The UnAnxious Generation

Simple but Not Easy

Kids in America spend less time outdoors than federal inmates. Big Social has made trillions attention-fracking Americans. As documented by Jonathan Haidt in The Anxious Generation, the economy of endless scrolling has generated a psychology of loneliness and anger.

To address these challenges, I introduced The UnAnxious Generation package this week, a series of three bills that hit hard against the social media corporations in order to curb AI deepfakes, empower parents, and invest in trade education & local journalism.

• Deepfake Liability Act – Holds social media companies accountable for cyberstalking and deepfakes on their platforms. Makes clear that AI does not have liability exemption.

• Education Not Endless Scrolling Act – Taxes Big Tech’s advertising revenues to fund trade schools, one-on-one tutoring in public schools, and journalism tax credits.

• Parents Over Platforms Act – Holds app developers and app stores accountable for ensuring users have access to age-appropriate privacy settings, app features, and content. Puts parents in the driver’s seat and gives them stronger tools to control what apps their kids access.

(Above) I recently joined Brian Reed on Question Everything to discuss how Congress can penetrate Big Tech’s Section 230 liability shield.

However, there are opposing bills making their way through committee, carrying the water of the tech lobby. Due to Meta’s lobbying, for example, the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA) fails to protect children and absolves social media platforms of stringent responsibility for age verification and children’s data. Meta’s efforts to back the ASAA align with a pattern of avoiding blame, as seen in recent reports about their 17-strike policy for removing accounts flagged for child sex trafficking, and internal Meta documentation advising software engineers that it’s “appropriate” for bots to have “sensual” conversations with users as young as 12 years old.

This week, in an interview with TIME’s Charlotte Alter, I explained that the UnAnxious Generation is the bipartisan action that Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk hate, and that parents and children deserve.

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Rep. Jake Auchincloss, a Massachusetts Democrat and longtime critic of Big Tech, introduced a package of three bills on Monday designed to tighten oversight of social media platforms, expand safeguards for children, and tax advertising revenue from major tech companies to fund education initiatives.

“These social media corporations are the most wealthy, most powerful corporations in the history of the world,” Auchincloss told TIME. “I believe they have been corroding our civil discourse, they’ve been ‘attention fracking’ our children and treating our youth like products, not people.”

Auchincloss has named the trio of bills the UnAnxious Generation package, in reference to Jonathan Haidt’s bestselling book The Anxious Generation, which outlines the ways social media has transformed and degraded American childhood. Auchincloss says the package targets social media corporations’ three prized assets: their legal immunity, the time teens spend on their apps, and the immense fortune they make from advertising to children. “I’m going directly at their jugular,” he says.

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Tackling legal immunity

First, the bipartisan Deepfake Liability Act—cosponsored with Utah Republican Rep. Celeste Maloy— revises Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides broad immunity for digital platforms hosting user-generated content. The bill would make that immunity conditional on establishing a duty of care to address deepfake porn, cyberstalking, and digital forgeries. It also clarifies that AI-generated content is not covered under Section 230.

Currently, thanks to the Take It Down Act, platforms must remove deepfake images and nonconsensual porn within 48 hours of receiving a report. Auchincloss says this bill would shift companies’ responsibility from reactive to proactive, i.e. social media companies would not receive Section 230 immunity unless they are actively working to address these harms. “If a company knows it’ll be liable for deepfake porn, cyberstalking, or AI-created content, that becomes a board level problem,” he says.

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Taxing digital advertising revenue

Auchincloss also introduced the Education Not Endless Scrolling Act, which would implement a 50% tax on digital advertising revenue over $2.5 billion. “This is for the major social media corporations,” he explains, “not the recipe blogs.” That money would then go towards funding a national one-on-one tutoring program in American schools, a local journalism trust, and a career and technical education fund for kids.

“These social media corporations have made hundreds of billions of dollars making us angrier, lonelier, and sadder, and they have no accountability to the American public,” he says. “Let’s tax them, and let’s spend that money improving the lives of our children that they treat like products.”

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Expanding safeguards for young users

Finally, the bipartisan Parents Over Platforms Act— cosponsored with Rep. Erin Houchin, an Indiana Republican— would close loopholes that allow kids to evade age restrictions on social media apps. Currently, many apps like Instagram and TikTok ask users their age upon sign-up but have no way to independently verify that information. At the same time, critics of age-related internet laws worry about the privacy implications of kids providing personal data across dozens of apps.

Under the bill, parents would provide a child’s age to the App Store when setting up their phone. The App Store would then be required to communicate that age range to relevant apps, ensuring that kids under 13 are unable to access restricted platforms.

For Houchin, this bill is personal. “When my daughter was 13, she accessed a social media platform without our knowledge or consent, hacked around our parental controls, and was messaging who she thought were other 13-14yr old kids all over the world,” she says. When Houchin contacted the platform to delete her daughter’s account, “we were told that she could have the account legally at 13, and we had no authority over whether or not she had access to it.”

This feeling of helplessness led Houchin to co-lead on this bill with Auchincloss, as well as introduce two other bills aimed at making AI chatbots safer for kids. “My goal is to put parents back in the driver’s seat,” she says, “and close these loopholes that are a danger to our kids.”

The package comes at a moment when Congress seems to be mobilizing to take on Big Tech. On Tuesday, the Energy and Commerce Committee is hosting a legislative hearing to discuss 19 bills that would all address kids’ safety online. The Senate has already reintroduced the bipartisan Kids Online Safety Act, which passed overwhelmingly in the last term.

Houchin and Auchincloss are also forming a first-of-its-kind Kids Online Safety Caucus to find bipartisan solutions to protect kids online. They both believe this is a rare issue with broad bipartisan consensus. “Good policy supersedes politics,” says Houchin. “We’re Republican and Democrat, but we agree on this issue and we’re absolutely dedicated to trying to get these safety protocols in place.”

Auchincloss believes Americans are increasingly frustrated with how Big Tech has monetized children’s attention and want lawmakers to act. The reason Congress has stalled, he says, is the immense lobbying power of Big Tech. But after hearing repeatedly from parents about how social media has consumed their family life, he thinks now is the time for change.

“I don’t like to be passive or wait for the ground to shift,” he says. “I am trying to be an earthquake.”