'There Is No Safe Cigarette': Brian Schatz Pushes Bill To Set Social Media Minimum Age-Limit To 13

7/30/2024

During remarks on the Senate floor, Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) spoke about the harmful effects of social media use and promoted a bill that would ban children under 13 creating social media accounts.

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Transcript

00:00Senator from Hawaii. Madam President I ask unanimous consent to vitiate the

00:05quorum call. Without objection. Thank you Madam President. After a long time of

00:09talking about all the ways in which social media is harming kids and

00:14debating what to do about it, this week the Senate is taking some action. For

00:19years kids have been swimming in a toxic stew of bullying and harassment,

00:24glorified violence and constant false comparisons and the results have been

00:29absolutely catastrophic. Record rates of anxiety and depression, unimaginable

00:35levels of suicidal ideation and self-harm, an alarming epidemic of

00:40loneliness and low self-esteem. These things are not a given. They did not just

00:47happen overnight. The fact that young children as young as eight or nine or

00:52ten can feel so sad and so helpless that they think they'd be better off not

00:58living at all, that is a uniquely modern malady inflicted by social media.

01:04Sadness in kids is not new but a pandemic of youth depression is new. The

01:10fact that it's a relatively recent phenomenon is also

01:15cause for us to have some hope. It does mean that this is fixable. This is not

01:19the way it is supposed to be. This is not the way it has always been. It

01:25means if we choose to take some pretty common-sense steps we can finally get

01:29kids the help that they need and common-sense steps are exactly what the

01:33Kids Online Safety Act and the Children and Teens

01:39Online Privacy Protection Act are. I'm proud to co-sponsor both bills which

01:43will provide important tools to protect the safety and privacy of kids online

01:48and I want to thank Senators Blumenthal and Markey for their early leadership on

01:53both of these bills. For the first time in the age of social media Congress is

01:58taking meaningful action to confront the very worst of the Internet's ills. It's

02:03been a long and difficult journey to get to this moment, not least because some

02:07in big tech have done everything in their power to protect profits over kids

02:13and so it's to the credit of everyone involved in these bills that we are here

02:17overcoming stiff opposition and inertia to finally enact something. It's a

02:23good step but we have to do a lot more because we have yet to address the

02:30fundamental question of when is it appropriate for a child to be on social

02:36media. We have more than enough data, more than enough lived experience, more than

02:42enough scientific expertise to know that social media is harming kids brains,

02:48pushing them down rabbit holes, plunging them into deep and dark places. We know

02:54that even adults aren't equipped to process the dizzying amount of

02:57information available online at all times and that's to say nothing of the

03:02hate and the vitriol and the abuse served up on an endless loop by

03:06coercive algorithms. That begs the question, why is a seven-year-old or an

03:11eight-year-old on TikTok to begin with? Why are young boys and girls instead of

03:17playing with their friends outside or learning an instrument getting

03:20radicalized or starving themselves because of something they saw on

03:26Instagram? The fact is we need to delay the onset of social media use. There is

03:33no safe cigarette. There are no settings that are going to solve this problem. My

03:40bipartisan bill, the Kids Off of Social Media Act, which I introduced earlier

03:44this year with several of my colleagues, will finally set a legal minimum age for

03:49social media use to 13. It will also ban platforms from targeting kids under 17

03:55with powerful black box algorithms designed to keep them scrolling for

04:01hours on end. These are reasonable proposals. These are proposals that can

04:08be implemented. These are proposals that will pass constitutional muster. And so

04:16the question in front of us is why in the world is a nine-year-old allowed on

04:26TikTok when we know that the stubborn facts operate like this? The longer people

04:34spend time on your platform, the more money you make in ad revenue. Okay, that

04:41stands to reason. The more people use your site, the more money you get to make.

04:45Here's the stubborn fact that Meta and Twitter and TikTok and everybody else

04:52actually stumbled upon. They weren't searching for it, but they stumbled upon

04:55it. How do you get people to stay on your website? How do you get people to say

05:01stay on your social media platform? The most reliable way to get any user to

05:09stay on a social media platform is to upset them. And so you've got these

05:14publicly traded companies, some privately held, but they all have an obligation to

05:19try to maximize profit. To maximize profit, you have to maximize eyeballs. In

05:24order to maximize eyeball, you have to systematically upset, alienate, anger, make

05:32sick a whole generation of children. We don't have to do this to ourselves. It's

05:39not impermissible for us to set a minimum age for a product for children.

05:43There is a compelling government interest. There is a compelling moral

05:48interest for us to take this action. The bottom line is our kids

05:53need help, and after a series of fits and starts, we are starting to deliver it.

05:58Progress, however overdue and however incremental, ought to be recognized and

06:03celebrated, but let's also remember that our work here is just beginning. The

06:09scale of the ongoing crisis and the needs of kids who are thoroughly

06:13overwhelmed online demand that we do more, and we must do more in the months

06:20and years ahead.

06:23Madam President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

'There Is No Safe Cigarette': Brian Schatz Pushes Bill To Set Social Media Minimum Age-Limit To 13

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