A Gen Z Perspective on Why We Must Pass the Kids Online Safety Act

Social media holds immense promise to connect us. But to reap the benefits, we need to regulate it first.

Intro from Zach Rausch and Jon Haidt:

One of the goals of this Substack is to share and deepen our understanding of what members of Gen Z actually think about the impact of social media on their generation.

In a previous post, Eli George reviewed the existing literature on Gen Z perspectives on smartphones and social media. He sought out young people who believe that the phone-based childhood has benefited their generation, but found hardly any (if you know of any, please put them in the comments). We have published several other essays from members of Gen Z and connected with many youth-led organizations that formed in response to the harms of social media. Despite repeated invitations for dissenting voices from Gen Z to contact us or contribute to our Substack, we have received zero submissions as of July 1st, 2024. 

In this post, UNC-Chapel Hill student and Young People’s Alliance Co-Founder Sam Hiner argues that we need regulation in order to enjoy the benefits of social media. He advocates for the Kids Online Safety Act, a bipartisan bill now cosponsored by 70 senators. Sam addresses misconceptions about the bill and highlights its endorsements by numerous youth-led organizations. At this point, the main obstacle to the bill’s progress seems to be the lobbying efforts of the social media companies. 

It has become clear that members of Gen Z are ready for change. Social media has caused their generation significant harm, and if we were to listen to their concerns, we would have passed KOSA by now.

– Zach and Jon

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As a young person who has had Instagram since I was 11, I value social media.¹ It has opened up new avenues for education, art, philosophy, and connection that we’ve scarcely been able to classify but will surely be represented in the museums of the future. I hear poetry as powerful as Shakespeare's in 15-second videos recorded in bedrooms. Social media holds immense promise for our generation.

At the same time, I am among the loudest voices advocating for the regulation of social media. I’m a student at UNC-Chapel Hill, but I spend most of my time advocating for lawmakers to regulate social media companies in my role as Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Young People’s Alliance, where we mobilize thousands of students each year to effect change on issues affecting our generation, especially tech and mental health policy.

While social media offers immense promise for greater connection and learning, it has also inflicted significant harm on my generation. Personalized recommendation algorithms often show people content that encourages them to hate themselves and others because outrage and hatred keep people scrolling. Like counts encourage harmful social comparison, leading users to obsess over their image and compare themselves to photoshopped influencers, friends, and altered versions of themselves. Addictive design keeps people online longer than they intend, fostering isolation rather than connection. Almost anyone in my generation will tell you about how they mean to go on social media for 5 minutes, and then, the next thing they know, 3 hours have passed.

We can’t pretend that this is normal. I’ve seen young people in my life become trapped by algorithms that amplify their worst impulses, leading them to dark places like eating disorders and political extremism. 

In this post, I argue that to truly enjoy the benefits of social media, we must first regulate it. The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) will not only protect millions of young people from harmful design features but will give our generation genuine autonomy online. We shouldn’t have to accept the false choice social media companies have given us: social isolation or behavioral addiction. KOSA’s champions have worked with youth advocates, LGBTQ+ groups, and civil liberties groups and have amended the bill based on our feedback to ensure it benefits all young people. We must call out and recognize that the primary force holding this bill back is the social media companies' lobbying efforts. It’s time to pass KOSA.

The Conversation We Need To Have

Calls to regulate social media are more than a parent-driven moral panic. Young people like me know that major platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and others use manipulative design features that significantly harm our mental health. At the same time, we recognize the potential good that these platforms can offer. 

It’s precisely because I believe in the promise of social media that I advocate for regulation. Social media has become my generation's unavoidable and essential public square—for better and worse. Despite social media’s integral role in our social fabric, many of my peers have had to delete their accounts because it’s too addictive or because their feeds are flooded with content that provokes eating disorders and leads to doomscrolling. Many others wish there was no explore page on Instagram but hesitate to leave the app because it would isolate them from their friends who post and DM them.

We should be able to exist on social media and connect with each other without being subjected to manipulative features designed to undermine our autonomy. These features keep us online for longer than we want and force-feed us content designed to provoke emotional reactions that don’t align with who we aspire to be. 

The First Step is The Kids Online Safety Act

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) is a comprehensive bill that promises a brighter future for my generation—one that can reverse our collective descent into social media-fueled insecurity, hatred, and polarization. Introduced in 2022 by Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), KOSA now has bipartisan support from 70 Senators. You can learn more about the bill with these available one-pagers here and here.

KOSA would allow users to opt out of algorithmic recommendations, ensuring that social media companies serve content based on users’ intentional preferences rather than subconscious scrolling patterns. I hope it will be further amended to make this the default setting, as people should not be subjected to manipulative algorithms without their informed consent. 

With KOSA, you will have more control over your feed—such as the option to have a chronological feed that only includes posts from people you follow. As a result, hashtags, search, follows and other explicit indicators of interest would begin to play a greater role in your experience. If you want to see videos of kittens, you can still do that, but you find them directly rather than videos being chosen for you in a feed designed to weaponize those preferences to keep you online.

Furthermore, KOSA would enable a better environment for community building. With more users’ feeds being determined by the accounts they follow rather than an algorithm, users would see more content from the people and institutions that matter to them. KOSA would also help small businesses reach customers because your local mom-and-pop shop is more likely to have a robust community of followers than they are to have an armada of growth hackers on payroll to hack the algorithm.

KOSA is not a Trojan Horse

Some groups criticized KOSA early on, fearing that it would worsen the internet experience for young people. The original bill raised concerns that state Attorneys General could misuse an unclear definition of mental illness to target the promotion of LGBTQ+-related content online. 

At the Young People’s Alliance, we recognized this concern, too. We believe the fight for regulation is part of a broader fight for youth autonomy online. Neither Big Tech companies nor the government should be able to manipulate our online experiences—we should be in control. Online safety should not come at the expense of our freedom and autonomy.

Given our concerns with the early version of KOSA, we wrote a separate bill to protect youth autonomy online. However, in February 2024, KOSA was amended to address our concerns by removing enforcement from state Attorneys General and explicitly adding that KOSA only regulates design features, not online content.

As a result of these changes, seven prominent LGBTQ+ organizations, including GLAAD and the Trevor Project, dropped their opposition. We now support the bill because we believe it will benefit all communities, especially LGBTQ+ youth who find community online and deserve a digital home that doesn’t manipulate them.

These changes would not have happened without the pressure from youth-led and civil liberties organizations and the consistent collaboration from KOSA champions with these groups to create a bill that would protect marginalized communities. 

Conclusion

We should not accept the lies of lobbyists who tell us that any social media regulation would make the internet worse. For us to start grasping the benefits of the internet, we first need to stop companies spending billions of dollars to grab hold of our attention from the time we start puberty.  

With regulation, perhaps Mark Zuckerberg will be remembered for pioneering digital technology to connect people, which had some rough spots but ended up making our world much better. Without regulation, Mark Zuckerberg will be remembered as the person who found out how to turn off our brains and used this power to make us sit in the dark, ignore our dreams, and disconnect from the people we love.

What You Can Do

KOSA could come to a vote as soon as this summer, but it’s at risk of being deprioritized relative to more partisan issues as we approach the 2024 election. You can help make this a priority by calling your Senators. Young people can also join the Design It For Us coalition to get involved in these conversations, and students can contact us to start a Young People’s Alliance chapter at their school. 

1. When I say social media, I am referring to platforms where users share content with each other, and the platform uses algorithms and other design features to create feeds of content, like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Reddit.