Biden criticises social media on child safety

In his State of the Union address US president says it's time to 'strengthen privacy protections, ban targeted advertising at children and demand tech companies stop collecting personal data' on children

US president Joe Biden has called on Congress to improve child safety on social media platforms by implementing new laws that ban digital platforms from serving certain ads targeted at children.

In his first State of the Union address, Biden said that it was time to bolster privacy protections and demand that tech firms cease collecting personal information on children.

Speaking in the presence of Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, the president said that social media platforms need to be held accountable for the "national experiment" they are conducting on children for profit.

The Biden administration contends that big social media platforms have exacerbated the mental health crisis among youngsters by using their data to keep them clicking - with significant implications.

Biden urged the Congress to put pressure on digital platforms to develop their products with child safety in mind from the start. He said that such platforms must be required to ensure the health and safety of children.

"It's time to strengthen privacy protections, ban targeted advertising at children, and demand tech companies stop collecting personal data on our children," Biden said.

The White House intends to make specific funding requests to investigate and improve children's online safety.

The president said he would request $5 million in his 2023 budget to further research on how social media hurts users' mental health, as well as the clinical and societal interventions that the government may utilise to address those issues.

Over the next year, the Department of Health and Human Services will launch a "National Center of Excellence on Social Media and Mental Illness," as part of efforts to create and disseminate new guidelines on the impact of teenage social media use, the President said.

Biden's statement underscores a pushback against the world's major tech firms and their pervasive products.

Campaigners, parents and lawmakers have long argued that social media sites and streaming services like YouTube are designed to hook their users by feeding them content that the companies know will keep their attention.

Last year, Haugen published internal papers revealing that Facebook was aware of the fact that up to 3 per cent of teenage girls experience anxiety, depression, or self-harm as a result of using Instagram, but nonetheless sought a teen-targeted version of the app.

The leaked documents also showed that the company was aware that about 12.5 per cent of its users (nearly 360 million people) indulged in compulsive usage of the social media platform, impacting their sleep, work or relationships.

A majority of users surveyed by Facebook researchers perceived their compulsive behaviour to be worse on the Facebook than any other major social media platform.

The problems included a "loss of productivity when people stop completing tasks in their lives to check Facebook frequently, a loss of sleep when they stay up late scrolling through the app and the degradation of in-person relationships when people replace time together with time online," the documents showed.

Last year, Ms Haugen said that it was "unconscionable" that Facebook, rebranded as Meta, was investing to build its virtual metaverse environment, while the firm's own documents state that "there need to be more resources on very basic safety systems".