The Biden Administration’s Kids Online Health and Safety Task Force released a report on July 22 identifying key risks and benefits of online platforms and digital technologies to young people’s health, safety and privacy.
The document, “Online Health and Safety for Children and Youth: Best Practices for Families and Guidance for Industry,” also provides best practices for families, recommendations for companies, and a research agenda to support further study into the impacts that online platforms like social media have on the well-being of children. The report also calls for the passage of bipartisan federal legislation and requiring access to platform data for independent researchers in ways that will preserve user privacy.
“While online platforms facilitate social connection and learning, they also pose a range of harms. Children and youth, particularly Black, Brown, and LGBTQIA+ youth, face harassment, cyberbullying, exposure to harmful content, and sexual exploitation and abuse at disproportionate rates,” according to a press release. “Nearly half of teens have experienced some form of cyberbullying, including harassment and image-based sexual abuse — which has skyrocketed in recent years with the advent of AI and disproportionately impacts girls.”
In the United States, 95 percent of teenagers use social media, and nearly a third report using social media “almost constantly.” Simultaneously, the number of children and young adults with anxiety and depression has risen nearly 30 percent in recent years. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly three in five teen girls reported feeling persistently sad or hopeless in 2021, and one in three had seriously considered suicide.
In June, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy called social media platforms an “important contributor” to the nation’s worsening teen mental health crisis.
The latest report includes 10 practices that online service providers should take to develop platforms with youth well-being in mind, including:
- Designing age-appropriate experiences for youth users
- Making privacy protections for youth the default
- Reducing and removing features that encourage excessive or problematic use by youth
- Limiting “likes” and social comparison features for youth by default
- Developing and deploying mechanisms and strategies to counter child sexual exploitation and abuse
For families, recommendations include:
- Building a family media plan that can help to manage expectations and create an agreement across all members of a family or household about media use
- Balancing time with and without devices
- Talking about social media
Additional recommendations and guidance are sorted by a child’s age range (children 10 and younger, tweens and teens).
Next steps outlined for policymakers include:
- Calling for Congress to enact federal legislation to protect youth health, safety and privacy online
- Advancing industry action to implement age-appropriate health, safety and privacy best practices on online platforms
- Promoting youth voices in solution setting
- Engaging in international efforts to collaborate on online safety
“Digital technology is ubiquitous in the lives of children and youth. Their interactions with the digital landscape are embedded in a complex system involving peers, parents, schools, and the larger world. In addition, technology and digital media are changing rapidly. The ways in which youth engage with these media today may not be the way they will engage a year from now,” the report concludes. “Thus, addressing health, safety, and privacy concerns for youth online must involve an on-going, whole-of-society approach in which industry, parents and caregivers, schools, health providers, other community-based organizations, and policymakers play their roles, informed by insights from a robust research community, and from engaging with youth voices.”
