{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/blumenthal-and-blackburn-hold-roundtable-with-young-people-to-discuss-online-kids-safety", "Blumenthal & Blackburn Hold Roundtable with Young People to Discuss Online Kids Safety", "2023-10-23", "2023", "2023-10", "Democrat", "Senate", "CT", "Richard Blumenthal", "B001277", "www.blumenthal.senate.gov", "blumenthal", "https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/newsroom/press", "scraper", "[WASHINGTON, D.C.] \u2013 Last week, U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) hosted a roundtable with young people\u2014middle schoolers, high schoolers, and college students\u2014to discuss the harms they and their friends are facing online. Blumenthal and Blackburn are the lead sponsors of the bipartisan Kids Online Safety Act, which would provide kids and parents with better tools to protect themselves online, hold Big Tech accountable for harms to kids, and provide transparency into black box algorithms.\n\nMore photos are available here and here & video is available here\n\n\u201cYour bearing witness today is so very powerful,\u201d said Blumenthal, welcoming the group, and discussing the Kids Online Safety Act. \u201cWe now have almost 50 co-sponsors. You know, that\u2019s almost half of the United States Senate. That\u2019s virtually unprecedented. And it\u2019s evenly divided: Republicans, Democrats.\u201d\n\n\u201cAs we started looking at what was happening in the virtual space and having hearings, we heard from parents, kids, pediatricians, teachers, principals, child psychologists, and children\u2019s hospitals,\u201d said Blackburn, discussing the drafting of the Kids Online Safety Act and the bipartisan series of hearing the Senators held over the course of two years on Big Tech\u2019s harms. \u201cSo many times they would open up with, \u2018We\u2019ve seen your hearing. We watched it. Can we tell you our story?\u2019 And because of that, we knew this was a problem that needed to be solved.\u201d\n\nSharing young people\u2019s perspective on online issues were a group of middle schoolers, high schoolers, and college students from across the country, including Washington, D.C., Virginia, Tennessee, Florida, and Oregon.\n\n\u201cJust remember that if something abusive happens online, harassment online, exploitation online, it is not your fault,\u201d said 13-year-old Frances Binford-Ross from Oregon. \u201cWe are dealing with so many forces, so many huge forces, and it is so hard to push against them. They have these algorithms that push extreme content on us just for engagement, for likes, comments, follows, anything. They do not care about our wellbeing and they\u2019re not taking accountability for how they\u2019re harming us, or for how they\u2019re harming the future of this country.\u201d\n\n\u201cI identify as a survivor of online exploitation, and the only reason I\u2019m here talking about it is because I don\u2019t want anybody else and their childhood to be for sale, because I was put for sale,\u201d said 26-year-old Olivia Littleton from Florida. \u201cEvery single predator I\u2019ve met that\u2019s extorted me was connected to me through a website or an app, and they would have not had access to me otherwise.\u201d\n\nMore photos are available here and here & video is available here\n\n-30-", 1, "2026-03-30T01:40:41Z", "2026-04-08T00:49:26Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/blumenthal-and-blackburn-hold-roundtable-with-young-people-to-discuss-online-kids-safety"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.9817099198698997, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}