Sens. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut announced a bill Wednesday seeking to protect children from harmful content on Big Tech platforms.
The bipartisan bill plans to prevent harm to minors, outlining the risks of several “physical, emotional, developmental, or material harms” posed by social media companies, including “promotion of self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse,” “addiction-like behaviors,” “physical harm, online bullying, and harassment,” “sexual exploitation, including enticement, grooming, sex trafficking, and sexual abuse of minors and trafficking of online child sexual abuse material,” “deceptive marketing practices,” and promotion of illegal “products or services.”
“The legislation requires social media platforms to put the interests of children first, providing an environment that is safe by default and help prevent these destructive impacts,” reads a press release announcing the bill.
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“The legislation also requires independent audits and supports public scrutiny from experts and academic researchers to ensure that parents and policymakers know whether social media platforms are taking meaningful steps to address risks to kids.”
In particular, the bill introduces measures for protecting children’s data online. Big Tech platforms will be required to provide children and their guardians “with readily-accessible and easy-to-use safe guards to control their experience and personal data” under the proposed legislation.
“The Kids Online Safety Act would finally give kids and their parents the tools and safeguards they need to protect against toxic content — and hold Big Tech accountable for deeply dangerous algorithms,” Blumenthal said.
“In hearings over the last year, Senator Blumenthal and I have heard countless stories of physical and emotional damage affecting young users, and Big Tech’s unwillingness to change,” Blackburn added.
“The Kids Online Safety Act will address those harms by setting necessary safety guide rails for online platforms to follow that will require transparency and give parents more peace of mind,” she said, adding that protecting minors is “critically important.”
In August, the senators called on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to release internal data from the company regarding the platform’s effects on the mental health of minors. Facebook responded to the senators with a lengthy letter absent of any studies conducted by the company itself.
Zuckerberg’s company told the bipartisan team that its research is “kept confidential to promote frank and open dialogue and brainstorming internally.”
When questioned in 2021 about social media’s effect on children’s mental health, Zuckerberg said, “The research that we’ve seen is that using social apps to connect with other people can have positive mental-health benefits.”
With a similar goal, Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Cynthia Lummis introduced a bill last week to explore social media addiction. According to a press release, the bill will “study the addictive qualities of social media and give the Federal Trade Commission oversight authority on how social media companies design their platforms.”
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“By empowering the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to study the addictiveness of social media platforms, we’ll begin to fully understand the impact the designs of these platforms and their algorithms have on our society,” Lummis said of the bill, dubbed the NUDGE Act.
