Those Moloch worshipers were pikers. Back in those days, I imagine the ancients brought a child or two to the altar to be knifed in early spring, in order that Moloch would grant them a good harvest. Just think – only sacrificing a couple kids!

But the Molochians were beat out by King Minos, who according to Greek legend made larger demands. In recompense for a past offense, the city-state of Athens had to send Minos an annual tribute of 14 young people – seven boys and seven girls – to be fed to the Minotaur.

“What barbarians,” we think while reading this stories. “What senseless evil.” But those societies of old really had no idea how to go about child sacrifice. They had nothing on us.

In the Big Tech society, systems operate at scale – that is, to the largest degree possible, using the automation of digital platforms to execute tasks with the greatest efficiency. I might add “and that includes child sacrifice,” but that’s not precise enough. It appears, increasingly, that a primary goal of our interconnected digital system is to sacrifice as many children as possible, as fast as possible, with as little friction as possible. The followers of Moloch, seeing how piddling their efforts were by comparison, should throw themselves into the volcano out of pure embarrassment. America’s tech monopolies, in 2026, show exactly how it’s done.

You think I’m overstating the case? Hyperbolizing for a little fun? I sincerely wish I was. To the contrary: we’re facing evidence that if taken seriously would cause us to tear our clothes in grief.

Although it’s just one of many examples, what’s happening on Twitter/X should be all the evidence needed to prove my case. At Elon Musk’s direction, X has installed his AI chatbot, called Grok, and a feature that allows users to edit posted photos by typing in an AI prompt. So when someone posts a photo of their child (or any child) on Grok, in come the prompts, like “put her in a bikini.” The new photos, modified as requested, immediately appear on public feeds. Photos of women, racial minorities, and Jews have also been targeted, resulting in a torrent of deepfake porn images, available worldwide. Musk’s platform has turned into an on-demand generator of child sexualization, violence, antisemitism, and racism.

I spoke with Lora Kolodny on Techtonic this week about what’s happening: here’s the episode page and here’s the podcast. Lora, a tech reporter at CNBC, has been covering Musk’s empire for years and describes clearly both what’s happening on X today, and how it fits into Musk’s past behavior.

But Elon Musk is hardly the only offender. Facebook/Meta, under Mark Zuckerberg’s leadership, has practically written the book on how to exploit kids for profit. Over four years after the “Facebook Files” leak showed that Instagram execs knowingly designed their platform to harm teens, it’s still happening.

A recent report (Sep 2025) by Fairplay, subtitled “How Instagram is Failing to Protect Minors,” has a foreword written by two parents whose teenagers committed suicide after being exposed to months of harmful content on Instagram. They write:

Meta’s new safety measures are woefully ineffective. . . . Time and time again, Meta has proven they simply cannot be trusted.

. . . We implore everyone reading this: Help us make sure that not one more child is lost to Meta’s greed, and not one more parent has to live with a grief like ours.

The report goes on to detail the ways that Instagram has cut expenses, by failing to build effective safety systems, and raised revenue, by serving up kid photos on demand:

In July, our testing found that . . . Instagram’s search autocomplete recommended searching for “Gymnastics girls young.”

That issue above is a known problem, having been reported in the Wall Street Journal back in 2023: Instagram Connects Vast Pedophile Network. Zuckerberg, unfazed, has chosen to continue business as usual.

But Big Tech’s interest in kids is hardly limited to Musk’s and Zuckerberg’s enablement of child pornography. Silicon Valley demands a much bigger sacrifice than that.

Take, for instance, the rash of teen suicides due to AI chatbots programmed to amplify users’ depressive feelings. There are a number of ongoing lawsuits, such as this one: Google and Character.AI to Settle Lawsuit Over Teenager’s Death (NYT, Jan 7, 2026). As the article puts it:

Sewell, 14, of Orlando, killed himself in February 2024 after texting and conversing with one of Character.AI’s chatbots. In his last conversation with the chatbot, it said to the teenager to “please come home to me as soon as possible.”

The suicide-encouraging chatbot platform was heavily supported by Google. While it initially tried to distance itself from Character.AI, Google had in fact invested in the company and in 2024 agreed to pay it $3 billion to license its AI characters.

Not to say that Google has anything against kids. In the same way that Google spies on you as you use its platforms and devices, it’s nothing personal. Google has just found that platforming suicide-friendly chatbots, like its main surveillance business, is very, very profitable. Stated in language that a Google or Facebook exec would understand, it’s the upside of child sacrifice.

And death doesn’t always have to be the result. Merely weakening kids can make money, too. Just look at Big Tech’s gigantic investment in infiltrating the educational system. Kids walk into school, fully surveilled and mesmerized by Big Tech apps with endless video feeds designed to create addiction (for the kids) and growth (for the companies). Even if the school collects the devices, many kids will be back on them – for hours a day, according to Pew Research – when the school day ends.

During the school day itself, even without phones present, many school systems force the students onto Google Chromebooks and platforms like G Suite for Education, where the students’ data is harvested for the benefit of Big Tech. As the EFF points out:

technology providers are spying on students — and school districts, which often provide inadequate privacy policies or no privacy policy at all, are unwittingly helping them do it.

The students themselves are surrounded by screens in the classroom – even if only school-issued laptops – that are often used for purposes other than education. As Jean Twenge writes (Nov 16, 2025):

In a survey of American teenagers by the nonprofit Common Sense Media, one-fourth admitted they had seen pornographic content during the school day. Almost half of that group saw it on a school-issued device.

. . . One study of Michigan State college students — nearly all legal adults presumably more capable of focusing their attention than young teens — found that they spent nearly 40 percent of class time scrolling social media, checking email or watching videos on their laptops — anything but their classwork.

Here we see an entire generation of students dropped onto the altar to Big Tech for monetization by surveillance and distraction. It’s what Silicon Valley excels at: sacrifice at scale.

And then we get to AI, the false idol of the moment, the spurious savior of monopolies seeking endless growth. Big Tech’s goal here is to demolish the relationship between child and student, and between child and family, in order to cement a new relationship between child and Big Tech, through the use of AI.

The early results are the least surprising thing you’ve read all year. “Schools’ Embrace of AI Connected to Increased Risks to Students,” writes this report by the Center for Democracy and Technology (October 2025). Students say that they feel “less connected to their teacher,” that they’re “exposed to extreme/radical views,” and that they’re worried about being “treated unfairly” while forced to use AI in schools. For their part, teachers report that students are distracted – not least by the deepfake porn images of classmates that commonly circulate – and that the AI doesn’t work as promised.

Yet the system is working as designed. In its bid for growth at any cost, Big Tech has created or invested in AI tools that reduce critical thinking, encourage dependence on the AI, and – perhaps most importantly for the companies – habituate kids to using the tech platforms any time they need to read, write, or think.

But wait, some will say, this isn’t the intent. The tech industry wants to make things better – to teach kids better – to make society better. In response I’ll cite a quote by Stafford Beer:

The purpose of a system is what it does.

What is the purpose of our tech buildout, our multi-trillion-dollar investment in phones and social media and data centers and all the connective software and hardware and infrastructure to knit together this entire internet-enmeshed economy? Sure, we were promised that it would improve the lives of kids in so many different ways. But what is the system actually doing? The phones are addictive, the platforms spy on them, the bots encourage suicide, the image generators output porn, and the algorithms amplify it all. That’s what the system does. And it makes perfect sense for the Big Tech companies. Just look at their stock prices over the past few years. The growth came in large part from weakening, harming, traumatizing, or encouraging the death of kids at scale.

And this leaves one principality disappointed. Moloch, that stone idol of sacrifice, knows that he missed out. A kid here or there in planting season, all he got back in those days, is really nothing. He could only have dreamed of the global scale of destruction brought about by our corporate platforms today. But children offered up to Big Tech – for the exploitation of minds, bodies, and souls – by the million? Moloch weeps.

P.S. Please support my work by joining Creative Good. We’re building a community of people who want to resist Big Tech’s predations – and find alternatives, too, so that we can survive the tech age.

You’re on a free membership, and I want columns like this to be widely available. But only 2% of my readers subscribe. So I’d like to ask – if you find this newsletter helpful, and if you have the means – please chip in.

Thanks,

-mark

Mark Hurst, founder, Creative Good ← please join as a member
Email: mark@creativegood.com
Podcast/radio show: techtonic.fm
Follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon