U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) met with high school teachers in New Haven on Monday to talk about how social media has affected their students.
Rose Murphy, an English and journalism teacher at Hill Regional Career High School, described the content her students see online. She said she didn’t think she would be surprised by what they told her, but she was.
“People being killed, people being assaulted, people's bodies being exposed online for revenge or for retaliation, fights; locally and from all over the place, being exposed,” Murphy said.
Blumenthal met with the group to inform his legislation: the Kids Online Safety Act.
Blumenthal and Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) proposed the bill in 2022 and reintroduced it last year. It would force companies to disclose their algorithmic practices, stop advertising things like tobacco and gambling to kids, and introduce measures to protect the data of minors, among other things.
Blumenthal said it would support teachers and parents in the fight against addictive algorithms and toxic content.
“The government simply has to impose a duty on social media, because right now they're saying, ‘well, it's on the parents, it's on the parents, it's their responsibility,’” Blumenthal said. “Well, I'm a parent, I feel that responsibility. But I need some help.”
Despite general support for the legislation among the eight teachers in attendance, some raised concerns that too much government oversight of tech companies and internet use could hurt kids who have questions that they aren't comfortable asking their parents about.
“Not all technology's bad,” Mia Comulada Breuler, a counselor at Wilbur Cross High School, said. “And I want my children to be able to find certain information, especially if they can't access it via their parents, or they're embarrassed to look it up. So I'm thinking in pockets too, like, for a student who is LGBTQIA+, I don't want that censored, so they can't go find information that's healthy, and that they need, and that's affirming to them.”
Blumenthal assured her that there was no need to worry about censoring such content.
“There's a lot of positives in terms of connecting communities, and LGBTQ young people can connect with others,” Blumenthal said. “So there's no goal here of censoring or blocking content, we're not going to say that certain kinds of positions can't be shown. And we define very narrowly what the harms are that the duty of care applies to.”
Last week, Blumenthal participated in a Senate hearing with CEOs from big tech companies, including TikTok, Meta and X, formerly Twitter.
The meeting was attended by parents, many of whom had lost children to suicide caused by cyber bullying.
He said he asked Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg about why his company didn’t put more money into protecting kids.
“He had no response other than to say in his testimony, ‘we're spending money, we're adding features’ and so forth,” Blumenthal said. “But as I said to him, it's not working. Nobody can trust you.”
Blumenthal said he hopes to vote on the Kids Online Safety Act in the Senate in the coming weeks. It’s co-sponsored by half of the Senate, by senators from both sides of the aisle.
