YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat offering only small changes to ensure safety of young users: US …

WASHINGTON: YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat are offering only “tweaks and minor changes” in their operations to ensure young users’ safety amid rising concern over the platforms’ potential harm to children, the head of a Senate panel told the companies’ executives Tuesday. “Everything you do is to add more eyeballs, especially kids’, and keep them on your platforms for longer,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said at the start of a hearing by the Senate Commerce subcommittee on consumer protection that he heads. The panel took testimony recently from a former Facebook data scientist, who laid out internal company research showing that the company’s Instagram photo-sharing service appears to seriously harm some teens. The subcommittee is widening its focus to examine other tech platforms, with millions or billions of users, that also compete for young people’s attention and loyalty. “We’re hearing the same stories of harm” caused by YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat, Blumenthal said. “This is for Big Tech a Big Tobacco moment … It is a moment of reckoning,” he said. “There will be accountability. This time is different.” The three executives – Michael Beckerman, a TikTok vice president and head of public policy for the Americas; Leslie Miller, vice president…
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