Ever since whistleblower Frances Haugen outed her former employer Facebook (now Meta) for prioritizing profits over the mental health of its young users, parents of tweens and teens have been clamoring for better protections from social media platforms.

Lawmakers listened. This week Congress introduced bipartisan legislation to curb potentially harmful impacts of social media on kids ages 16 and younger. ABC News reported that The Kids Online Safety Act of 2022 includes the following elements:  

• Social media companies would be required to provide privacy options, the ability to disable addictive features and allow users to opt-out of recommendations like pages or other videos to “like.” It would also make the strongest privacy protections the default.
• The bill would give parents tools to track time spent in the app, limit purchases and help to address addictive usage.
• It would require social media companies to prevent and mitigate harm to minors, including self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, sexual exploitation and unlawful products for minors, like alcohol.
• Social media companies would be required to use a third party to perform independent reviews to quantify the risk to minors, compliance with the law and whether the company is “taking meaningful steps to prevent those harms.”
• Social media companies would be required to give kids’ data to academic and private researchers. The scientists would use that data to do more research on what harms children on social media and how to prevent that harm.

Proposing legislation is no guarantee that it will pass, but this bill appears to have bipartisan support as well as the support of many professionals who work with kids. “The politicians are taking what we know from the science and saying how do we build in these safeguards,” said Dr. Dave Anderson, a clinical psychologist at the Child Mind Institute. 

All those in favor, contact your senator to register your support for The Kids Online Safety Act of 2022.  

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• Is Social Media Harming Your Child