Social media platforms know the harm they do to children. Kids spend huge portions of their days in front of screens. About 40 percent 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 percent of parents support strong federal measures to protect children on social media. No wonder 41 states and Washington, D.C. 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.
The argument goes like this: KOSA's duty of care legally obligates platforms to mitigate the mental health harms that medical professionals, parents, and kids all know are caused by social media's design features. But what if FTC Chair Lina Khan decides that some conservative position or news item on social media promotes depression or suicidal ideation? Surely censorship will follow.
This argument deserves high marks for cleverness, repurposing real concerns about Silicon Valley's posture towards conservatives as an argument for why conservatives should protect Silicon Valley. But it fails on the merits.
The reason KOSA has been able to maintain such widespread support is because its language is narrowly tailored. Sharpened through rigorous negotiation, KOSA's duty of care carefully targets only the most serious and well-documented health risks of social media. If it didn't, it couldn't possibly maintain support from such a broad coalition, including stalwart conservatives. Kara Frederick, director of the Heritage Foundation's Tech Policy Center and a chief critic of Big Tech censorship, dismisses this scare tactic with the derision it deserves. "Folks would be hard pressed," she writes, to argue "that conservative outlets, like The Daily Wire or TheBlaze, 'promote ... suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, [and] sexual exploitation' or encourage minors to take narcotics, ingest tobacco products, gamble, or consume alcohol."
What makes Big Tech's argument even stranger is that the FTC already interprets its own authority as, in the words of one commentator, encompassing "any conduct that the agency deems coercive, exploitative, or collusive, even in its incipiency." Under this understanding of its Section 5 authority, the FTC has immense power to protect consumers from "unfair or deceptive" practices as it sees fit. If it wanted to interfere with social media's content practices, it is already free to try. Conservatives rightly concerned about agency overreach should applaud, not cower, when Congress introduces targeted bills that define what the FTC should do in specific markets.
This is exactly what KOSA does. It gives the FTC clear guidance by clearly delineating the harms for which social media companies should be held accountable. Other supposed "harms" that a politically motivated actor may wish to allege fall far outside these strict, focused parameters. KOSA doesn't arm the FTC with new authority to censor political speech; it gives the commission clearer, narrower direction to focus where it should—on actual dangers to kids.
Underneath this specific scare tactic is a broader claim: that KOSA somehow represents a departure from the norms that govern American society. "Too many view the internet as an accessory to 'real life,'" and therefore feel free to "strip users of their basic economic or civil liberties," writes David McGarry, a policy analyst at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance. But this argument is exactly backward. KOSA's strength is that it understands exactly how "real life" social media has become, and therefore insists that social media conform to real-life standards. American social and legal norms not only permit but require us to keep kids out of dangerous environments like nightclubs, protect environments like playgrounds that are meant to be safe for kids, and prevent kids' access to harmful products like alcohol. We entrust the nation's children to social media for hours every day. Excluding it from these norms is bizarre.
Frivolous lawsuits and rogue bureaucrats are normal, real-life risks we routinely accept for the sake of ensuring child safety. We asked the FCC to keep explicit adult material off broadcast TV because that medium is "uniquely pervasive," in the words of the Supreme Court. That description applies all the more to social media today. Could a hypothetical FCC have declared conservative speech obscene? Sure, until a court slapped it with a preliminary injunction the next day. Did any FCC try it? No. Should we have welcomed the broadcasting of explicit material to children rather than take the risk? Of course not.
Chris Griswold is the policy director at American Compass.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
