For years now, children across our country have been systematically duped by predators into exposing themselves sexually online. The next step is often blackmail. This is what drove 16-year-old Carter Bremseth to take his life one night in 2021, after volunteering as an altar server at his church.
His mother Jaime—a licensed mental health counselor—went searching for answers, when she discovered the horrible truth. Her kind and caring son had become a victim of sextortion.
Jaime had been proactive in protecting her son online, even educating him about the threat of online predators. Nevertheless, within six months of creating a Snapchat account, he was victimized to death.
Stories like Carter’s should be unthinkable. Instead, they are becoming routine.
Given the easy access to children that social media and smartphones provide, there appears to be no way to put a stop to it. Unless, that is, tech companies are held accountable, and parents are better empowered to protect their kids online.
Currently, no parental involvement is required whatsoever for a child to download any app or create a social media account. This is not right.
Minors are legally treated as digital adults at age 13, when in the real world adulthood is 18. To make matters worse, digital adulthood is never enforced. It’s no wonder then that, according to one study, a full quarter of boys 9 to 12 have used an online dating app.
Where legislators and litigants have tried to hold Big Tech companies accountable for such egregious violations of norms, courts have protected them, placing economic concerns and the free speech rights of corporations above child welfare.
The dark secret is that the systematic grooming and exploiting of America’s children is made possible because media companies have been protected from legal liability by Congress and the courts since the 1990s (when smartphones and social media didn’t even exist). Through Section 230 immunity—which was meant to protect online platforms from any liability for harms caused by third-party content they host—Big Tech has been shielded from practically any liability whatsoever, even for their own role and product design in facilitating harms to minors online.
These sweeping protections have allowed digital technology to be weaponized against America’s kids, turning the online world into a wasteland of revenge porn via deepfakes and algorithms promoting everything from anorexia to suicide to beheading videos.
This is an environment ripe for predators, where adult strangers can easily connect with minors en masse. The smartphone-app ecosystem has created what Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, recently called a “child-to-stranger pipeline.”
But a movement of parents, advocates, and legislators has arisen in recent years to stop it. More than two dozen states have now passed laws requiring age verification to access pornographic content, and as many as ten states have enacted legislation age gating social media platforms and requiring parental consent before minors can open an account.
A new piece of federal legislation, introduced by Lee and Rep. John James, R-Mich., addresses a critical aspect of the problem. The App Store Accountability Act puts parents in control of what apps their child downloads and uses. The bill requires app stores to provide age ratings and content descriptions that accurately reflect the risks that an app poses for kids and requires app stores to perform age verification and acquire parental permission before a child downloads or purchases any app.
The crux of the bill is based on the common and long-standing practices of contract law. In the real world, kids are not allowed to enter into complex contracts without parental consent, nor can they purchase age-restricted products without parental involvement. In the app stores, however, children are free to accept on their own an app’s labyrinthine Terms of Service. This occurs potentially millions of times an hour.
There are myriad laws that hold brick-and-mortar establishments accountable when they circumvent these standards. The App Store Accountability Act simply applies these same common-sense laws to the digital world.
Libertarian critics worry that the Act is not privacy preserving and would require app stores and apps to widely share sensitive information about child users. But the bill does nothing of the sort. App stores already undergo informal forms of age verification during startup and by collecting credit card information for purchases.
Moreover, as Google and Apple have recently revealed, app stores already have the capability to reliably estimate a user’s age as well as to anonymously share a user’s age category with apps. The proposed law simply goes one step further by requiring app stores to leverage their existing capabilities to verify a users’ age—and holds them accountable if they don’t.
According to a national poll commissioned by the Digital Childhood Alliance, 88% of parents support requiring app stores to get parental approval before minors can download an app. Parents want the App Store Accountability Act. Congress should give it to them.
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