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Floor Speech
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Mr. SCHATZ. Madam President, after a long time of talking over the ways social media is harming kids and debating what to do about it, this week, the Senate is taking some action.
For years, kids have been swimming in a toxic stew of bullying and harassment, glorified violence, and constant false comparisons, and the results have been absolutely catastrophic--record rates of anxiety and depression, unimaginable levels of suicidal ideation and self-harm, an alarming epidemic of loneliness and low self-esteem.
These things are not a given. They did not just happen overnight. The fact that young children as young as 8 or 9 or 10 can feel so sad and so helpless that they think they would be better off not living at all--that is a uniquely modern malady inflicted by social media.
Sadness in kids is not new, but a pandemic of youth depression is new. The fact that it is a relatively recent phenomenon is also cause for us to have some hope. It does mean that this is fixable. This is not the way it is supposed to be. This is not the way it has always been. It means that if we choose to take some pretty commonsense steps, we can finally get kids the help they need, and commonsense steps are exactly what the Kids Online Safety Act and the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act are.
I am proud to cosponsor both bills, which will provide important tools to protect the safety and privacy of kids online. I want to thank Senators Blumenthal and Merkley for their early leadership on both these bills.
For the first time in the age of social media, Congress is taking meaningful action to confront the very worst of the internet's ills. It has been a long and difficult journey to get to this moment, not least because some in Big Tech have done everything in their power to protect profits over kids. So it is to the credit of everyone involved in these bills that we are here, overcoming stiff opposition and inertia, to finally enact something.
It is a good step, but we have to do a lot more because we have yet to address the fundamental question of, when is it appropriate for a child to be on social media?
We have more than enough data, more than enough lived experience, more than enough scientific expertise to know that social media is harming kids' brains, pushing them down rabbit holes, plunging them into deep and dark places. We know that even adults aren't equipped to process the dizzying amount of information available online at all times, and that is to say nothing of the hate and the vitriol and the abuse served up on an endless loop by coercive algorithms.
That begs the question--why is a 7-year-old or an 8-year-old on TikTok to begin with? Why are young boys and girls, instead of playing with their friends outside or learning an instrument, getting radicalized or starving themselves because of something they saw on Instagram?
The fact is, we need to delay the onset of social media use. There is no safe cigarette. There are no settings that are going to solve this problem.
My bipartisan bill, the Kids Off Social Media Act, which I introduced earlier this year with several of my colleagues, will finally set the legal minimum age for social media use to 13. It will also ban platforms from targeting kids under 17 with powerful black box algorithms designed to keep them scrolling for hours on end. These are reasonable proposals. These are proposals that can be implemented. These are proposals that will pass constitutional muster.
So the question in front of us is, Why in the world is a 9-year-old allowed on TikTok when we know that the stubborn facts operate like this: The longer people spend time on your platform, the more money you make in ad revenue. OK. That stands to reason. The more people that use your site, the more money you get to make. Here is the stubborn fact that Meta and Twitter and TikTok and everybody else actually stumbled upon. They weren't searching for it, but they stumbled upon it. How do you get people to stay on your website? How do you get people to stay on your social media platform? The most reliable way to get any user to stay on a social media platform is to upset them. So you have these publicly traded companies, some privately held, but they all have an obligation to try to maximize profit. To maximize profit, you have to maximize eyeballs. In order to maximize eyeballs, you have to systematically upset, alienate, anger, make sick a whole generation of children.
We don't have to do this to ourselves. It is not impermissible for us to set a minimum age for a product for children. There is a compelling government interest and there is a compelling moral interest for us to take this action.
The bottom line is, our kids need help, and after a series of fits and starts, we are starting to deliver it. Progress, however overdue and however incremental, ought to be recognized and celebrated, but let's also remember that our work here is just beginning. The scale of the ongoing crisis and the needs of kids who are thoroughly overwhelmed online demand that we do more, and we must do more in the months and years ahead.
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