FTC Report Shows Profit-Hungry Tech Giants Are ‘Harmful to Kids and Teens’

Child welfare advocates renewed their calls for U.S. lawmakers to pass two controversial bills that would protect young people from Big Tech’s “dangerous and unacceptable business practices,” after the Federal Trade Commission released a report Thursday detailing how social media and streaming companies are endangering children and teens who use their platforms.

The FTC staff report, titled Behind the scenes: investigating the data practices of social media and video streaming services—”shows how the tech industry’s monetization of personal data has created a market for commercial surveillance, particularly through social media and video streaming services, with insufficient measures to protect consumers.”

The agency investigated the practices of Meta platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp; YouTube; X, formerly known as Twitter; Snapchat; Reddit; Discord; Amazon, owner of the gaming site Twitch; and ByteDance, the owner of TikTok.

“The report finds that these companies collected data en masse from their users and, in some cases, non-users,” Samuel Levine, director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in the article. “It shows that many companies failed to implement adequate safeguards against privacy risks. It sheds light on how companies used our personal data, from delivering hyper-granular targeted advertising to powering algorithms that shape the content we see, often with the goal of keeping us hooked.”

The publication also finds that these practices pose unique risks to children and teens, as the companies have done little to effectively respond to documented concerns raised by policymakers, psychologists and parents about the physical and mental well-being of young people.

FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a statement that “the report exposes how social media and video streaming companies collect vast amounts of Americans’ personal data and make billions of dollars a year from it.”

“While these surveillance practices are lucrative for the companies, they can also compromise people’s privacy, jeopardize their freedoms and expose them to everything from identity theft to stalking,” she added.

Researchers from Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard University published an analysis last December showing that social media companies made nearly $11 billion in advertising revenue from U.S. users under the age of 18 in 2022.

According to the FTC report:

While the use of social media and digital technology can provide many positive opportunities for self-directed learning, building community and reducing isolation, it has also been linked to harms to physical and mental health, including exposure to bullying, online harassment, child sexual exploitation and exposure to content that can exacerbate mental health problems, such as the promotion of eating disorders.

The publication also flags “algorithms that may prioritize certain types of harmful content, such as dangerous online challenges.”

The report accuses social media companies of “willful blindness to child users” by claiming that there are no children on their platforms because their sites do not allow them to create accounts. This may be an attempt by the companies to avoid legal liability under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Last December, Khan proposed sweeping changes to COPPA to address the problem.

Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay, a nonprofit that works to help kids thrive in an increasingly commercial, screen-obsessed culture, said in a statement that “this report from the FTC is yet more evidence that Big Tech’s business model is harmful to children and teens.”

“Online platforms use sophisticated and opaque data collection techniques that endanger young people and compromise their healthy development,” Golin added. “We thank the FTC for listening to the concerns raised by Fairplay and a coalition of advocacy groups, and we call on Congress to pass COPPA 2.0, the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act, and KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act, to better protect our children from these companies’ dangerous and unacceptable business practices.”

On Wednesday, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce voted to advance COPPA 2.0 and KOSA, both of which passed the Senate overwhelmingly in July.

However, human rights groups including the ACLU condemned KOSA. The civil rights group warned that it “would violate the First Amendment by giving the federal government the power to control what information people can access online and emboldening social media platforms to censor protected speech.”

In May 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued an advisory addressing “growing concerns about the effects of social media on the mental health of young people.”

The White House simultaneously announced the creation of a federal task force “to improve the health, safety, and privacy of minors online, with a particular focus on preventing and mitigating the negative health impacts of online platforms.”

Murthy also advocated for tobacco-like warning labels on social media to raise awareness of the potential dangers of the platform for children and teenagers.

According to an investigation published in January by corporate power watchdog Ekō, in just one week, more than 33 million posts were made on TikTok and Meta-owned Instagram “under hashtags with problematic content targeting young users,” including suicide, eating disorders, skin bleaching and so-called “forced celibacy.”