Political Quotes

“for years, I have come to this floor and I have talked about what Big Tech is doing to our children in this country. There is an entire generation of children that have become the product when they are online on some of these social media platforms. What we have learned, as we have worked in a bipartisan basis-- Senator Blumenthal and I, working for over 5 years addressing these concerns--what we have learned is that when our children are online, they are the product of these Big Tech companies and these social media sites. The way these companies view our kids is that they are a profit center. Even Meta has assigned a dollar value to each child. You think, how incredibly callous can a company be? But they are fine with that. Think about that. Our kids are their product. Our kids are their profit center. Meta sees a kid, and they see $247 in profit. That is what they see. They do this because the more children they can get online, the longer they can keep them scrolling, the more data they collect on that child. And the longer the eyeballs are trained on that screen, the richer the data. And then, guess what? The Big Tech company whose value is based on how many eyeballs they have and how long they have those eyeballs on that screen, they make more money. Their valuation is higher. To me, that is reprehensible. It is disgusting. This is why we have continued to work on this issue.”