An odd coalition has formed on questions of children’s online safety. This coalition fuses conservatives to the most technocratic of progressives — the kind of statists with whom conservatives would never ordinarily ally. The soldering iron is an entirely good-faith concern for youth online.

Progressives, all too typically, have proffered policies antithetical to free markets and innovation, free speech, privacy and cybersecurity, parental rights, and good governance. Oddly, in this case conservative support has coalesced around many such proposals. Prudential skepticism and knowledge problems have been thrown aside.

Conservatives who cling to progressives to advance the size and scope of government in the digital world should consider whether they have miscalculated.

Consider the recent approbation enjoyed by America’s Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, whom many concerned conservatives praised after he advocated a social media “warning label.” Murthy, however, found himself a defendant — and later a titular party — in a suit challenging the Biden administration’s blitzkrieg against disfavored speech online.

Earlier this year, he declared gun violence a public health crisis. Conservatives who find themselves warming to progressives’ regulation-happy, nanny-statist posture towards digital regulation might reflect on whether they have erred in the company they keep.

Another such new-found and disreputable ally is the taxpayer-funded World Health Organization (WHO). WHO’s Natasha Azzopardi Muscat says tobacco regulation ought to serve as a model for kids’ online safety regulation, as reported by Politico.

The statement requires the reader to suspend not just elementary critical thinking but his recollection of the long train of abuses, fecklessness, and blundering that compose WHO’s history on tobacco policy. WHO’s battle against Big Tobacco has rampaged against tobacco harm reduction products — the very products that have proven the best tools of those attempting to quit cigarettes.

Similarly myopic campaigns against social media and devices will yield similarly disastrous results.

Under cover of metaphor, too many tech-skeptical commentators attempt to smuggle the insinuation that social-media use ravages children’s mental health — an unproven conclusion about which debate rages. Like Muscat, they equate device use — usually social media — to tobacco use or say the former provokes literally the same psychological reaction as drugs. Some have labeled certain social media “digital fentanyl.”

This is gross hyperbole, to say the least.

A good parent would not allow her child to use fentanyl to keep quiet on an airplane. Nor would a good parent store fentanyl at home, for personal recreational use, while withholding it from her child (but only until a certain age). Severing oneself from social media requires far less than breaking a hard-drug or nicotine addiction.

A recent WHO survey reports, “Both social media and digital gaming can be beneficial for young people, but a growing number of adolescents seem to use these technologies in a problematic way.” Replace “social media and digital gaming” with “tobacco” and “fentanyl”, review the sentence, and find whether the analogy to addictive drugs survives scrutiny.

But even were devices akin to tobacco, as Muscat suggests, WHO policy prescriptions ought to serve as a warning, not a blueprint.

The organization has subordinated harm reduction to ideology. It has fibbed, propagandized, and distorted and withheld data. It has contorted language to arrogate to itself new powers, invading national sovereignty. American conservatives should vet their chosen allies more carefully. Not long ago, the WHO was called a compromised anti-nation organization, under the corrupt influence of nefarious foreign interests.

WHO contemns individual freedom and consumer choice. It remains unclear why anyone would think it might respect family autonomy and parental rights. The petty bureaucratic mini-minds who seek global regulatory dominion — who seek the widest powers, over the broadest jurisdiction possible, to manipulate the smallest minutiae — have earned a profoundly justified antipathy from many, especially American conservatives.

WHO’s analysis and recommendations deserve neither deference nor charity. Conservatives should not allow their well-intentioned concern for children online to overwhelm their better judgment.

David B. McGarry is a policy analyst at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.