Red States Are Taking the Lead to Protect Teens From Big Tech

Toney and Brandy Roberts, the parents of Englyn Roberts, thought they had done everything right when they gave their teenage daughter a smartphone. They told her not to download social media apps like Instagram and TikTok. They required her to share her password and checked her phone regularly for apps or other questionable content.

But Englyn was able to outsmart them, accessing Instagram and TikTok without their knowledge. And in the midst of some boy troubles, her use of social media helped lead her down a very dark path. A friend shared an Instagram video on suicide, Englyn’s father, Toney, told 60 Minutes: “And that video was a lady on Instagram pretending to hang herself, and that’s ultimately what our child did. You ask yourself, how did she come up with this idea? And then when I did the research, there it was. She saw it on Instagram.”

“If that video [hadn’t been] sent to her, because she copied it, she wouldn’t have had a way of knowing how to do that certain way of hanging yourself,” her mom, Brandy, said. In the wake of this tragedy, Meta, Instagram’s parent company, said they are making every effort to protect children from harmful content on the social media site. But a CBS News producer impersonating a 13-year-old was able to get on Instagram easily and access content promoting self-harm and anorexia.

Englyn’s death is but one dramatic example of the toll social media are exacting on America’s teens. A mounting body of evidence indicates social media are a big factor in skyrocketing rates of anxiety and depression among adolescents, especially teenage girls, with these rates surging since 2010, when smartphones became widely available. Depression more than doubled in this same period, from 12 percent in 2010 to 26 percent today, for teen girls. Teen suicide among girls has risen to a 40-year high and, just last week, the CDC released a new report indicating that almost three in five teenage girls felt persistent sadness in 2021—the highest rates of sadness recorded in a decade.

So, what’s the answer? We must treat Big Tech the way we dealt with Big Tobacco at the end of the last century — as an industry whose access to a vulnerable population, our teens, must be curtailed. Unfortunately, Congress has failed to find common ground to pass a new version of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act that would make it easier for parents to protect teens from the harms of Big Tech.

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