-9999

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mrs. BLACKBURN. Mr. President, the dangers children encounter when they go online have increased exponentially since social media platforms took over our lives. Just a few years ago, cyber bullying dominated our conversations about kids and the virtual world. Now those cyber bullies are joined by drug dealers, sex traffickers, pedophiles, and influencers who glorify mental illness, eating disorders, and self- harm.

Last week, the Biden administration decided to pay some attention to this pressing issue. While I am glad to see the White House get behind us on this issue, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that they are far behind.

Over the past 2\1/2\ years, the Senate has dedicated an incredible amount of time and energy to investigating the harm these threats have inflicted on young people. When Senator Blumenthal and I led the Commerce Committee's Consumer Protection Subcommittee, we hosted five separate hearings investigating the inherent dangers children encounter online. The Judiciary Committee hosted a sixth this past February. During those hearings, we produced more than 500 pages of testimony. This is just the testimony from witnesses who have come before us in those hearings.

In addition to this testimony, we have collected hundreds more pages of evidence illustrating the devastating impact Big Tech has had on the lives of children and teens. We also found proof that these online companies knew they had lost control of their platforms, and still, even knowing it, still they made the affirmative choice to not protect their users. They did this knowing children were at risk.

On top of that are the additional hours we spent talking to parents who tried to protect their children. We also independently confirmed just how easy it is for predators to target young people with dangerous content.

I would implore my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to confront what is in these pages of testimony. Familiarize yourself with what we heard during these hearings and in conversations--heartbreaking conversations--with families and stakeholders. As you do, remember that the examples we discussed in committee weren't just available for children to access; in many cases, there was no hiding from it, which seems unbelievable until you actually speak to young people about how pervasive this harmful content and many times illegal content is. This is why Senator Blumenthal and I spent time talking to kids and teens about their firsthand experiences with dangerous content.

The Presiding Officer knows this issue well. He has worked on kids' online privacy. He did that when he was in the House, and he has done it in the Senate. So he knows the importance of the steps we have taken not to limit the conversation just to grownups but to talk to teens and children, and that is what we have done. No one has a better understanding of what is happening to teens online than teenagers.

So we invited them into the room and asked them: What can we do to be helpful?

What they told us that they needed was something that is more proactive and more enforceable than what the Biden administration has chosen to offer.

According to the White House's announcement, HHS and the Commerce Department will lead an interagency Task Force on Kids Online Health and Safety. Their job will be to identify harms to minors from online platforms and then develop voluntary guidance, policy recommendations, and a toolkit for industry.

That sounds awfully familiar, doesn't it? We have been doing that here in the Senate for more than 2 years. Yet the White House wants to start from scratch. What is the point in that? We know what the harms are. The harms have been articulated.

We also know that voluntary guidance will do nothing to make online platforms safer. We tried that kinder, gentler method, and it failed. It does not work. Social media platforms have proven to us that they are incapable of self-regulation. Why is that? Because, when our children are online, our children are the product. They are data mining our children. They are selling that data to the highest bidder.

The second item I want to highlight is a good development but one that will complement rather than replace work we have already done here in the Senate.

According to the White House's announcement, DHS and the Justice Department will work with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to create combined image repositories to help identify victims of online trafficking and sexual abuse. This is promising because it puts law enforcement on the frontlines. That is an important distinction, but this effort needs our support, which means staying the course on existing legislation to bolster both law enforcement and NCMEC's legal authorities.

On that front, this week, the Judiciary Committee will consider the REPORT Act. It is a piece of bipartisan legislation I sponsored with Senator Ossoff that will require online companies and social media platforms to report known instances of child sex trafficking or enticement on their platforms. It will also substantially increase the fines imposed for failure to report this abuse to NCMEC.

Importantly, the REPORT Act also includes another one of my bills, the END Child Exploitation Act, which requires online platforms to preserve reports to NCMEC's cyber tip line for a period of 1 year. By extending this retention period, we can ensure that law enforcement has enough time to access evidence and to prosecute these crimes.

This bill will also make it easier for NCMEC to transfer these cyber tip line reports to law enforcement, which will, in turn, help law enforcement prosecute cases faster and put more offenders behind bars-- no more excuses.

You know, it is so interesting. I have talked to Tennesseans, and they thought this would already be the law--that these social media platforms would have to report these sex traffickers, these pedophiles, these drug dealers, these child sexual abuse images, and things that were online. They are surprised that they don't and that they don't take them down. So no more executives coming up here to the Hill to give us excuses for why they are not able to do this and complaining about how hard it is to tackle criminal perversion on their platforms-- they need to get busy with this.

The policies laid out in the REPORT Act are critical to helping Silicon Valley and law enforcement stop predators. As I said, they ought to be the first ones to stand up and say: We have got some bad actors over here. We are going to take them down.

There should be bipartisan agreement on this. Everybody should say: Let's do this, and let's do it now.

I know I can't be the only person in this Chamber who is wondering why these big tech companies haven't kept their own promises to make the online world safer for kids and for teens.

The White House's plan for voluntary guidelines and toolkits gives these companies far too much credit. As I said, they have proven to us they are incapable of self-governance.

Why are they incapable? Because they need the eyeballs of our kids on their sites for longer stretches of time. That means the data is richer. That means they sell that data. They are putting profit before the safety of our children. Go talk to these parents who have lost their kids. Go listen to these teens who are recovering from social media addiction.

This is why, earlier this year, Senator Blumenthal and I reintroduced the Kids Online Safety Act. It has 34 bipartisan cosponsors and the endorsement of more than 200 bipartisan organizations.

First, it would force platforms to give families the ability to protect minors' information, disable addictive product features, and opt out of algorithmic recommendations. Next, it would give parents the safeguards needed to protect their children's online experiences as well as to provide a dedicated channel to report harmful behavior. Those are things that currently do not exist.

Most parents are shocked when they go onto these platforms, and when they are trying to report cyber bullying, they don't hear a word back from the platform or, maybe months later, they get an email that says: This content does not violate our community standards.

How disgusting.

Many of these parents know what is going on, and they are trying to help. They know what their kids are seeing, and they know predatory content. Content that promotes self-harm, suicide, eating disorders to minors will now, indeed, be a problem for these platforms to deal with when we pass the Kids Online Safety Act.

Parents are tired of the denial, the deflection, and the disrespect that is shown to them and their children by these social media platforms. Our kids deserve better than what these platforms and big tech companies are dishing out to them. They deserve protection on these sites.

As the Presiding Officer well knows, there are things that are illegal in the physical space but that are allowed in the virtual space on these platforms, and these platforms do nothing--nothing--to take this down.

In addition to making it difficult for these social media platforms to skirt the provisions of KOSA, we are requiring in that legislation a requirement for an annual risk assessment and access to data sets we can use to access and assess safety threats to underage users. It is time to make certain that safety is there, that it is safety by default, safety by design for our children.

Both the REPORT Act and the Kids Online Safety Act have earned the enthusiastic support of bipartisan policymakers, advocates, medical professionals, tech experts, and families from across the country. It is time we pass this legislation.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source