The broadly bipartisan effort also showcases the pressure ratcheting up on party leaders by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who are demanding Congress act to protect children, after years of watching similar efforts dither.
Freshman senator Katie Britt, an Alabama Republican, ran as “a momma on a mission” and says this is a personal issue to her and the others. “Bringing the issues that we talk about as parents in the home, with our friends, [that] we watch unfold before us in our schools and our communities—that’s what we’re here to do, is to bring that voice, the voice of parents,” Britt says.
As to whether their measure could stifle the next generation of tech entrepreneurs, Britt says the opposite is the case. “That’s what we’re fighting for,” Britt says. “You want our kids to be healthy and prepared to achieve their American dream.”
Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton is the other Republican author. On the Democratic side, Senator Murphy of Connecticut is joined by Brian Schatz of Hawaii as a lead sponsor. All four are young, in Senate terms at least, and all have young children.
While all the major Silicon Valley social media firms, from Instagram to TikTok, say they block children from using their apps, these senators say those efforts have failed.
“It’s not working,” Schatz says.“There’s no free speech right to be jammed with an algorithm that makes you upset, and these algorithms are making us increasingly polarized and disparaging and depressed and angry at each other. And it’s bad enough that it’s happening to all of us adults, the least we can do is protect our kids.”
While the measure’s sponsored by progressive Democrats and one of the most ardent conservatives in the Senate, lawmakers from across the ideological spectrum are equally skeptical of the proposal, showing the difficult road ahead for passing any new media measure, including those aimed at children. Many lawmakers are torn between protecting kids online and preserving the robust internet as we know it. Naturally, most senators are looking at their own families for guidance.
“My grandkids have flip phones. They don’t have smartphones until they get older,” Senator Mitt Romney, a Utah Republican, says. Romney—who’s open to the idea, if initially dubious—says there’s not even uniformity in his own family on these issues.
“I have five sons, so there are five different families and they do have different approaches,” Romney says. “And the youngest son is the one that’s most strict, and the oldest son didn’t really think of it as being such a big deal.”
For Smith, the Minnesota senator worried about her party coming across as Big Sister, there wasn’t even uniformity in her own household when her boys were fighting over the family’s first desktop computer ages ago. And her kids also proved to be (mini) hackers.
“We were trying to figure out how to monitor their interactions with the computer, and we quickly figured out that, at least for them, it was hard to put hard and fast rules, because kids find a way,” Smith says. “And different parents have different rules for what they think is the right thing for their kids.”
