While all of Silicon Valley’s major social media companies — from Instagram to TikTok — say they’re banning children from using their apps, these senators say those efforts have failed.
“It doesn’t work,” Schatz says. “There’s no free speech right to obfuscate an algorithm that makes you upset, and those algorithms make us more polarized, disparaging, depressed, and angry at each other. It’s bad enough that it’s happening to all of us adults, and the least we can do is Protect our children.”
While the measure was sponsored by progressive Democrats and one of the Senate’s most ardent conservatives, lawmakers from across the ideological spectrum are equally skeptical of the proposal, showing the difficult road ahead for passing any new media measure, including those aimed at children. Many lawmakers are torn between protecting children online and preserving the power of the Internet as we know it. Naturally, most senators look to their families for guidance.
“My grandchildren have tap phones. They don’t have smartphones until they’re old,” says Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah. Romney — who is open to the idea, if suspicious at first — says there isn’t even uniformity in his family on these. issues.
“I have five sons, so there are five different families and they have different styles,” Romney says. “And the younger son is the tougher one, and the older son didn’t really think of it as a big deal.”
For Smith, the Minnesota senator, who worried about her party coming across as the big sister, there wasn’t even homogeneity in her home when her boys were fighting over the family’s first desktop computer in ages. And her children also proved to be (little) pirates.
“We were trying to figure out how to monitor their interactions with the computer, and we soon discovered that, at least for them, it was hard to set hard and fast rules, because kids find a way,” says Smith. “And different parents have different rules for what they think is the right thing for their children.”
While Smith is open about the new procedure, she is concerned. “I think I tend to be a little dubious of the hard and fast rules, because I’m not sure they work and because I kind of think parents and children should have the freedom to decide what’s right for their family,” says Smith.
While Smith is a progressive Democrat, by this new metric, she is currently aligned with Sen. Rand Paul, a libertarian-leaning Republican from Kentucky. Parents exercise some oversight over what their children watch on the Internet, what they watch on TV, all of these things are important. I’m not sure I want the federal government (involved), Paul says.
The new scale also has competition. Just last week, Senators Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, reintroduced EARN IT — the Elimination of Abusive and Pervasive Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act. This action will strip existing Section 230 of protections for any sites that post child sexual exploitation content online. Section 230 remains a highly controversial law because it shields online businesses from liability for much of what users post on their platforms.