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Floor Speech

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Mrs. BLACKBURN. Madam President, I know we are waiting for our colleague from Indiana to come to the floor, so as we do, today, we are moving to a cloture vote on the Kids Online Safety Act. This is something Senator Blumenthal and I have worked on over the last 3 years, and we are grateful that we are now to this day. We introduced this bill about 3 years ago, after a series of hearings where it became evident that platforms like Instagram knew they were causing rising rates of eating disorders, mental health issues among teenage girls, and yet they were downplaying these harms.

Since then, we have seen more and more evidence that Big Tech is focused on putting profit over children's safety. Children are the product when they are online. We have seen internal documents from these companies that show they know what they are doing to our kids.

We have worked tirelessly over the last 3 years to get this bill in shape. It will create new tools for parents to identify harmful behavior and to report abuse directly to those social media sites.

It will provide new controls for families to support their children, including to opt out of algorithmic recommendations.

It will require mandatory audits of the social media platforms to ensure that the platforms are mitigating harms to children.

Perhaps most importantly, it will create a duty of care for online platforms to prevent and mitigate specific dangers to minors, including the promotion of suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, and sexual exploitation.

Without real and enforceable reforms, social media companies will only continue to pay lipservice to the issue of protecting children while putting profits over their safety.

I am grateful to my colleague Senator Blumenthal and to Senator Schumer for his leadership in allowing the vote today.

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