If you’re a parent, you know that social media can cause problems for your children. What you may not know is just how serious the problem is.
Social media apps aren’t innocent places for kids to share funny cat videos with their friends. They’re sophisticated data-collecting and marketing platforms that use personalized algorithms to addict users — including your children.
Using your children’s personal data, these apps have the ability to feed kids a relentless and personalized stream of toxic media, including sexually explicit material and content that can push children and teenagers, especially young girls, toward anorexia and suicide. And just this week, the Surgeon General released an advisory stating that social media can “have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.”
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We believe that parents should have the power to fight back and protect their kids online, just as they do in the real world. That’s why we introduced the bipartisan Protecting Kids on Social Media Act, which requires parental consent for teenagers under 18 to use social media and bans social media outright for children under 13.
This bill would also prevent social-media companies from using personalized algorithms to promote content to underage users, algorithms that send them down “rabbit holes” of harmful content.
Of course, Big Tech doesn’t like our bill. In fact, they’re working overtime to kill it with an allied assault by lobbyists and think tanks on their payroll.
This bill would also prevent social-media companies from using personalized algorithms to promote content to underage users, algorithms that send them down “rabbit holes” of harmful content.
Parents are standing up for their children like never before, in front of school boards and on sports fields, and the same should be true for the internet. What our children are seeing and learning online can be just as damaging — if not more so — as some of what they’re being taught in the classroom.
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Reasserting parental control over what is taught in schools will come as little consolation if we can’t solve the social media problem too.
