Training America’s Workforce Act

Madam President, there is a grave threat to America's future lurking online. Big Tech giants and other online platforms are working every day to capture the minds of our children in order to pad their profits.

Toddlers, before they can walk or barely talk, have learned to reach out and touch that bright little screen. Mothers and fathers on car rides and plane trips trust that little screen will buy them quiet time. Captivated, mesmerized, even hypnotized, the screen experience continues. And unless parents are very careful, it can go from bad to worse. It starts with music and games, which many of the parents find harmless. As the child grows up and graduates to a cell phone, there is an opportunity to move to a new level of information and communication.

Let's face it, even the most caring, conscientious parent struggles to keep up with all the apps and options. And the producers of these online experiences are determined to work on the brains of these children, capture their

little customers in the process, and pad their profits.

So who is protecting our kids from internet profiteers and predators? I am sorry to say, almost no one. In fact, our laws are written to protect the predators, not the kids.

Clearly, every child can benefit from a safe online experience. They can make friends, expand their knowledge, learn skills. But social media, we all know, has a dangerous dark side. Innocent children are lured into online environments and powerful algorithms working to keep them there. Unsuspecting kids can be sexually exploited and their childhood images captured forever by predators and profit-taking abusers.

Drug pushers no longer search for playgrounds to sell deadly narcotics. Two clicks on the internet bring them their new young customers. Many children are bullied and harassed online or pressured into dangerous, deadly behavior.

Rose Bronstein is a mother from Chicago. She knows how cruel and dangerous the online world can be. Rose's son Nate was a 10th grader at a private school when he started being taunted by classmates using texts and Snapchat. The bullying of her son was vicious, and it included messages urging Nate to kill himself. Nate died by suicide at the age of 15.

We have known for years about the online dangers to children's privacy and safety. We have talked a lot about them. We have even held hearings in Congress about them. Journalists have written so many articles about the dangers, but the problem has only grown worse.

Research into exactly how social media use affects children is still in its early stage, largely because of Big Tech's failure to adequately monitor, report, and prevent violation of children's online privacy and safety. But a picture is emerging, and it is alarming.

This chart tells a story. The gold line you see here shows the amount of time teenagers spend scrolling through social media and watching online videos. According to Common Sense, a group that tracks media use by young kids and teens, kids spend an average of nearly 3 hours a day on sites like Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube. That is a nearly 60-percent increase in the last 6 years.

This white line shows that an increase in teens' use of social media has been accompanied by a sharp spike in teen depression. According to the CDC, between 2013 and 2021, the percentage of teens who reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness shot up 42 percent-- between 2013 and 2021.

The blue line shows what happens with girls' mental health. Today, nearly one in three girls in America say they have seriously considered suicide. That is a 34-percent spike in the past decade.

We have given tech companies nearly three decades to police themselves. They have failed miserably, and our children are paying the price. Our teenagers are in a mental health crisis.

Congress must impose stronger, enforceable online protections for kids. Our children are not commodities, and we can't continue to expect parents and victims alone to stand up to Big Tech with few ways to hold tech companies accountable.

Two months ago, the Senate Judiciary Committee, which I chair, held a hearing on online threats to children's safety. We heard powerful testimony from those working to increase children's privacy and safety online. They included law enforcement, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, the American Psychological Association, and the child internet safety advocacy organization known as Fairplay.

We also heard from victims. The stories were frightening, frightening to every parent and every grandparent, and heartbreaking.

Charlotte--and I am using a pseudonym here--didn't attend the hearing, but she has allowed me to tell her story in the hope that it may help others who have been victimized online, as she has been, by sexual predators.

Charlotte was 16 years old when she first visited a social media site that a friend told her about. It sounded so exciting, she said, a place where she could meet people from all over the world. I won't use the name of the site, but you would recognize it immediately. It is used by tens of millions of people every single day.

Among the people Charlotte met online was a man who showered her with attention and compliments, gained her trust, and eventually enticed Charlotte into performing sex acts for him over the webcam and sending explicit videos to him.

Maybe that sounds shocking to you, but be prepared. Research shows that over one-third of teenagers today believe that it is normal to share the same sorts of images and videos that Charlotte shared online--one-third.

She was still in high school when the online harassment began. First came anonymous emails, then a phone call to her parents' house calling her vile names. Eventually, the images she shared with that man she thought was a friend would be posted on more than 100 websites across the world, often with her name and identifiable information included.

Charlotte filed her first of six police reports about the images when she reached the age of 18. Eventually, she, her mother, her boyfriend, and child safety groups would file hundreds of reports with social media providers around the world trying to get these horrible images taken down, often to no avail.

While she was in college studying to be a teacher--her lifelong dream--the images were posted again, along with her name and the name of her college. When the university found out about it, it canceled her student teaching placement and threatened to withhold her degree.

She was a teacher of special education at a middle school when one of her students saw the images again online. Charlotte told her principal. She was fired a few days later.

Again and again, it was Charlotte who was blamed, not the abusers who tormented her online. Over the years, Charlotte tried three times to take her own life. It has now been 14 years since she met that predator online, but the images continue to circulate again and again. The abuse never stops, and Charlotte says she doubts she will ever feel safe again.

This Senate can help Charlotte and countless other young people who are sexually abused online each year by passing a bill that I am introducing today. It is called the Stop CSAM Act. CSAM, C-S-A-M, stands for ``child sexual abuse material.'' Federal law still uses the old term--``pornography,'' ``child pornography''--but that is misleading because pornography implies consent, and children under the age of 18 cannot legally consent to the creation or sharing of sexually explicit images of themselves.

So these images are, by definition, evidence of a crime. Yet, under current law, it is extremely difficult to bring lawsuits against tech companies that allow child sexual abuse materials to be posted on their websites.

How can this be, you ask? Here is how. The Communications Decency Act of 1996--remember that year--contains a section, section 230, that offers near-total immunity to Big Tech. As a result, victims like Charlotte have no way to force tech companies to remove content posted on their sites--not even these child sexual abuse horrible images.

My bill, the Stop CSAM Act, is going to change that. It would protect victims and promote accountability within the tech industry. Companies that fail to remove CSAM and related imagery after being notified about them would face significant fines. They would also be required to produce annual reports detailing their efforts to keep children safe from online sex predators, and any company that promotes or facilitates online child exploitation could face new criminal and civil penalties.

When section 230 was created in 1996, Mark Zuckerberg was in the sixth grade. Facebook and social media sites didn't even exist. It is time that we rewrite the law to reflect the reality of today's world.

A bipartisan bill sponsored by Senators Graham and Blumenthal would also help to do that. It is called the EARN IT Act, and it would let CSAM victims--these child sexual abuse victims--have their day in court by amending section 230 to eliminate Big Tech's near-total immunity from liability and responsibility.

When we learned two decades ago that Big Tobacco was lying about their

efforts to hook kids on smoking, Congress took action to establish reasonable guardrails to protect public health, and the courts held Big Tobacco accountable for the damage and death it had caused.

Now, Big Tech is using the same playbook in order to profit by hooking America's kids on its dangerous products. It is time to hold them accountable just as we did with Big Tobacco.

I will close with one more story from our committee hearing. Kristin Bride is a mother from Oregon. After being bullied relentlessly by supposed friends using Snapchat and anonymous messaging apps, Kristin's 16-year-old son Carson hanged himself in his family's garage. After his death, Kristin discovered the online taunts they had been throwing at her son. She sued the anonymous messaging apps in California State court for failing to enforce even their own safety standard.

The court dismissed the lawsuit, and what did they cite? Section 230, our law from 1996.

As Kristin told our committee, ``It shouldn't take grieving parents filing lawsuits to hold the industry accountable for their dangerous and addictive product design.''

We have the bipartisan support in the Senate to protect our children and grandchildren online. It is time that we use it.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Madam President, in February, the Biden administration argued to the U.S. Supreme Court that title 42 will terminate in May of 2023 with the expiration of the COVID-19 public health emergency.

Removing one of the last tools available to Border Patrol agents during a record-shattering border crisis is intolerable. Congress should not stand by and refuse to address this obvious problem.

Title 42 authority was initially based on the pandemic, and while I agree that the pandemic is over, the border crisis and the deadly drug overdose crisis that it fuels are worse than ever.

Whether to maintain border security policy should not depend on whether there is a pandemic. That is why I am reintroducing the Stop Fentanyl Border Crossings Act today. This legislation would preserve continued use of title 42 authority to combat drug trafficking at the border.

Clearly, the deadly epidemic has not ended. Deadly fentanyl is flooding American communities--deadly fentanyl, produced with the help of the Chinese Communist Party and smuggled by drug cartels across our southern border.

More than 100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in the last 12 months, most of them from synthetic opioids like fentanyl. It is the No. 1 cause of death for Americans between the ages of 18 and 45.

The rise in fentanyl overdoses and deaths affects every State and congressional district. It kills the young and the old, the rich and the poor, in cities and in small towns alike. It is not a partisan issue, and finding a solution shouldn't be partisan either.

When I talk to Tennessee sheriffs, they tell me that fentanyl is becoming more and more lethal, how a so-called ``bad batch'' can kill dozens of people. Once this deadly substance arrives in American communities, it is too late. We have to stop it before it crosses our borders. That is why I have reintroduced this legislation to combat drug smuggling.

When I travel to the border, Border Patrol agents tell me that the cartels use human waves of illegal border crossers as cover to transport fentanyl and other deadly narcotics. While Border Patrol agents are diverted to manage caravans of border crossers, the gap in coverage is then exploited by the smugglers. In many cases, these are well-planned and carefully coordinated occurrences.

The agents told me that ``the people don't stay at the border, and the drugs don't either.'' They also told me that title 42 is the last tool the Border Patrol has left to partially slow this ongoing tidal wave of illegal crossings. We can't afford to take away this tool in the midst of a crisis.

Letting title 42 end without creating a permanent, new authority to replace it empowers drug cartels. It enables them to send migrants across the border at strategic points, bogging down Border Patrol agents with paperwork and processing that takes five times longer without title 42. This dramatic increase in processing times absent title 42 will significantly decrease the scarce resources available to actually patrol our southern border. Cartels will then use the longer and more frequent enforcement gaps to move more fentanyl across the southern border. We cannot allow this to happen.

My legislation simply adds drug smuggling as an additional basis for using title 42 authority. It would help Border Patrol stop drug traffickers.

This should not be controversial. Yet, last Congress, Democrats blocked its passage three times on the Senate floor. Now that we are staring down at the end of title 42, it is time to pass this bill. I hope my colleagues across the aisle will not let title 42 expire without action. We must protect the border security tools we have to stop the fentanyl flowing across our southern border before more lives are lost.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.