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Floor Speech
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Mr. MARKEY. Mr. President, I rise today in defense of the mental health of children and teenagers in the United States of America.
Our young people today are facing a devastating mental health crisis. I have said these statistics on the floor before, but they bear repeating because they come from the Centers for Disease Control in our country: One in three high school girls in the United States seriously considered suicide in 2021 and at least one in ten high school girls attempted suicide that year; among LGBTQ youth, the number is more like one in five attempted suicide. That is staggering, and it is unacceptable that Big Tech has knowingly contributed to these disturbing numbers.
And let's just move on. Take it from the U.S. Surgeon General who, just a few weeks ago, referred to the young mental health crisis as an ``emergency'' and identified social media as an ``important contributor'' to that crisis.
Over the next week, the U.S. Senate has a chance, finally, to do something about it, to stand up to Big Tech's lobbying machine and put an end to the invasive targeting and tracking of young people online.
Today we have a procedural vote to move ahead on the Kids Online Safety Act, which includes my legislation partnering with Senator Cassidy, the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA 2.0. Our legislation cuts to the heart of this emergency by addressing Big Tech's financial incentives to keep kids and teens addicted to social media and allows kids, parents, and teens to say no to the endless tracking and targeting of young people online in our country, because as long as Big Tech can profit off of young people's addiction, they will find ways to do so.
And our job is to change those incentives, to change Big Tech's business model so that addicting kids and teens does not lead to fatter wallets and larger bonuses for Big Tech executives. The core problem facing children and teens is Big Tech's relentless and unyielding drive to accumulate more and more data on its users.
This data may seem vague and uncertain, but it is anything but vague and uncertain. It is a child's name, a child's email address, a child's location, their height, their weight, their health conditions, their fingerprints and facial scan, their likes, their dislikes, even their sexual orientation and gender identity. Why? Targeted advertising by Big Tech companies.
With more data, the platforms can develop more effective targeted ads; ads that are chosen to match the user's specific age, location, and interests; ads that are displayed at a certain time of day when the algorithm knows a user is most likely to click them; and soon, with the advent of artificial intelligence, perhaps ads that are even generated just for the individual user. That is the promise of AI.
All of this hyperpersonalized advertising requires huge amounts of data on an individual user. Data is the fuel for Big Tech's profit machine, the raw material that sustains Big Tech's business model. The formula is simple: More time on social media means more data to fuel the targeted advertising machine, which means more profits for Big Tech. More addiction equals more data equals more money for Big Tech. Very simple. And they target teenagers and children in our country in the same way that the tobacco industry targeted teenagers and children.
And it is a lot of money.
In 2022, the major Big Tech platforms earned nearly $11 billion from U.S. users under the age of 18--$11 billion. That is 11 billion reasons to build ever more sophisticated data profiles on younger users; 11 billion reasons to develop new addictive features; 11 billion reasons to keep your young people clicking, swiping, and liking all day long.
With the growth of artificial intelligence, Big Tech's appetite for data has never been greater. And that means the privacy of our young people has never been more at risk. The question, then, is how to change Big Tech's incentives to develop platforms that benefit children and teens rather than addict them. And if Big Tech no longer has an incentive to maximize the data collected on a young person, it will lose the incentive to develop ever-changing methods to addict that child or teen in the first place.
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Mr. MARKEY. May I ask for one additional minute?
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Mr. MARKEY. Here is what the bill does. One, it will ban targeted advertising to children and teens. Two, it will create an eraser button to delete children and teens' data. And, three, stop the unnecessary data collection practices of online platforms.
With these updates, the Senate has an opportunity to pass the most comprehensive privacy law for young people in over 25 years and send a message to Big Tech that these days of invading and exploiting young people must come to an end.
We have to stop business as usual. That is what we are going to vote on today, to begin this process procedurally to get it out on the floor of the Senate substantively for an historic vote next week.
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