Lawmakers Hash Out Ways to Protect Kids From Internet Bullies, Predators

Lawmakers questioned experts and advocates about the best ways to keep children safe from the dangers lurking on the internet during a hearing of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary on Tuesday.

“Child safety is a top priority. We lock the door and teach our kids not to talk to strangers,” said Committee Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). “But in the virtual world, criminals and bullies don’t need to pick a lock or wait outside the playground to hurt our kids. They only have to lurk in the shadows online of Facebook and Snapchat. In those shadows, they can bully, intimidate, addict, or sexually exploit our kids. Right in our own homes.”

During the hearing, witnesses shared horror stories recounting the dangers of social media and called on lawmakers to take action.

Kristin Bride, a social media reform advocate and “parent survivor” from Portland, Oregon, lost her son, Carson, to suicide in June 2020. After his first night of training for a summer job at a pizza restaurant, he wrote his work schedule on the kitchen calendar. That night, while his parents slept, he took his life.

“After his death, we discovered that Carson had received nearly 100 negative, harassing, sexually explicit, and humiliating messages, including 40 in just 1 day,” she said.

The bullies were “Snapchat friends” — high school classmates of Carson’s who used the anonymous apps YOLO and LMK to mask their identities, Bride explained. “Anonymous apps like Whisper, Sarahah, and Yik Yak have a long history of enabling cyberbullying and leading to teen suicides.”

In its user policies, YOLO stated that it would monitor for cyberbullying and share the identities of anyone engaging in such behavior. But Bride sent four requests to the company asking them to unmask her son’s bullies. All were ignored.

She filed a class action lawsuit against YOLO and LMK for “product liability design defects and fraudulent product misrepresentation,” but it was dismissed in a California court last month due to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which “provides that companies will not be treated as publisher or speaker of any information provided by another person,” as noted by Durbin.

Another witness, Mitch Prinstein, PhD, chief science officer for the American Psychological Association, highlighted other online dangers, including “numerous online communities and opportunities to engage with content that actually teaches kids how to cut themselves, how to engage in behaviors that are consistent with an eating disorder, [and] how to conceal these behaviors from their parents and adults.”

These forums and online chat rooms even “sanction young people when they discuss the possibility of engaging in adaptive rather than maladaptive behaviors,” he added.

These same types of spaces also train predators.

“The dark net, including Tor, has become the newest online haven for child exploitation,” said John Pizzuro, a former law enforcement officer in New Jersey and CEO of Raven, an initiative built to raise funding for law enforcement to stop such exploitation.

There are forums where offenders share “best practices on how to groom and abuse children effectively,” he explained. “There’s a post even named the ‘Art of Seduction,’ that explains how to seduce children, that has been read more than 54,000 times.”

According to Pizzuro, virtually all social media and gaming platforms have vulnerabilities that make it easy for offenders to target children.

“If the platform allows individuals to chat, or a way to share photographs and videos, I assure you there’s a very real danger that offenders are using that access to groom or sexually exploit minors,” he said.

Finding Solutions

Senators proposed a number of strategies to address the harmful and criminal acts either being willingly perpetrated online by social media companies or allowed to continue because of their negligence.

The business model in Big Tech is to compel people to watch or read their content as much as possible, “whether or not those things are good for you,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), citing a 2021 report from the Surgeon General that details their operations.

“They make money based on eyeballs and advertising,” he noted, and American consumers remain “virtually unprotected” from their behavior.

“There were 21 million episodes last year of sexual exploitation against children … And we have no system in place to empower parents and empower consumers to seek justice to fight back and protect themselves,” Graham said. “There is no regulatory agency in America with any meaningful power to control this.”

To that end, he is working with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on a bill to develop a “digital regulatory commission” with the authority to shut down any website that doesn’t follow “best business practices” for protecting children from sexual exploitation.

Along with Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Graham also lobbied to pass the EARN IT Act, which “removes blanket immunity for violations of laws related to online child sexual abuse material (CSAM)” from Section 230, as noted in a press release.

This legislation would hold tech companies responsible for “complicity” in the sexual abuse and exploitation of children if they refuse to report or remove images of such abuse on their platforms, and it would allow survivors — people like Bride — recourse to civil litigation.

“It’s a step, not a stride,” said Blumenthal, “but it will mark major progress if we are able to pass this measure.”

Bride also urged Congress to pass the Kids Online Safety Act, which she said “requires social media companies to have a ‘duty of care’ when designing their products for America’s children.” She called the bill “long overdue.”

Durbin noted that he also had been working on “a comprehensive bill to close the gaps in the law and crack down on the proliferation of child sex abuse material online,” known as the STOP CSAM Act. He plans to release a discussion draft on Monday.

In addition, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) called for passing legislation to ban children from social media until age 16.

Asked whether this would be an effective strategy, Emma Lembke, founder of the LOG OFF Movement and a sophomore at Washington University in St. Louis, said, “I think the question we really have to ask is when children, who know more than most parents, enter these online spaces, how are they protected? Because we have seen time and time again that no matter the bans, kids find a way.”

At the closing of the hearing, Durbin promised the witnesses that he would hold a legislative mark-up to determine the “common goals” of the committee and “common efforts to reach those goals.”

The final result will probably not include everything that he wants or that the witnesses themselves would have written, “but if it is a step forward to protect children, we’re going to do it,” he said.