(The Epoch Times)—Nearly half of American teenagers are using social media sites such as YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat “constantly”, amid growing concerns about the impact on youth, according to a Dec. 12 report by the Pew Research Center.
Analysts found that YouTube remains the most widely used social media platform among teenagers, with 90 percent of those surveyed reporting they watch videos on the site, down slightly from 95 percent in 2022.
This was followed by ByteDance’s video-sharing platform, TikTok, used by roughly six in ten teens, as well as Instagram and Snapchat, each used by 55 percent of teens.
Teen use of Meta-owned Facebook and the platform X had fallen steeply within the past decade, the survey found.
A total of 22 percent of teens reported using Facebook, a sharp decline from 71 percent in 2014–15. About 17 percent of teens said they use X, roughly half the share from a decade ago (33 percent) and down from 23 percent in 2022.
Overall, 73 percent of teens said they visit YouTube on a daily basis, making the video-sharing platform the most widely used and visited platform among those surveyed. Among those who use the site on a daily basis, 15 percent described their use as “almost constant.”
For TikTok, 16 percent reported constant daily use while for Snapchat, 13 percent of teens surveyed said they use it constantly.
The research center surveyed U.S. teens aged 13 to 17 between Sept. 18 and Oct. 10.
The findings come as multiple social media platforms are facing lawsuits accusing them of fostering addiction and fueling the mental health crisis among children and teenagers.
A Harvard University study showed social media platforms such as Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram produce the same neural circuitry that is caused by gambling and recreational drugs.
Florida Considers Under 14 Social Media Ban
Multiple platforms including Meta have denied claims their platforms are contributing to the mental health crisis. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in an October 2021 statement that the company cares “deeply about issues like safety, well-being, and mental health,” and had employed more people dedicated to fighting harmful content on the platforms than “any other company in our space.”
Some U.S. states have passed laws aimed at restricting access for minors without a parent’s permission.
A full under-14s ban in Florida would require children ages 14 and 15 to have parental or guardian approval to sign up for social media.
The ban is due to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2025, but is being challenged in court on free speech grounds.
In California, a newly-introduced bill could see it become the first state to require mental health warning labels on social media sites informing of the potential risk to children and teens.
The legislation, sponsored by state Attorney General Rob Bonta, is already facing pushback from industry officials who have vowed to fight it under the First Amendment.
Lawmakers in Australia recently passed a bill banning children under the age of 16 from using social networks.
That legislation includes fines of up to AU$49.5 million (US$32.2 million) for companies that fail to take “reasonable steps” to prevent minors under 16 from accessing their platforms.
Children will be able to access YouTube for educational programs, according to the bill.
Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
