[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 28 (Tuesday, February 11, 2025)]
[Senate]
[Pages S837-S838]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                       Kids Off Social Media Act

  Mrs. BRITT. Mr. President, I rise today to discuss an epidemic that 
is affecting our Nation's youth, a crisis each and every parent should 
be concerned about and one that so many parents I know already are.
  Our kids' worsening mental health is an emergency, and it is an 
emergency clearly and undeniably linked to social media. Emergency room 
visits among adolescents for anxiety, mood disorders, and self-harm 
have all risen dramatically in the years since social media apps 
exploded onto the scene.
  Over that same time period and during the second decade of this 
century, rates of depression amongst teenagers more than doubled. By 
2019, 20 percent of teenagers agreed with the notion that ``life often 
feels meaningless''--almost a 100-percent increase from a decade 
earlier.
  According to the CDC, in 2021, and buckle up for this, one in three 
high school--young women said she actually considered death by 
suicide; 25 percent of teenage girls made a plan to do so; 9 percent of 
high schoolers and 13 percent of teenage girls actually attempted death 
by suicide.

  As a mom, that is beyond horrifying. I worry for my own kids. I worry 
for their friends. And as a Senator, I worry about the future of the 
next generation of Americans.
  To make matters worse, social media companies know the harm their 
platforms create. Instagram's parent company, Meta, conducted internal 
research that showed that one-third of teenage girls who use the app 
report: It makes them feel worse, but they cannot stop.
  And while social media companies have taken some steps, it is clear 
that there is work for Congress to do. The last time a U.S. President 
signed a major piece of legislation addressing children and the 
internet was--wait for it--1998.
  So you look. Almost 30 years ago, the Children's Online Privacy 
Protection Act was signed into law. For reference, at the time that the 
law was signed, MySpace didn't even exist.
  It is time for an update, and there is a clear place to start. 
Studies have shown the most damaging time for an adolescent to use 
social media is during their preteen years. And the 1998 law tried to 
address that. The law says that websites and other online services 
cannot collect personal information from children under 13 years old 
without parental consent. Now, the catch is that those websites have to 
know that the child is under 13.
  The standard minimum age for social media platforms is 13. But 
current law creates an obvious incentive for companies not to verify 
whether their users are old enough to be on the app. And because social 
media companies have to know that a child is under 13 for the law to 
apply, they simply choose not to verify this information.
  Look, anti-child-sex-abuse organization Thorn actually conducted a 
study in 2021 that showed that 49 percent of respondents between the 
age of 9 and 12 years old said that they had used Instagram; 52 percent 
said that they had used Facebook; 58 percent said that they had used 
Snapchat.
  And it was just last week, in a Senate Judiciary Hearing, where I 
heard not one but two parents tell about their painful story where 
their children had died of fentanyl poisoning from a pill that they had 
bought on Snapchat, thinking it was something else. They thought they 
bought a Percocet; they thought they bought an oxycodone. It was laced 
with fentanyl, and now they are dead.
  Sixty-nine percent of these people in this survey, between 9 and 12 
years old, said that they had used TikTok.
  The age limits social media companies claim they have mean absolutely 
nothing. That is why I introduced the Kids Off Social Media Act, 
alongside Senators Ted Cruz, Chris Murphy, and Brian Schatz. The four 
of us approached this not as Democrats or Republicans, not as someone 
who sits on the right or the left, but as four concerned parents that 
are raising teenagers right now and dealing with this issue.
  Our bill would set a minimum age of 13 years old for social media 
platforms, but that is not the only thing that it would do. The Kids 
Off Social Media Act would also prevent platforms from feeding targeted 
content picked by an algorithm to users under the age of 17.

[[Page S838]]

  For anyone who is curious about why that is in the bill, all you have 
to do is ask a teenager, especially a teenage girl. Former U.S. Surgeon 
General Vivek Murthy wrote that nearly half of all adolescents say that 
social media makes them feel worse about their bodies. That doesn't 
seem like an accident.
  If you read--and many people have--Jonathan Haidt's book ``The 
Anxious Generation,'' you will learn that these apps use algorithms 
that ``home in on and amplify girls' desires to be beautiful in 
socially prescribed ways, which include being thin.''
  Once that starts, once the algorithm starts feeding teenage girls 
images of increasingly thin and unhealthy women, the vicious cycle 
begins, and those girls end up finding images or videos promoting 
anorexia and/or, as Haidt says:

       Emaciated young women urging their followers to try extreme 
     diets like the ``corpse bride'' diet or the water-only diet.

  These algorithms on social media platforms are not just leading our 
daughters to starve themselves; they are leading them to torture 
themselves as well.
  By turning the Kids Off Social Media Act into law, we can put a stop 
to this. I am so grateful that Senator Ted Cruz, from the great State 
of Texas, prioritized our bill in the Commerce Committee, and I am sure 
that parents everywhere are grateful too. After all, parents 
overwhelmingly support our mission.
  A survey conducted by the Count on Mothers group showed that over 90 
percent of mothers agree that there should be a minimum age of 13 on 
social media platforms, and 87 percent of mothers agreed that social 
media companies should not be allowed to use personalized algorithms to 
deliver content to our children.
  If there has ever been a theme of the legislation that my colleagues 
and I have pursued so far this Congress, it is keeping American 
families and children safe. The Laken Riley Act will help keep kids 
safe from criminal illegal aliens. The Halt Fentanyl Act, which I spoke 
about on this very floor just last week, will help kids be safe from 
deadly fentanyl and fentanyl poisons. And the Kids Off Social Media Act 
will help keep kids safe from mental health effects that these 
platforms and their algorithms produce.
  There is nothing more important we can do as a body than protect the 
people we serve. So let's do it. Let's get the Kids Off Social Media 
Act through Congress and to the President's desk. There are parents 
across this country that are counting on us to step up to put the 
proper guardrails in place so their children can be safe and their 
children have an opportunity to both explore and to succeed.
  All of our country's children are free to pursue their own American 
dream, just as our generations were, and this will enable them to do 
that.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont.