The CEOs from five of the largest tech companies are set to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday to answer questions about how their addictive products have failed to keep minors safe. During that hearing, close attention will be paid to the interactions between senators and the CEOs — the sound bites, which cable news will air on repeat, and the tongue-lashing, the unexpected and fiery moments.
But as moms who have lost children to the same online harms that these CEOs failed to prevent, we’ll be watching for something different: What will Congress do when the CEOs have boarded their private planes home? Is this finally the time that Congress takes action to protect families like ours?
As parents, we did everything we could to teach our kids how to use social media responsibly and monitor their usage, but it still wasn’t enough. Our sons, Carson and David, suffered from relentless cyberbullying that resulted in them taking their own lives. As we navigated our own grief and struggled to understand the pain that overwhelmed our sons, we met each other — and even more “survivor parents” who have experienced similar loss.
Time and again, we ask ourselves: When will enough be enough? We can’t do this alone. We need Congress to act and pass responsible safeguards such as the Kids Online Safety Act, which would require tech companies to keep our kids safe from addictive and manipulative content.
Every day, we live with the reality that our sons might still be alive today if the tech companies had done more to protect underage users from harmful content, anonymous bullying and manipulative algorithms. They failed to take action even when confronted with evidence that the platforms they designed and marketed to minors were fueling a national mental and physical health epidemic, as documented extensively by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and whistleblowers such as Frances Haugen and Arturo Béjar. But for far too long, the companies behind these popular social media apps have escaped accountability. While we were mourning the loss of a child, Big Tech executives were focused on one thing and one thing only: maximizing profit by keeping their users engaged.
According to a new study by researchers at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X and YouTube collectively made $11 billion in 2022 from ads directed at users under the age of 18. Of that, $2.1 billion came from users who were 12 and younger. In order to comply with federal children’s privacy protections, nearly all of the platforms have banned users under the age of 13. But they know millions of children are still active on their sites. And rather than taking action to protect these users or making their platforms safe for them, they have chosen to feign ignorance while raking in the profits.
These massive profits have enabled the platforms to turbocharge addictive features that wreak havoc on impressionable brains while they leverage their deep pockets to employ armies of lobbyists, squash any effort to set higher standards and escape accountability.
Preemptive changes, such as those recently announced by Meta aimed at limiting what young users are exposed to on the apps, amount to little more than temporary lip service with a crucial congressional hearing on the horizon. The platforms have a history of marginalizing the internal teams dedicated to this valuable work and failing to live up to the promises in their news releases.
When Haugen appeared before the Senate in 2021, she detailed internal documents from Meta revealing that Instagram was creating a “perfect storm” of mental and physical health crisis among teenage girls. Early last year, the CDC found that teenagers in the U.S. are experiencing never-before-seen levels of hopelessness and suicidal thoughts, fueled by social media. And later in the year, Béjar appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee with evidence that Meta executives were purposely ignoring warnings and cooking the books to dramatically downplay the prevalence of sexual predation, bullying, exposure to hate speech and eating disorder or self-harm content directed to minors.
Time and time again, Congress and the American people have been confronted with irrefutable evidence that the tech companies cannot be trusted to act in the interests of our children and our families and must be held accountable. But each time, the lobbying forces of Big Tech have mobilized to halt any progress. This cannot be allowed to happen again.
Existing legislation such as the Kids Online Safety Act already has strong bipartisan support from both sides of the aisle and has been endorsed by nearly half of sitting senators. The proposal would mandate the strongest safety settings possible by default and give kids tools to disable addictive product features. The bill also gives policymakers and the American public more visibility into how these platforms operate.
In an age of deep polarization, it’s rare to see broad bipartisan support for any proposal — but this is one area where Republicans and Democrats agree. And so do Americans across the political spectrum; according to a poll by Issue One’s Council for Responsible Social Media, 87% of the electorate believes that it’s time for the president and Congress to take action to combat the harms being caused by social media platforms.
It isn’t enough to publicly shame these companies for failing to protect children online. For the families like ours that are currently struggling with social media harms or have already lost children, another hearing won’t cut it. We demand action.
Kristin Bride is a member of the Council for Responsible Social Media for Issue One, a crosspartisan political reform group. Maurine Molak is the co-founder of David’s Legacy Foundation, a nonprofit focused on combating cyberbullying.
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