Political Quotes

“Madam President, after a long time of talking over the ways social media is harming kids and debating what to do about it, this week, the Senate is taking some action. For years, kids have been swimming in a toxic stew of bullying and harassment, glorified violence, and constant false comparisons, and the results have been absolutely catastrophic--record rates of anxiety and depression, unimaginable levels of suicidal ideation and self-harm, an alarming epidemic of loneliness and low self-esteem. These things are not a given. They did not just happen overnight. The fact that young children as young as 8 or 9 or 10 can feel so sad and so helpless that they think they would be better off not living at all--that is a uniquely modern malady inflicted by social media. Sadness in kids is not new, but a pandemic of youth depression is new. The fact that it is a relatively recent phenomenon is also cause for us to have some hope. It does mean that this is fixable. This is not the way it is supposed to be. This is not the way it has always been. It means that if we choose to take some pretty commonsense steps, we can finally get kids the help they need, and commonsense steps are exactly what the Kids Online Safety Act and the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act are. I am proud to cosponsor both bills, which will provide important tools to protect the safety and privacy of kids online.…”