Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) detailed on Breitbart News Daily how the bill she and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) unveiled Tuesday would crack down on big tech’s danger to children.
Blackburn and Blumenthal introduced the Kids Online Safety Act, a bipartisan bill that aims to protect children’s privacy and protect them from addictive and dangerous behaviors.
The Kids Online Safety Act is a key part of Blackburn’s tech platform, which includes the Open App Markets Act, which would break up Apple and Google’s duopoly on smartphones, and the BROWSER Act, which requires companies to provide an opt-out policy for big tech data collection.
The legislation is backed by senators across the political spectrum and by hundreds of advocacy and technology groups, including Common Sense Media, the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Compass, Eating Disorders Coalition, Fairplay, Mental Health America, and Digital Progress Institute.
Blackburn told Breitbart News Daily host Alex Marlow that she has been working with Blumenthal for three years on the legislation and that it has significant support in Congress and from stakeholder groups despite big tech’s significant opposition to the bill.
She said that the legislation would “disable some of these tracking features that push addictive products and behavior. And also it requires the social media platforms to be transparent with their algorithmic black boxes, to open these up.”
The Tennessee senator said that big tech platforms often put children down the road towards “suicidal thoughts, or depression, or anxiety, or eating disorders, or other addictive behaviors.”
The Kids Online Safety Act would:
- Require social media platforms to provide minors with options to protect their information, disable addictive product features, opt out of personalized algorithmic recommendations
- Give parents more controls to spot harmful behavior and provide them and schools a dedicated channel to report harm to children
- Create a “duty” for tech platforms to prevent and mitigate dangerous behaviors, including promotion of “suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, sexual exploitation, advertisements for certain illegal products (e.g. tobacco and alcohol)”
- Require large tech platforms to perform an independent audit to assess the risks of platforms to minors and their compliance with the Kids Online Safety Act
Breitbart News’s Alana Mastrangelo detailed how several TikTok challenges, such as the NyQuil challenge and the “bathroom challenge” have led to dangerous behaviors.
Rep. Bob Latta (R-OH) slammed TikTok CEO Shou Xi Chew during a House hearing in March about how the platform allowed dangerous trends:
House Committee on Energy and Commerce / YouTube
Blackburn emphasized that society does not allow children to be exposed to harmful behaviors at a young age in the physical world, and therefore Congress should take action to prevent children from being exposed to them in the digital world.
She explained, “There are things that [children] should not be exposed to until a certain point in life. They can’t drive until they’re sixteen. We don’t allow them in the physical world to be exposed to pornography. … We don’t allow some companies to market cigarettes, alcohol, tobacco, things of that nature, to children. And, for them to be barraged with this type of behavior and information online without parents being able to shut that down is one of the things that we have heard about from so many organizations.”
She said, “Suicide is the third leading killer of kids. … We’ve got to make certain that we put these controls in place.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 6:00 to 9:00 A.M. Eastern.
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.