How We Helped with the Senate Hearing on Child Safety Online
Hi,
For the past month our community has been sprinting on the subject of child safety, trying to collect all of our communities’ expertise and help the Senate have an effective hearing with tech CEOs on the subject. And I’m very happy to share how much our community showed up!
It is clear that child safety is a huge issue for the public. Our visiting fellows Theodora Skeadas, Arushi Saxena, and David Evan Harris analyzed national and state level tech legislation in the US, and they found that child safety was the number one issue being tackled in tech legislation across the country.
And our community really cares about the issue. Our members include people who have both led and worked on child safety issues inside companies for years, and have unique insights into how these issues manifest on different platforms. I personally remember when I transitioned from Facebook Integrity to Instagram Integrity, saw the typical types of harmful content on Instagram, and thought “Oh, there is an entirely new set of harms happening over here. Shit.”
Apart from the subject matter, which can be disturbing, it has been a joy to see our members come together to help both the Senate and the world better understand the types of harms children can experience online, the ways in which platforms can contribute to and cause those harms, and what solutions would actually help the situation we find ourselves in.
Three of our members and three of our resident fellows went deep and helped us create a full briefing deck for Senate staffers to help them prepare for the hearing and guide their Senator’s statements and line of questioning.
12 of our members and three of our resident fellows helped us publish our blog post about steps that can be taken to better keep children safe online.
Our member Vaishnavi J, former head of youth policy at Meta, did an episode for our Trust in Tech podcast and published an article in Tech Policy Press (Cross posted with us) to help the public prepare for some of the common, but unconstructive, defenses tech companies often bring to hearings.
Our resident fellow Jenn Louie led our watch party for the hearing. It peaked at 20 members watching together and resulted in a 49 page chat log! Watching the hearings with a group of people who can both laugh while playing “drink when…” and bingo as well as get into the nuance of the discussion and what the CEOs’ words actually mean is a genuinely wonderful mix of cathartic, informative, and fun.
We published our analysis of the hearing, digging into the themes of the discussion that happened as well as the important questions and discussions that didn’t.
Over ten of our members helped us prepare our recommended list of questions that Senators send to the tech CEOs as part of the written record for the hearing. These cover the themes we felt could use a deeper discussion than is possible in the limited time of a live hearing. These questions can effectively act as an ad hoc “child safety risk assessment” if they do manage to make it into the record.
All in all, dozens of members shared their expertise and experience to help produce a comprehensive overview of the problem space that also landed at a critical moment for policy makers. And so I would like to extend a huge thank you to all of them! And a big thanks to the II team who built all the spaces for our community to come together and are experts in turning the chaotic frenzy of ideas that is our community into useful output that the world can use.
And I hope you all find our work useful! We are definitely planning on more work in the child safety space, so don’t hesitate to reach out if you have ideas on where we could help.
Cheers,
Jeff
Thank you to Integrity Institute members and policy team for their contributions! For more information about how platforms could better protect child safety online, read the entire collection of our resources here.
