As a secondary school teacher, I have learned that asking a student to put away a fidget spinner is not the same as asking them to put away a phone. While they are both distractions, only the phone feels like asking the student to give up a lifeline. It holds their friends, their jokes, their music, their worries, their self-image, and the continual pressure to check just one more thing.
That small moment in a classroom tells us something larger about the modern world. With a phone, there is so much to read, watch, and listen to—right at our fingertips. This technological and informational boom has in many ways been a blessing. We can communicate with loved ones quickly. We can share hope, peace, and God’s love around the world in the blink of an eye.
You and I already know, though, that our tools of technology have been bringing a little more division than unity in recent years. For disciples of Jesus Christ, the question is not whether technology is good or bad. The question is whether we are actively using it as a tool, or whether the “tool” is quietly training us.
Just because technology can fill the world with light and hope does not always mean that it will. Like other tools, it has been designed for a specific job. Just as a hammer is better at pounding nails than a screwdriver, different types of technology are better suited to different tasks than others. Gaining an understanding of how these tools guiding our digital lives are designed, particularly social media, will help us better understand the increase in polarization and disunity in our communications and our communities.
The U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory recognizes that social media can provide connection, while also warning that current evidence points to meaningful risks and unanswered safety questions for children and adolescents.
A Tool Built to Hold Our Attention
The first thing we should remember about social media is that it is a profit-making tool. This can be easy to forget as we, the users, never have to pay to use the service. Instead, social media companies make money by selling our attention to advertisers. This is called the attention economy.
Not only do advertisers pay to get ads in front of us, but they will pay even more if they can target those ads to the people most likely to buy them. This is a big reason why social media companies track so much of what we do on and around their platforms, from each click and search to how long we wait before we scroll away. In 2024, the Federal Trade Commission reported that major social media and video platforms collect, track, and use personal information to determine ads and content—often through feeding said data to algorithms, AI, and data analytics.
The first thing we should remember about social media is that it is a profit-making tool.
Engagement is their key metric: both time in the app and how much we interact with it. This means that anything and everything that social media companies can do to increase our engagement will pay off for them financially. So it should come as no surprise that Netflix, while not a social media company, built its financial incentives around the attention economy—so strongly that its then-CEO Reed Hastings once called sleep its “primary competitor.”
Other apps are often faced with similar competition, sending notifications during school hours and late at night: everything they can to get users back onto their platform. A 2023 Common Sense Media report found that more than half of young participants received 237 or more phone notifications per day.
They don’t just want to get us onto their sites, but to keep us there.
When a Tool Trains Our Habits
There are many other technological tricks and design choices made to keep us engaged as long as possible. From daily streaks to personalized endless feeds, social pressure, likes, and bright colors, social media sites are designed to be habit-forming.
Just like a slot machine, you never know if that notification is going to bring good news, irritation, embarrassment, attention, or a near miss. These intermittent and instantly-gratifying rewards can resemble patterns that make habits hard to break. Social media is not unlike a casino, except that instead of money, we often pay in time, and instead of a payout, we may walk away with a dizzying sense of loneliness.
Just as casinos are window-less to obscure the passage of time, social media has autoplay and infinite scrolling so you don’t need to look up to keep partaking.
As members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we take special care not to partake of addictive substances in our physical diets. Social media, however, has taken over many of our informational diets with habit-forming patterns that shape our attention to bring us back the next time a notification arrives.
With every scroll and every click, we may be handing our attention to the machines we carry around in our pockets.
Agency in the Attention Economy
Our perspective on the damage caused by addiction inform us, even beyond the commandments, not to partake of harmful substances. Agency is a cornerstone of the Latter-day Saint worldview. The Church teaches that moral agency gives us “the power to act for ourselves” and to take responsibility for our choices.
In the premortal life, Satan wanted to take away our agency to gain glory unto himself. Christ, however, offered Himself for a better way forward, preserving our power to choose. We all chose Him over the arguably more “comfortable” route of letting outside forces control our destiny. The Church’s Gospel Topics guide teaches that Satan “sought to destroy the agency of man,” while those on earth had used their agency to accept God’s plan.
This comparison should make us careful. A platform is certainly not Satan, and a phone is not evil. But any system that narrows our choices, claims our time without our intention, or nudges us toward impulse instead of covenant can weaken the good habits agency requires. The addiction-forming patterns of social media can take our thoughts and time away from all the good that we could do with our agency.
As a secondary school teacher, I can attest to the powerful nature of the devices we allow our children to carry everywhere they go. When I ask students what they did over the weekend, a surprising number will simply say they communicated with friends through their phones. These tech companies have strong financial reasons to make sure that our favorite way to pass the time (and our children’s favorite), keeps drawing us back to the screen.
What Our Feeds Teach Us About People
One of the most subtle ways these platforms train us is the way they teach us to view one another. Because their bottom line is tied to engagement, algorithms often reward content that keeps us clicking, including content that is shocking, angry, depressing, disturbing, or rage-worthy.
A 2025 PNAS Nexus study of Twitter’s engagement-based ranking found that, compared with a reverse-chronological feed, the engagement-based algorithm over-represented emotionally charged and out-group hostile content, and that political tweets selected by the algorithm made users feel worse about their political out-group.
Strawman arguments and unfaithful misrepresentations of others are also too often rewarded.
Strawman arguments and unfaithful misrepresentations of others are also too often rewarded. These types of content causes outrage and disgust directed at anybody different. Viewing it changes us from seeing our fellow citizens as well-meaning friends to seeing them first as problems, threats, or harbingers of evil.
This effect is in direct opposition to the directive of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who teaches that we are all children of God. God is no respecter of persons. We, who are disciples and saints within these latter days, are admonished to follow the Savior. Perhaps we should consider how much time we think Jesus would spend on social media, if any at all? What types of posts and comments would He write or share? Wherever this thought experiment leads us, we need to go and do likewise.
Preach My Gospel states that “Through repentance, we develop a fresh view of God, ourselves, and the world. We feel God’s love for us anew as His children—and our Savior’s love for us.” If we gain a fresh view of the world by repenting, that must mean we are viewing our brothers and sisters in this human family with greater love, as God views them.
This is God’s way, and it is a clear opposite of the way of contempt, misrepresentation, and endless outrage.
A More Christian Digital Diet
As we move through this mortal journey, we Latter-day Saints know of the importance of maintaining the presence of the Holy Ghost. We can walk with God on earth as we keep our covenants and serve others. Christ taught that if we love Him, we must feed his sheep. In our baptismal covenant, we promise to mourn with those that mourn, comfort those in need of comfort, and stand as witnesses of God.
Social media is designed in such a way that it can suck our time away from this important work and twist our brains into believing the worst of our brothers and sisters. While much good can be brought about as we share righteousness and bring light to the world, we must remember that the platforms themselves are financially incentivized to maximize engagement, even when our engagement is done is wisdom, peace, or discipleship.
In recent general conference messages, President Dallin H. Oaks taught both the importance of the family-centered gospel and the need for followers of Christ to use the “language and methods of peacemakers.” President Oaks was announced as the 18th President and prophet of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on October 14, 2025, and the same month he reminded that the Church is “a family-centered church.” And in April 2026 he urged followers of Christ to forgo contention and avoid what is harsh and hateful.
I believe we should think carefully about the role social media has to play in our daily activities and the examples we set for our children. May our digital diets reflect all things virtuous, lovely, and of good report. And may we remember to follow the Savior when it comes to how we hold our human family within our hearts.
