Principal Listening Sessions

NTIA, on behalf of the Biden-Harris Administration’s Task Force on Kids Online Health and Safety, hosted a virtual listening session open to the public in January 2024, to follow up on its Request for Comment. Officials from NTIA heard from listening session attendees on the safety, health, and privacy challenges facing youth online and solutions to protect and empower them.

Participants discussed a range of topics, including:

• Centering well-being as a design goal for social media platforms.
• Calibrating privacy protections to digital services based on their risk levels.
• Addressing the addictive features inherent in the technological design and business models of online services.
• Ensuring that filtering and moderation technologies do not disproportionately harm marginalized youth.
• Supporting parents with more transparent, accessible safety features like parental controls.
• Providing researchers with the funding and data access needed to meaningfully study online platforms.
• Acknowledging the positive impacts of safe, affirming online spaces on youth mental health.

Participants at the listening session included the individuals listed below:

Listening Session Participants included:

• Medha Tare, Senior Director of Research, Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop
• Alexa Mooney, Policy Counsel for Youth & Education Privacy, Future of Privacy Forum
• Morgan Reed, President, ACT | The App Association
• Gaia Bernstein, Technology, Privacy, and Policy Professor of Law, Seton Hall University School of Law
• Aliya Bhatia, Policy Analyst, Free Expression Project, Center for Democracy & Technology
• David Sullivan, Executive Director, Digital Trust & Safety Partnership
• Maya McKenzie, Senior Counsel, Entertainment Software Association
• Jennifer Hanley, Safety Policy Manager, Head of Safety Policy, North America, Meta
• Lisa Cline, Co-Founder, Student Data Privacy Project
• Will Cunningham, Senior Director, Head of Government Relations for the Americas, Match Group
• Andrew Zack, Policy Manager, Family Online Safety Institute
• Kris Perry, Executive Director, Children and Screens
• Casey Pick, Director of Law and Policy, The Trevor Project

Copy of Readout of Kids Online Health and Safety Task Force Principal Listening Session

February 02, 2024

White House leaders and the co-chairs of the Biden-Harris Administration’s Task Force on Kids Online Health and Safety (KOHS Task Force) hosted a listening session with academic experts, youth advocates, civil society leaders, and practitioners on advancing the health, safety, and privacy of kids online. Officials from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Domestic Policy Council, the Gender Policy Council, and the National Economic Council joined officials from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the Office of the Surgeon General, and the Federal Trade Commission to welcome guests and to detail the Administration’s ongoing work to advance the health and safety of youth online.

Following opening remarks, participants discussed a range of topics, including:

• The harms and risks kids and teens face online.
• The necessity of digital technologies for engaging in every-day life.
• Policy and design strategies that could center children’s well-being in companies’ product development processes.
• The need for solutions that center the experiences and perspectives of young people, including direct youth representation in policy and design processes.
• The importance of designing digital environments that help kids thrive, while identifying and addressing risks.
• The need to balance the risks and harms of social media with the value of online platforms in building communities, particularly for historically marginalized groups including LGBTQI+, Black and Brown, and neurodiverse children.
• The risks to kids of large-scale personal data collection and advertising models of technology companies; and
• Support for President Biden’s call for strong bipartisan legislation to protect children online in particular, as well as broader legislation that protects the public’s privacy.

Protecting youth mental health, safety, and privacy online is a key component to delivering on President Biden’s Unity Agenda – a set of priorities that Americans from every walk of life can support. This listening session will inform the Biden-Harris Administration’s ongoing efforts to address the harms America’s children and youth face online. More information on the Biden-Harris Administration’s Task Force on Kids Online Health and Safety is available at the Kids Online Health and Safety Task Force website.

Listening Session Participants included:

• Amina Fazlullah, Head of Tech Advocacy Policy, Common Sense Media
• Arthur C. Evans Jr., CEO and Executive Vice President, American Psychological Association
• Charlotte Willner, Executive Director, Trust and Safety Professional Association
• Christopher Yoo, Professor, University of Pennsylvania
• Dan Perkel, Partner, Media & Technology, IDEO
• Desmond Upton Patton, Professor, University of Pennsylvania
• Emma Lembke, Co-Founder, Log Off Movement
• Jules Polonetsky, CEO, Future of Privacy Forum
• Kayla Bethea, Wired Human Youth Coalition Core Leader
• Megan Moreno, American Academy of Pediatrics, Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health
• Nora Benavidez, Senior Counsel and Director of Digital Justice and Civil Rights, Free Press
• Pamela Wisniewski, Associate Professor, Vanderbilt University
• Rebecca MacKinnon, Vice President for Global Advocacy, Wikimedia

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Copy of Readout of Kids Online Health and Safety Task Force Principal Listening Session at Stanford University

March 13, 2024

Officials from the Biden-Harris Administration’s Task Force on Kids Online Health and Safety engaged with and heard from experts on the health and safety of youth online at a listening session hosted by Stanford’s Internet Observatory and Social Media Lab with the Stanford Center for Youth Mental Health and Wellbeing, in collaboration with the Task Force. Officials from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration joined with Stanford to welcome guests and to detail the Administration’s ongoing work to advance the health and safety of youth online. Representatives from the US Surgeon General’s Office (Director of Science and Policy), the Department of Justice’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Applied Cybersecurity Division were among the government attendees at the event.

In addition to fireside chats, participants discussed a range of topics, including:

• Young people are exposed to, and navigate, online communications at early ages, often with little direct help from parents, schools, or platforms themselves.
• There is a need for more transparency about what services and features involve—including using language for younger kids—well beyond when they first start to use a service.
• Better mechanisms are needed—and in some cases, already exist—to help shape kids’ online experiences as they grow up. These can include increasing levels of control for kids themselves as well as tools that allow for parental oversight.
• Young people reported feeling a continued compulsion to use online services, despite negative impacts on their lives including loss of sleep, anxiety, and depression. They attributed this compulsion to both technical design features of online services as well as social pressures (the “fear of missing out” on what their peers were doing and saying online).
• Unlike physical safety concerns for young people (such as the appropriate age to stop using a car seat), online safety issues can lack objective measures. Medical experts cannot pinpoint for parents or for companies at what precise age specific features and media are safe for the development and well-being of young people across the board.
• Most online platforms and services have been designed to take user privacy, safety, and satisfaction into account to some degree, but few of these services were designed to consider young people’s well-being, specifically.
• Online methods for stopping child sexual exploitation are not adequate. There is a particular concern, given the advent of advanced image generation technology, that both platforms and law enforcement will soon be overwhelmed by AI-generated CSAM, which could further interfere with efforts to identify and intervene in cases involving the exploitation of real children. Machine-learning based image classifiers could be helpful in detecting CSAM (whether real or AI-generated) but their development is severely constrained by existing law.
• Industry and researchers lack common data formats and metrics for measuring youth well-being that would allow for better assessments of what is happening to kids online and to measure the efficacy of mitigation efforts.

This listening session will inform the Biden-Harris Administration’s ongoing efforts to address the harms America’s children and youth face online.

A wide variety of [nearly 100] participants, including youth advocates, experts in mental health, design, safety and privacy, parents and companies, engaged in discussion.

Copy of Readout of Kids Online Health and Safety Task Force Principal Listening Session at the Morehouse School of Medicine

March 25, 2024

Officials from the Biden-Harris Administration’s Task Force on Kids Online Health and Safety engaged with and heard from experts on the health and safety of youth online at a listening session hosted by the Morehouse School of Medicine and Emanuel Preparatory School of Math and Science, in collaboration with the Task Force. Officials from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration joined with the Morehouse School of Medicine to welcome guests and to detail the Administration’s ongoing work to advance the health and safety of youth online. Representatives from the U.S. Surgeon General’s Office, the Department of Justice’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, and the National Institute of Health were among the government attendees of the event.

During the two-hour listening session with parents and their children, participants discussed a range of topics, including:

• When youth experience harassment or are exposed to inappropriate content, many would rather leave the session/room/chat/game instead of using report functions on social media platforms. Leaving the session is faster than reporting negative experiences.
• During the COVID-19 pandemic, some youth used social media and video platforms to make up for lost real-world connections. These youth explained that they feel like they’re talking to someone when watching videos.
• Youth see inappropriate ads online when they are looking for content that is age- appropriate for them. Parents also expressed concern that even when their children were interacting with age-appropriate content online, advertisements were often inappropriate (e.g., for alcohol, tobacco, or depicting sexual themes). In response to these experiences, some youths advocated for content moderation rules comparable to TV channels that are marketed towards children.
• Children are afraid of doom scrolling and the effects of shorts and reels on their attention spans. Some see doom scrolling and Internet addiction as potential threats to their ability to succeed offline, as they believe excessive use of certain platforms has a detrimental impact on their ability to interact with peers and teachers offline due to an inability to put devices down.
• Youth would like social media platforms to enforce timeout limits on platforms to address concerns of overuse and addiction.
• Parents employ a variety of techniques to supervise and help guide their children’s use of digital technology and online platforms, including having limits on when devices can be used (e.g., not at the dinner table) and where and how certain apps can be used (e.g., streaming video apps only on the family television and not on mobile devices, certain apps only used with a parent’s active participation).
• Parents also expressed a desire for devices and services that were designed to help bridge the gap between child- and adult-oriented experiences. They expressed a need to have services grow with their child and a desire for limited-functionality devices that could help tweens begin to learn how to use smartphones safely without exposing them to the entire mobile app ecosystem.

This listening session will inform the Biden-Harris Administration’s ongoing efforts to address the harms America’s children and youth face online.