Teen girls are facing record levels of sexual violence and suicide risk as online harassment and bullying trends persist, according to a damning new survey from the Centers for Disease Control. Meanwhile, data brokers are buying and selling patient mental health data with nearly zero oversight — putting kids' privacy at greater risk as AI-enabled tools outpace federal regulation, and drive new and disturbing forms of online harassment.
With mounting pressure to act, both Democrats and Republicans in the Senate hope to craft new legislation to tackle threats to kids' online privacy and rein in the risks to mental health posed by social media. (Whether the Senate is remotely equipped to address such a thorny subject, rife with both privacy and free speech concerns, is a different question.) Their counterparts in the GOP-led House, however, have been busy — but not with anything related to the present-tense well-being of America's young people. Instead, the Oversight Committee continues its relentless crusade against former Twitter executives over the site's short-lived efforts to block circulation of a New York Post story about Hunter Biden's laptop.
