VICTORY! Kids Online Safety Act Passes Committee

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) was passed out of the House Energy & Commerce Committee on Wednesday! Many of you rallied together to make this victory possible, contacting your Representatives earlier this week. We are tremendously grateful for your work in pushing forward this crucial bill!

KOSA is the most comprehensive child protection bill currently pending before the U.S. Congress. If passed, it will require all online platforms to design their products in a way that keeps children safe – establishing a duty of care.

With more cases every day of children being sexually exploited, exposed to harmful content, and even dying as a result of the dangers they encounter online, it is clear:

Kids cannot wait one more day, let alone one more legislative session, for the protections offered by KOSA.

THANK YOU for helping us push this life-or-death bill forward!

The Atlantic: Social Media Companies' Worst Argument

When the tobacco industry was accused of marketing harmful products to teens, its leaders denied the charge but knew it was true. Even worse, the industry had claimed that smoking made people healthier—by reducing anxiety, say, or slimming waistlines.

The social-media industry is using a similar technique today. Instead of acknowledging the damage their products have done to teens, tech giants insist that they are blameless and that their products are mostly harmless.

And at times, a more audacious claim is made: that social media helps teens, even as mounting evidence suggests that it’s harming many of them and playing a substantial role in the mental-health crisis afflicting young people in numerous countries around the world.

In Case You Missed It: Instagram Will Make Teen Accounts Private!

It was Christmas break. A peaceful morning. Bonnie’s* conversation last night with her three sons still hung in her mind. The boys had talked about their plans for the New Year. Her 16-year-old, Colin*, said he wanted to save up his money for a holiday to go visit some friends.

Bonnie noticed that Colin’s light was on now—his bedroom door ajar. She walked upstairs and nudged the door open, asking, “Are you up?”

And that’s when she found her son’s dead body.

Colin is only one of numerous teens who have died by suicide after being sexually extorted on Instagram. A stranger reached out to him on the app, pretending to be a teenage girl. Colin was eventually manipulated into sending a nude image—and from there, the blackmail started.

But what if that stranger could never message Colin to begin with?

Maybe he would still be with his family right now. Maybe he would have been able to take that holiday he wanted, to visit his friends.

Tragically, it’s too late for Colin. But it is not too late for the millions of teens who still use Instagram today.

Which is why we’re celebrating a monumental victory with Instagram that just broke this morning: thanks to new safety changes that YOU joined us in requesting, soon strangers will no longer be able to find and message teens on Instagram!

LA Times: ‘A culture of silence and deference’: A sex trafficking expert analyzes the allegations against Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs

Sean "Diddy" Combs, rapper and music mogul was indicted on charges of sex trafficking, racketeering, and transportation to engage in prostitution.

Although Combs maintains that he is innocent of these allegations, Lauren Hersh, the former chief of the sex trafficking unit at the Kings County district attorney’s office in Brooklyn said she was not surprised by the accusations, as the money and power present in the music industry cause many people to be easily drawn in. 

The indictment states that Combs drugged people, he forced them to perform sex acts for days, and then would get them to comply by threatening their career. He’d record videos of sex acts, then dangle videos over people’s heads, [saying,] “If you speak or reveal anything I will disseminate this.”

Sincerely,