Children’s privacy and safety have been subject to concern in recent years and California lawmakers gathered last week to discuss how to impose greater protections.
The California State Assembly Committee on Privacy and Consumer Protection held an informational hearing last week to discuss how to better protect children online. The hearing comes at the heels of President Joe Biden’s request during a State of the Union address in March, calling on Congress to strengthen privacy protections and online safety for children.
​​”We must hold social media platforms accountable for the National experiment they're conducting on our children for profit. It's time to strengthen privacy protections, Ban targeted advertising to children to man the tech companies stopped collecting personal data on our children,” Biden said.
The request comes just months after Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former lead product manager for Facebook’s division on civic integrity disclosed internal documents from the company to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Haugen testified that Facebook actively attempted to recruit kids to their platforms regardless of the known detriments it would have on their mental health. The testimony revealed that these harmful impacts often are facilitated by intentional design choices seeking to maximize engagement and pursuit of corporate profits.
In February, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy testified before the U.S. Senate regarding the deteriorating mental health of youth, which he dubbed “a crisis of loneliness and helplessness”.
The internet is a tool for youth to explore new ideas, and interests, develop skills and stay connected with family and friends. With the COVID-19 pandemic, the screentime for most children dramatically increased as most, if not all, academic and social activities moved online, and screen time unrelated to school more than doubled for American teenagers, from 3.8 to 7.7 hours per day, according to Murthy.
The documents disclosed by Haugen included a study exploring problematic use of Facebook’s platforms and found that rates of problematic use by age peak with 14-year-olds, likely due to underdeveloped self-regulatory capacity.
Haugen testified: “Facebook has studied a pattern that they call problematic use, what we might more commonly call addiction. It has a very high bar for what it believes it is. It says you self-identify that you don’t have control over your usage and that it is materially harming your health, your schoolwork, or your physical health. Five to 6% of 14-year-olds have the self-awareness to admit both of those questions. It is likely that far more than 5-6% of 14-year-olds are addicted to Instagram.”
“Young people turn to social media for connection, creativity, information, curiosity, and fun, but they work harder and harder to filter out the bad and search for the good. They have to navigate the complexities of the online world on their own," said Vicki Harrison, MSW, Program Director at the Stanford Center for Youth Mental Health & Wellbeing. " In my conversations with young people, I've been troubled by the degree to which their perceived value on social media seems to be fusing with their emerging identity. ”
Haugen’s testimony revealed that these harmful impacts often are facilitated by intentional design choices seeking to maximize engagement and pursuit of corporate profits, and addressed how technology and social media impact young people on a wide variety of issues, including body image, anorexia, addiction, anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation.
According to the documents, internal studies at Facebook have allegedly confirmed anecdotal accounts that its amplification algorithms, like engagement-based rankings on Instagram, “can lead children from very innocuous topics like health recipes […] to anorexia-promoting content over a very short period. […] So Facebook know that they are leading young users to anorexia content.”
“I'm concerned both as a legislator and as a parent. Over the past two decades, we've passed numerous laws, both state and national to protect children online, but listening to the testimony of Dr. Murthy, Francis Hogan, of my constituents and experiencing this firsthand as a parent, I'm not sure those laws are protecting young people in the ways we intended ”Assemblymember Tasha Boerner Horvath (D – Encinitas) said.
Several bills have been proposed in Congress seeking to strengthen protections for the privacy and safety of children online. At a state level, California has seen only incremental success at implementing guardrails to protect from online harm.
“This inaction is a product of the complexity of the issue and the elusiveness of simple solutions, but many conceivable solutions at the state level are also constrained by federal laws that generally limit state authority,” the Assembly committee wrote in a joint statement with Committees on Privacy & Consumer Protection and Arts, Entertainment, Sports, Tourism, & Internet Media.
Both committees expect to consider an array of bills in the years to come.
Several handouts were made available by the California State Assembly Committee on Privacy and Consumer Protection to educate the public on the impact of digital media on children.
