When I was born in 1979, my parents brought me home in a bassinet that sat, unsecured, on the back seat of their Honda hatchback. They did this not out of reckless disregard for my safety, but because it was the norm.
Today, parents never would think of driving their young children without proper safety seats. Yet when it comes to the internet — which can be as dangerous as any busy highway — we’re not only forgetting to buckle up our kids, we’re handing them the car keys.
Erin Nicholson
There’s an important lesson here. Car seat norms didn’t change because people got smarter or wiser overnight, they changed because of raising awareness and — most importantly — industry regulation, traffic safety laws and enforcement.
In order to meet the tide of rising risks children and young people face online, we need similar regulation that holds tech companies accountable for keeping kids safe on their platforms.
The 1970s and early ’80s were a turning point in road safety in the U.S. Since that time, road fatalities among children under age 5 have declined significantly from 9.1 deaths per 100,000 population in 1979 to 2.3 deaths per 100,000 population in 2023.
None of this happened without major pushback from the auto industry and without concerns over personal freedom violations, but safety standards and behavior change ultimately won. Most people now follow these laws because they understand the risks if they don’t: Fines, jail time, injury or death.
“On the internet, there are still very, very few safeguards to protect children and young people.”
On the internet, there are still very, very few safeguards to protect children and young people from sexual abuse and exploitation, which can lead to physical harm, trafficking and even death, and little to no enforcement of the rules that do exist.
Safeguards are mostly voluntary, and platforms are currently only required to remove illicit content once it is reported to them — not to proactively search for it. And by that time, an image could be shared exponentially, across multiple platforms.
With the online environment expanding, evolving and changing daily, it is difficult to keep up with the new threats and access bad actors have available to them. Law enforcement agencies by and large are under-resourced and simply can’t keep up with the deluge of global reports of child abuse online, complicated by the fact that this is a problem not confined to state or country lines or jurisdictions.
Big Tech plows ahead with no guardrails in place, prioritizing profits over children’s safety, with futile and often useless “safety features” that sound good but don’t do enough, and without any real repercussions for the countless atrocities committed on their platforms daily.
Road safety laws to protect children were implemented in part because, no matter how well an individual parent tried to protect their child, the environment itself was too dangerous to reasonably do so. It’s exactly the same with the internet. Parents can make lots of choices to make it safer for their kids — delaying smartphones, monitoring texts and apps, talking with their kids and modeling good digital habits — but the online environment is still too dangerous.
AI especially brings up new and different risks and harms that were unforeseen even a few months ago. If significant, industry-wide change doesn’t happen soon, it may be too big to wrangle.
“Online safety policy has strong bipartisan support in Congress.”
We need a collective of organized citizens calling their representatives and asking them to support legislation to protect children online. We can — and should — also use our consumer power and our collective voices as parents to pressure the industry.
Online safety policy has strong bipartisan support in Congress, and there has been some good progress made including the REPORT Act and the TAKE IT DOWN Act, which both have been signed into law. But these bills fall short of requiring companies to proactively search for and take down child sexual abuse content, or to transparently report on what safeguards are in place for children on their platforms.
There are other bills in play, however, to address exactly these issues, including Stop CSAM Act. This bipartisan piece of legislation would strengthen reporting requirements, ensure transparency and expand tech platform liability, making much-needed updates to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act so survivors of online child sexual exploitation have the right to sue platforms and app stores. Passing this bill would be a gamechanger for child safety online.
As a society, through legislation, consumer pressure and parent advocacy, we chose to protect children on the roads. We must do the same with the tech industry. Until meaningful legislation is in place to combat this flood of dangerous tech inundating our kids, they will continue to be at risk.
Erin Nicholson is strategic communications adviser for ChildFund International, a global nonprofit dedicated to protecting children online and offline. ChildFund launched the #TakeItDown campaign in 2023 to combat online child sexual abuse material. She is currently a Public Voices Fellow on prevention of child sexual abuse with The OpEd Project.