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Floor Speech
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Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Read the bill.
If you read the bill, you will see, for example, there is no empowering of attorneys general to enforce this measure; there is no vagueness in these provisions. They were crafted narrowly to target specific evils--real evils--that destroy lives.
And if he thinks that this bill, as he has termed it, is ``crazy'' and ``bizarre,'' he should tell the parents and the young people who have come to us over these past years--to Senator Blackburn and myself--with harrowing stories of the destructive harm to their children's lives, and young people telling us about those harms to their own lives.
The principle of this bill is very simple: It does not empower those unelected bureaucrats--which, again, unfortunately, our colleague from Kentucky has misread. It empowers young people and parents. It gives them choices. It enables them to take back control over their own lives. It enables the strongest settings of safety by default. It requires companies to disable product features that are destructive. It gives young people and parents tools to opt out, to choose not to be a part of algorithm recommendations that fuel destructive mental health harms. It gives them safeguards to shield themselves against online predators and options to protect their own information.
Young people and parents deserve these kinds of choices to make on their own. That is the principle of the bill.
And so this mischaracterization is regrettable, but I know that my colleagues are going to see through it--they are going to see that this bill is very specific, not vague; narrowly targeted, not broad--to protect children and give parents and kids choices that enable them to take back control over their own lives.
And let me just say, there is no censorship in this bill--none, zero. It is about product design, much as it would be about a car that is unsafe and is required to have seatbelts and airbags.
We wouldn't credit an argument by a car manufacturer that somehow it is a First Amendment right of expression to eliminate those car seats and airbags that protect lives. It would be ludicrous. It would be laughable, and so are these objections that have been made by my colleague from Kentucky.
I am proud of the work that we have done on a bipartisan basis over these years. This bill is the result of bipartisan, careful, methodical, time-consuming work by Senator Blackburn and myself listening to those parents and young people but also--and let me be very blunt here--listening to the Big Tech companies. They have come to us, and they have said, in effect: Trust us. Trust us. We will take care of it.
We have seen this movie before. We know how it ends: No action. ``Trust us'' is no longer tolerable, and one reason it is no longer tolerable is we have looked under the hood. We have seen how the car works. We have seen it from their own documents, their own files, their own written product designs. And we have seen their business model, which is repetitive, toxic stuff driven at kids and more eyeballs meaning more advertisers, meaning more dollars if those kids are online for longer periods of time without the choices that we are giving them to disconnect.
We are no longer going to trust Big Tech to do the job. We are determined that we will make this product safer by empowering young people and their parents and creating a duty of care--not vague, not overbroad, but carefully crafted--to make sure that these companies have to prevent the kind of harms that they know are happening.
We know they are happening because the documents show it, and their own evidence, in effect, proves it. And we are not going to trust them anymore to comply with the law; we are going to require audits and transparency, access to the black box algorithms so that they are held accountable.
This bill is a major step toward online safety for children, and I am hopeful that my colleagues will, in fact, see through the inaccuracies in the arguments that have just been made here and that they will join Senator Blackburn and me, as 70 have done in cosponsoring this measure, to say it is time for online safety.
I yield to my colleague from Tennessee, Senator Blackburn, who has been a steadfast and invaluable partner in this effort.
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Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, I just want to add--and I thank Senator Blackburn for her excellent summary and argument--about this reference to social speech: We are dealing here with social media companies. This proposed rule of construction, in effect, would destroy the bill. That is the intent here, and we are not going to let it happen.
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