Hearings to examine the impact of technology on America's youth.
Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee
2026-01-15
Source: Congress.gov
Summary
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Participants
Transcript
Good morning. Senate Commerce Committee will come to order. It's incredibly hard to be a kid right now. All the parents I know, myself included, are deeply concerned about all the time that kids spend glued to screens, watching and reading insidious content that puts their minds and their bodies at risk. Parents are fighting a constant battle to keep their children safe in a rapidly evolving digital world. For instance, there has been a stunning increase in exploitative, AI-generated, deepfake revenge porn and images of victims, very frequently teenage girls. Thankfully, Congress rose to meet this challenge and passed my and Senator Klobuchar's bill, the Take It Down Act. which makes clear that if you create and spread these heinous images of anyone, you'll face the full force of the law. But there's clearly much more work to be done to protect children online. Given the prevalence of online devices, children are often introduced to screens at a very young age and end up using them for a significant portion of the day. Children ages 8 to 12 now use screens an average of five and a half hours each and every day. For teens, it's even higher, at eight hours and 39 minutes each and every single day. Put another way, more than half of the time that a teenager is awake, he or she is staring at a screen. Parents intuitively know that excessive use of internet-connected devices like smartphones and tablets poses significant physical and mental health risks to children.
Even many kids know it's a problem. Surveys routinely show large numbers of teenagers admit to spending way too much time each day on a smartphone. Kids need time to be kids, to experience the real world, not to get lost in a virtual one. This phone-based childhood, predominantly spent on social media, has been documented to lead to social awkwardness, reduced self-confidence, a more sedentary childhood, fragmented attention, disrupted learning, addiction, and social withdrawal. With the introduction of the smartphone, we've also seen a rise in teen mental health disorders, anxiety, and depression. In 2023, one out of five children had a mental or behavioral problem diagnosis. We've also seen significant increases in child and teen suicide rates. Something is very wrong. And I don't believe it is merely a coincidence as our witnesses will discuss today, that these harms are rising alongside the early and excessive use of screens. Sadly, parents face further challenges in monitoring and limiting their children's screen time, in part because our education system, fueled by federal subsidies and incentives, has increasingly required the use of internet-connected devices in schools. Most students are now assigned laptops or tablets, often without guardrails or parental controls in order to complete their schoolwork. There aren't many parents who think it has become easier to help with schoolwork or to cut down on screen time when schools send their kids home with a personal tablet. There's a role to be sure for technology in the classroom.
But we should discuss whether assigning personal devices to children is actually improving academic outcomes or doing more harm than good. During the Biden administration, not only did congressional Democrats give billions of dollars to the FCC to buy personal internet devices for children, But the Biden FCC sought to bankroll kids' unsupervised internet access and undermine parental rights by expanding the E-rate program to install Wi-Fi hotspots off campus, including in school buses and students' homes. I was proud that the Senate passed my legislation to repeal this program, and I hope that the House lawmakers pass it now and send it to the President's desk. Senator Schatz and I also have advanced the Kids Off Social Media Act, which this committee passed overwhelmingly back in February of last year to help protect kids on social media, the predominant use of a smartphone. Cosmo meets parents where they're at. It's a real struggle to keep your kid offline when you're told that all my friends are on Instagram or TikTok. It's incredibly hard to be the one parent who won't let your kid have a phone or social media account. So Cosma says we're going to hold big tech accountable to their terms of service. Big tech says no one under 13 can set up an account. Cosma makes that the law. No more social media for children and no more addictive algorithms for teenagers. Cosma also gets cell phones out of the classroom. No school getting federal taxpayer dollars would allow kids to access social media in the classroom. I am hopeful that the House will pass this bill, the Senate will pass this bill, and we will send it to the president's desk to become law.
I want to thank the witnesses who are here with us today, and I look forward to this critical discussion about how we can best protect children and empower parents. With that, I recognize Ranking Member Cantwell. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for calling this hearing today, and thank you for the witnesses testifying.
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