[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 108 (Wednesday, June 21, 2023)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2176-S2180]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                           Digital Platforms

  Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I am sorry I didn't have the chance to 
say thank you to our colleague from Connecticut for his speech tonight 
about loneliness in the United States. I was grateful that he gave it 
and grateful that he is in the Senate and grateful to know that another 
parent of young kids has the perspective that he has shared tonight 
because I think it is so important. And strangely enough, I am here to 
talk about something similar tonight.
  First, Madam President, I will put it away because it is not supposed 
to be on the floor, but I wanted to come here tonight to talk a little 
bit about this smartphone and the world of social media, the world of 
machine learning algorithms and generative AI that has now been put at 
our fingertips.
  The rise of smartphones and social media is one of the most rapid, 
profound, and, I would argue, poorly understood transformations in 
American life in our entire history.
  If you had asked me when I was the age of the pages who are here, 
when I was growing up, and you had said to me: Someday, Michael, there 
is going to be a device--well, here is the device--there is going to be 
a device that looks like this; it doesn't even have a wire next to it, 
that would have been astonishing in and of itself. How can an 
electronic device not have a wire? But it does not have a wire. Not 
only does it not have a wire, but you can FaceTime anybody on Earth the 
way Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock FaceTimed each other.
  The Presiding Officer knows what I am talking about. These folks may 
not know who Captain Kirk was or who Mr. Spock was. But the idea that 
you could reach somebody and communicate with them on video, on a 
telephone, or a device that had no wires, that alone would have been 
shocking.
  If you had said: Well, let me tell you something else about that 
device, I would say: OK. What else can you tell me about that device?
  And you said: Well, you can buy any book that has ever been written 
by humans, basically, on that device. And if you want it, you can make 
a choice. You can have it digitally, and it will just download 
immediately on your device, or you can order it, and it can be at your 
house by tonight, if you would rather have a print version of the book 
rather than getting it digitally. And I will tell you something else, 
Michael, it will translate any language that you care to hear.
  I was, today, with the CEO of Google who was in my office talking 
about how one of their projects now is to help recover and sustain lost 
languages or languages we are in danger of losing in this country and 
around the world, which I think is a worthy project. We definitely, in 
my State, are at risk of losing Native American languages that really 
are at risk.
  But in any case, if you said to me: You can translate any language or 
you can translate yourself into any language, and somebody would ask: 
What do you think that device is worth? In 1983 or 1987, when I was 
graduating from high school or college, I think I probably would have 
said that is probably--I can't imagine what it is worth--millions of 
dollars. Millions of dollars. To have every book that has ever been 
published that is in every library in the world? Millions of dollars, 
to be able to translate every language that you can translate? Millions 
of dollars.
  And if you told me that it actually only cost a few hundred dollars, 
which it does, and that everybody on planet Earth would have one, which 
is almost in many ways the case, I would have asked what you were 
smoking. But it is true. It is true. And that is the world we have 
inhabited for almost 20 years. It is not new: the digital age, the 
information age, the age of ubiquitous smartphones, social media, and a 
handful of digital platforms that control them.
  And for all of the extraordinary convenience and extraordinary 
productivity and entertainment that these technologies have allowed, as 
a country, we still haven't come to grips with the profound cost to our 
economy, to our society, and to our democracy, and that is before we 
even consider AI.
  This is what everybody around here is talking about, what some would 
call the most consequential technology for humanity since the invention 
of fire. But unlike fire, this technology can improve itself, and it 
has the potential to move faster and transform more than any innovation 
in our history, for better or for worse.
  Even in its early days, generative AI has already demonstrated the 
power to write the code to animate and even compose in ways that would 
have been absolutely unimaginable 20 years ago or 10 years ago, to say 
nothing of when we were in school.
  It is easy to forget how different the world was just 20 years ago. 
Twenty years ago, General Motors topped the Fortune 500 list. Apple was 
285, and Amazon didn't even make the cut. Twitter was still an idea 
somewhere in the recesses of Jack Dorsey's head. Mark Zuckerberg was 
barely old enough to vote, even though he likely already acquired the 
undeveloped view of the First Amendment that he seems to hold to this 
day. No one on this planet had ever heard of Gmail or TikTok or 
ChatGPT. That was only 20 years ago, but it might as well have been 200 
years ago.
  Today, Americans spend over 2 hours a day on social media, more time 
socializing online than in person. The average TikTok user in our 
country spends 90 minutes a day on the app--more than 3 weeks a year.
  Facebook now hosts 2.7 billion friends--a half a billion more souls 
than Christianity.
  Twitter has fewer followers, but they include every single 
politician--probably almost every single person in this Chamber--every 
journalist, every TV producer in America, withering our political 
debate to 280-character effervescent posts.
  In just two decades, a few companies--less than a handful, really--
have transformed much of humanity's daily life: how we amuse ourselves, 
how we discover, how we learn, how we shop, how we connect with friends 
and family and elected representatives, how we pay attention, how we 
glimpse our shared reality. This transformation is a staggering 
testament to American innovation.
  And we can all think of a dozen ways that platforms have improved our 
lives. I, for one, have been entirely relieved of the stress of sitting 
in rush-hour traffic, wondering if there is a better route. I am now 
confident that Waze is guiding me like my own personal North Star, and 
that has made an enormous difference to my sense of well-being.
  But this dramatic shift from our analog to our digital human 
existence has never been guided and has never been informed by the 
public interest. It has

[[Page S2177]]

always been dictated by the unforgiving requirements of a few gigantic 
American corporations and their commercial self-interests. And what are 
those interests? To make us better informed citizens? To make us more 
productive employees? To make us happier people? Of course not. It is 
to turn a profit and protect their profits through their own economic 
dominance, and they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
  This is the market capitalization of some of the largest industries 
in America. You can see at the top here that this is Apple and 
Microsoft and Alphabet and Amazon and Meta combined. They are at $9 
trillion in market cap. To get to $9 trillion, you basically have to 
add up our entire banking sector, our entire oil and gas sector, and 
our entire pharmaceutical sector just to give you a sense of the size 
of the market cap of these companies alone and the reason they have 
become so dominant.
  Through it all, unlike almost any small business in Boulder, CO, or 
in any town in New Hampshire, these digital platforms have remained 
almost entirely unregulated--moving fast and breaking things, as they 
have famously said, and forcing the rest of us to sweep up the 
wreckage.
  There is another way these companies are different from the brick-
and-mortar companies in Boulder, CO, or in New Hampshire. Digital 
platforms aren't burdened by the fixed costs of an analog world. Beyond 
the blinking lights of their energy-intensive server farms, their 
businesses are on the cloud, a place where no one works and that 
requires little physical investment. They have no need to use their 
profits to invest in America by building the kind of infrastructure 
these other industries do or had.
  Unlike their industrial forbearers, today's platforms have devised a 
new digital barrier to entry to protect their profits. It is different 
from the way it was in the past. They have figured out how to protect 
their profits and economic dominance, and we know that digital barrier 
as the network effect.
  The network effect means that platforms become exponentially more 
valuable as more people join and spend more of their waking moments 
there--more valuable to users because their friends and families are on 
it; more valuable to the platforms themselves, which hoover up our 
identities for their profits and train their machine-learning 
algorithms; more valuable for advertisers, who pay the platforms for 
our identities to barrage us with ads; and so valuable--so valuable--to 
the markets, where the top tech companies now equal, roughly, a quarter 
of the entire S&P 500.
  In the name of building this barrier to entry--this network effect--
they have stolen our identities and our privacy, and they have addicted 
us to their platforms. The platforms' imperative to grow big and stay 
big poses a very basic question: How do you get people on your 
platform, and how do you keep them there?
  For platforms like Apple and Amazon, it is to sell products that 
people want, to offer subscriptions, and, if they are lucky, to enmesh 
them in your closed ecosystems. For social media platforms with free 
services, like Meta and Twitter and TikTok, the answer is more 
sinister, I am afraid--to harvest as much data on your users as you 
can, to feed that data to your algorithms to serve up whatever content 
it takes to keep people hooked so you can keep selling ads.
  That is the core business model. That is the model that has led to 
these market caps. Although this particular business model has bestowed 
enormous value on a few companies, it has imposed profound costs on 
everybody else, even in places we don't necessarily expect it.
  A senior law enforcement official just told me, within the last 
couple of weeks, that social media is the ``last mile of every fentanyl 
and meth transaction in America.'' The Presiding Officer knows that in 
being from New Hampshire. It took my staff 20 seconds to find illegal 
drugs for sale on Instagram.
  I would ask the pages, please, to avert your eyes here. The image on 
the left appears to be pills of MDMA. The image on the right shows you 
how to contact the dealer through Whatsapp and pay him through another 
app called Wickr. Below that are all of the places you can purchase 
this stuff, including in Denver, CO, where we are having a terrible, 
terrible problem with fentanyl and with methamphetamines.
  Even though the vast majority of Americans never interact with 
content like this, we all pay a price. Millions of Americans have 
surrendered to private companies an endless feed of data on their 
lives, all for the convenience of being served up self-gratifying 
political content on YouTube, less traffic, or better movie 
recommendations. Most Americans have made that trade without ever 
really knowing it.

  The young people who are here today don't know a world where that 
trade was something that wasn't automatically made. Any suggestion that 
we have made that trade fairly, I think, is ludicrous. It mocks any 
sense of consent. These are contracts of adhesion, really. As a 
society, we have never asked how much of our identity or our privacy we 
are willing to trade for convenience and entertainment. We have never 
had a negotiation with Mark Zuckerberg about that. Until today, these 
questions have been resolved entirely to the benefit of the platforms' 
bottom lines.
  I suppose it would be one thing if the only consequences of the 
digital platforms' use of our data were to sell better advertising--
although even that would be a fairly pathetic concession, I think, of 
our own economic interests and of the precious value of our data and 
our privacy and our identities. But, as every parent knows and as every 
kid suspects, better advertising is not the only consequence of this 
model.
  Over the years, digital platforms have imported features from gaming 
and from gambling--from brightly covered displays to flashing 
notifications, to likes--and they unleash secret algorithms to reverse-
engineer our most basic human tendencies, which are to seek out tribe 
approval, conformity, and to create an almost irresistible feed of 
content.
  Americans now spend a third of their waking hours on their phones, 
which we check an average of 344 times a day. In speaking as a parent 
who has raised three daughters in this era, we certainly have not 
agreed to run a science experiment on our children with machine-
learning algorithms and generative AI chatbots that the companies 
themselves barely understand at all.
  While we are still coming to understand the specific role social 
media plays in the epidemic of teen mental health, the early evidence 
gives us plenty of reason to worry. Here is what we do know:
  In 2006, Facebook became available to the general public. The 
following year, Apple released the iPhone. By 2012, just 5 years later, 
half of Americans had a smartphone. Today, everyone has one. Everybody 
has got one, I think, except for Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, 
who is still using a flip phone.
  A similar story unfolded with teens and with social media. By 2012, 
about half of teens used social media. Today, 95 percent of teens use 
it. When my parents excoriated me--and they did, just like your parents 
excoriated you for being glued to the television in the 1970s--the 
average American teen watched TV for 4 hours a day. Today, teens are on 
their screens for twice as long. Half are online almost constantly, 
they say. More than one in five 10th grade girls spend 7 or more hours 
a day on social media. That is 35 hours a week. In France, that is a 
full-time job.
  As our children retreat into the digital world of someone else's 
making, they pay for it. They are paying for it with less sleep and 
exercise and time with their friends, as my colleague from Connecticut 
was talking about. All of this has contributed to an epidemic of teen 
anxiety, to depression, and to loneliness, especially among teenage 
girls.
  Today, girls who use social media heavily are two to three times as 
likely to say they are depressed, compared to those who use it less 
often or not at all. And since the introduction of smartphones and 
social media, we have seen a dramatic and unprecedented rise in serious 
depression among Americans under 25.
  To be fair, I am not saying social media is the only cause of this. 
But as the father of three daughters who have

[[Page S2178]]

grown up in its shadow, I know it has played a role.
  Kids are in despair in our country. Today, almost half of teens 
believe they can't do anything right. Almost half of teens say: I don't 
enjoy life, and my life is not useful.
  All of these numbers began to rise around the time that smartphones 
and social media began to pervade the country and hook a generation to 
their screens.
  Over this same period, we have tragically seen the suicides of young 
people increase 60 percent compared to 2007.
  I see this crisis of teen mental health everywhere I go in Colorado--
everywhere I go in Colorado. Parents tell me about how social media has 
undermined their children's sense of well-being and especially--
especially--a girl's body image and sense of self.
  A teenager recently told me that the ``electronic bullying follows me 
home.''
  ``There is no escape,'' she said, ``at any hour, on any day.''
  And I felt the panic. I felt the panic of a parent who can't fix it 
and make it better. It felt like there was nothing that I could do. It 
was beyond my control to make it better.
  It has become common now, at the end of my townhalls, for parents to 
come up to me. They are usually not people--or they are often not 
people--who have come to the townhall to listen to the townhall; they 
are people who might be working the slide projector or who might have 
set the chairs out for people to sit in. They come to me after the talk 
is over, the conversation is over, and they will say something like: My 
daughter is 5 feet 10 inches, she is 105 pounds, and her confidence is 
in tatters because of the way she has interacted with social media and 
the way it has shredded her body image.

  All of my young staff and my two eldest daughters universally say how 
lucky they are to have avoided middle school in the age of social media 
or to have gone to middle school before there was social media. Their 
younger siblings aren't so lucky, and they know that about their 
younger siblings.
  Maybe the most poignant expression of this concern were the moms whom 
I met in the Mississippi Delta, in my wife's hometown of Marianna, AR, 
which is the county seat of Lee County, AR. One after the other of 
these moms told me that their kids in this rural, poor county in 
America just don't read because no book can compete with their phone--
even as the Silicon Valley executives who designed these phones send 
their kids to social media detox camps every single summer. That is not 
something that is available to these parents in Marianna. These parents 
work two or three jobs. They can't afford childcare. And they have to 
compete for their child's attention against algorithmic poison. They 
have never stood a chance, and neither have their kids. Now these 
parents also have to compete with generative AI, virtual reality, and 
the power they bestow to fully immerse yourself in the digital world.
  My constituents in Colorado are most worried about what digital 
platforms have done to their kids and their families. I will tell you, 
I don't have a bunch of data tonight about the causal link between 
social media and the phones and the mental health epidemic that is 
going on in America, especially among American youth, but there is no 
doubt that we are having that epidemic. There is no doubt that it 
correlates to the advent of the phone and social media. There is no 
doubt it has been compounded by COVID and the effects of that.
  This has been a hard time to be a young person in our country, to be 
a high school student, to be a college student, to have your life 
interrupted by a once-in-a-generation, once-in-100-years pandemic on 
top of everything else. I just think about all the kids like my 
daughter Anne, who spent so much of that time in her room at home on 
that phone.
  When I was superintendent of the Denver public schools 15 years ago, 
we were working, focused so much on student achievement. It is amazing 
the way things have changed. When I was asked about this--about 
education in America--long after I had been superintendent but before 
COVID happened, I had an easy answer back then. My answer was mental 
health. Mental health. Mental health. And that was pre-COVID. There 
isn't anybody in America who thinks things have gotten better since 
then.
  This is a tough time to be a kid in our country. It is a tough time 
to be a kid because of this dynamic. It is a tough time to be a kid 
because we haven't, as the Senator from New Hampshire has told us here 
over and over again, figured out how to stop this epidemic of fentanyl 
in this country, so that we are living in a time now, unlike when I was 
superintendent, where kids have to lobby their school nurses to be able 
to put antidotes in the nurse's office so their friends don't die 
because they took one pill that was labeled a prescription drug, and 
that pill killed them or almost killed them. We didn't do that--worry 
about that when I was superintendent 15 years ago.
  This is off-topic tonight, but add on to that the fact that in 
America--this is the only country in the world where the leading cause 
of death for kids is guns, and two-thirds of that is people killing 
people, other people, assaults or suicides. Only 5 percent are 
accidents.
  This is a tough time to be a kid in America.
  I would argue that a lot of what we are dealing with here is manmade, 
human-made. It is not just a natural occurrence out there, somehow, in 
the world. We have to come to grips with it. We have to understand it.
  Among other things, we need these companies, like other companies in 
the past, to share their data so that independent researchers can help 
us make the assessments we need to make in order to make the judgments 
we need to make to provide oversight--kind of like the tobacco 
companies finally had to cough up the data way back when.
  As I say, my constituents are most worried about this, these issues, 
about their kids and about their families, but they also worry a lot 
about the effect on our democracy, and they have a lot of reason to be 
concerned about that too.
  When I first joined the Senate, it was around the time of the so-
called Twitter revolutions in Egypt and Libya and Tunisia that we then 
heralded as the Arab Spring. At the time, people in Washington and 
around the world hailed social media as a powerful tool for democracy. 
It didn't take long, though, for tyrants to turn those tools 
against democracy. The dictators who once feared social media soon 
harnessed it for their purposes--to track opponents, to dox critics, 
and to flood the zone with propaganda.

  Vladimir Putin understood this better than most. He saw the vast and 
unregulated power of social media over our democracy, and he wielded 
social media as a digital Trojan horse to inflame our divisions and 
undermine trust in our democracy. The damage inflicts us to this day.
  Ahead of the 2016 elections, Putin flooded our social media with 
disinformation. According to the Mueller report, the Russians 
``conducted social media operations . . . with the goal of sowing 
discord in the U.S. political system.'' We know that, of course, now.
  They sought to fracture our country along every conceivable line--
race, religion, class, sexuality, politics--playing both sides. They 
didn't care. Half this stuff is pro-immigrant, for example; half is 
anti-immigrant. Half of it is pro-Muslim; half is anti-Muslim. What 
they wanted was to divide this country, to divide this democracy.
  By the way, it took us more than a year to figure out this was 
Russian propaganda and not just our own political discourse, which says 
a lot about our own political discourse, where we might want to reflect 
on that.
  The Russians played both sides over 10 million tweets and nearly 
4,000 fake accounts. Imagine what Putin would have done with generative 
AI or could do with generative AI and the power to create fake images 
and videos that most of us would fail to distinguish from reality.
  Back in 2016, as I said, we let it all happen because we couldn't 
tell the difference between this discourse and our discourse.
  I published a book during my not-very-well-noticed campaign for 
President about this because I kept running into people--I can remember 
I ran into a senior at a nursing home in New Hampshire who was 
repeating stuff that I knew was Russian propaganda.
  He was saying: What are you going to do about it?

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  I am not saying that you couldn't find something on the internet that 
is true. Obviously, there is a lot there. But he was repeating Russian 
propaganda, and he didn't have any idea.
  When I joined the Senate Intelligence Committee after that, I began 
to realize that this problem extended far beyond our borders and that 
it was serious. That is why 3 years ago I wrote to Mark Zuckerberg, 
warning him--warning him--that Facebook had become authoritarians' 
``platform of choice'' to suppress their opposition around the world.
  The consequences have been horrific. In Myanmar, the United Nations 
named Facebook ``a significant factor'' in stoking communal violence 
against the Rohingya after it repeatedly ignored calls to remove hate 
speech and hire more staff who actually knew the country.
  Around the world, we have seen fake stories on these platforms spark 
violence--in India, in Sri Lanka, in Kenya, and on January 6, 2021, 
here in the United States of America.
  In the weeks before January 6, President Trump--our first President 
who ran his campaign and administration through Twitter--incited a mob 
to invade this Capitol. I remember sitting in a windowless room with 
the Presiding Officer in the Capitol on the 6th. We watched CNN as our 
fellow citizens invaded the U.S. Capitol with their racist banners and 
with their anti-Semitic t-shirts to ``save'' an election, they said, 
that had not been stolen.
  In these moments, we cannot bury our heads in our digital feeds. All 
of us are called upon to defend this democracy and to burnish our 
example at home. We can help--the people in this body can help by 
reining in the vast power of digital platforms and reasserting the 
interests of the American people and our public interest.
  The Americans who came before us would never have known about 
algorithms. They wouldn't have known about network effects. But they 
would recognize the challenge that we face, and their example should 
guide our way.
  The Founders themselves designed one of the most elegant forms of 
checks and balances to guard against tyranny.
  After Upton Sinclair exposed ghastly conditions in meatpacking 
facilities, in 1906, Teddy Roosevelt joined Congress to create the Food 
and Drug Administration. As broadcasting became more central to 
American life, in 1934, FDR and Congress created the Federal 
Communications Commission. After the 2009 financial crisis, President 
Obama and Congress established the Consumer Financial Protection 
Bureau. In each case, Congress knew it lacked expertise to oversee 
complex new sectors of the economy, so it created independent bodies to 
empower--to empower--the American people.
  Today, we have no dedicated entity to protect the public interest, 
and we have been powerless as a result. That is why last year, I 
introduced a bill to create a Federal Digital Platform Commission. I 
reintroduced it earlier this month with our colleague Senator Welch 
from Vermont.
  We have essentially proposed an FCC for digital platforms--it is not 
really more complicated than that--an independent body with five 
Senate-confirmed Commissioners empowered to protect consumers, to 
protect competition, and to defend the public and the public's 
interest. The Commission would hold hearings, conduct research, pursue 
investigations, establish commonsense rules for the sector, and enforce 
violations with tough penalties. Most important, the Agency would 
finally put the American people in a negotiation with digital platforms 
that have amassed vast power beyond our imagination and over the 
American people's lives and the lives of our children.
  Previous Congresses knew they would never have the expertise to 
approve or disapprove new drugs, for example.
  We didn't have a debate on this floor about that because we knew that 
expertise would better lie with the FDA. We don't write the safety 
guidelines for airlines on this floor either. We have a commission that 
will do that.
  Why would we expect Congress to be able to regulate technologies that 
are moving at quantum speed like AI? It is not possible.
  And perhaps this is why Sam Altman, the creator of ChatGPT, testified 
that we urgently need a new regulator--assuming that he wasn't a deep 
fake.
  Some may say: We don't need a new government Agency. We already have 
the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice.
  These Agencies are staffed by hard-working public servants, but they 
don't have the expertise or the tools or the time to regulate this 
brandnew sector. And that was before generative AI.
  And I want to say, on that note, I am very grateful to Chuck Schumer, 
the majority leader, for his remarks earlier today. I completely agree 
that we need to chart a responsible course between promoting innovation 
in AI and ensuring the safety of our children and our democracy.
  And while I think a dedicated, expert Agency is the best solution, 
and I believe others will come to that judgment as well, I welcome the 
debate that we are going to have on this. And I am the first to admit 
that I don't have a monopoly on wisdom on anything but certainly on 
this.
  But whatever we do, we cannot accept another 20 years of digital 
platforms transforming American life with no accountability to the 
American people. We are still coming to terms with the harm from 20 
years of unregulated social media. And we haven't come to grips with 
that. Every parent knows that. I shudder to imagine what our country 
will look like if we allow the same story to work its way out with AI.
  That particular technology may be new, but we face a familiar 
American juncture. We have been here before. In the late 19th century, 
when Gilded Age robber barons abused their dominance of the coal, 
steel, and railroad industries to stifle competition, to exploit 
workers and undermine democracy, government stepped in to assert the 
public interest.
  And, looking back, it is hard to imagine American life without the 
victories of that era--from basic antitrust laws and consumer 
protections to the direct election of Senators and the income tax. And 
I think, looking forward, we have similar questions to answer.
  What will our response be to the digital robber barons of our era 
that addict our children, that corrode our democracy and plunder our 
privacy, our identity, and our attention? Will we allow them to 
continue transforming American life according to their self-interest, 
or will we step up to safeguard the interests, civil liberties, and the 
freedoms of the American people?
  You know, especially for young people that are listening to this who 
might say: There is nothing you can do; the cat is out of the bag; you 
can't hold back the ocean--my answer to that is not very helpful 
because it is to recall something that young people here won't 
remember, but it is in my mind when I am talking to families and to 
young people in my State and I am listening to them talk about the 
mental health impacts of what they are facing.
  It reminds me of when the Cuyahoga River caught on fire in Cleveland. 
And that moment, for those of us who were around then, was so 
extraordinary because that unbelievable image of a river in America 
burning, catching on fire, flames shooting into the sky, that is what 
finally forced us to come to grips with the pollution that we were 
allowing to flow freely into our watersheds and into our communities. 
The same thing with our air. And we finally did something about it, and 
the country is better as a result.
  This is another case, by the way, just like those environmental 
regulations, where I think it is critically important for the United 
States, with our set of values and our commitments to democracy, to 
help set the international standards here and to not take standards 
from authoritarian regimes like China, for example.

  And that is a big risk if we don't act here. But I think we will, and 
I think we can. And I think that is going to not only give the American 
people a chance to negotiate with these companies but give America the 
chance to lead on questions that are fundamentally important for 
humanity.
  None of this is going to be easy. It never is. But when the stakes 
are nothing less than the health of our children and the health of our 
democracy, we have no choice but to try. And we

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should try. I think we have a unique responsibility to lead here, not 
just for the reasons that I just said but also because, after all, it 
was American companies that blazed the trail into the digital age and 
invited all of humanity to follow. And we now live in the world that 
they created, for better and for worse, with its wonders and with its 
conveniences but also with its risks and dangers and difficult 
questions.
  The same platforms that amplify a protester's cry for freedom in Iran 
also equip tyrants around the world to suppress democratic movements. 
The same technologies that liberated anyone to say anything also 
unleashed a perpetual cacophony, leaving all of us screaming louder to 
be heard. The dazzling features that brought the world online have also 
trapped us there, more connected but more alone, more aware but less 
informed--enthralled to our screens, growing more anxious, more angry 
and addicted by the day.
  Overcoming all of this will not be easy, but we can't simply hide 
under our covers or scroll through TikTok and hope these problems are 
going to solve themselves. That is our job. The health and future of 
our children lie in the decisions that we make or the decisions that we 
fail to make.
  Our objective, my objective to being here tonight, is not to hold the 
world back. In Colorado, we have always welcomed innovation, but we 
also understand that not all change is progress and that it is our job 
to harness these changes toward a better world.
  We are the first generations to steer our democracy in the digital 
age, and it is an open question whether democracy can survive in the 
world that digital platforms have created. I may be wrong, but the 
evidence so far does not fill me with confidence. It fills me with 
urgency--urgency to reassert the public interest; to reclaim our public 
square and exercise in self-government; to level the playing field for 
America's teens, for our parents, for teachers and small businesses 
who, for 20 years, have battled alone against some of the most powerful 
companies in human history.
  This is a fight worth having. This is a fight worth winning. And if 
we succeed, we may help save democracy not just in this country but 
around the world.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Colorado.

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