Anti-gun bias in the media is hardly a new phenomenon, but rarely is it as blatant as a report from NBC’s Today show, which gave anti-gun activist Nicole Hockley of Sandy Hook Promise free rein to demonize online influencers in the 2A space as well bash tech companies for supposedly exposing kids to gun videos.
The premise for Today’s reporting is a new report by Sandy Hook Promise and the group Children and Screens called “Untargeting Kids: A Call for Platform Transparency — Putting Parents Back in Charge of Firearm Safety.” The report claims, in part:
In a recent experiment, test YouTube accounts set up to mimic 9- and 14-year-old boys interested in video games were quickly flooded with firearm content – a reasonable recommendation given that video games often contain firearms, but an inappropriate one given the putative age of the users. Not all of the content was overtly adult-oriented, but much of it was sexualized and graphic. Over a one-month period, one of the test accounts that was made to resemble a 14-year-old received more than 1,300 firearm-related video recommendations (video games and movies were included as “firearm content” in this study, but are not equated with real life firearm content in the current report). Many of these videos were monetized with targeted advertising.
The report goes on to claim that 54% of boys ages 10–17 report seeing sexually charged firearm content at least once a week, but never actually define what “sexually charged firearm content” looks like. More broadly, though, the report takes issue with young users of social media being exposed to “live-action firearm content” in general.
So how much of that “live-action firearm content” is sexualized and graphic, versus clips from video games, movies, and TV shows? The report doesn’t say, and the Today reporter doesn’t appear to have asked Hockley to get specific.
Nor did she push back on Hockley’s claim that “firearm manufacturers have been targeting children as a future consumer,” suggesting that it’s gun companies, not influencers, that are producing this content.
Boys, especially, may be at risk of being negatively influenced by online firearm influencers.
“They’re forming their sense of self and identity, and yet they’re then getting served content that is talking about firearms make you powerful, firearms make you sexually attractive, firearms are the way to solve your conflicts,” she says.
And even if the content is focused on safety, Hockley asks, “Should that still be served to kids, or is it the role of parents to teach safety around guns?”
There are a host of reasons parents might have firearms in their home: self-defense, protection, hunting, collections, heritage. They may want their children to understand some basics about guns.
There are, however, important distinctions. Hockley says, “A parent would never tell a kid you need to have a firearm in order to be powerful, you need to have a firearm in order to be attractive, you need to have a firearm because when someone angers you, this is how you’re going to deal with them.”
She adds, “I don’t think that there’s many parents that would say that that fits within their values and principles, yet that is the message that is hitting our kids.”
Is it really, though? If so, it’s certainly not coming from firearm manufacturers, and I’d argue it’s not coming from the vast majority of GunTubers either.
On the other hand, I’ve seen plenty of Snapchat and TikTok videos featuring kids who are too young to legally purchase or possess firearms acting irresponsibly or with criminal intent. I wouldn’t call those individuals “influencers,” at least not in the same sense that label is applied to Hickok 45, Garand Thumb, or Demolition Ranch.
Hockley’s calling on tech companies to be more transparent about their algorithms and metrics showing the average “time-to-deletion” for videos featuring unsafe gun handling, and the report itself states “that censorship is not the goal of this report.”
Adults are free in the United States to engagein First Amendment-protected speech, including around firearms and in online spaces. Rather, reasonable platform safeguards for minors need to be in place and enforced to ensure young people are learning about firearms from their parents, not from online.
The best way to do that is for parents to monitor their kids’ viewing habits, regardless of whatever policies Big Tech has in place. And despite the report’s myopic focus on firearm-related content, this applies to all kinds of subject matter.
Can sites like Facebook and YouTube serve up age inappropriate content? Absolutely. Are their algorithms designed to keep viewers watching, regardless of what that content consists of? Yes, they are.
But let’s also be honest here: popular culture as a whole has been increasingly sexualized for decades now. When I was 14 I was exposed to all kinds of sexually charged videos on MTV, not to mention full-frontal nudity on cable networks like Showtime and Cinemax (affectionally known as “Skinemax” by many Gen-Xers in their youth). We had groups railing against violence in movies and on TV as well back then, and even in the dial-up days of the Internet there was plenty of age-inappropriate content to be found with just a few clicks of a mouse.
There’s nothing wrong with demanding more transparency from social media networks and platforms like YouTube. If that’s where Hockley had stopped I’d actually agree with her. But when she accuses firearm companies of targeting kids with sexually charged images or messaging that guns make you sexually attractive or are “the” way to solve conflicts without citing any specific evidence whatsoever, that’s where she loses me. And when Today allows her to make those unfounded claims without any kind of challenge or rebuttal, their reporting becomes an anti-gun hit piece that’s so one sided it’s nothing more than propaganda for the gun control lobby.
Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment.
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