Empower Parents to Protect Their Kids from Social-Media Harms

I n 1998, connecting to the Internet from home meant tying up the phone line and slowly loading low-resolution images. Since then, getting online has become as easy as pulling out a phone to watch livestreamed videos in high definition. But the main law meant to protect children online, the Children Online Privacy and Protection Act (COPPA), hasn’t been updated since it was passed in 1998. A law designed before even MySpace came on the scene is simply inadequate for the TikTok era.

According to the Pew Research Center, 60 percent of parents say they are concerned about their preteens coming across age-inappropriate material online, and many say they feel ill-equipped to know how to monitor what their children do online. A new bipartisan piece of legislation introduced last week could offer parents important new tools.

The Kids Online Safety Act would take steps toward better protecting their children on social-media platforms and raising the bar on how social-media companies treat children under the age of 16 who are on their platforms.

Ideally, as one of us has written, it would be best to give COPPA, the original law, a full overhaul, perhaps including raising the age to 18 to effectively keep minors off these platforms entirely. But in the interim, the bill introduced by Senators Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) is an important recognition that policy-makers need not sit on their hands in the face of an ever-expanding social-media environment aimed at young people, and the harms associated with it.

And there is a pressing need to address these harms. By now, the statistics are fairly well-known. Between 2011 and 2018, the rates of depression, self-harm, suicides, and suicide attempts exploded among American teens. The rates of teen depression increased by more than 60 percent, with larger increases among young girls. Between 2009 and 2015, emergency-room admissions for self-harm among 10- to 14-year-old girls tripled, and suicides substantially increased. As NYU professor Jonathan Haidt and others have argued, there seems to be no other reasonable explanation for the massive, sudden, and multinational deterioration of teen mental health during the period right after social media began.

Social media’s negative impact on kids is twofold. First, many sites do only the absolute minimum to police content that is dangerous and harmful to minors. Secondly, the nature of the platforms themselves is designed to be addictive and create social dynamics that cause negative effects on children’s and teens’ mental health and development, particularly teenage girls. This bill targets both sides of these harms.

The most important feature of the bill is the requirement that platforms set the default safeguards to the strongest option available and enable parental controls by default for any user it knows or reasonably believes to be a minor. Social-media companies would have to provide minors (or parents acting on behalf of minors) with accessible safeguards, including disabling auto-playing videos, notifications, or rewards for time spent on the site, as well as opting out of algorithmic recommendation systems and limiting time spent on the platform. The bill would require companies to provide parents similar controls for supervising a minor’s use of the platform.

Providing these tools as the default empowers parents to protect their children. The bill would also mandate that platforms provide notice of how to access the parental safeguards, and to obtain acknowledgement from a minor or a parent of the receipt of that notice prior to initial use of the platform. While the devil will be in the details in terms of how this provision gets implemented, this framework should be nonnegotiable in future policy discussions.

Secondly, the bill would help address the harmful content that currently proliferates on major sites such as YouTube and Facebook by creating a duty of care for platforms to prevent and mitigate specific harms to minors.

It specifically delineates a list of harms that platforms would be obligated to mitigate. The list would include material related to self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, sexual exploitation, sex trafficking, and sexual abuse of minors, as well as products that are illegal for minors, such as drugs, tobacco, gambling, and alcohol. Requiring social-media companies to aggressively police their platforms to prohibit these harms is a laudable move.

One harm that is missing from this otherwise-comprehensive list, however, is pornography and adult content. Like content related to eating disorders, suggestive images and lewd text need not be illegal for parents to wish their children to be free of being assaulted by them. For example, TikTok has been shown to send teens down rabbit holes of sexually illicit content and promote videos that link to the adult-content-for-hire site OnlyFans.

Other strengths of the Blackburn–Blumenthal bill include requiring platforms to perform an annual independent audit assessing risks to minors, and tasking the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) with establishing guidelines for platforms seeking to conduct market research on minors (including a standard informed-consent form for minors and their parents).

Crucially, it would direct several government agencies to study the most technologically feasible options for age verification at the device or operating-system level. Age verification will be an important technological component to effectively enforcing this Blackburn–Blumenthal legislation and could aid efforts to impose age-based restrictions in order to access any pornographic website down the road.

Lastly, the bill empowers both the FTC and state attorneys general to bring actions to enforce platforms’ compliance. Because states often have the ability to work more nimbly than the FTC, that enforcement mechanism could make the bill more effective.

To push the bill to the next level, Congress could require platforms to give parents the option of administrator-level access to their children’s accounts. Giving parents the screen-time controls and other tools mentioned above is important and welcome. But user-generated content, by its very nature, requires more hands-on monitoring than the old days of ratings systems or monitoring school-library collections. Parents may well appreciate a better ability to see what their children are seeing, and who they are communicating with.

Senate hearings and investigative reporting have provided ample evidence that social-media companies should no longer enjoy the benefit of the doubt when it comes to protecting children, if they ever could. Allowing social-media companies to continue to “self-regulate” is the equivalent of letting them run a society-wide experiment on an entire generation of teens and children in our country.

The Kids Online Safety Act would be an important step in updating the way we treat kids online and help ensure that social-media companies are accountable for the impact their products can have on kids and teens. If Congress wants to put parents first, rather than Big Tech, it should consider swiftly passing this legislation and give families more power to protect their children online.

Clare Morell is a policy analyst at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where she works on the Big Tech Project. She worked in the White House Counsel’s Office and the Justice Department during the Trump administration.

Patrick T. Brown (@PTBwrites) is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a former senior policy adviser to Congress’s Joint Economic Committee.