America is experiencing an unprecedented youth mental health crisis. In the United States, 95% of teenagers use social media, and nearly a third of teens report using social media almost constantly. At the same time, the number of children and young adults with anxiety and depression has risen nearly 30% in recent years. According to the CDC, in 2021, nearly 3 in 5 teen girls reported feeling persistently sad or hopeless, the highest level reported over the past decade, and 1 in 3 had seriously considered suicide.
While online platforms facilitate social connection and learning, they also pose a range of harms. Children and youth, particularly Black, Brown, and LGBTQIA+ youth, face harassment, cyberbullying, exposure to harmful content, and sexual exploitation and abuse at disproportionate rates. Nearly half of teens have experienced some form of cyberbullying, including harassment and image-based sexual abuse—which has skyrocketed in recent years with the advent of AI and disproportionately impacts girls. The numbers are staggering – and that’s why the Biden-Harris Administration has taken bold action to protect children online.
President Biden has repeatedly called on Congress to pass stronger protections for children’s online health, privacy, and safety, and has made tackling the youth mental health crisis a top priority for the Biden-Harris Administration. To advance this work, President Biden created a task force for agencies across the U.S. government to mobilize to advance online health, safety, and privacy and address these modern threats facing youth.
Today, the Biden-Harris Administration convened U.S. officials, civil society leaders, youth advocates, academic researchers and other experts to announce new actions that will advance children’s online health, safety, and privacy:
The Kids Online Health and Safety Task Force unveiled its final report “Best Practices for Families and Guidance for Industry.”
- The best practices and guidance reflect input from youth, parents and experts from across the nation. The report identifies key risks and benefits of online platforms and digital technologies to young people’s health, safety and privacy and provides best practices for parents and caregivers, recommended practices for companies, and a research agenda to support further study into online harms and their impacts on children and youth wellbeing. The report is accompanied by a set of next steps for policymakers, including calls to pass bipartisan federal legislation and require access to platform data for independent researchers in privacy-preserving ways.
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, in collaboration with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), is announcing it will work with stakeholders to draft guidelines for researchers working with online platform data.
- The guidelines will be a reference for researchers, companies implementing new researcher access programs, bodies generating international research agreements, and legislators as they draft privacy laws.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are announcing the development of new ways to measure and study student use of social media, and resources for addressing children’s online safety.
- For the first time this fall, the 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey will include a national estimate of social media use among high school students. This report provides the most recent surveillance data and 10-year trends on health behaviors and experiences among high school students in the United States.
- The CDC recently developed and updated resources for children’s online safety, including the Youth Violence Prevention Toolkit, two guides for LGBTQ youth and their parents and caregivers on healthy, safe relationships, and StopBullying.gov with resources on cyberbullying.
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration is releasing new guidance for health providers on social media and mental health.
- The SAMHSA-funded American Academy of Pediatrics Center of Excellence for Social Media and Youth Mental Health will produce new clinical case examples that focus on diverse adolescent patients and demonstrate how to integrate conversations about media use into health consultations. These will be tailored towards pediatricians and other clinicians who work with children and families.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will evaluate new ways to estimate and verify age online and to ensure equity across ages and genders.
- As detailed in their May 2024 report, NIST has new plans for a long-term effort to perform frequent, regular tests of age estimation and verification algorithms. The agency created a new evaluation system for age estimation algorithms and plans to update its evaluation results every four to six weeks.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is developing a new framework for research on youth and technology developed by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).
- NICHD & NIMH are working together to develop a strategic framework for research on youth and technology, anticipated in Winter 2024/2025.
These announcements build upon recent administration actions from across the U.S. government to protect kids online:
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has taken robust enforcement action to protect children’s privacy.
- The FTC recently announced an order that will ban NGL Labs, LLC. from offering anonymous messaging apps to kids under 18. The FTC took action to prevent unfair marketing to kids and teens, and prevent the company from deceiving kids into signing up for paid services.
- The FTC is also working to update rules on the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) to address new harms to children’s privacy posed by digital, new and emerging technologies.
The White House has issued a call to action to combat image-based sexual abuse to encourage voluntary actions to curb this growing harm.
- In May, the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Gender Policy Council issued a Call to Action to Combat Image-Based Sexual Abuse—including synthetic content generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and real images distributed without consent— which has skyrocketed in recent years, disproportionately targeting girls, women and LGBTQI+ people. Through this call to action, the White House is encouraging companies and other organizations to provide meaningful tools that will prevent and mitigate harms, and to limit websites and mobile apps whose primary business is to create, facilitate, monetize, or disseminate image-based sexual abuse.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) launched public awareness and other efforts to combat child sexual exploitation.
- In April 2024, DHS announced Know2Protect, Together We Can Stop Online Child Exploitation™, a national public awareness campaign to raise awareness of child exploitation and how to keep children safe. Through partnerships with sports leagues, technology companies, and youth-serving organizations, the program is reaching kids and families across the country and has received more than 100 million impressions online. Project iGuardian, the official educational program of the Know2Protect campaign, has given 950 presentations to more than 82,000 kids, teens, parents, and teachers, which has yielded more than 41 victim disclosures and 72 investigative leads for online child sexual exploitation and abuse.
The Department of Education released new guidance for educational technology developers.
- The Department of Education’s new guidance will help to protect students and ensure the development of safe, responsible, and nondiscriminatory uses of AI and education technologies used by children and students across the nation.
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