Hey there --

We’re pretty pumped about what President Biden said at his State of the Union.

In case you missed it, for the first time ever in a State of the Union address, the President called out social media platforms for their harm to young people’s mental health. He said “We must hold social media platforms accountable for the national experiment they’re conducting on our children for profit."

And he did not stop there.

President Biden called on Congress to “strengthen privacy protections, ban targeted advertising to children, demand tech companies stop collecting personal data on our children” and received applause from both Democrats and Republicans in the chamber.

Last March, we launched a global coalition calling for a ban on surveillance advertising—the toxic business model at the heart of Big Tech’s incentivization to hook users with emotive, divisive, and polarizing content. Now, we’re seeing transatlantic momentum to ban surveillance advertising as the E.U. finalizes legislation to ban targeted advertising for kids and President Biden calls on Congress to do the same.

We put together a thread to help contextualize the work we’ve done over the past year and emphasize what President Biden’s support means to us. If you’re on Twitter, share our thread:

We applaud President Biden for recognizing the inconvenient truth Big Tech executives continue to deny—that their products and platforms now play an important role in defining the future of this country, from the resilience of our children to the health of our democracy.

Now’s our chance to rein in Big Tech’s harms to our kids. 

Let’s get it done,

Nicole

Nicole Gill
Co-founder & Executive Director
Accountable Tech

We see the irony of asking you to take action on the same platforms we’re fighting to hold accountable, but they are… well… dominant. We have to reach people where they are in order to level the playing field -- and we’re ready to bring the fight right to their own platforms.