Child Safety HearingSenators Demand Tech Executives Take Action to Protect Children Online

A spokesman for the committee, Josh Sorbe, said the five companies that appeared offered a diverse set of products that took different approaches to policing child sexual abuse material. He said the panel’s leaders had agreed on the five witnesses appearing at the hearing on Wednesday.

“There are no heroes in this space. There are, sadly, a laundry list of companies’ C.E.O.s that could sit at the witness table,” Mr. Sorbe said. “Just because a company is not testifying does not mean they are off the hook.”

YouTube has faced its share of scrutiny. The European Commission asked it last year to provide more information about how it protects young users’ physical and mental health. In 2019, Google was fined $170 million by the Federal Trade Commission to settle accusations that YouTube had illegally collected data from underage users.

A YouTube spokeswoman, Ivy Choi, said in a statement last week that it considered unacceptable any content that put minors in danger. She said the company had made its technology for detecting child sexual abuse material available to other companies and nongovernmental organizations.

In 2022, YouTube reported more than 631,000 pieces of content to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which works to monitor the spread of child sexual abuse material, according to a report produced by Google.

Apple is also absent from the hearing. The company abandoned a plan in 2021 to scan files stored to iCloud, its cloud storage platform, for child sexual abuse material. Activists have pressed the company to do more. That included running an ad that featured quotes from victims of child sexual abuse during a recent National Football League playoff game.

An Apple spokesman pointed to an August letter in which Erik Neuenschwander, the company’s director of child safety, said that child sexual abuse material “is abhorrent and we are committed to breaking the chain of coercion and influence that makes children susceptible to it.”

Mr. Zuckerberg added that the company was continuing to work on the issue to prevent other families from going through similar experiences.

The moment came after a tense exchange with Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri. The senator pressed Mr. Zuckerberg on a number of issues, including what he said was Meta’s failure to adequately act on what he characterized as rampant child exploitation and abuse across the social media company’s many apps — Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.

Mr. Zuckerberg drew some of the most scrutiny from senators during the wide-ranging hearing on online child safety, in which X, Snap, Discord and TikTok chief executives also testified. They pressed him on topics including child sexual abuse content and whether he supported proposed legislation to halt it.

Mr. Zuckerberg has staunchly defended his company’s actions, noting during the hearing that he has authorized more than $20 billion to help safeguard the platform and has hired tens of thousands of employees.

But he has also said that operating Meta inherently means trade-offs, attempting to elevate good experiences — facilitating connections between friends, loved ones, celebrities and interests — and mitigating the bad. The senators questioning him emphasized that he should focus the company’s efforts on doing a much better job on the latter category.

Before Mr. Zuckerberg addressed the gallery, Mr. Hawley asked whether Meta would offer any remuneration to the families of deceased children who suffered abuse on the platform, adding that “your product is killing people.” Mr. Zuckerberg did not directly answer the question. Most of Mr. Hawley’s questions were shouted at the chief executive.

“Your job is to be responsible for what your company has done,” Senator Hawley said before Zuckerberg stood to address the room. “You have made billions of dollars on the people sitting behind you here. You’ve done nothing to help them, you’ve done nothing to compensate them, and you’ve done nothing to put it right. You could do so here today, and you should.”

After Mr. Zuckerberg finished speaking, members of the families in the Senate gallery remained silent.

Reached afterward, Mary Rodee, a parent in the hearing room, said she and other parents of victims were skeptical of Mr. Zuckerberg’s comments to them. She said she’s waited two years for a response from Meta on the death of her son, who she said died of suicide in 2021 after sexual exploitation in Facebook Messenger.

“The companies are not doing enough,” she said. “Enough talking.”

Cecilia Kang contributed reporting from Washington, D.C.

It would also require the services to turn on the highest privacy and safety settings by default for users under 18. And it would allow young people to limit or opt out of features like personalized newsfeeds, smartphone notifications and autoplaying videos “that result in compulsive” use of apps.

Cosponsored by Senators Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, and Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, KOSA is backed by dozens of other senators. It has also won support from prominent children’s groups and medical associations including the American Academy of Pediatrics. And Snap, the company that owns Snapchat, recently became the first social media giant to back KOSA.

But the ambitious bill faces an uphill battle.

Civil rights groups including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, have opposed it on free speech grounds. In particular, the groups say the bill’s definition of harm is so broad and so vague that it could lead social media and other apps to censor content on politically polarizing issues like reproductive health or gender identity.

“We don’t allow people under the age of 13 to use Facebook,” Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, told Senator Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, during a Senate hearing in 2018.

Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, made similar comments in Senate testimony in 2021: “If a child is under the age of 13, they are not permitted on Instagram.”

The reason social media platforms have such age-related policies is a federal law, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. The law was designed to help parents control the personal information that apps and sites collect from young children. It requires online services that are aimed at children to obtain a parent’s permission before collecting personal details — like a first and last name, a phone number or selfie photos — from a child under 13.

Even so, millions of underage children have been able to sign up for accounts on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, according to complaints from regulators in the United States and Britain, as users can lie about their birth date when they sign up.

In April, regulators in Britain fined TikTok $15.9 million for inappropriately allowing more than one million underage children to use the service, violating British data protection rules. TikTok declined to comment.

In the United States in October, a bipartisan coalition of 33 state attorneys general sued Meta, saying millions of underage users were an “open secret” at Instagram and accusing the company of widespread violations of the children’s privacy law.

“Within the company, Meta’s actual knowledge that millions of Instagram users are under the age of 13 is an open secret that is routinely documented, rigorously analyzed and confirmed,” the states’ complaint said, “and zealously protected from disclosure to the public.”

In a statement, Meta noted that Instagram’s terms of service prohibited users under 13 and said, “We have measures in place to remove these accounts when we identify them.”

Meta said that it had spent a decade working to make online experiences safe and age-appropriate for teenagers and that the states’ complaint “mischaracterizes our work using selective quotes and cherry-picked documents.” Meta has filed a motion to dismiss the case.

Researchers have said that under Mr. Musk’s ownership — during which he has laid off more than 75 percent of staff — X has failed to moderate hate speech and child exploitation on the platform. An investigation by The New York Times last year found that exploitative material still circulated on the platform, including images that the authorities consider the easiest to detect and eliminate. And in October, Australia fined the company $384,000 for failing to provide information about how it combats child exploitation.

In 2023, X said last week, it suspended 12.4 million accounts for violating its rules against child sexual exploitation and reported 850,000 accounts to a national tip line — up from the crackdowns by Twitter’s previous management. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which operates the tip line, said that reports from X had increased because the company expanded the kinds of incidents it documents to include reposts and link sharing. The company also said it would open a facility in Austin, Texas, dedicated to content moderation.

Senators are expected to ask Ms. Yaccarino about X’s role in the distribution of exploitation material and the steps the company is taking to stop its spread. She may also receive encouragement from some lawmakers who previously criticized the company for being overly censorious, and who are aligned with Mr. Musk’s more laissez-faire approach to content moderation.

Michael H. Keller contributed reporting.

Still, the app has survived threats of a ban across two presidential administrations and is firmly the second-most-popular platform among U.S. teenagers after YouTube, according to the Pew Research Center. Fifty-eight percent of teenagers said in a recent Pew survey that they use TikTok every day, and 17 percent said they use it “almost constantly.”

Last year’s hearing raised the public profile of Mr. Chew, who was born in Singapore and lives there with his wife and three children. TikTok users rallied to his defense, stitching together clips mocking some of the questions from lawmakers and even painting him as a heartthrob.

Mr. Chew planned to describe how TikTok made “careful product design choices to help make our app inhospitable to those seeking to harm teens,” according to his prepared testimony. He also planned to say that the average age of U.S. TikTok users was over 30 and that the app had grown to 170 million monthly users in the country.

The company has faced questions about how it protects young users, especially girls, from adult predators. It has also come under scrutiny for how it limits under-13 accounts and verifies the ages of users, who can lie that they’re older to get access to more app features.

TikTok has said its efforts to safeguard young people include special guardrails for 13- to 15-year-olds. Children younger than 16 can’t use direct messaging, and their content is not eligible to be pushed into TikTok’s main feed. The company has also urged parents to link to their teenagers’ TikTok accounts through “Family Pairing,” which enables guardians to set screen-time limits, filter keywords and restrict potentially inappropriate content.

The app’s younger demographic and private nature have raised concerns among parents and regulators, who worry about the conversations that children could have there without supervision. In 2022, relatives of young people who died from fentanyl overdoses sued the company, claiming that the app facilitated the sale of the drug. A judge ruled this month that the suit could proceed to trial.

Snapchat responded to the concerns by rolling out parental controls in 2022 that allow parents to see which contacts their children have recently messaged and review their friend lists. About 20 million of its 100 million users in the United States are teenagers. The app also blocks searches for drug-related keywords and shares information about dealers with the Drug Enforcement Administration.

“While we recognize that it may be virtually impossible to eliminate all of the risks involved with using online services, we are determined to do our part to protect the Snapchat community,” Mr. Spiegel said in his prepared testimony. Snapchat disabled 705,000 accounts in 2023 for sharing drug-related content, and made 690,000 reports to a national clearinghouse for child sexual exploitation material during that same period, Mr. Spiegel added.

Senators may ask Mr. Spiegel, 33, about his plans for encrypted messaging, which the company has not adopted. Many tech companies, including Meta, the owner of Instagram, have begun to encrypt their users’ messages, hiding them from everyone except the sender and receiver. The moves have angered law enforcement officials who say they need access to message archives during criminal investigations.

Last week, Snap said it would support the proposed Kids Online Safety Act. The bill, co-sponsored by Senators Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, and Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, would require online platforms to prevent their services from recommending harmful content to young people. Other major social media platforms have opposed the measure or refrained from taking a position on it.