s Culture Friday! Back with us today, John Stonestreet, the President of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint Podcast. 

John, good morning.

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: Well John, two massive legal blows for Meta this week—they are sending shockwaves all throughout Silicon Valley.

First and early in the week, New Mexico: A jury here hit Meta with a $375 million verdict for failing to protect kids from exploitation. Then came Wednesday: California, another jury found Meta and YouTube liable for “addictive” designs that the jury said fueled a young woman’s mental health crisis.

So two states, two completely different kinds of legal attacks, but one big question: Is the “immunity shield” for Big Tech finally cracking?

So John, for you—lawyers say this is just the tip of the iceberg—do you think we're watching the start of a huge legal shift?

STONESTREET: Oh, they’re huge. That’s the understatement, because this obviously opens up the potential of all kinds of future litigation too, and we know the victims are many, from patients who have experienced the same kind of mental distress or depression, even being led to self-harm and suicide, and also what we now know, which is that the tech execs knew. They behaved differently with their own kids as compared to how they were expecting and hoping parents would behave with their kids.

So I think the precedent here is the same as the harms of smoking and the lawsuits against big tobacco. I think it’s similar to the lawsuits against the Sackler family after mis-advertising addictive, free pain medication, you know, that’s a famous story as well.

The question is, where is this going to end? 

And I think it still leaves the question: are we going to behave differently? Because yes, I do think that companies bear some responsibility, but now we know. Now they’ve been guilty. Now the platforms are still there, and the addictions also are still there.

Now we know how bad it is, particularly for children, and yet parents are still buying smartphones and putting their kids on social media or allowing their kids to be on social media. 

Schools, private schools, public schools, are still encouraging technology use and not regulating it, even during the school day. Some are—a whole lot more are now than used to be—but there’s a responsibility now that we know, now that it’s been litigated, now that a decision has been made, now that these companies are beginning to be held accountable, that we hold ourselves accountable.

Speaking at an event last week in another country that is not as far down the sewage drain as we are on some of these issues, and I just you know did a flat-out endorsement: "get your kids off social media. Get your kids off screens."

And another speaker there that was a pastor who was on the panel with me said, “And get off it yourselves.” In other words, you need to reflect the kind of behavior that you’re expecting your kids to exhibit. 

And I think that’s the case. We have companies held accountable. Consumers need to hold themselves accountable.

BROWN: John, you said we know—we know the harm, we know what these platforms are doing.

So how much of this is really new—and how much of it is something we should have acted on years ago?

STONESTREET: Yeah. I mean, I think there’s a difference between 20 years ago and 10 years ago. 

I think it is a difference between the ability of parents to stay in touch with their kids and a culture that felt more dangerous. There were all kinds of reasons for parents to want to stay in touch with their kids, and that’s been a driver, I think, of parents doing this for their kids in many ways.

But 10 years into it, when you’re talking about the social media boom, we knew a lot more than we acted upon. Educational officials knew a lot more than they acted upon, just like these companies knew a lot more than they acted upon.

And there’s also those who use this—not only those who developed this technology and created it in a way so that it would be addictive, but then those who knew it and then used that to brainwash kids.

I mean, one of the things we’re going to have to reckon with that Jean Twenge and others have pointed out, is that when you lay the trend lines of social media use and the expansion and growth of that among minors and the incredible spike in mental health issues among minors—of gender confusion and self-harm—I mean, these are trend lines that literally lay on top of each other.

And we knew that. We knew we should have known that. And those companies that leverage these platforms that we are now saying are dangerous, knew that they were dangerous then, just like parents did. So there’s a lot of accountability here to go around.

And look, even 20 years ago, we may not have known everything about smartphones, but we had a whole lot of people warning us about screens and entertainment addiction and things like that, and early sexualization of children. And, you know, go down the line of the things that we did know about.

So were we prescient on this? No. Should we have been more? Absolutely. 

EICHER: Well John, before we leave this topic altogether, I'm curious what your overall thought was as to the importance of these verdicts. 

Would you say that this is a general good for the culture?

STONESTREET: You know, when a culture gets messed up, it’s a lot more like a drop of dye has been put into the water and you can’t really fully pull it out without kind of going through a whole purification process.

There’s going to be overreach. There’s going to be greed of lawsuits and lawyers. And honestly, it’s kind of like, again, the Sackler family—the overall amount of money that they ended up paying was nowhere near the damage that they caused.

And you think about an eye-popping number like 300-and-some million dollars in one jury decision—that’s eye-popping—but that’s not even close to the overall financial cost of this behavior.

So there’s going to be positives and negatives. There’s going to be good and bad, even in the decisions that are rendered in the future of the litigation.

BROWN: Well, another story this week, John—the death of Kermit Gosnell.

The Philadelphia abortion doctor convicted in 2013 of murdering infants born alive during late-term procedures…along with the death of a patient under his care.

His clinic was described by prosecutors as a “house of horrors.”

The case drew outrage at the time—not only for the crimes themselves, but for how little attention it received from the national media.

John, when you look back at the Gosnell case—both the crimes and the lack of media coverage—what stands out most to you now?

STONESTREET: It is hard to know where to begin, I mean, this was a scandal at the time that the media was so silent on—really what was the trial of maybe the most prolific serial killer in American history by any definition. Not to mention the medical malpractice here, specifically directed at women, and the lack of care to women who underwent abortions, some of them having died at the clinic or in the days after. 

I mean, this was just an incredible thing.

It was also a story about the lack of oversight—how abortion got to play by different rules. There was more oversight in Philadelphia of nail salons and ice cream shops than what this was, which became known as a "House of Horrors," according to the police investigators that looked at the story.

And the media coverage of this—or the lack thereof—both during the trial and now in the days after his death, I guess is unsurprising.

The malpractice is pretty deep, as we know, in media. 

And we saw it actually this past week, or the last couple weeks, in another death—that of Paul Ehrlich. Here you had the author of The Population Bomb, who predicted essentially that the population of the Earth would exceed the resources decades ago and lead to mass starvations and so on and so on and so on.

And what did we have? We had national media outlets calling his views controversial. They weren’t controversial, they were flat-out wrong. And not only were they flat-out wrong, but they inspired things like China’s one-child policy, which was a state-sponsored genocide of epic proportions—not to mention forced sterilizations in developing nations like India and other places.

Paul Ehrlich and Kermit Gosnell have an awful lot in common. Their views were very anti-human. Their ideas had consequences. And because they were such bad ideas, they had victims.

They were both wrapped up in their own ability to be heroes and saviors, and ended up instead leading to an awful lot of deaths. And the media failed to deal with either one of them in a way that was appropriate for the terribleness of their views.

So, it came in bunches in the last couple weeks—not only from Gosnell, but also Paul Ehrlich.

EICHER: Well John, let me ask you this: How do you think Christians ought to respond to the death of someone responsible for real evil like this? 

We did just have a public object lesson with the president of the United States celebrating the death of someone he considered to be a political enemy, and he was rightly criticized for the way he went about that. 

But it does raise a question for us: What is the right response to the death of the actual wicked, specifically a convicted mass murderer?

STONTESTREET: Well, Scripture tells us that God doesn’t cheer the death of the wicked, but it also doesn’t do anything to downplay the wickedness of the wicked. And that’s why, I think, the Bible is so compelling and the Christian worldview so compelling.

When people ask, you know, what is it about it that you find the most convincing, it’s its description of the human condition. Because within other worldviews, you have to assume that humans are gods. In some worldviews, you have to assume that intention overcomes the rightness or wrongness of action. In others, you, you know, basically remove human responsibility or accountability since we’re just essentially animals with a conscience.

It’s within the Christian worldview that you have the inherent human dignity, and also the ability and capacity of humans to violate that dignity, both in themselves and in others.

Blaise Pascal wrote about this in incredibly powerful terms in his collection of writings called Pensées, that humans are the glory and the garbage of the universe. And I think we should apply that and frame that out in how we think and talk about folks.

I thought, for example, Professor Robert George on his X account wrote a bit of a description of Kermit Gosnell as an image bearer and also as someone who just completely lost track of what was true and right and what gave humans value, and the consequences of that were dramatic.

And I think you can do that as a practitioner, like Gosnell did. I think you can do it as a theoretician, like Paul Ehrlich did. I think you can do it as a dictator, like we saw throughout the 20th century, and the dehumanizing ideas of communism and so on.

There’s all kinds of ways to violate human dignity, and it doesn’t do us any favors to downplay that, ignore that, or anything else.

And yet, what do we know? That God does not rejoice in the death of the wicked.

BROWN: All right, John Stonestreet is President of the Colson Center and Host of the Breakpoint podcast. 

Thank you, John. 

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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