When gardening with my mom, I was taught not to just pull off the leaves of a weed but to dig in and rip out the roots. Otherwise, the weed will keep growing and pollute the rest of the flowerbed. In the same way, if policymakers are concerned with kids’ online activity, then they should go to the roots of the kids’ internet ecosystem.
On Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a headline-grabbing hearing on protecting children online. This is a pertinent question with so many concerned about the experience of children on a given online platform. The hearing has generated some excitement, with outlets publishing stories highlighting how various tech CEOs from several vital companies will be testifying.
Unfortunately, based on who is and who is not attending, it is clear this spectacle will be more bark than bite. This reality is unfortunate and avoidable.
According to a release from Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, the Judiciary Committee chair, this hearing will feature CEO’s of Meta, X, TikTok, Snap and Discord. While the presence of these has certainly generated some clicks for Durbin, the bigger news is who is missing from the hearing. Apple and Google will not be at the hearing, even though those companies are the gatekeepers who shape what online experiences have or do not have.
Without Apple and Google present, Congress is ignoring the root of the problem. The absence of these two companies is conspicuous and disheartening. These companies respectively run the app stores that control all smartphone access to platforms and programs.
Their absence should concern anyone interested in protecting kids. It also casts a shadow on the seriousness of the hearing. How can Judiciary Committee members claim they are committed to protecting children online when they have omitted the two most prominent players from scrutiny and analysis?
For Google, it isn’t that it owns an app store but also YouTube, the number-one streaming platform in the world and a platform more kids use. In fact, a recent Gallup study found that teens, on average, spend almost two hours daily on YouTube.
According to Pew, 93 percent of surveyed teens say they use YouTube, compared to 59 percent who use Instagram. Anyone with a kid knows that through a simple search, their child could be exposed to everything and anything, good or bad.
This amount of time on YouTube is compounded by another study published by the Institute for Family Studies, which concluded that of the various platforms used by kids, “mental health problems were only associated with YouTube and TikTok.”
This connection should be notable to legislators. When the most popular app and potentially most harmful isn’t even featured, it’s really a missed opportunity.
With so much focus by state and federal policymakers on initiatives to improve age verification practices, there is an opportunity to take a more holistic practice. Considering how much debate there is about access via the smartphones favored by kids, it would make sense to look at this means of connection. Specifically, looking at the app store instead of taking a “wack-a-mole” approach going to one app or site at a time.
In a recent Newsweek column, Adam Candueub and Clare Morrel make this point: “Apple and Google could verify user age on the device once and the device verification could be integrated with social media platforms and other apps or websites with age thresholds, with the added benefit of increased protection of user privacy.”
Likewise, Kara Frederick of the Heritage Foundation and Joel Thayer of the Digital Progress Institute bring attention to the constitutional value of looking at the app stores to pass First Amendment concerns. In a Daily Signal post, they explain that legislative efforts to beef up protections for kids should take a holistic approach to pass judicial muster. Frederick and Thayer point out that “Apple and Google provide parents several tools to shield kids from certain apps and wondered why the state needed to go through social media platforms to do what the app stores ought to.”
The Senate hearing featuring some tech CEOs will create headlines and soundbites, but in many ways, the CEOs who are not there will be far more deafening of an omission. Not including key players in the ecosystem is just ignoring an opportunity for a better solution.
It is unclear if this decision was made because of influential lobbyists from Google and Apple to evade scrutiny or just an oversight by the committee, but there is still time to right the wrong and bring them in to join the conversation.
Nathan Leamer is executive director of the Digital First Project.
