YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat vowed to reveal data on their impact on children

Representatives of the technology companies YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat pledged on Tuesday to deliver to the United States Congress all the internal information they have about the impact of their products on the mental health of minors. That promise of transparency comes after a former Facebook employee revealed that Facebook and other platforms she owns, such as Instagram, hid information about how social media can create addiction in children and or damage their perception of themselves. At a Senate subcommittee hearing, Democratic Rep. Richard Blumenthal asked representatives from YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat whether, like Facebook, they had evaluated the impact of their products on minors and ripped off their commitment to turn over any information to Congress. In response to the senator’s questions, Snap’s vice president for global policy (owner of Snapchat), Jennifer Stout, explained that her company’s internal investigations have concluded that 95% of users say that the social network makes them “happy” because it connects them with their friends. For his part, TikTok’s vice president for the US, Michael Beckerman, said that such research on the impact of social networks on the mental health of adolescents should be done in a “transparent way” with external and independent experts of the company. He suggested, for example, the possibility of such studies being done in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the U.S. government agency in charge of medical research. The vice president of Youtube (owned by Google), Leslie Miller, indicated that her platform has already published some analysis of this type and that it will soon release more information.Miller said that Youtube is committed to protecting minors and that only in the first half of the year it removed 120,000 videos with sexual content about children and adolescents. The platform is also working to improve an app dedicated exclusively to minors called “YouTube Kids,” which it launched in 2015 with the goal of preventing harmful content. Tuesday’s session, dubbed “Protecting Our Children online,” comes at a time when Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Congress have increased their scrutiny of social media and are promoting different laws to regulate the sector. The meeting also represents the first time representatives of TikTok and Snapchat have testified in Congress.

Original source in Spanish