WASHINGTON, D.C. — During his State of the Union address, President Joe Biden promised to hold social media companies accountable for the impact their sites have on kids. Biden called the actions by companies a “national experiment” on America’s children for profit. 

More than 60 advocacy groups are asking Congress to put more safeguards in place to protect kids online. 

Katharina Kopp with the Center for Digital Democracy, one group that sent a letter to Congress demanding safeguards, said the risks for kids online are “getting worse by the minute.” 

Kopp said that online use can affect the mental health, safety and physical health of children. 

“These online platforms have an enormous amount of information about children,” Kopp said. “Most of them don’t understand how they are being manipulated and how the standards are being used against them.” 

The letter to Congress reads in part, “We are deeply concerned that young people, who are spending more and more time online, are being targeted in unfair ways by online platforms and apps that take advantage of their developmental vulnerabilities.”

The advocacy groups asked that Congress put safeguards in place for young people everywhere online, not just on “child-directed” sites, ban advertisements targeting young people and provide greater resources for enforcement by the Federal Trade Commission. 

Dr. Christia Spears Brown, a developmental psychologist at the University of Kentucky, said that the use of social media by kids as a “complicated story.” 

“Some research shows that the more you talk about yourself honestly on social media, for adolescents, the more positive the effects are, so it’s a real chance for connection,” Spears Brown said. “Now the flip side of that is because peer comparisons are important for teens that often what they are doing is comparing themselves to others.” 

Those comparisons include airbrushed or unreal images. 

Spears Brown said that no matter what safeguards are in place, it’s important that parents have candid conversations with their children to help them stay safe.

“What are some of the dangers online? How do we talk to people online?” Spears Brown used as examples of good questions to ask kids. “I think having those conversations with kids is how we protect them because it’s how we protect them from real life peer interaction.”