Connecticut Child Advocate Sarah Eagan is also co-chair of the state's Child Fatality Review Panel (CFRP). In that position, she sees the worst outcomes of damaging social media and internet use. She has a warning:
"There are zero guardrails within the system itself to protect children and empower parents to limit their exposure to God-knows-what from God-knows-who."
Members of the U.S. Senate are trying to change that with the proposed Kids Online Safety Act. It's a bill co-sponsored by Democrat Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Republican Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee.
Among other things, the bill would require tech companies to allow parents and kids to opt out of algorithms which direct impressionable users to dangerous content.
Eagan says she'll never forget a case she reviewed for the CFRP. It's the case of a young boy who committed suicide.
"He learned how to die by suicide by looking it up in a platform on the internet," says Eagan, "and he must have found his way to it by looking up the very themes around his own despair, his own loneliness, and found his way to a platform that taught him what he needed to do to die, undetected by his parents."
"What drives me is those heartbreaking, harrowing stories of lives destroyed," adds Blumenthal, "children lost literally to suicide, eating disorders, bullying online, and parents unable to have any tools to protect their kids, and the kids themselves wanting to disconnect having no tools to do it."
According to details published by the office of Sen. Blumenthal, the Kids Online Safety Act would also:
--require social media companies to provide children with options to protect their personal information
--give "parents new controls to help support their children and spot harmful behaviors, including by providing children and parents with a dedicated channel to report harms to kids to the platform"
--create "a duty for social media platforms to prevent and mitigate harms to minors, such as content promoting of self harm, suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, and sexual exploitation"
The Senate Judiciary Committee will discuss the plan Tuesday. A similar bill failed during the last legislative session, according to Blumenthal, who says, "We would have succeeded but for the armies of lobbyists and lawyers that 'big tech' had at its beck and call."
