Keller @ Large: Advocates skeptical about Kids Online Safety Act
BOSTON - What can happen to kids on social media? Fourteen-year-old Jasmine Hernandez was met with a barrage of vicious, racist bullying. "It was a lot of, like, cyberbullying with pictures of me, imposed on someone hanging on a tree or like the KKK surrounding someone burning on the cross," she told CBS News.
Jasmine missed weeks of school and spent the rest of the year in counseling. And now two senators, Connecticut Democrat Richard Blumenthal and Tennessee Republican Marsha Blackburn, have refiled a bill they hope will help protect children like Jasmine - the Kids Online Safety Act.
Their bill would give parents new ways to identify harmful behavior and report negative content and require social media companies to make it easier for minors to protect their information and disable addictive features. All aimed at dealing with fast-growing rates of depression and despair among teens, especially girls.
"Big tech is aggravating, and exacerbating, profiting from driving toxic content at kids," says Blumenthal.
But the big social media companies like TikTok say they already do what they can to police content. And even staunch advocates of better protection for kids online are skeptical of the measure.
"While the issues we're talking about here are real, this legislation would actually make them worse," says Evan Greer, director of the Boston-based group Fight For The Future, who claims the bill could weed out harmful content on eating disorders and mental health while also blocking self-help material.
"The way this provision is written, it would lead to platforms suppressing not just content that's promoting those things, but also content that is helping kids avoid those things," she says.
Meanwhile, Jasmine is left to mostly fend for herself. "I am more careful on it," she says of her social media use.
Greer's group supports a bill co-sponsored by Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) that would keep the tech companies hands off your teen's personal data, which is often used to spoon-feed them all sorts of dangerous garbage. It would also ban targeted advertising to kids of all ages.
But take note of what's happening - this is such a hot topic, well-meaning pols are all jumping in with their own bills, creating a jumble that could well result in nothing being done.
Great for the platforms, not so good for our kids' mental health.