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FTC Report Shows Profit-Hungry Tech Giants 'Harmful to Children and Teens'
"Online platforms use sophisticated and opaque techniques of data collection that endanger young people and put their healthy development at risk," said one children's advocate.
Sep 19, 2024
Child welfare advocates renewed calls for U.S. lawmakers to pass a pair of controversial bills aimed at protecting youth from Big Tech's "dangerous and unacceptable business practices" after the Federal Trade Commission published a report Thursday detailing how social media and streaming companies endanger children and teens who use their platforms.
The FTC staff report—entitled A Look Behind the Screens: Examining the Data Practices of Social Media and Video Streaming Services—"shows how the tech industry's monetization of personal data has created a market for commercial surveillance, especially via social media and video streaming services, with inadequate guardrails to protect consumers."
The agency staff examined the practices of Meta platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp; YouTube; X, formerly known as Twitter; Snapchat; Reddit; Discord; Amazon, which owns the gaming site Twitch; and ByteDance, the owner of TikTok.
"The report finds that these companies engaged in mass data collection of their users and—in some cases—nonusers," Bureau of Consumer Protection Director Samuel Levine said in the paper. "It reveals that many companies failed to implement adequate safeguards against privacy risks. It sheds light on how companies used our personal data, from serving hypergranular targeted advertisements to powering algorithms that shape the content we see, often with the goal of keeping us hooked on using the service."
The publication "also finds that these practices pose unique risks to children and teens, with the companies having done little to respond effectively to the documented concerns that policymakers, psychologists, and parents have expressed over young people's physical and mental well-being."
FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a statement that "the report lays out how social media and video streaming companies harvest an enormous amount of Americans' personal data and monetize it to the tune of billions of dollars a year."
"While lucrative for the companies, these surveillance practices can endanger people's privacy, threaten their freedoms, and expose them to a host of harms, from identify theft to stalking," she added.
Researchers at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard University published an analysis last December that revealed social media companies made nearly $11 billion in 2022 advertising revenue from U.S.-based users younger than 18.
According to the FTC report:
While the use of social media and digital technology can provide many positive opportunities for self-directed learning, forming community, and reducing isolation, it also has been associated with harms to physical and mental health, including through exposure to bullying, online harassment, child sexual exploitation, and exposure to content that may exacerbate mental health issues, such as the promotion of eating disorders, among other things.
The publication also flags "algorithms that may prioritize certain forms of harmful content, such as dangerous online challenges."
The report accuses social media companies of "willful blindness around child users" by claiming that there are no children on their platforms because their sites do not allow them to create accounts. This may constitute an attempt by the companies to avoid legal liability under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act Rule (COPPA). Last December, Khan
proposed sweeping changes to COPPA to address the issue.
Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay—a nonprofit organization "committed to helping children thrive in an increasingly commercialized, screen-obsessed culture"—said in a statement that "this report from the FTC is yet more proof that Big Tech's business model is harmful to children and teens."
"Online platforms use sophisticated and opaque techniques of data collection that endanger young people and put their healthy development at risk," Golin added. "We thank the FTC for listening to the concerns raised by Fairplay and a coalition of advocacy groups, and we call on Congress to pass COPPA 2.0, the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act, and KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act, to better safeguard our children from these companies' dangerous and unacceptable business practices."
On Wednesday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted to advance COPPA 2.0 and KOSA, both of which were overwhelmingly passed by the Senate in July.
However, rights groups including the ACLU condemned KOSA, which the civil liberties organization warned "would violate the First Amendment by enabling the federal government to dictate what information people can access online and encourage social media platforms to censor protected speech."
In May 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued an advisory on "the growing concerns about the effects of social media on youth mental health."
The White House simultaneously announced the creation of a federal task force "to advance the health, safety, and privacy of minors online with particular attention to preventing and mitigating the adverse health effects of online platforms."
Murthy has also called for tobacco-like warning labels on social media to address the platform's possible harms to children and teens.
According to a study published in January by the corporate power watchdog Ekō, in just one week that month there were more than 33 million posts on TikTok and Meta-owned Instagram "under hashtags housing problematic content directed at young users," including suicide, eating disorders, skin-whitening, and so-called "involuntary celibacy."
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The House Must Reject the Senate’s KOSA Internet Censorship Bill
The members of Congress who vote for this bill should remember—they do not, and will not, control who will be in charge of punishing bad internet speech.
Aug 01, 2024
The Senate just passed a bill that will let the federal and state governments investigate and sue websites that they claim cause kids mental distress. It’s a terrible idea to let politicians and bureaucrats decide what people should read and view online, but the Senate passed KOSA on a 91-3 vote.
Bill proponents have focused on some truly tragic stories of loss, and then tied these tragedies to the internet. But anxiety, eating disorders, drug abuse, gambling, tobacco and alcohol use by minors, and the host of other ills that KOSA purports to address all existed well before the internet.
The Senate vote means that the House could take up and vote on this bill at any time. The House could also choose to debate its own, similarly flawed, version of KOSA. Several members of the House have expressed concerns about the bill.
The vast majority of speech that KOSA affects is constitutionally protected in the U.S., which is why there is a long list of reasons that KOSA is unconstitutional.
The members of Congress who vote for this bill should remember—they do not, and will not, control who will be in charge of punishing bad internet speech. The Federal Trade Commission, majority-controlled by the president’s party, will be able to decide what kind of content “harms” minors, then investigate or file lawsuits against websites that host that content.
Politicians in both parties have sought to control various types of internet content. One bill sponsor has said that widely used educational materials that teach about the history of racism in the U.S. causes depression in kids. Kids speaking out about mental health challenges or trying to help friends with addiction are likely to be treated the same as those promoting addictive or self-harming behaviors, and will be kicked offline. Minors engaging in activism or even discussing the news could be shut down, since the grounds for suing websites expand to conditions like “anxiety.”
KOSA will lead to people who make online content about sex education, and LGBTQ+ identity and health, being persecuted and shut down as well. Views on how, or if, these subjects should be broached vary widely across U.S. communities. All it will take is one member of the Federal Trade Commission seeking to score political points, or a state attorney general seeking to ensure re-election, to start going after the online speech his or her constituents don’t like.
All of these speech burdens will affect adults, too. Adults simply won’t find the content that was mass-deleted in the name of avoiding KOSA-inspired lawsuits; and we’ll all be burdened by websites and apps that install ID checks, age gates, and invasive (and poorly functioning) software content filters.
The vast majority of speech that KOSA affects is constitutionally protected in the U.S., which is why there is a long list of reasons that KOSA is unconstitutional. Unfortunately, the lawmakers voting for this bill have hand-waved away those concerns. They’ve also blown off the voices of millions of young people who will have their free expression constricted by this bill, including the thousands who spoke to EFF directly about their concerns and fears around KOSA.
We can’t rely solely on lawsuits and courts to protect us from the growing wave of anti-speech internet legislation, with KOSA at its forefront. We need to let the people making the laws know that the public is becoming aware of their censorship plans—and won’t stand for them.
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Digital Rights Groups Launch Week of Action Against 'Bad Internet Bills'
The coalition is "demanding that Congress focus on passing badly needed comprehensive privacy legislation to actually protect us from the harms of Big Tech companies and data brokers."
Jul 20, 2023
A coalition of digital rights groups is sounding the alarm as U.S. lawmakers try "to push through a swarm of harmful internet bills that would severely impact human rights, expand surveillance, and enable censorship" online by launching a week of action Thursday to demand Congress pass comprehensive data privacy legislation instead.
Groups including Fight for the Future, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and the ACLU kicked off the weeklong campaign against #BadInternetBills with a call to action for activists and a vow to "get loud about our opposition" to five bills and "demanding that Congress focus on passing badly needed comprehensive privacy legislation to actually protect us from the harms of Big Tech companies and data brokers, instead of pushing through misguided legislation before August congressional recess."
During the week of action, participants will "drive emails and phone calls to legislators and urge influencers and online communities to speak out against misguided legislation," including:
- The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which gives state attorneys general the power to censor speech related to LGBTQ+ issues and abortion rights;
- The Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (EARN IT) Act which threatens the availability of end-to-end encryption, and opens the doors to widespread censorship;
- Strengthening Transparency and Obligation to Protect Children Suffering from Abuse and Mistreatment (STOP CSAM) Act, which fails to address the scourge of online child exploitation, while threatening encryption, much like the EARN IT Act would;
- The Cooper Davis Act, which would punish communications providers that encrypt your communications and co-opts those companies for increased government surveillance of marginalized communities; and
- The Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology (RESTRICT) Act, a measure to grant the government extraordinary power to censor apps.
Fight for the Future President Evan Greer argued on Twitter that "KOSA will lead to MORE harm online, not less," adding that the proposed legislation "should be permanently shelved so that Congress can focus on actual solutions to Big Tech's harms, like passing data privacy and antitrust legislation, algorithmic transparency, studying the failure of SESTA/FOSTA, etc."
Opponents say the 2018 law known as SESTA/FOSTA has forced sex workers—both voluntary and trafficked—"offline and into harm's way," according to a May plea from more than 100 groups warning of the privacy and other risks of the EARN IT Act.
Congress is under pressure to pass these bill by some children’s rights and health groups. The ACLU warned on its website that the "EARN IT and STOP CSAM Acts may sound well-intentioned, as they claim to protect children from sexual exploitation, but their impact on free expression and online privacy would be devastating."
"Let's be clear: These bills would create a clear avenue to remove important, protected speech from the internet, and our ability to communicate without the government seeing," the group stressed.
"These bills also create an outsized risk that any user-posted speech with even vague ties to sex and sexuality, including speech on reproductive, sex worker, and LGBTQ+ rights will be removed," the ACLU added.
EFF argued: "The Cooper Davis Act would turn some of the most popular online platforms into Drug Enforcement Administration informants. The content-scanning tools that would likely be used have large error rates, and would sweep up innocent conversations, including discussions about past drug use or treatment."
"This bill contains no warrant requirement, no required notice, and limited user protections, and deserves to be defeated on the Senate floor," the organization added.
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