In June, the Wall Street Journal published a sobering analysis of content protections for teens on social media. Studies found that Instagram was feeding adult content to teens’ accounts within minutes of their creation. After less than 20 minutes of clicking on adult-themed Instagram Reels, the accounts’ feeds were “dominated” by explicit content.
Adult content is just one of many concerns parents raise about social media. Experts link teen social media use to mental health issues, and social media platforms can be abused by sexual predators seeking access to children. These are the reasons why prominent Silicon Valley executives secretly set technological limits for their own children, even as they publicly promote the same technology.
Despite public research on the impact of social media on children and private concerns from technology experts, the last time the federal government passed legislation to protect children online was in 1998 – six years before Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook and nearly a decade before the iPhone was released. But this week, 26 years later, the U.S. Senate took a historic, bipartisan step to protect children online.
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On Tuesday, I joined the vast majority of my Senate colleagues in voting for the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). These two bills would bring online protections for children from the 1990s into the 2020s.
KOSA would create safeguards for youth social media use. It would require platforms to enable the strictest privacy settings for children by default and provide more privacy options for minors. Crucially, it would give parents new controls to protect their children and identify harmful behavior. The bill would prevent the promotion of dangers such as suicide and substance abuse to minors and require independent research into how social media affects the well-being of teens and children.
The KOSA Act, which I co-sponsored, also contains my legislative intent to prohibit the use of misleading user interfaces on the Internet – so-called “dark patterns” – that trick young users into agreeing to reveal personal information.
COPPA, on the other hand, would strengthen online privacy protections, building on the first law of its kind in 1998. That law would prohibit online services or applications from collecting personal information from users ages 13 to 16 without their consent and would prohibit customized, targeted advertising to children and teens. It would close loopholes, create new requirements for the deletion of personal information from minors, and prohibit the excessive collection of data from children and teens.
These bills are common sense, bipartisan reforms that have America’s children in mind. It’s not often that the Republican and Democratic majority in the Senate enthusiastically agree on a package of legislation. But Democratic and Republican lawmakers agree: It’s been decades since we started protecting our children online. I’m confident the House will agree, and we can soon get this package into law – for the benefit of American families, American children, and America’s future.
Thank you for participating in the democratic process. I look forward to seeing you again next week.
