by Sen. Marsha Blackburn
Since 1998 — the last year Congress passed a major law to reform the tech industry and protect children in the virtual space — a lot has changed.
In the last 26 years, more than 100 million Americans were born during the internet’s profound transformation from dial-up to near constant connectivity, especially with the emergence of the biggest social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and more.
In Tennessee and across the country, young people have grown up alongside this transformation. But instead of improving their lives, in many ways it has led to unthinkable harms.
As minors have become glued to social media with addictive algorithms and product features — with teenagers spending an average 8.5 hours a day on their screens — we’ve seen rising mental health issues, eating disorders, online sexual abuse and human trafficking, drug overdoses, and suicides.
At the same time, we’ve seen more and more evidence, including from industry whistleblowers, that Big Tech companies knew about the harms they were causing but did nothing to stop them.
The reason is simple: For social media platforms, children are the product and addiction is the business model. In 2022 alone, social media platforms generated almost $11 billion in advertising revenue from children. In fact, in internal communications, Facebook placed the “lifetime value” of a 13-year-old user at $270.
By treating our children as revenue sources, Big Tech has repeatedly put profit over their safety.
Thankfully, Congress is taking a big step to protect children from Big Tech’s abuses with the Senate’s passage last week of the bipartisan Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA).
Over the last three years, Senator Chuck Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and I crafted KOSA by working with a broad coalition of stakeholders, including parents, child safety advocates, tech experts, faith leaders, pediatricians, and child psychologists, to ensure that social media platforms are safe for children by default.
Among its important provisions, KOSA will create new tools for parents to identify harmful behavior and report abuse directly to social media sites, provide new controls for families to support their children, including to opt out of algorithmic recommendations, and require mandatory audits to ensure that platforms are mitigating harms to children.
Perhaps most importantly, KOSA will create a duty of care for online platforms to prevent specific dangers to minors, including the promotion of suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, and sexual exploitation.
Simply put, KOSA will hold Big Tech accountable and put power back into the hands of parents and their children. It is no surprise, then, that major conservative organizations — including the Heritage Foundation, America First Policy Institute, American Principles Project, and many more — support this pro-family legislation.
In many ways, KOSA’s Senate passage would have been impossible without the hundreds of brave parents and young people who came to Washington over and over again, shared their heartbreaking experiences with social media harms, and never gave up on demanding change. Their powerful testimonies were a big reason why KOSA has strong bipartisan support, with 91 senators from across the political spectrum voting to pass it.
With its passage in the Senate, KOSA now heads to the U.S. House of Representatives, where the legislation has broad support. In the weeks ahead, I look forward to working with our House colleagues to ensure that we can send KOSA to the President’s desk as quickly as possible.
As kids head back to school, families should have every tool they need to protect their children on social media. The Kids Online Safety Act will ensure that happens.
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Marsha Blackburn is a mother of two and a grandmother to four, and represents Tennessee in the U.S. Senate.
