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Big Tech Is Exploiting Kids Online. Congress Has to Step In
Social media platforms know the harm they do to children. Kids spend huge portions of their days in front of screens. About 40% of kids between the ages of 9 and 12 use Instagram daily, despite current law ostensibly restricting social media use for people younger than 13.
Researchers, including Big Tech‘s own internal researchers, continue to confirm what American parents already know firsthand: social media use is a key driver of the current mental health crisis among children and teenagers, including growing rates of suicidal ideation and self-harm. Over 80% of parents support strong federal measures to protect children on social media. No wonder 41 states and Washington, DC, just sued Meta (formerly Facebook) for its “scheme to exploit young users for profit.”
The problem, of course, is that reducing this harm might also reduce Big Tech’s revenues. Addressing parents’ concerns requires policy intervention, which is why Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) introduced the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). KOSA provides parents and children new tools to mitigate or avoid some of social media’s harmful features. It also creates a duty of care that legally obligates platforms to act in the best interests of the minors using them.
To meet this obligation, platforms will need to take reasonable measures against the most alarming harms caused by their products, including sexual exploitation; promotion of narcotics and alcohol; encouragement of serious mental health disorders, including eating disorders, suicidal behavior, anxiety, and depression, as defined by the best available medical evidence; and deliberate aggravation of addiction to social media itself.
The bill is also widely popular. KOSA is cosponsored by almost half of the U.S. Senate, has earned unanimous support from the Senate Commerce Committee, and has won endorsements from over 200 organizations representing everyone from the American Psychological Association to technology experts to children themselves. In the face of this popularity, Big Tech is pulling its latest ploy to stymie KOSA’s momentum: trying to convince conservatives that keeping kids safe will empower the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to censor conservative speech.
Meta Whistleblower to Testify in Senate Hearing on Child Safety, Social Media
Senators will hear testimony Tuesday from a former Facebook employee who is alleging the company failed to act on reports of harassment and harm facing teens on the platform. Arturo Bejar, a former Facebook engineering director who later worked as a company consultant, will testify before a Senate subcommittee about social media and its impact on the teen mental health crisis, the panel announced Friday.
Bejar’s allegations were revealed in a Wall Street Journal report published Friday. The former Facebook engineering director returned to the company in 2019 for a two-year consulting contract after seeing the harm his teen daughter and her friends experienced on Instagram.
During his two-year contract, Bejar and a team worked to create a questionnaire to evaluate user experience on the platform, according to the Journal. The questionnaire led to a report he sent to top Meta executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, then-Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Product Officer Chris Cox and Instagram head Adam Mosseri, according to the Journal.
The BEEF questionnaire, short for “Bad Emotional Experience Feedback,” found that “bad experiences” were particularly common among teen users on Instagram. For example, 26% of users under 16 recalled having a bad experience in the last week due to witnessing hostility against someone based on their race, religion or identity, according to the report.
States Reconsider Religious Exemptions for Vaccinations in Childcare
Montana, like 44 other states, allows religious exemptions from immunization requirements for school-age children. If the state is successful in expanding its policy to childcare facilities, it would become the second this year to add a religious exemption to its immunization requirements for younger kids.
Mississippi began allowing such exemptions for schools and childcare centers in July following a court ruling that the state’s lack of a religious exemption violated the U.S. Constitution’s free exercise clause.
Until recently, the trend had been going the other way, with four states — California, New York, Connecticut, and Maine — removing religious exemption policies over the past decade. West Virginia has never had a religious exemption.
The Montana Religious Freedom Restoration Act prohibits the state from infringing on a person’s right to the exercise of religion. Another act bans discrimination based on vaccination status.
U.S. CDC to Expand Surveillance of Traveler Samples for Respiratory Viruses
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will expand its traveler-based surveillance program to include testing for respiratory viruses, partners Ginkgo Bioworks (DNA.N) and XWELL (XWEL.O) said on Monday. The expansion, to be launched at four of the seven participating airports, comes ahead of the fall and winter months in the United States when viruses that cause respiratory diseases such as influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV)usually circulate more heavily.
Ginkgo and XWELL said they will monitor over 30 new viruses, bacteria, and antimicrobial resistance targets including seasonal respiratory pathogens such as influenza A and B, RSV, and SARS-CoV-2 as part of the expansion.
The expansion will launch at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, San Francisco International Airport, Boston Logan International Airport and Washington Dulles International Airport.
The surveillance program is a public-private partnership between the health agency, Ginkgo’s biosecurity and public health unit, Concentric, and XWELL’s diagnostic testing service, XpresCheck. The agency conducts voluntary nasal swabbing and airport wastewater sampling as part of the program, aimed to help with the early detection of new SARS-CoV-2 variants and other pathogens.
COVID Pandemic Has Caused ‘Collective Trauma’ Among U.S. Adults, New Poll Says
Nearly four years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. population is still experiencing “collective trauma,” a new survey suggests. The American Psychological Association (APA), headquartered in Washington, DC, has released the results of Stress in America 2023, its nationwide survey that polled more than 3,185 U.S. adults about their physical and mental well-being.
Adults between the ages of 35 and 44 reported the highest spike in chronic health conditions since the pandemic, rising from 48% in 2019 to 58% in 2023, according to an APA press release.
That age group also saw the biggest increase in mental heath illnesses, led by anxiety and depression, rising from 31% in 2019 to 45% in 2023. Even so, adults between 18 and 34 years old still had the highest rate of mental illness, at 50% in 2023.
Dr. Marc Siegel, clinical professor of medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center and a Fox News medical contributor, was not involved in the APA’s poll but said he did not find the results surprising. “The rise in chronic illness and mental illness among adults aged 35 to 44 is clearly due to the stress and anxiety provoked by lockdowns and mandates, fear of the virus and the rampant divisiveness,” he told Fox News Digital.
Teens Willing to Give Parents Control of Their Social Media
Many teens use social media to connect with their friends and the outside world, but a large number of young people now support having parental consent requirements as the dark side of social media takes a toll on their mental health.
In a new Pew Research poll of nearly 1,500 teens and parents, teens were more likely to support parental consent for minors to create social media accounts than oppose it. Roughly half, or 46% of teens aged 13 to 17 supported this measure, while only 25% opposed it. And even more teens, 56%, supported age verification to use social media platforms, which have widely been linked to mental health issues in children.
Jill Ehrenreich-May, a psychology professor at the University of Miami and expert on adolescent anxiety and depression, said the evidence is clear that social media harms teens’ mental health, with higher rates of anxiety and depression linked with increased usage.
In 2017, 85% of teens used social media daily, and in 2022, that number had reached 95%. This is in stark contrast to 2009, when only around half used it daily, according to the Pew Research Center. At the same time social media use by teens skyrocketed, teenagers found themselves at the precipice of a mental health crisis that hadn’t been observed in previous generations.
MSG’s Lawyer Ban Sparks NY Bar Push to Curb Facial Recognition
The New York State Bar Association is calling on state lawmakers to amend New York law to prohibit companies like Madison Square Garden Entertainment Corp. from using facial recognition technology to bar people from sports venues.
The association is throwing its support behind the legislature’s Biometric Privacy Act, which would require private companies to establish a policy and timeline for permanently destroying biometric information about people who have interacted with the company. The bill is sponsored by Sen. John Liu (D) and Assemblywoman Aileen Gunther (D).
“The larger and more powerful the corporation, the more powerful this tool can be. The more the use of facial recognition technology can insulate that corporation from opposing lawyers and lawsuits, the more access to justice for individual citizens is imperiled,” NYSBA’s report says.
The NYSBA Working Group on Facial Recognition Technology and Access to Legal Representation’s report, released Monday, focuses on MSG’s policy banning lawyers involved in litigation against the company from its venues, including the famous arena. MSG uses facial recognition technology to identify and ban so-called adverse attorneys.
AI Fake Nudes Are Booming. It’s Ruining Real Teens’ Lives.
Artificial intelligence is fueling an unprecedented boom this year in fake pornographic images and videos. It’s enabled by a rise in cheap and easy-to-use AI tools that can “undress” people in photographs — analyzing what their naked bodies would look like and imposing it into an image — or seamlessly swap a face into a pornographic video.
On the top 10 websites that host AI-generated porn photos, fake nudes have ballooned by more than 290 percent since 2018, according to Genevieve Oh, an industry analyst. These sites feature celebrities and political figures such as New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez alongside ordinary teenage girls, whose likenesses have been seized by bad actors to incite shame, extort money or live out private fantasies.
Victims have little recourse. There’s no federal law governing deepfake porn, and only a handful of states have enacted regulations. President Biden’s AI executive order issued Monday recommends but does not require, companies to label AI-generated photos, videos and audio to indicate computer-generated work.
EU’s Breton Tells TikTok CEO to ‘Spare No Effort’ Against Disinformation
TikTok must “spare no effort” to counter the spread of disinformation on the short video-sharing app, EU industry chief Thierry Breton told the company’s CEO on Monday, as the European Union steps up its efforts to curb the powers of Big Tech.
Breton last month gave TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, an Oct. 25 deadline to provide information on its crisis response measures and also ordered the company to provide details by Nov. 8 on how it protects the integrity of elections and minors online on its platform.
“Because now more than ever, we must spare no effort to protect our citizens — especially children and teenagers — against illegal content and disinformation,” he said.
