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U.S. senators on both sides of the aisle are uniting in a bitterly divided Congress to enhance online safety for children, and Hawaii’s Sen. Brian Schatz is leading the way.

Schatz, a senior member of the Senate Commerce Committee, joined Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and Katie Britt, R-Ala., to introduce a bipartisan bill aimed at curtailing harmful content and ensuring a safer digital environment for minors.

, named the “Kids Off Social Media Act,” builds on legislation Schatz crafted last spring and aims to prevent social media platforms from algorithmically targeting users under 17 and limit platform usage to people 13 and older.

There are growing concerns about the negative impact of online platforms on children’s mental health and well-being.

“The use of social media among children has skyrocketed, and there’s a direct correlation between the use of social media and bad outcomes,” Schatz said in an interview, adding that 57% of high school girls in 2021 felt persistently sad or hopeless. “More than a fifth of all high school students considered suicide.”

Hawaii students are not immune. According to , one out of every three Hawaii public school students in grades six to 12 experienced such deep sadness or hopelessness for at least two consecutive weeks that it interfered with their regular activities.

In 2024, considered legislation to protect children online. gained national attention in March by signing a bill to prohibit children under the age of 14 from holding social media accounts and requiring parental consent for 14-and 15-year-olds.

Despite action by individual states, Schatz emphasized the need for a more uniform approach.

“It’s very hard to regulate the internet with 50 different states having 50 different ideas about how it all should work,” he said, “I think this is a nationwide issue. I think this has risen to the top tier of things that people worry about.”

In a 2023 survey, found that over 90% of mothers across ideologies and regions supported congressional action to set a minimum age of 13 for social media accounts and prohibit social media companies from using children’s personal data to create targeted algorithms.

“It would resemble the old Facebook and the old social media platforms, which are not algorithmically driven and would have a feed of essentially your friends.”

Sen. Brian Schatz

Arguably, restricting algorithms is the most important component of the proposal.

“The truly toxic aspect of social media and the new danger is that these algorithms determine what is maximally likely to make you have a body image issue, feel violent, feel alienated, feel anxious, feel depressed, feel outraged, feel isolated, and then it feeds you more and more of that content based on an algorithm that keeps improving itself using AI,” Schatz said.

By prohibiting algorithms, the bill allows users ages 13 to 16 to access a safer social media environment.

“It would resemble the old Facebook and the old social media platforms, which are not algorithmically driven and would have a feed of essentially your friends and whomever you follow and whatever they choose to post,” Schatz said.

What are the bill’s chances?

“I’m always cautious to predict what will happen, but we’ve got a bill with a growing cohort of senators on a bipartisan basis,” Schatz said. “And it’s also just a straightforward idea whose time has come.”

Indeed, in recent months both Democrats and Republicans in Congress have shown unprecedented willingness to regulate social media companies. Last month, President Biden signed legislation banning TikTok, the short-form video app, unless its Chinese owner, ByteDance, sells the platform to a U.S.-approved buyer.

Unlike Schatz’s bill, which seeks to limit harmful outcomes for children across all social media platforms, this TikTok regulation is focused on national security and Chinese government access to U.S. users’ data. But it does suggest a growing understanding in Congress about the power and impact of social media and an urgency to tackle a problem that lawmakers previously appeared reticent to address.