A Salt Lake City man recently admitted to using Snapchat to lure three girls, ages 12 to 14, to a nearby store. He then took them to a park, where he sexually assaulted them.

Snapchat’s signature feature — videos that vanish after viewing — lets predators like him operate in the open, but with a dangerous cloak of invisibility.

Those vanishing videos, by the way, aren’t a bug in the Snapchat app. It is a design choice.

In the movie “Gladiator,” the Roman General Maximus delivers the crowd a violent spectacle of blood and carnage, and then turns to them and shouts that famous piercing question: “Are you not entertained?” That arena existed to capture attention — at any cost. And for that brief moment, the Roman crowd had to stop and reckon with what their appetite had made possible.

Two thousand years later, we have built new arenas. They fit in our children’s pockets.

Social media platforms like Snapchat, AI companions and online gambling apps are not just mindless, harmless tools. They are precision instruments, engineered with extraordinary sophistication, to identify the exact psychological levers that make young people most vulnerable. And once they have identified those levers, they pull them. For profit.

The business model is simple: Grab attention, harvest data and monetize it.

Our children are both their most active audiences and their most lucrative long-term customers. Children, or as they could be called in this context, victims.

As Utah’s attorney general and a father of four, these dangers are not simply an abstraction. I’ve seen the evidence. I’ve read the internal documents. And I can tell you that what these companies know about the harm they cause — and their willingness to continue anyway — should keep every parent in America awake at night.

Research confirms it. Kids who use social media heavily are twice as likely to show signs of clinical depression as those who don’t.

Fortunately, Utah has responded.

We recently sued Snap for designing a platform that predators and drug dealers use with impunity, and then choosing to look away when these same predators used their platform to extort our children and sell them drugs. We’ve taken action against Meta and TikTok for engineering products that bombard children with notifications at all hours of the day, deploying addictive features deliberately designed to keep young eyes glued to the screen.

In 2023, one AI bot embedded in Snapchat instructed an account with a listed age of 13 years old how to have sex with an adult. It also advised another account with a listed age of 15-years-old how to hide drugs and alcohol from parents.

These cases are not outliers. They are simply the foreseeable and documented consequences of systems optimized to promote engagement above all else — including our kids.

This threat has now expanded beyond social media. Sycophantic AI chatbots now simulate intimacy, offering children the illusion of a trusted confidant, while optimizing every interaction to keep them online longer. There have been numerous documented cases where those interactions have turned dangerous and deadly. We have no adequate legal framework to address this — and the companies building these tools have shown no urgency to develop one either.

Online gambling is just the newest front, and one of the most deceptively packaged. Though gambling is illegal in Utah, betting platforms are just a tap away on a teenager’s phone — and they look like every other app they already use. Dressing gambling up as merely a “prediction market” or calling it “investing” doesn’t reduce the harm. The disguise just buys the industry time to hook as many teenagers as possible.

All of these online threats appear to have the same underlying goal: Identify what makes a child vulnerable, automate the exploitation and scale it to every device on earth.

Utah refuses to be a testing ground for that depraved economy. We will keep filing cutting-edge lawsuits, pushing legislation and demanding accountability from companies that have grown wealthy by treating childhood as just another source of revenue.

The arenas have changed, but the exploitation hasn’t. Two thousand years later, Maximus’s question still hangs uncomfortably in the air — and unlike the Roman crowd, we are not obligated to keep watching. But we are obligated to act.

Derek Brown is the Utah attorney general. He brings decades of legal and political experience to his role, shaped by his service as legal counsel to two U.S. senators and as a state lawmaker.

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