Washington, Oct. 26 (BUS): In the face of hugely popular social media platforms and their impact on children, Senate leaders have called on CEOs from YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat to address questions about what their companies are doing to ensure youth. safety of users.
The Senate’s Commercial Subcommittee on Consumer Protection is talking about a highly charged hearing with a former Facebook data scientist, who put together internal research for the company.The company’s Instagram photo-sharing service appears to be doing serious damage to some teens.
The panel is expanding its focus to examine other tech platforms, with millions or billions of users, that are also vying for the attention and loyalty of young people, The Associated Press (AP) reports.
The three CEOs – Michael Beckerman, Vice President of TikTok and Head of Public Policy for the Americas; Leslie Miller, Vice President of Government and Public Policy Owner of YouTube Google; and Jennifer Stout, Vice President of Global Public Policy, Snap Inc. Mother Snap Inc. They are scheduled to appear at a subcommittee hearing on Tuesday.
The three platforms are woven into the fabric of young people’s lives, often influencing their dress, dance movements and diet, possibly amounting to an obsession. Peer pressure for applications is strong. Lawmakers say social media can provide entertainment and education, but the platforms have been misused to harm children and promote bullying, school vandalism, eating disorders and fraudulent marketing.
“We need to understand the impact of popular platforms like Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube on children and what companies can do best to keep them safe,” Senator Richard Blumenthal, chair of the subcommittee, said in a statement.
Blumenthal says the commission wants to find out how algorithms and product designs can amplify harm to children, foster addiction and intrude privacy. The goal is to develop youth protection legislation and to give parents tools to protect their children.
The video platform TikTok, which is very popular among teenagers and young children, is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. In just five years since its launch, it has gained an estimated 1 billion monthly users.
TikTok denies allegations, most notably from conservative Republican lawmakers, that it operates at the behest of the Chinese government and provides it with users’ personal data. The company says it stores all TikTok US data in the United States. The company also rejects criticism of promoting harmful content to children.
TikTok says it has tools, like screen time management, to help young people and parents adjust how long kids spend in the app and what they see. The company says it’s focusing on age-appropriate experiences, noting that some features, such as direct messaging, aren’t available to younger users.
Early this year after federal regulators ordered TikTok to disclose how its practices affect children and teens, the platform toughened its privacy practices for those under 18.
A separate committee in the House of Representatives investigated the video service YouTube Kids this year. Lawmakers said the YouTube branch was feeding children inappropriate material in a “wasteland of spoiled consumer content” so it could serve them ads. The app, with both video hosting and original offerings, is available in about 70 countries.
A committee of the House Oversight and Reform Committee has told YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki that the service is not doing enough to protect children from potentially harmful material. The committee chair said in a letter to Wojcicki that it instead relies on artificial intelligence and self-censorship by content creators to determine which videos are shown on the platform.
Parent company Google agreed to pay $170 million in 2019 settlements with the Federal Trade Commission and New York State over allegations that YouTube collected personal data on children without their parents’ consent.
The lawmaker’s letter said that despite the changes made after the settlements, YouTube Kids still showed ads to children.
YouTube says it has worked to provide protections for children and families and parental controls such as time limits, to limit viewing to age-appropriate content. He maintains that the 2019 settlements included the YouTube core platform, not the kids’ version.
“We took action on more than 7 million accounts in the first three quarters of 2021 when we learned they might be owned by a user under the age of 13 — 3 million of those in the third quarter alone — as we ramped up our automatic removal efforts,” Miller says, Vice President of Google, in written testimony prepared for the hearing.
The Snapchat service from Snap Inc. People send pictures, videos and messages that are supposed to disappear quickly, which is a temptation for its young users who seek to avoid intrusion by parents and teachers. Hence its faceless (and wordless) white “Ghostface Chillah” logo.
Snapchat, which is just 10 years old, says 90% of 13-24 year olds in the US use the service. It reported 306 million daily users in the July-September quarter.
The company agreed in 2014 to settle allegations by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that it deceived users about how effectively the shared material disappeared and that it collected users’ contacts without telling them or asking for permission. The organizers said the messages, known as “snaps,” can be saved using third-party apps or other methods.
Snapchat was not fined but agreed to create a privacy program to be monitored by an outside expert for the next 20 years — similar to the censorship imposed on Facebook, Google and Myspace in the privacy settlement of recent years.
RAE