Dear Senator Wicker:

We appreciate your dedicated and effective work to protect America’s children by helping to advance the Kids Online Safety Act (S.3663) to unanimous passage through your Committee.

We are particularly grateful for the leadership you and Senator Marsha Blackburn showed in advocating for children’s online safety as a non-partisan issue that should be a Committee priority. Bipartisan collaboration is rarer now than it once was, and when Senators reach across the aisle to build broad support for legislation in the public interest, the nation benefits.

Now, the bill must pass the Senate, and time is short. Given the dangers to children and teenagers posed by a largely unregulated social media environment, we are writing to urge you to do everything you can to help move KOSA to a vote in the Senate before the end of the current session.

This bill will significantly increase the tools families have to protect their children online, and the reporting that digital platforms must do about the dangers and the steps they are taking to mitigate them. In particular, the requirements it imposes on digital platforms related to privacy protection, algorithmic recommendations, and addictive features will materially reduce the risk to children’s health and well-being online.

And, as you know, children and teenagers are particularly vulnerable to emotional manipulation by both individual and corporate users of social channels. Digital media showcases successful people and aspirational lifestyles, and can leave even well-adjusted adults feeling inadequate; internal Facebook research shows how much more damaging those feelings can be for people in their emotionally turbulent teenage years. A third of teen girls polled said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse. And in one poll, 13 percent of teen boys blamed Instagram for making them want to kill themselves.

The problem is acute in your home state: 27,000 Mississippians aged 12-17 have depression. More than two-thirds of young Mississippians with depression, and more than half with major depression -- and an even higher proportion in rural areas -- do not receive any care. That’s because more than half of them who are covered by private health insurance do not have access to mental health benefits -- and because almost two-thirds of Mississippi communities don’t have enough mental health providers to adequately serve their residents. This means that it is critically important for us to reduce factors that exacerbate the negative feelings that lead to depression -- something that KOSA is designed to do.

These young Mississippians are at greater risk of suicide. And although suicide is the 3rd leading cause of death for young Mississippians, they have less access to substance abuse counseling and suicide prevention services than the national average.

Dangerous and damaging content doesn’t end up in young people’s social media feeds by accident; it is placed there deliberately by algorithms designed to maximize pageviews and revenue. Research by Fairplay, a nonprofit that investigates child-oriented marketing, has demonstrated that Instagram’s algorithm has built and maintains a core community of 90,000 members who frequently post and share content that encourages eating disorders -- and that content is followed by over 20 million people. A third of the core community is underage (some as young as 9 years old), and the median age is just 19. This community directly generates almost $2 million a year for Instagram, and the 20 million people who view their content generate more than $200 million a year.

That’s big money. But it pales in comparison to the immense social and economic impact of eating disorders. Just in Mississippi, 262,000 people will suffer from an eating disorder at some point in their life, and every year Mississippians incur a direct economic cost of $600 million as a result of eating disorders, along with a much greater social cost. Digital media companies make these problems worse, with catastrophic consequences for children and families -- and the controls on algorithmic content that would be created by KOSA would directly address them.

Social media companies have demonstrated that their first priority is their own revenue, not the public interest. In 2018 Facebook changed its posting algorithm to deliberately prioritize divisive and provocative content, because anger and discord drives pageviews -- and their revenue shot up. But this also encouraged promoters to post more of this content, leading to an ever more toxic environment with serious negative social consequences, including for young people. Facebook’s own employees have identified hundreds of instances of dangerous, criminal, and violent content, including content related to human trafficking and child abuse. But Facebook, and companies like it, do far too little in response. Their own research shows the scale of the danger, yet time and again they stall, delay, and decline to take action to protect children and families.

KOSA will bring meaningful reform. It will impose restrictions on the social platforms that limit the ways in which they can use dangerous content to manipulate underage users for revenue. And it will lead to tracking and reporting that will define the extent of the problem and hold them accountable for change. We urge you to help bring KOSA to a vote during the current session. Given its unanimous bipartisan passage through your Committee, it has a very high chance of passing on the floor, and we must not squander this opportunity to bring about genuine safety improvements in young Americans’ online environment.

Thank you for your attention to this important matter.