Biden to Announce Social Media Crackdown, Citing Children’s Mental Health

President Joe Biden is proposing a number of steps to prevent social media companies from damaging children’s mental health.

Biden is set to roll out the proposals during his State of the Union address Tuesday night as part of a larger comprehensive mental health strategy. He will specifically call on Congress to pass legislation banning data collection and targeted ads for children and young people and stopping “discriminatory algorithmic decision-making” that “too often return harmful content, including pornography rather than role models, toys, or activities.”

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“The president believes tech companies should be held accountable for the harms they cause and believes we need action here,” one senior administration official told the Washington Examiner. “Some pieces of this do require legislation, but there are also pieces that we believe we could do administratively, I think particularly around research and understanding harms.”

The official declined to expand on possible penalties or enforcement mechanisms Biden could use to force social media and technology companies to comply with his proposals but reiterated the administration has various “tools in the toolbox that will ensure that we are holding companies accountable and protecting children’s health and well being.”

A second senior administration official noted that “this is an area where the president believes that there is possibility to find agreement, regardless of party.”

“This is something where we are seeing progress among Democrats and Republicans, and Congress should act on this and deliver progress to the American people,” that person added.

According to the White House, social media companies have spent years “conducting a national experiment on our children and using their data to keep them clicking — with enormous consequences.”

Officials cited one estimate that social media companies can provide advertising firms with 72 million different data points on an average 13-year-old user to “deliver age-inappropriate content, promote unhealthy social comparisons, and enable harassment, child sexual exploitation, stalking, and cyber-bullying.”

Biden’s larger mental health strategy, which he will expand on during the State of the Union, will focus on three core areas: strengthening system capacity by training new behavioral health providers, connecting more Americans by expanding coverage networks and telehealth options, and creating healthy environments.

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“President Biden is laying out a vision to transform how mental health is understood, perceived, accessed, treated, and integrated — in and out of health care settings. The American Rescue Plan laid the groundwork, providing critical investments to expand access to mental health services,” the White House added in a statement. “Now, far more is needed to ensure that everyone who needs help can access care when and where they seek it. The President is announcing a national mental health strategy to strengthen system capacity, connect more Americans to care, and create a continuum of support –transforming our health and social services infrastructure to address mental health holistically and equitably.”