Meta just announced it will start alerting parents when their teenagers ask Instagram’s artificial intelligence chatbot about suicide or self-harm. It’s a good and overdue step. It is, whether Meta intends it this way or not, also an admission of everything that Sammy’s Law has been arguing for two years: parents cannot protect their children on these platforms unless they can see what’s happening on them in real time before it’s too late.
I know exactly how true that is, because I am one of the parents who found out too late.
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My son Sammy was 16. He was funny, curious, an A student. My wife and I did what parents are supposed to do: we knew his friends, we knew where he was, we kept him away from the people and places we thought were dangerous. What we didn’t know, what we couldn’t have known, was that a drug dealer had found him on Snapchat. On Feb. 7, 2021, that dealer delivered what turned out to be a counterfeit drug, laced with fentanyl, to our house, like a pizza. Sammy didn’t know what he was taking. He died in his bedroom while we slept down the hall.
There was no alert. No warning. No system was built to catch what was happening in plain sight on a platform into which we had no visibility at all. That’s the gap Sammy’s Law, now moving through Congress as S.4159 and H.R.2657, is designed to close. It doesn’t ask platforms to police speech or make editorial judgments about content. It simply requires large social media and gaming platforms to open real-time APIs so that parents can choose an independent, Federal Trade Commission-registered, third-party safety provider to watch for the signs, such as drug contact, exploitation, self-harm, and four others. Then it alerts them when something is wrong.
Meta’s new feature is a narrower version of that same idea, built and controlled entirely in-house. And that’s exactly the problem with leaving this to individual companies rather than an open, competitive safety software industry. Meta chose to act on suicide and self-harm because those categories have drawn the most lawsuits and headlines. It has not chosen to build equivalent alerts for drug solicitation, sextortion, or trafficking, the categories that took my son, and that took James Woods, a 17-year-old from Ohio who was blackmailed to death over a photo. A company that builds its own safety tools also gets to decide, unilaterally, which dangers are worth flagging, which ones aren’t, and whether to narrow the feature next year quietly when the news cycle moves on.
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Third-party safety software doesn’t have that conflict of interest. Companies, including Bark, Bright Canary, and Aura, already do this work well for the platforms that let them in. Their whole business depends on catching every category of harm, not just the ones that generate press releases. Sammy’s Law would simply require every major platform to give these independent providers the same real-time access that platforms already give themselves, nothing more invasive, and with strict data-minimization rules built into the bill. Right now, the main platforms used by children do not allow this vital technology the access required to save lives.
Meta’s announcement should be read as validation, not a substitute. It proves that real-time monitoring of at-risk teenagers is technically possible, that it can be built responsibly, and that companies will only build it for the narrow slice of harm that’s politically convenient unless Congress requires the rest. My son didn’t die from a risk Meta has decided to cover. He died from one that, five years later, still isn’t covered by any platform’s voluntary safety feature. Congress has a bipartisan bill sitting in front of it, with sponsors and co-sponsors from both parties. Meta just showed that the technology works. What’s missing is the will to make every platform with children integrate this lifesaving technology.
Samuel P. Chapman is CEO of Parent Collective, a California nonprofit organization working to prevent online harms to children. He lives in Redondo Beach, California.
