- “The Anxious Generation” author Jonathan Haidt said Utah Gov. Spencer Cox is the top spokesperson against social media.
- Cox has called for lawsuits against Big Tech and a ban on social media for those under 16, like has been done in Australia.
- Critics say Cox’s approach tries to replace parents and blames social media for societal problems that have other causes.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox uploaded a scathing takedown of social media giants on Thursday in the form of a campaign-ready, two-minute-long video.
“This is your sign to log off and touch grass,” read the caption on Cox’s post on X — a platform that Cox has admitted to spending too much time on in the past.
The clip, which stitches together scenes of teenagers scrolling on smartphones and Cox’s best anti-Big Tech one-liners, has since amassed more than a million views.
To some of the nation’s political thought leaders, it represented the boldest statement yet in a centrist revolution to take on the ultimate bipartisan boogeyman.
Since the assassination of Charlie Kirk threw Cox into the national spotlight, the governor has grown increasingly aggressive in his attacks against some of the biggest companies in the country.
“However much you hate social media, you do not hate it enough,” Cox says in the video.
The corporations behind TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, YouTube, etc., knowingly created a product that promotes eating disorders, pornography addictions, political dysfunction and anxiety, Cox alleges.
In no other sphere of American life can children give their private information to a faceless firm whose goal is to “keep us addicted,” according to Cox, who compares social media’s effect to gambling, fentanyl and worse.
“Social media is a cancer,” Cox says. “And it is taking all of our worst impulses and putting them on steroids.”
National attention for an anti-social media message
In short order, Cox has become a spokesperson for age restrictions on apps, classroom phone bans, treating social media like tobacco companies, and banning it for those under 16, like has been done in Australia.
One of the most well-known critics of social media, Jonathan Haidt, whose book “The Anxious Generation” points to iPhones as the source of increased depression among children, says “the tide is turning.”
On Thursday, Haidt said in response to Cox’s video that he believes “public disgust with what social media companies are doing to kids is rising around the world,” in part because of the advocacy of Utah’s governor.
“Nobody has been more eloquent on the problem and more active on its solutions than Utah Gov. Spencer Cox,” Haidt wrote.
Haidt’s note is just the latest sign that Cox’s yearslong initiative to criticize and regulate social media in the name of a pragmatic, family-first conservatism is drawing attention.
In October, policy writer and co-author of “Abundance” Derek Thompson said Cox was one of a handful of politicians carving out a niche “near the political center” that Thompson called “touch grass populism.”
“Rather than identify the enemy of America as specifically left, or right, or corporate, or foreign, the enemy they name is the digital hellscapes that summons the worst demons of our nature,” Thompson wrote.
Can Cox take this message to the White House?
This was the subject of Cox’s conversation with Atlantic writer McKay Coppins in a November episode of the “Deseret Voices” podcast. Coppins later noted that while criticisms of social media are common among pundits, few politicians seem willing to take it up.
On Dec. 14, one of the top political journalists in the country, Jonathan Martin, Politico’s politics bureau chief, said Cox’s leadership on this issue demands that he run for president in 2028 as a “cause candidate.”
Cox has earned his fair share of criticism, too.
Writers for libertarian publication Reason said his heavy-handed approach to social media inserts government into what should be the parents’ jurisdiction and blames technology for problems that are fundamentally cultural and ideological.
But Cox’s message seems to be breaking out of the Beehive State bubble — and not just among social media-bashing intellectuals.
A recent focus group conducted by the Manhattan Institute asked 20 young conservative voters who they would name as their ideal next president. A majority said Vice President JD Vance. The remaining respondents all proposed different candidates, with one, a 21-year-old college student, saying, “Spencer Cox.”