PRIORITIES • Protect Our Future • Policy to
Keep Our Kids Safe Online
Why I believe this — and how I’ll fight for it.
I have a young family, so this one keeps me up at night. We are running the largest uncontrolled experiment in history on our children’s developing brains — handing them platforms and products engineered to be as addictive as possible — and we’re only starting to see the damage: the anxiety, the depression, the isolation, the childhoods lost to a screen. As a father, I refuse to accept that this is just how it is now.
We already protect kids from the things we know can hurt them. You have to be 21 to buy alcohol or tobacco, 16 to drive a car — because we understand these things are dangerous to a body and a mind that are still developing. Social media and AI belong in that same category. They’re addictive by design, they change the brain chemistry of a child who’s still growing, and we’re only beginning to understand what they do to a young mind. We should not be wiring our kids’ brains with technology built to hook them.
So here’s my belief, plainly: the open internet is no place for a child. Not because technology is evil — but because these products were built to profit off attention, and a child’s is the easiest to capture and the most damaging to lose. We can protect our kids from the worst of it and give them something far better in its place. That’s the fight — and it’s one every parent, of every background, can get behind.
Here’s what I’ll do — and why
Set an age limit of 16 for social media and AI — without handing your data to Big Tech. We set a minimum age for alcohol, tobacco, and driving. We should do the same for the addictive platforms — and for the AI chatbots children are nowhere near ready for. I’ll fight for a national standard keeping kids off addictive social media and AI products until 16. But how we do it matters just as much: we will not do it by forcing families to hand their private data and their kid’s ID to the tech companies. That’s surveillance, and it feeds the very machine that’s harming our kids. Age verification is the job of a trusted public standard — our community and our country — not another excuse for Big Tech to vacuum up more of your information. We protect the children without feeding the beast.
Hold Big Tech accountable — and liable — for addicting our children. These companies know exactly what they’re doing. They’ve engineered their products to hook kids, measured it, optimized it, and profited from it — the same playbook the opioid makers ran. I know what that playbook costs a family: it’s the one that got my own father addicted and nearly destroyed us. When a company deliberately addicts a child to a product that harms them, its executives should be held accountable and liable — in their bottom line, and when they cross the line, in court. No more hiding behind a screen while a generation pays the price.
Get kids off the open internet — and protect them from predators. The open internet was never built for children, and it’s full of people who prey on them. I’ll fight to hold platforms accountable for protecting kids from predators, exploitation, and grooming — and to make sure the only online spaces our children are in are the specialized, protected, age-appropriate ones built to keep them safe, not the ones built to keep them scrolling. A child’s safety comes before a platform’s profits, every single time.
Build the real-world places kids actually want to be. This is the part that matters most, because you can’t just take something away without offering something better. As we get kids off the addictive feeds, we have to give them somewhere real to go. I’ll fight to invest in the things that actually make a childhood: parks and rec centers and libraries, the arts and music and sports, mentorship, community, and the mental-health support so many kids are going without. Third places — enriching, welcoming, easy to get to, and genuinely fun — where kids build real friendships and real lives, off the screen. That’s what a healthy generation is built on.
What this means for Our District
Every parent in this district knows this fight in their own home — the battle over the phone at the dinner table, the worry about who their kid is talking to at night, the feeling that something is being done to our children that none of us agreed to. And it keeps getting worse for one reason: the companies profiting from it help fund the politicians who are supposed to stop them. The same Big Tech giants writing checks to our congressman are the ones designing the products harming our kids. I don’t take their money — so I can actually take them on. In this district and this country, our children should never be the product. They should be the whole point.
The bottom line
Our kids get one childhood, and right now the most powerful companies on earth are spending billions to take it — one notification at a time. We don’t have to let them. Set real limits, hold Big Tech accountable the way we held the opioid makers, protect our kids’ privacy instead of trading it away, and give them real places and real people to grow up with — and we hand the next generation something we’re at risk of losing: a childhood that belongs to them. Let’s give it back.
SOURCES
U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on social media and youth mental health (2023): HHS — “Social Media and Youth Mental Health: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory”