After Landmark Hearing, Parents Look to Schumer to Move Kids Online Safety Act
250 families Send Letter to Senate Leader Schumer Urging Passage of the Kids Online Safety Act
(Washington, D.C., February 8, 2024) — In the wake of last week’s hearing with social media CEOs, parents who lost their children to social media harms are calling on Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to bring the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) to a vote on the Senate floor.
In a letter sent today and published as a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal, more than 250 families urged Leader Schumer to move the bill that could have prevented their children’s deaths. Signatories to the letter include families whose children have died by suicide after being cyberbullied, sextorted or served pro-suicide content; families who lost children to dangerous viral challenges; and families whose children overdosed on fentanyl-laced drugs purchased over social media. Many of the signatories were in attendance at last week’s Senate hearing, holding pictures of their children.
It has been 25 years since Congress last passed legislation to protect children online, long before smartphones and social media even existed and long enough ago that most of the children represented in this letter lived and have died. The letter states:
We have paid the ultimate price for Congress’s failure to regulate social media. Our children have died from social media harms. Platforms have done everything and anything to maximize young people’s engagement – including designing products that send our kids down dangerous and deadly rabbit holes of pro-suicide and eating disorder content; enticing them to attempt dangerous challenges; facilitating sextortion schemes; and implementing design features that make children more vulnerable to predation, drug dealers, and cyberbullying. These are not isolated incidents but rather a harrowing reflection of a broader, systemic mental health crisis that demands immediate legislative action.
Maurine Molak, co-founder of ParentsSOS, an initiative of 20 families advocating for KOSA who all signed the letter, said “While we appreciated seeing the CEOs squirm in the hot seat, pointed questions from Congress and forced apologies won’t save children’s lives -- but the Kids Online Safety Act will. Parents understand better than anyone that these platforms prioritize profits over safety and are done listening to Big Tech’s empty promises and evasions as children die from preventable causes. We need Congress to create guardrails on social media to ensure no other families suffer the tragedy of losing their children to corporate greed.”
Josh Golin, executive director of non-profit advocacy organization Fairplay and co-founder of ParentsSOS said, “The Kids Online Safety Act is the only legislation that would address the wide-range of serious and even fatal harms that young people experience on the Internet and force social media companies to change their toxic business model. With nearly 50 bipartisan cosponsors, we are confident it would sail through a floor vote in the Senate. We urge Senator Schumer to stand with these courageous families and advance KOSA.”
Additional organizations supporting the letter include: Accountable Tech; American Psychological Association; Center for Digital Democracy; Common Sense Media; Design it for Us; Eating Disorders Coalition; Issue One; Mental Health America; National Center for Sexual Exploitation; Parents Together Action; SAVE; The Tech Oversign Project and Wired Human.
