President Biden wants to put a stop to child-targeted advertising

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In his first State of the Union address, President Biden called on lawmakers to put a stop to tech companies collecting children’s data for the sake of targeted advertising.

“It’s time to strengthen privacy protections, ban targeted advertising to children, demand tech companies stop collecting personal data on our children,” said the President in the second half of his speech.

It seems the President’s remarks were inspired by Frances Haugen, who was in attendance as the First Lady’s guest. In fact, Haugen is responsible for revealing the infamous “Facebook Papers.”

The Facebook Papers were a dump of files and internal notes. They shined a light on some of the sketchy practices that Facebook and its sister company, Instagram, practice to keep users engaged on their site.

“As Frances Haugen, who is here with us tonight, has shown, we must hold social media platforms accountable for the national experiment they’re conducting on our children for profit,” the president goes on to say.

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To kickstart this campaign, President Biden said he will be dedicating at least $5 million of his 2023 budget. Specifically, the $5 million will be to research the harmful effects of social media.

Additionally, Senators Marsha Blackburn and Richard Blumenthal recently introduced a new bill. The new bill is called the Kids Online Safety Act.

The bill would put strict regulations on social platforms to help protect kids’ information. The act would give both children and their parents more control over the data that sites collect.

This is an interesting initiative from President Biden, but we’ll need to wait and see. 2021 revealed a lot about how social media platforms operate, and it ruffled many feathers. However, not much has changed.

So, it will be interesting to see how President Biden and the rest of the government move forward on this new initiative to protect children from targeted advertising.

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