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WASHINGTON — Placards featuring 272 names, each with a photo and the age of a child or young adult who lost their life due to what their families call social media-related causes, lined the lawn of the U.S. Capitol’s Upper Senate Park Tuesday evening.
Scattered among the signs stood dozens of bereaved families, friends, lawmakers and advocates from across the country and both sides of the political aisle, joining together to honor those who had died — and call for legislation aiming to make social media safer for children.
Founded in 2023 by two mothers whose sons died the same morning, Social Media Victims Remembrance Day commemorates young victims of online threats such as cyberbullying, blackmail, drug dealing, viral challenges and addictive algorithms.
Tuesday’s public memorial — the largest ever held in commemoration of kids impacted by social media, organizers said — featured speeches from Democratic and Republican U.S. senators working to pass legislation that would, among other things, seek to hold tech companies more accountable for a series of harms caused by their platforms.
Just as they took the stage, the rain that had been showering Washington all day trickled to an end and sunlight broke through clouds, shining down on the crowd and the placards that swayed gently in the breeze around them, which Sen. Amy Klobuchar used as a metaphor for the issue.
“I think part of what we need is more sunshine on what’s happening here, and more transparency, and people understanding how truly bad this is,” the Minnesota Democrat told the families seated before her.
Sens. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, and Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, also spoke at Tuesday’s memorial.
Social Media Victims Remembrance Day
Mothers Kristin Bride and Amy Neville created Social Media Victims Remembrance Day to honor their late sons Carson Bride and Alexander Neville, who died in social media-related incidents on June 23, 2020.
Carson Bride, of Oregon, was 16 when he died by suicide after being cyberbullied through anonymous integrated apps on Snapchat. Fourteen-year-old Alexander Neville, of Arizona, lost his life the same morning from a fake prescription pill laced with fentanyl, which he had purchased through a drug dealer, also on Snapchat.
For Neville, founding Social Media Victims Remembrance Day was a way for her to put her “feelings out there at scale.”
The day now also gives her the chance to connect with other parents who have gone through similar tragedies.
“It’s a weird feeling being out in the world among people who don’t know what you’ve experienced,” she said in a joint interview with Bride on Tuesday. “Being together like this with folks who know, folks who have similar experiences, we feel normal. It is special to be together like this.”
Bride saw Social Media Victims Remembrance Day as an opportunity to “make a difference,” she said.
“I really feel like the way we can come at social media companies is education and awareness, which this event does,” she added. “Carson always wanted to make the world a better place. And I feel like we could be grieving alone on this day, or we could be together with so many other families.”
Big Tech or families?
Bride and Neville held the first Social Media Victims Remembrance Day event in 2023 in front of the Orange County Crime Victims Monument, a memorial outside the district attorney’s office.
Then, after taking a year off, they decided to bring the observance to the nation’s capital last year because they wanted to increase lawmakers’ awareness of the dangers surrounding youth social media use.
“We want them to make the decision: Is it Big Tech, or is it American families?” Bride said. “Because unfortunately, this memorial continues to grow.”
Over the past year, efforts to protect children online and hold Big Tech companies accountable for social media harms have continued to grow, with U.S. lawmakers in both the House and Senate pushing regulatory legislation and parents taking a legal stand.
Tuesday’s event three months after a California jury found Meta and Youtube liable in a breakthrough social media addiction trial, one of the first in a long line of suits blaming tech companies for personal injury and recklessness. A New Mexico jury had just days before found that Meta violated its state law in a separate child sexual exploitation case.
Social media platforms have rejected the framing that their products are responsible for harms to young users.
In a statement responding to the California verdict, Meta said the issue was much more complicated than the jury recognized.
“Teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app,” a company spokesman wrote on X.
Congressional action
On Monday, Republican and Democratic leaders on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce announced that they had reached a bipartisan agreement on a bill aimed at making social media environments safer for children and holding parent companies accountable.
“If you make a defective toaster and it blows up in someone’s home, they are liable,” Blumenthal said Tuesday. “When Big Tech makes products that addict and kill young people, they should be liable under a duty of care that is clear and effective.”
Blumenthal was one of the senators who introduced the measure in February 2022. The bill eventually passed in the Senate, 91-3, but did not receive a vote in the House as social media platforms opposed it.
House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Brett Guthrie of Kentucky, a Republican, and ranking Democrat Frank Pallone of New Jersey reached a deal this year to include the bill as part of a broader legislative package titled the Kids Internet and Digital Safety, or KIDS, Act.
“Through empowering parents, establishing safety as a default, strengthening privacy for children and teens, increasing transparency around data brokers, and holding Big Tech accountable, the KIDS Act delivers the 21st century protections parents have demanded and our kids deserve,” Guthrie and Pallone said in a news release.
Politico reported last week that Meta has dropped its opposition to the safety measures because the package also includes provisions on artificial intelligence that the company supports.
Hawley on Tuesday accused the companies of putting profits above children’s wellness.
“We’re here today to say that there is no amount of profit that justifies the exploitation of our children,” Hawley said. “But that’s exactly what these companies are doing, and they know just what they’re doing.”
