First Focus Campaign for Children doesn’t aim to “keep children safe from technology” but to make technology safer for children. Congress should work to retain the benefits of technology while reducing or eliminating the harms. Social media, AI, and other technologies are products that are manufactured by companies and sold or given to the public and they should be regulated as such. The federal government has a long and well-established history of regulating products to make them safer for children, such as mandating car seats and seat belts in vehicles and removing lead from toys and paint. In the exact same way, the federal government must legislate and regulate technology products to be safer for children by adding safety features and removing harmful elements. If a tech product has benefits for children, regulators should ensure that it is safe for them. If a tech product has no benefit for children, regulators should consider limiting children’s access to it.
What Works
- Enhancing Children’s Right to Privacy: protects children’s data from advertisers and bad actors
- Safety by Design: removes harmful features from apps and products and gives children more control over what content they see
What Doesn’t Work
- Content Moderation: the evolving nature of content makes moderation ineffective and can lead to First Amendment challenges
- Age Verification: very difficult in practice to separate children from adults without violating privacy of all people and putting many people at risk of data breaches; may also make it easier for predators and bad actors to target children online
- Social Media Bans: bans rely on age verification to work and don’t let children get the full benefits of social media. Children are then unprotected in online spaces where bans are ineffective or in alternative spaces not affected by bans.
- Blaming the Parents: tech companies made these products and should not pass off the responsibility of protection to parents, especially since parental controls are often ineffective.
Lawmakers and federal regulators must take action as soon as possible to make technology safer for the nation’s children. Government should pursue the following goals through legislation or regulation:
Protect Children’s Privacy
- Congress must pass the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0) (S.836) to ensure children have a right to privacy in the face of emerging and evolving privacy threats.
Ensure that All Products Follow Safety By Design Principles
- Extend safety by design features to all users, not just children, to eliminate the need for age verification.
- Require all AI generated content to be clearly labelled or watermarked.
- Remove infinite scroll / autoplay features to make social media less addictive.
- Make all push notifications and alerts opt-in and prevent apps and websites from pinging users during sleep hours.
- Allow users to control the data and preferences collected by apps and websites. This allows users to control what content they see and to avoid harmful content.
- Require opt-out time limits or time warnings to prevent excessive social media use.
- Require more transparency from tech companies on how reports of harmful content are handled.
Protect Children from Online Gambling
- Ensure gaming products marketed to children do not have gambling features.
- Ban loot boxes and pay-to-win microtransactions.
- Ban advertising of prediction markets and sports betting in children’s media and media children could be exposed to.
- Authorize social norms campaigns to address the rise in youth gambling.
Regulate AI
- Until there is a federal framework, allow states to experiment with AI regulation.
- Promote transparency in the data collected by AI and tech products.
- Allow the children and families to take legal action against privacy violations and harm caused by AI.
- Reduce harm caused by data centers to local communities and alleviate the burden data centers place on the electrical grid.
- Fund research on effective policy solutions to mitigate harm caused to children by AI.