While all of Silicon Valley’s major social media companies — from Instagram to TikTok — say they block children from using their apps, these senators say those efforts have failed.
“It doesn’t work,” says Schatz. “There is no right to free speech to be disturbed by an algorithm that upsets you, and these algorithms are making us more and more polarized and belittling and depressed and angry with each other. And it’s bad enough that it happens to all of us adults, the least we can do is protect our children.”
While the measure is sponsored by progressive Democrats and one of the most staunch conservatives in the Senate, lawmakers across the ideological spectrum are equally skeptical of the proposal, showing the tough road ahead for new media measures to pass, including those targeting children. . Many legislators are torn between protecting children online and preserving the robust internet as we know it. Of course, most senators look to their own families for guidance.
“My grandchildren have flip phones. They don’t have smartphones until they get older,” said Sen. Mitt Romney, a Republican from Utah. Romney – who is open to the idea, though dubious at first – says there is no consensus in his own family on these issues.
“I have five sons, so there are five different families and they have different approaches,” says Romney. “And the younger son is the one who is strictest, and the eldest son didn’t think it was so important.”
For Smith, the Senator from Minnesota, worried that her party would come off as Big Sister, there wasn’t even uniformity in her own household when her boys battled over the family’s first desktop computer centuries ago. And her kids also turned out to be (mini) hackers.
“We tried to figure out how to monitor their interaction with the computer, and we quickly found out that it was hard, at least for them, to set hard and fast rules because kids find a way,” says Smith . “And different parents have different rules for what they think is right for their children.”
While Smith is open to the new measure, she is wary. “I tend to be, I think, a bit suspicious of hard and fast rules because I’m not sure they work and because I think parents and kids should have the freedom to decide what’s right for their family ,’ says Smith.
While Smith is a progressive Democrat, she is currently aligned with Senator Rand Paul, a Libertarian Republican from Kentucky. “Parents exercise some control over what their children see on the internet, what they see on television, all of these things are important. I’m not sure I want the federal government [involved]’ says Paul.
The new measure also involves competition. Last week, Senators Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, reintroduced their EARN IT bill – the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act. That move would remove current Section 230 protections for sites that publish online content about child sexual exploitation. Section 230 remains a highly controversial law because it protects online companies from liability for much of what users post on their platforms.
