Now that the 119th Congress has convened, there’s little question that the Big Tech lobbying machine will be back in full force to thwart renewed efforts to pass critical legislation designed to protect minors from harmful content and activity on social media. The widely supported, bipartisan Kids Online Safety Act nearly made it to the finish line again in December 2024. However, Big Tech quashed its passage with an aggressively funded disinformation campaign to protect its financial interests.
Despite overwhelming bipartisan Senate support and the advocacy of hundreds of nongovernmental organizations, survivor groups, and even tech billionaire and X owner Elon Musk urging its passage, House leadership failed to include the KOSA in its year-end spending legislation. How did this happen?
Co-authored by Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), the bill, in short, would restrict targeted advertising to children, disable addictive features, provide the option to opt out of algorithmic recommendations, and enforce the highest privacy settings for accounts used by minors.
Big Tech’s financial motivation for opposing this child online safety legislation is clear. The old saying “follow the money” screams the sad reality that multibillion-dollar tech companies have a financial interest in peddling disturbing exploitative content and intentionally creating algorithms to hook children.
A 2022 Harvard study found that six major social media platforms made $11 billion from U.S. users under 18. An internal email revealed Meta assigns a lifetime value of $270 per 13-year-old user. Further, Big Tech has spent approximately $90 million over three years opposing the KOSA’s passage.
The human cost of delay is severe. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called social media’s impact on children’s mental health “the defining public health challenge of our times” and “a contributing factor in the mental health crisis among young people.” Recent statistics show that 95% of children 13-17 use social media and over two-thirds of children 11-17 report difficulty stopping technology use.
Children are at risk of exposure to harmful and dangerous online content and material including suicide and self-harm content, hardcore pornography, and other forms of exploitation such as sextortion. While parents struggle to protect their children, social media companies prioritize profits through aggressive lobbying against child protection legislation.
Real tragedies highlight the stakes. In a final December push for a House vote on the KOSA, Blackburn held a “roundtable coffee” on Capitol Hill highlighting stories from parents whose children died all too young because of the harms suffered from online exploitation. Mason Bogard, 15, died from a “choking challenge” found on social media in 2019. Gavin Guffey, 17, died by suicide in 2022 after falling victim to sextortion.
Sadly, the heart-wrenching pleas of these families, and countless others, have largely gone ignored by Big Tech in spite of multiple Senate hearings in which both Democratic and Republican senators grilled Big Tech CEOs over their failed policies and lame attempts to put children’s safety first. Quite simply, mental health problems resulting from the trauma and addiction associated with social media will continue to destroy the lives of children unless our elected officials join us in holding these multibillion-dollar Big Tech giants accountable.
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Enough Is Enough joins affected families, nonprofit organizations, tech accountability groups, pediatricians, parents, and the Senate in urging immediate House passage of the KOSA. Child online safety transcends partisan divisions, with widespread support at federal and state levels. Each day without the passage of legislation such as the KOSA is a day children continue to suffer from the harms of online exploitation.
EIE’s 2024 Children’s Internet Safety Presidential Pledge, backed by over 60 organizations and survivor leaders, seeks commitment from President-elect Donald Trump to prioritize preventing online child exploitation and push for policies that put child online safety first. This is a unifying issue in which we must check our differences at the door for the sake of the innocence, safety, and dignity of children, America’s future, and hope.
Donna Rice Hughes is the CEO of Enough Is Enough. She is an author, speaker, media commentator, and podcast host of Internet Safety with Donna Rice Hughes.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
