1st Lieutenant Andres Zermeno Post Office Building

Floor Speech

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Mr. MARKEY. Madam President, I rise today with deep disappointment and frustration at the House of Representatives' failure to take up my bipartisan, bicameral legislation with Senator Bill Cassidy--the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act, COPPA 2.0.

Just a few months ago, the Senate passed COPPA 2.0 by a resounding vote of 91 to 3 as part of the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act. It was a remarkable moment for a Chamber that has too often succumbed to partisanship on key technology issues. Young people and families across the country finally had a moment to celebrate that their government was actually coming to their aid on a critical issue and that lawmakers from across the aisle could hold hands and recognize that the youth mental health crisis was raging in red and blue States alike.

This crisis demanded action, and the U.S. Senate was meeting the need and the moment with a popular children's and teens' privacy bill. Help, it seemed, was finally on the way. It was long overdue. For more than a decade, I have been fighting to strengthen online protections for our young people. In fact, if COPPA 2.0 were a person, it would have just turned 13 and would have aged out of our current privacy protections for children, which I first authored 26 years ago.

Over those 26 years, that law--the original Children's Online Privacy Protection Act--has been critical to protecting children online, but when I wrote COPPA, only birds tweeted, and ``TikTok'' was a sound that a clock made. Today, our children and teens confront a far more complicated and privacy-invasive online world--one that, according to medical experts and the Surgeon General, is contributing to a youth mental health crisis.

The stats are devastating. The stats are overwhelming. Listen to these stats. Listen to the problem we have in our country: More than one in four high school girls in the United States seriously considered suicide in 2023--one in four teenaged girls--and at least one in eight high school girls attempted suicide in 2023. Let me repeat it again. One in eight teenaged high school girls attempted suicide in 2023. Amongst LGBTQ+ youth, the number is more like one in five attempted suicide in 2023.

COPPA 2.0 cuts to the heart of the emergency. COPPA 2.0 bans targeted advertising to young people, ensuring that teenage girls stop being targeted with weight loss pills and other harmful ads.

It empowers parents and teens by giving them an eraser button to delete an ill-advised post, and it prevents companies from burying their heads in the sand and ignoring the children and teens on their platforms.

These policies specifically target Big Tech's financial incentives-- profitable targeted ads--that keep kids and teens clicking, swiping, and scrolling on social media, even to their ill health. In fact, in 2022, the major Big Tech platforms earned nearly $11 billion from U.S. users under the age of 18--$11 billion--and those are 11 billion reasons to oppose any opposition to COPPA 2.0. But the tech companies-- they want to monetize the young people in our country, and we know they are doing so at the expense of their mental health.

Who said it? The Surgeon General of the United States. Who said it? The pediatricians of the United States who are the experts on children and teenagers in our country--a mental health crisis largely created by online social media.

So this is an incredible moment for us because, with that $11 billion which the media companies and the big tech companies make, there are 11 billion reasons to turn their lobbying power on the House Republican leadership and concoct farfetched theories for why a bill that passed 91 to 3 on the floor of the U.S. Senate should not even receive a vote--at the height of a mental health crisis for young people in our country--on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Unfortunately, House Republican leadership capitulated to the pressure of Big Tech, with grave consequences for young people. The House had a rare opportunity to show families across the country that it cared about their children, about their teenagers; that money in politics didn't drive their decision making; and that our youngest and our most vulnerable came first and not Big Tech. House Republican leadership--they failed that test. They sat for months on the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act and then refused to even consider it for passage at the end of the year. They want to wait until next year and next year. We brought this bill out for three Congresses in a row.

This is not a new issue. It is a crisis. Everyone knows it is a crisis. Everyone knows that teenagers are getting addicted because of deliberate strategies by Big Tech to absolutely harm them. We know that, right now, if a teenaged girl has bulimia and she goes online to get information about it because she has only told her mother and father, that girl can be bombarded with ads from companies and from others because that information is now out there that she Google- searched.

Well, the impact on her psyche is dramatic if that happens, and it is happening every single day because Big Tech monetizes that girl's bulimia or anorexia problem. This is the bill that says you can't do that. If the parents want all of that information erased or they don't want the girl to be targeted with ads, you can't do it--91 to 3 on the Senate floor, no vote in the House for three Congresses in a row.

They always want to wait until next year for a Republican Congress or for a Republican President, yes, but what about right now? And are they actually going to do it next year? And while they wait, our young people will continue to suffer. Every day that this does not pass is another day where platforms can serve dangerous, targeted ads to children and teens. Every day that it does not pass is another day when parents and teens don't have the tools they need to protect themselves online.

Every day that COPPA 2.0 does not pass is another day when children and teens are suffering from suicide, from anxiety, from depression. This is the heart of the issue. This is the sinister side of cyberspace. This is the harmful side of it.

Are we going to do anything about it? Is it the Keynesian quality to the internet? It is the best of technologies and the worst of technologies simultaneously. It can enable. It can ennoble. It can degrade. It can debase.

Yes, these companies tout all the wonderful things that they are going to do, and they actually want to put it on steroids: AI. They are going to find a cure for cancer. They are going to do all these other wonderful things. We will see.

But at the same time, we don't have the safeguards built around the harm they are doing right now--the mental health harm to teenagers and children in our country. And it is only going to get worse--much worse--as AI injects itself into the system more and more: more suicide, more anxiety, more depression.

So it is a sad day for an institution that had a historic opportunity. And I commend the Senate leadership for making a decision in prioritizing the mental health of kids and teens. But I am deeply disappointed in the House of Representatives, where I proudly served for 36 years.

For decades, the House has lamented that the Senate's rules have prevented us from taking action on important issues. And I have made those arguments myself as a House Member years ago. But when the Senate did act on an issue critical to families and to parents across the country and when it acted decisively, House Republican leadership decided to play politics with the lives of teenage children in our country.

So to the kids and the parents and the advocates who have fought courageously for stronger online privacy rights for children and for teens, thank you. Don't go away. Keep your energy up. If you are knocked down, you are hurting, just come right back. Come back the same way the abolitionists came back, the same way the suffragettes came back, the same way the anti-Vietnam movement came back, the same way the same-sex marriage movement came back. Just get up again. We are right; they are wrong. We have to get this passed.

So I have been honored to be with you. It is a very disheartening moment--very disheartening. This is an ongoing, preventable crisis in our country. And if we don't act and act soon, we are going to have teenagers and children 20 years from now writing books about what their Congressmen, their Senators--an older generation--inflicted upon them, with no protections whatsoever. They will be talking about it. They will be writing about it.

Let me finish, again, by giving you the numbers. These are, without question, some of the most staggering numbers I have ever seen attached to one single preventable issue. One in four high school girls in the United States seriously considered suicide in 2023. Let me just say that. One in four seriously considered it. One in eight high school girls in the United States in 2023 actually attempted suicide--one in eight. And one in five LGBTQ attempted suicide in 2023. And the Surgeon General, the pediatricians of our country implicate--point the finger at--social media, the self-image of these kids, as one of the leading causes. And we are not going to pass this legislation.

And the actions of the House and now from Elon Musk and others who are preventing this whole institution from working are going to ultimately expose all of these young people to images, ideas, that are, in fact, avoidable.

I thank you for giving me the time. And to all of those who worked so hard on this legislation over the last 2 years, please get up and get ready to come back again next year because this is a crisis in our country. This is something that these young people do not deserve, and their privacy cannot be monetized. It is just absolutely wrong and preventable.

With that, I yield back the floor.

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