If any issue can bring notoriously polarized Washington together across party lines — and should — it is the need to protect America’s children from such perils as those to be found in abundance on the internet.
Illinois U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, openly expressed his delight as senators from both parties came together last week in a renewed push to pass federal protections for young people online.
“I don’t know if any or all of you realize what you witnessed today,” Durbin said during the session. “But this Judiciary Committee crosses the political spectrum, not just from Democrats to Republicans, but from real progressives to real conservatives. And what you heard was the unanimity of purpose.”
There also seemed to be a growing sense of urgency. Twenty-five years have passed since Congress last passed a law to protect children from the internet’s sexual exploitation, mental health challenges, questionable privacy policies and companies that target children to sell their data to advertisers.
Congress has come a long way, we hope, since the 2006 debate during which then-Sen. Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican, tried to be helpful by describing the internet as “a series of tubes.”
Given that Stevens led the Senate committee responsible for regulating the rising new technology, his metaphor was widely ridiculed as an example of how little Washington leaders knew about the rapacious technology they were expected to regulate.
Since many lawmakers were still relying on their staffs to perform such now-routine tasks as sending emails, progress in legislating the web has been slow.
The Child Online Protection Act of 1998 was passed with the declared purpose of restricting access by minors to any material defined as harmful to them on the internet.
But the law never took effect. Three rounds of litigation led to a permanent injunction against it in 2009.
President Joe Biden has a different idea. In his State of the Union address, he unveiled a tech agenda focused on protecting the privacy of children and teens online.
Biden’s speech called out tech companies’ grip on young Americans, and sounded the alarm on how social media affects teenagers’ mental health. “It’s time to pass bipartisan legislation to stop Big Tech from collecting personal data on our kids and teenagers online,” Biden said. “Ban targeted advertising on children, and impose stricter limits on the personal data that companies collect on all of us.”
He called for similar measures at last year’s State of the Union, too, but this time lawmakers from both parties were prepared to join the debate with their own proposals.
Biden appears to have touched a very receptive public nerve. Although antitrust and privacy issues are not going away, much of the latest big bipartisan push has been centered on protecting kids and their safety.
In the hearing last week, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, indicated that he is working with Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, to reintroduce EARN IT, an act from the last Congress that would remove the benefits of Section 230, the law that protects online services from lawsuits.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, said that she and Blumenthal will be reintroducing the Kids Online Safety Act, which would have given children under 16 tools to prevent the amplification of harmful content on social media platforms and their parents the ability to limit their kids’ usage of those platforms.
KOSA would require that social media platforms provide minors with options to protect their information, disable addictive product features (a crucially important choice), and opt out of algorithmic recommendations that steer the user’s searches toward locations they didn’t request. The measure would give parents more controls and put responsibility on the platforms to reduce or avoid messages that promote suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, sexual exploitation and other harms.
Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, went further — as he often does — by proposing a bill with the mouthful of a title Making Age Verification Technology Uniform, Robust and Effective, aka the MATURE Act. Hawley said he wants to “create a legal age to be allowed on social media.”
The MATURE Act would require social networks to verify that users are at least 16 years old through a verification process that, privacy experts note, would require even more of the data collection than already troubles many Americans.
And, while a growing number of parents, kids, educators and other experts paint an increasingly unhealthy picture of what they are manipulated into watching online, some states have begun to roll out online safety acts of their own — undoubtedly with more court fights to come.
The consensus calling for action to corral Big Tech’s power has been growing for years and in both parties.
As the power and reach of online content has mushroomed, so have the harms and abuses. The desire to protect kids appears to be stronger than ever in the new Congress, which raises hopes that at least one law will actually get passed, perhaps aided by the heartfelt, often wrenching testimony by parents in the Senate hearing room.
For several years now, there’s been a bicameral and bipartisan consensus in Congress that something has to be done. . But what? And how?
Most Democrats and Republicans can’t even agree on whether Big Tech platforms moderate content too much or not enough. But while lawmakers have waffled and argued, a growing number of kids themselves have found platforms to state publicly their growing opposition to the stranglehold of social media sites on their lives. They’ve seen, better than most adults, the impact on their peers.
Now, let’s hope Congress has found new energy and fruitful reasons to seek a working consensus to help protect our most vulnerable population: our children.
