Children and Media

To protect kids online, Mark Zuckerberg says Congress should focus on Apple and Google — not Facebook and Instagram. The Meta CEO, owner of the two social media sites, is flooding Washington with ads aimed at convincing lawmakers to require his rivals’ app stores to verify shoppers’ ages and require parental consent for kids to download social media apps. In 2024, Zuckerberg was able to convince House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to shelve a bill that would have required Facebook and Instagram to make design changes to protect kids from bullying, sexual exploitation and other online ills.

Less than two weeks before the start of a landmark antitrust trial against tech giant Meta, the growing relationship between President Donald Trump and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is stoking fears in Washington (D.C.) that the White House could pull the plug on the whole case.

Artificial intelligence is playing an increasingly dominant role in how students navigate

In an effort to block kids from online content intended for adults, some have argued that age-verification or age-assurance tools offer the possibility of simple, effective guardrails. In our brief to the Supreme Court in 2024, the Center for Democracy & Technology laid out serious concerns these tools raise regarding privacy and First Amendment freedoms—in addition to questions about their efficacy.  But that doesn’t mean technical solutions can’t address

Early childhood educators make thousands of decisions each day. Among them are decisions around technology use with their young learners, which are too often shaped by policies and pedagogies that lag behind the latest research and the abundance of available options.

Meta has spent more than a year advocating for new laws requiring app stores to give parents control over kids’ app downloads, and just saw an early victory in the states.

Across U.S. politics, it’s become fashionable to blame nearly all the internet’s ills on one law I co-wrote: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Everyone from President Donald Trump to some of my Democratic colleagues argue that Section 230 has let major tech platforms moderate too much or too little. Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chairman, Brendan Carr, has already written about his plans to reinterpret the law himself. Many of these claims give Section 230 too much credit.

Sens Edward Markey (D-MA) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) reintroduced the bipartisan Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0), which would update online data privacy rules for the 21st century and ensure children and teenagers are protected online. Senator Markey first introduced this legislation to update his original COPPA law in 2011 as a member of the House of Representatives and has introduced the bipartisan legislation in every Congress since. Specifically, the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act would:

This report summarizes the key discussions and insights from an in-person symposium held in September 2024 on the topic of children’s online safety policy. During the symposium, the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) attempted to foster meaningful dialogue, identify areas of consensus and disagreement, and chart actionable paths forward. Key themes from the symposium include:

The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee recently approved 17 bipartisan bills, and a few of them impact the broadband industry. Since these have bipartisan support, it seems like they will have a decent chance of becoming law. The first is S.98 – Rural Broadband Protection Act, sponsored by Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV).