The prompt at minute one hundred

One · What happened

A complaint in Kanawha County and a notice at minute one hundred

The Circuit Court of Kanawha County received a complaint from Attorney General JB McCuskey. He filed it on October twenty-ninth under West Virginia’s consumer protection laws. Judge Richard Lindsay has the case. The defendants are TikTok and ByteDance companies, and the filing gives the companies served in California thirty days to answer. It alleges that the app was built to keep children scrolling and that the companies did not tell parents about gaps in the safety protections. A complaint states what one side alleges, and no court has tested any of it.

“Parents have a responsibility to monitor what their kids are doing online, absolutely,” McCuskey said in a statement his office issued the same day. He added that companies leave parents “cut off at the knees” when they do nothing to close safety loopholes. The complaint says state investigators ran two new accounts on identical phones, one registered as a thirteen-year-old girl and one as a thirty-five-year-old woman, and watched only what the feed chose to show. The woman’s feed, the complaint says, ran to recipes, local restaurants, a farmers’ market and lawn-care videos. The thirteen-year-old’s feed, it says, carried sexual content and dangerous conduct throughout.

The complaint quotes TikTok’s own research on how long children stay. Daily users under eighteen spent twenty-five percent more time on the app than adult daily users, the research found, an average of one hundred six minutes a day. TikTok then waited until a child had spent one hundred minutes in a single day before offering an optional prompt to set a limit, the complaint says. About two point seven million children saw that prompt daily. Roughly four percent set a limit through it, and roughly seventy-one percent closed the notice and kept going. The complaint also quotes Brett Peters, TikTok’s global head of creator advocacy and reputation, describing “really lofty goals of getting people to be on the app longer.”

Two · What it is doing

The verdict a parent reaches before the paragraph ends

A father reads that seventy-one percent of the children closed the notice. Before the paragraph is over he has pictured the room where his son keeps a phone. The fear under that picture is a sound one. A man who lies awake over what a thirteen-year-old might be shown has read the complaint’s account correctly, with a farmers’ market on one phone and sexual content on the other phone. Then the anger arrives. Some of it goes to the company the complaint names as defendant. Another share goes to the parents who handed a nine-year-old a phone, an anger that feels like holding a standard. Both aims feel like conviction, and both point away from the hallway outside his son’s door.

“Cut off at the knees” is how McCuskey described parents when companies do nothing to close safety loopholes. A parent can hear that line as a pardon, or hear the sentence before it, the one that puts the monitoring on parents, as a charge. Judge Lindsay and the lawyers on both sides will decide whether TikTok did what the state alleges and what follows if it did. A reader can hope for either outcome and still face the same question when the ruling comes.

The complaint’s figures describe children, yet TikTok’s audience numbers from October 2020 reach well past them, with users thirty-five and older at one hundred forty videos a day. A father who has finished this story on his phone has a screen-time report waiting there, and he has closed its weekly notice before. The notice takes a single tap to close, with no bill for the hours behind it. The tap that closed the children’s notice is one his own thumb already knows.

Three · Where the ground is

The woman said the serpent deceived her, and she ate

“The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate” (Genesis 3:12) is how the man answers when God questions him in the garden. God then turns to the woman and asks, “What is this that you have done?” She answers, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate” (Genesis 3:13). Each answer in the garden holds a fact. The woman’s handing over the fruit and the serpent’s deceit were both real. God calls neither fact false when he judges the serpent in the verses that follow, and he still sends the man and the woman out as the two who ate. No reader should cast the app as the serpent on the strength of a passage about how blame works.

Paul wrote down a saying that was going around Corinth, “All things are lawful for me,” and answered it twice. His first answer was “but not all things are helpful,” and his second was “but I will not be dominated by anything” (1 Corinthians 6:12). The test he sets is who rules the man. A thing can be allowed and honestly sold and still rule the man who uses it. David, writing as king, applied the same test to his own house when he sang, “I will walk with integrity of heart within my house; I will not set before my eyes anything that is worthless” (Psalm 101:2-3).

“For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1) went to churches tempted to go back under the law. Paul had no phone in front of him. Pressed onto a feed, it bends. The verse credits the freedom to Christ, in the past tense, and gives no man’s settings any part in it. A believer who has lost a month of evenings to a screen is still held by the one who bought him. Those evenings are his to confess before the one who holds him.

Moses told Israel that the teaching of children happens “when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise” (Deuteronomy 6:7). The verse maps a day with a phone riding in a pocket at each point on it. Paul tells fathers to bring their children up “in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4). A father cannot instruct in an hour he spends looking down. Neither passage sends a man to do it alone, and the congregation supplies another man who will ask him about his evenings.

Four · Today

Five things, and none of them are “stay informed”

Tonight is enough for the first four, and the fifth waits for church tomorrow, November first.

1. 01

   Open the screen-time report on your own phone.

   Find it under Screen Time on an iPhone or Digital Wellbeing on an Android phone. Read the daily average for the last seven days. Show the figure to your wife or a friend before you decide what it means, and weigh it against the complaint’s one hundred six minutes only after that.

2. 02

   Move every phone out of the bedrooms tonight.

   Buy a ten-dollar alarm clock and plug the chargers in at the kitchen counter, yours included. The hours Moses names in Deuteronomy 6 begin and end in the bedroom. Expect an irritable first week, and go first with your own phone before you tell the children it is the house’s rule.

3. 03

   Ask your child to show you the feed.

   Sit beside him for twenty minutes with his phone in his hands and ask him to scroll the way he does when you are in another part of the house. Keep your face level when something appears, because a child who gets punished for showing a parent will stop showing. If the feed holds something that frightens you, thank him and close the app together, then ask your pastor to sit with you both.

4. 04

   Set the limit yourself and sign it at the table.

   Choose a daily number with your child and write it on paper. Enter it yourself in the phone’s family controls, because the complaint says the prompt TikTok showed after a hundred minutes was optional and most children closed it. A limit is a fence around the hours and will not change a heart by itself.

5. 05

   Give one man at church the hours you lose.

   Tell your pastor, or one man in the congregation you trust, which app takes the hours and what time of day. Ask him to text you each Sunday evening for a month. James 5:16 puts confessing to one another ahead of praying for one another. If the loss runs back years and has damaged your marriage, a pastor or a biblical counselor can take it up with you both.