Dear Mr. Agrawal. Mr. Chew, Mr. Mosseri, Mr. Spiegel, Ms. Wojcicki, and Mr. Zuckerberg,

Children’s emotional and social well-being is fundamentally affected by the shifting digital landscape and the impact of the social media platforms you run. Your platforms sometimes offer joy, community, and connection to young people, but undeniably, far too often they do significant harm. From decreased self-esteem and body image dissatisfaction to cyberbullying, to an epidemic of teen suicide, your social media platforms are hurting America’s children.

You – and all of us in society – owe children better. We owe them better regardless of how much time their parents can spend looking over their shoulder, how much willpower they have to try and control their own social media use, or how much money their time on your platforms is worth. We owe them a place to grow and learn that is free from harm, toxic influences, and predatory behavior.

The only solution to this problem your platforms offer is parental controls. Parental controls are an insufficient bandaid for the real problem that serves to pacify critics and skirt the real solution – making core changes to your platforms’ design to protect children. Parents will always try our best and see our kids as our own responsibility, but we cannot keep our kids safe and healthy on your platforms in the face of mediocre piecemeal tools, intentionally addictive design, and your consistent business decisions to put profits above kids’ wellbeing.  

As President Biden recently said, we need our children to be free from the “social experiment,” that social media companies are running and for your companies to stop putting profits over the health and safety of our nation's young people. You make design, product, and policy choices every single day that result in habit-forming products, incendiary and graphic content, illegal substances, and predatory advertisers all being pushed onto vulnerable children.  

We demand better for kids. Our children are not your currency. It’s time to choose children over profits by taking the following actions:

1. Stop designing products to addict kids: Turn autoplay and endless scroll off by default on children’s accounts or content and stop pushing kids to be online with “nudges” to share or engage.

2. Protect kids from predators: Make children’s profiles private by default and turn off location tracking on kids' accounts to make it harder for strangers to contact and track them.

3. Stop using algorithms to promote harmful, dangerous content to kids: Train ‘recommender algorithms’ to stop pushing risky content – like white supremacy, eating disorder how-tos, and dangerous viral challenges – on kids.

4. Don’t sell kids’ private information: Opt all children under 18 out of all targeting advertising and don’t sell their data to 3rd parties.

5. Stop hiding information on the real effect of your products: Release all internal data about how your platform impacts kids so parents and families understand the risks and can make informed choices.