Rep. Jake Auchincloss, a Massachusetts Democrat and longtime critic Big TechOn Monday, he unveiled a package of three bills aimed at tightening oversight of social media platforms, expanding protections for children and taxing advertising revenue from big tech companies to fund education initiatives.
“These social media corporations are the richest and most powerful corporations in the history of the world,” Auchincloss told TIME. “I believe they are corroding our civil discourse, they are taking attention away from our children, and they are treating our youth as products rather than people.”
Auchincloss named the three banknotes the “Anxiety-Free Generation” pack, a reference to Jonathan Haidt's best-selling book. Anxious generationwhich describes how social media has changed and degraded American childhood. Auchincloss says the package targets three valuable assets of social media corporations: their legal immunity, the time teenagers spend on their apps and the vast fortune they make from advertising to children. “I go straight for their jugular,” he says.
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Fighting legal immunity
First, the bipartisan Deepfakes Accountability Act, sponsored by Utah Republican Rep. Celeste Maloy, revises Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides broad immunity for digital platforms that host user-generated content. The bill would condition this immunity on establishing a duty of care regarding deepfake pornography, cyberstalking, and digital forgeries. It also clarifies that content generated by artificial intelligence is not subject to Section 230.
Currently, thanks to the Take It Down Act, platforms must remove deepfake images and non-consensual pornography within 48 hours of receiving a report. Auchincloss says the bill would shift companies' liability from reactive to proactive, meaning social media companies would not receive Section 230 immunity unless they actively work to correct those harms. “If a company knows it will be held liable for deepfake porn, cyberstalking, or AI-generated content, that becomes an issue at the board level,” he says.
Taxation of digital advertising income
Auchincloss also introduced the Education Not Infinite Scrolling Act, which would impose a 50% tax on digital advertising revenues exceeding $2.5 billion. “This is for large social media corporations,” he explains, “not for recipe blogs.” The money will then fund the National Personalized Education Program in America's schools, the Local Journalism Fund and the Career and Technical Education Fund for Children.
“These social media corporations have made hundreds of billions of dollars by making us angry, lonely and sad, and they have no responsibility to the American public,” he says. “Let’s tax them and use that money to improve the lives of our children, whom they treat like a commodity.”
Extended guarantees for younger users
Finally, the bipartisan Parents Over Platforms Act, co-sponsored by Rep. Erin Houchin, R-Indiana, would close loopholes that allow children to bypass age restrictions on social media apps. Currently, many apps, such as Instagram and TikTok, ask users for their age upon registration, but have no way to independently verify this information. At the same time, critics of age-related Internet laws worry about the privacy implications of children sharing personal information across dozens of apps.
According to the bill, parents will indicate the age of the child in the App Store when setting up the phone. The App Store would then be required to communicate this age range to relevant apps, ensuring that children under 13 cannot access restricted platforms.
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For Khochin, this bill is personal. “When my daughter was 13, she went onto a social networking site without our knowledge or consent, hacked into our parental controls, and sent messages to other 13- and 14-year-olds around the world,” she says. When Houchin asked the platform to remove her daughter's account, “we were told that she can legally obtain an account at age 13 and we do not have the authority to determine whether she has access to it or not.”
That feeling of helplessness led Houchin to co-author the bill with Auchincloss, as well as two other bills aimed at making AI chatbots safer for children. “My goal is to put parents back in the driver’s seat,” she says, “and close these loopholes that are putting our children at risk.”
The package comes as Congress appears to be mobilizing to take on Big Tech. On Tuesday, the Energy and Commerce Committee will hold a legislative hearing to discuss 19 bills that address children's online safety. The Senate has already reintroduced the bipartisan Children's Online Safety Act, which passed overwhelmingly last semester.
Houchin and Auchincloss are also creating a first-of-its-kind Child Online Safety Forum to find bipartisan solutions to protect children online. They both believe it's a rare issue on which there is broad bipartisan consensus. “Good politics replaces politics,” says Houchin. “We are Republicans and Democrats, but we agree on this issue and we are absolutely committed to trying to implement these safety protocols.”
Auchincloss says Americans are increasingly frustrated with how big tech companies monetize children's attention and want lawmakers to act. The reason Congress has stalled, he said, is because of the enormous lobbying power of big tech companies. But after repeatedly hearing from parents about how social media has consumed their family life, he believes now is the time for a change.
“I don’t like being passive or waiting for things to change,” he says. “I'm trying to be an earthquake.”
