A U.S. Senate committee is examining the effects on children who spend hours with their eyes glued to smartphones, tablets, and other devices. During a hearing Thursday before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Jeremy Horvath, CEO of educational company LME Global, told Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Missouri, that online advertising aimed at kids is more sophisticated than the cereal TV commercials they grew up watching.
“Whatever was on the TV, we all watched it. There was a certain element of collectivism where our identities were formed around one thing that none of us touched,” Horvath testified. “Today, it’s all individualism. Everything you watch will be geared towards you, which means the ads you see will be geared towards you, and it shoves you into a very small path and which really narrows your identity.”
Dr. Jenny Radesky, Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Michigan Medical School, testified that YouTube in particular is a major source of video content for kids.
“Why does YouTube intentionally overload children with ads?” Schmitt asked Radesky.
She answered, “There’s a huge market for young children’s content on YouTube. There’s a couple of reasons for this. One, it’s very successful. Two, parents of young children are exhausted, and so they use YouTube to occupy kids. And so, there’s tons of ad space to be filled.”
She also said that YouTube-ers are now instructing each other on how to create AI-generated nursery rhymes and other content geared towards young children because they’re a “huge source of ad sales.”
San Diego State University psychology professor Dr. Jean Twenge told Schmitt that TikTok, YouTube, and other platforms “knowingly design addictive features” that target kids.
“That’s their business model,” she testified. “The more time people spend on (them), the more money they make. So, they have poured millions, if not billions, of dollars into those algorithms to make sure people use the app as much as possible.”
She continued, “And TikTok in particular, their internal research — they know that is especially effective with children and young teens because of brain development and impulse control. They have the biggest problem with spending an excessive amount of time.”
Schmitt then asked Twenge, “So, it would be your testimony that they know — not just that they can sell more ads — but they know that this is harmful to kids?”
She replied, “That is what the internal research that they have done, as well as the external academic research shows, yes.”
So far, neither YouTube nor TikTok have responded to the testimony from Thursday’s U.S. Senate committee hearing.
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