Assembly Privacy And Consumer Protection Committee

My mic's on. Good afternoon. We're going to call this hearing of the Privacy Consumer Protection Committee into order. This is an informational hearing that we are hosting today on online safety controls. And I want to start by thanking all of our panelists for attending and participating in our hearing today. And of course I want to thank the privacy staff, which is, as I

building, the rules committee sergeant's office and other support staff for helping to organize this hearing. This hearing was really born out of my experience serving on this committee for now seven years.

lived experience of parents navigating social media with their children who say that the systems are broken for their kids and they aren't working. And then we kept hearing from industry. The answer is parental controls. And so I decided that we needed to put these two perspectives together and have a real moment to talk about the parental controls, how they work, what they are, what they're doing. Do people know they exist? Are people using them? How and why? And can they fail children? And how do we navigate a path forward online that is safer for California's children? I want to really acknowledge all of the speakers who are here today to have that conversation with us. As I said, we're going to start with the Hinxes who will really share what it means to be a parents navigating this world. We're going to hear from folks representing children.

enough in this building. But we have two incredible organizations, Common Sense Media and Children now, who will be here to speak on behalf of California's children. I also want to give a huge debt of gratitude to the four companies, CA companies, I will say Google, Meta, OpenAI and Roblox who all agreed to be here. Often we have to go a second round to get people to participate, but every single one of the companies that we invited in the first round agreed to come and have a conversation with us about parental control. I really want to express my gratitude.

Then lastly, we'll have a panel to discuss potential solutions with some experts that research this space every day. And I think this conversation will hopefully help us navigate a path forward in the social media space that is informed by what is happening online, the realities of these products and the experts research. Because I know that all of us

I will say that I'm Entering this conversation personally with the fundamental question in my mind that if we know that these, in some cases, these online spaces are designed to be addictive and to keep our children engaged, can any amount

And so that's where I come at this. But I also think that it is the reality that our kids are growing up with. And so we need to figure out, you know, what is the way for California to create the safest spaces for our children. So with that, I want to turn it over to my colleagues.

First of all, I just want to thank our chair. This committee has led with moral clarity in a way nowhere else in the United States has, actually, including our federal government. And I am grateful as a father. Thank you, Madam Chair, for today and every day that we do this work. And I also want to thank everybody that has come here. I believe we are all a community together. All of us ultimately want the same

a healthy consumer, a robust business, a future that we all know this generation is surpassing the generation before it and so forth. And so I look forward to having individual relationships with each and every one of you. And I know that everybody on this committee feels this way. And it's just a joy that you, that you showed up today. So thank you so much.

and thanks for your leadership.

opening remarks will be from Victoria and

So thank you for being here. Thank you.

She wanted to be a preschool teacher

through what we went through.

had a bright future ahead of her.

Thank you. Victoria.

Thank you both so much for being here. I know this cannot be easy, but your advocacy absolutely makes us better.

Well now move to the first panel which is an overview of the types of parental control challenges and reasons for failure.

Stanford Social Media Lab, the Shawn Francis, policy analyst and advocate for children. Now

pronounce her last name?

Did I get that right? Anika yeah. Who's the PhD and founder and CEO of Clara Clear AI Risk Assurance and

Victoria thanks so much for sharing your stories and have courage to be here.

research about online harms because tragedy like

just want to protect our children. Madam Chair and community members, today I will share about our research at Stanford Social Media Lab on the challenges parents facing digital parenting.

and should not be interpreted to represent the views of the universities. So I'll start my presentation.

kids across the United States. I know the next panelist will talk about children's perspectives so I want to briefly highlight the key findings here.

parents to know about their social media use and online world.

guidelines and also have clear expectations when

their children and experiences the most Concerned

also impact on mental and social well being.

a safe and healthy online world.

is the way to control that?

really prevent harms and protect their children online? So what they do is by parental control.

links like Barks Custodial net nannies.

how to protect our children and reduce harms. Clearly those tools are not sufficient to prevent harms as we want today.

at our lab Core challenges that parents facing to really protect their children online. The first one is digital parenting is challenging. The second is tech is complicated. Third, there are constraints on parental controls and last, accessibility and equity gap.

A Pew report suggests that 2/3 of parents today think that parenting is harder today than 20 years ago because of technologies like social media and smartphone. Digital parenting is just one part of parenting. Parenting is challenging. Here's why mom shares with us.

everywhere all at once to your children.

more of this and be more of that within the environment that doesn't really support

navigate those complicated online safety worlds. So here's one parent share with us.

that he not bullied.

people can encounter online.

technologies and involving harms.

step or even 10 steps behind of their kids. So what's happening online?

And tech is complicated.

Parents has to constantly navigate all those different settings.

their updates they have to relearn everything again.

settings will not work at device level.

now use on her laptop which might

with her study more or her life more.

different ways to bypass old parental controls.

and increase Conflict in families Screen time is the number one conflict in family. Now lastly I want to highlight accessibility and equity gaps.

and energy to constantly moderate.

families and families that have parents have

to really constant monitor tools do exist,

controls don't work for four main reasons.

constraints or parent controls, accessibility and equity gap.

I'm so glad that the committee take this seriously and bring such a wide range of stakeholders here.

will help to framing the discussions.

future for the other panelists, witnesses and I look forward for questions in the discussion.

Thank you so much Madam Chair Members, My name is Lashawn Francis and I'm with Children Now. We are a statewide research, policy and advocacy org focused on the whole child. Our organization also leads the Children's Movement, a California network of more than 6,000 direct service, parent, youth, civil rights, faith based and community groups dedicated to improving children's well being. Our goal overall is to sound the alarm about how kids are doing in our state in regards to mental health, addiction and online spaces not well and the data makes it clear that digital spaces are both a reflection and a driver of that crisis. I know that today the header of this hearing is social media, but I'm going to talk broadly about digital spaces. I grew up in a time of AOL online chat rooms, and obviously that has changed. And so I'm going to say digital spaces more broadly because the iteration of things is constantly changing. That's just the nature of tech. In 2021, Children now wrote a letter to the governor asking him to declare a state of emergency for California's youth due to the mental health crisis. That declaration was never made, and the urgency around the mental health crisis for kids actually remains today. The connection between mental health, addiction and social in digital spaces has never been clearer. According to our 2025 youth poll, about 94% of young people in California report experiencing regular mental health challenges, with one third describing their mental health as fair or poor. Nearly all of those reporting poor mental health, 98% were youth of color. More than 1 in 3 LGBTQ youth in California seriously considered suicide in the last year. For transgender and non binary youth, that number climbs to nearly four in 10. Indigenous youth in California bear the highest rate of suicide deaths among any youth group by a wide margin on overdoses. Fentanyl has transformed the crisis entirely. Adolescent drug fatalities remain more than twice pre pandemic levels, 708 deaths nationally in 2023 compared to 282 in 2019. The National Crime Prevention Council estimates that 8 in 10 fentanyl overdose deaths are connected to social media contact, with dealers actively using these platforms to reach young people. Psychiatrists warn that generative AI affirms, enables, and fails to challenge delusional beliefs. The digital crisis connection to these mental health and addiction outcomes are no longer speculative. According to our youth poll, nearly a third of California young people say social media has been harmful to their mental health. About one in three report being cyberbullied, and roughly seven in 10 say social media contributed to a negative body image. So what is the industry offered as a solution? Parental controls and one of the things that I really do want to flag in this talk when we talk about parental controls and one of the reasons why I spent the majority of my introduction on the state of the mental health and addiction of young people is to realize that we're not actually answering a tech problem, we're answering a child safety problem. And once we understand that, I think the solutions will be clear. We need to be a little clear eyed about what parental controls actually are and where they come from. The design and definition of parental controls have so far been dictated by tech companies themselves. That means the industry has control the narrative around what safety looks like, and too often it looks good on paper while doing very little in practice. When companies use parental control features as a public relations shield, it allows them to sidestep the deeper systemic problems, harmful design, exploitive engagement algorithms, and inadequate privacy protections. A 2025 report titled Teen Accounts Broken Promises tested 47 of Instagram's teen safety and parental control features and found only eight worked as intended. Most were ineffective, unavailable, or easy to bypass. Fairplay found that parental controls do not accurately reflect what a teen is actually experiencing online. Parents are not notified by default when their child reports a poster account, and children can easily open a FINSTA account with no indication appearing in parental supervision tools. In 2025, pediatric experts warned that YouTube Kids still allows low quality and borderline harmful content to slip through even when parental controls are enabled. Because creators can self label videos as for kids and game the system with friendly thumbnails and keywords, these aren't isolated glitches. They reveal a pattern parental controls designed to look like protection without actually having to provide it. Young people see through that when we talk to youth about technology and online safety, parental controls are rarely what they bring up. In fact, when I bring it up, they actually chuckle. And it's not because they don't care about safety. It's because they know these tools don't work. Many of their parents aren't fully equipped to manage or understand how these systems work. Setting them up requires technological skill, time, and patience that parents simply don't have. And even when parents do engage with these tools and young people say the controls are set in such a way that they can easily navigate around them. So when I ask what will be effective because I know they care about their safety online, they say instead of focusing on parental controls, they want online literacy, digital responsibility, and corporate accountability. They understand that the online environment they inhabit is not shaped by personal choices alone. It's engineered by the design decisions tech companies make about platforms, algorithms, and engagement tools. In their view, teaching young people to critically evaluate content and understand data practices is more empowering than any parental dashboard. Young parents also want their parents to be educated not just on how to use parental controls, but on how to have open, informed conversations about tech, they want collaboration, not surveillance. When parents understand digital culture, social media norms, gaming communities, content creation spaces, they connect with their kids on a human level rather than a policing one. Importantly, the approach to digital safety needs to evolve as children grow. One of the things we see very often is that we Write legislation where the tech rules apply to a three year old in the same way that it would apply to a 17 year old.

Perhaps what's most telling is this. When I spend time with youth advocates and ask why they keep using platforms they clearly dislike, their answers reveal just how much the stakes have changed. They tell me they feel compelled to participate not for entertainment, but because school announcements live on social media, political activism happens on social media, and job opportunities are shared online. For today's young people, these platforms are not a fun pastime like my AOL chat rooms. They are infrastructure. Opting out isn't really a choice. That is precisely why the burden of safety cannot rest on families alone. The real question before us is not how to build better parental controls. It's how to shift the conversation entirely away from tech companies defining what digital safety means and towards families and young peoples, young people, and policymakers outlining what is expected from corporations that provide products to our kids. This should be no different than the safety protocols for vehicles, car seats, toys, cribs, and the like. We need policymakers to come together with urgency to examine which rules and regulations need to change, address the structural crises in our digital spaces, and put meaningful guardrails on corporations. Because our children do not feel that they have the ability to leave these digital spaces that are offering them different ways to engage in life. The resources and reforms we pursue must reflect the full scope of this both offline and on. Thank you for your time.

Okay.

All right.

on well being and empathy until I

actually I was on growth and safety teams.

worked on age assurance, which is particularly on the Youth well being team. In this particular space

based advocacy and to build the right products in this space and to have the right conversations and suggest the technical solutions that can actually work.

need a lot of different layers. And we need a lot of layers

on and so forth.

and things were broken.

lot of adults don't want to do it.

But it can also lead to circumvention

is the good news is we have

privacy preserving methods for children.

parent has helped them.

So you're limited.

Did you say 120 hours?

Which app was that?

pretty bad harms happen to children.

also, also as an advocate for the safety researchers that are working in companies today.

aren't always empowered to do that work.

And so I think there's even less of feeling protected to speak out and to really advocate for the change internally, which is one of the reasons I'm doing this work outside right now.

Because otherwise that also will drive circumvention.

meeting that bar really isn't good enough. And we need the standards for that.

and effect and we can make sure

no longer get harmed. So, yeah, that is my pitch.

Okay, before I say anything to the panel here, I just want to acknowledge the Hincks family. It is so important to have your voice in this conversation. And I know how. Well, I don't know, I don't know how challenging it is for you to come up and relive this all the time, but I can tell you that your presence here is meaningful to all of us and helpful for this conversation because we are able to make it real. So thank you for being here. I'm struggling and let me tell you why I'm struggling because I don't understand what safe is all about. Is safe meaning that we are, we're, we're stopping harm, crisis type harm from taking place, interactions that can be deadly, suicidal ideation, you know, things that are absolutely catastrophic harm. What about intellectual harm, academic harm? The empirical data that we're hearing right now, which is about our kids no longer surpassing this generation, I alluded to that earlier, which is a grave concern, I think, to all of us. I want to ask an open question about that and I'd like to hear how you answer that. That'd be great. And I also want to ask you about China and your feelings about what's happening in China. China, to me, is the only country that I know of that was ahead of this from a regulatory standpoint. I don't think of them as a beacon of civil and human rights whatsoever. And clearly they don't have a constitution with the Bill of Rights that we have here in the United States. And yet I wonder and do we have any information, empirical information about mental health disorders with youth happening in China right now as a result of those things. And I know that their efforts have been quite draconian. But to me, when it comes back to this issue of harm, they're very focused on STEM and steam. They're very focused on making sure kids raise the bar on their goals and their dreams and their hopes. They're focused on teaching kids healthy lifestyles and healthy choices and so forth. To me that's very attractive. I just wanted to ask for your comments and thoughts on these things.

I think those are the same question. I think fundamentally how we can support children to have a healthy development we don't know. I think that our research relates to technology is limited.

will make kids thriving. So there are fundamental needs both I think physical, psychological, mental, emotional. Those parts we know those psychological teachers have that.

First is I think that if you

I think that reducing harms is one part of how to supporting kids development. Kids cannot thrive when they are bullied. When they see all those online hate when they have those shoulders and harmful content and incontinent risk harms. So that's one aspect.

develop healthy their identities, who they are fulfill their potentials. Maybe it's intellectual, maybe it's social, maybe it's emotional.

harm that's one aspect. But how to make our environment both online and offline support kids development their fundamental needs. I think that's all parts of picture. And then I think that as about China. China for a little bit background. I think a few years ago China had this regulation for video game specific. So kids can only play video games at. I don't remember details but maybe half hour on Fridays, one hour on Sundays.

for all the kids. And they actually they implemented that really all the platforms they have to cut all those kids and the families have to take responsibility. You cannot have those kids to play video games.

research coming out I think a few years ago. I'm happy to share that article.

play video games did not decrease.

not decrease kids time online.

research to understand do those kids under those regulation develop better, have more time to play with friends to intellectual development. Happy to do more research and then figure that out.

So I'll say first I don't know much about China, so I can't answer that question. What I will say about how I know we've operated in the US unfortunately is that corporations and businesses seem to believe they have more rights than individual children and families and they will sue to prove it. And that tells me everything I need to know about how we are engaging here with corporations and who is really trying to set the bar and the parameters for safety. What I'll also say in the mental health context, in terms of what is even healthy for and safe and thriving is we know healthy face to face interactions are the best. That is the gold standard, not online interactions. So the gold standard is face to face in person interactions. The ability to read micro expressions, the ability to hug someone, the ability to, you know, put your hands on over someone's and show comfort. That's the gold standard. We have began talking as if the gold standard are online spaces with interaction. When it comes to mental health, whether it's through how we provide therapy or how we find community, it's not the gold standard. It's what we've done because we have a workforce shortage, but it's not the gold standard. So I just, I just want to say that, that it's actually something that we should be thinking about as secondary, not as primary.

I think there absolutely are good things that kids can do online.

keep talking to them.

at first because you don't look super

a community for themselves.

standards and the right controls.

out there instead of what the safety protections are, it's just not where we need it to be.

there really is

so that they can claim the benefits

experiences are the best. Then the second piece, I think is

I think there's also something really broken about how oversight was ever created because.

the tech company ends up winning because

Right.

false alerts and all these different things.

education, like what you were saying, Francis.

as well, to be part of educating kids to what the dangers are.

How can you report?

accountability on what happens to all these reports. Like, you know, how many reports that

eating disorders, this is this. How many get actually action on? We have no idea. Like, I've never seen that data of what the percentage is, of what reports are just getting dismissed. And so, you know, like, it's fine.

of accountability that we can ask for. And I think then we can make real progress on answering that question.

Yeah. Just one thing that I think Ms. Francis said that's really interesting is the

on this because the First Amendment is

Right.

or another risk to a First Amendment. You can't hate speech, for example. It's not protection under the First Amendment.

everything they do under the First Amendment with no exception.

is not, as I understood it as a young law student and practitioner, the

of that debate evenly in courts.

With that, Ms. McKinnon, thank you guys

I have one question.

Good question.

Yeah.

That was a short answer.

One last thing. What does success look like? How should we measure whether platforms are

reducing harm?

my big point, right.

we know what the base rates are.

systems and standards controls, do those harms go down?

And as much as we can, experimental

are actually working, because I think that's one of the big problems.

actually fix the problem, then really we're just. It's just lip service. Right.

It benefits the tech companies, it benefits

the families that we're trying to serve as well.

Well, I was just going to say no. An interesting point on that is that

long time ago while I was here

down by the courts under the First

to disclose as materials, which makes it harder to track all of what she's saying.

Thank you.

And do you mind if I add really quickly one of the things. Every young person I've talked to has used one of the reporting features to report content or something happening online. Every single one of them said they've never heard back. It just kind of goes off into the ether.

Sonny, remember Wicks, thank you for the testimony. I don't know a single parent that feels great about their tech situation with their children. They're like, this is awesome. Like, it's not a. You know, every time it's like a war, it's a fight. It's like the parents trying to navigate a very complicated. I mean, I can't even navigate my own phone. You know, I can't keep up with all of it myself. And then to manage your children's as well. So parents are just at their wit's

in the most generous terms and the most horrifying terms. We hear testimony from Victoria and Paul, and I also want to recognize their testimony. And this is obviously the worst case

So thank you for testifying. And that is like every parent I've ever talked to about this. And when I do pick up and drop off, this is what parents are talking about. When taking your kids to birthday parties, going to soccer practice, it's all consuming, and everyone's looking for a solution and they need help. And, you know, they're eager for government to take action because it feels like if it's a parent against a tech company, it's just an unfair fight, especially when the kids are often aligned with the tech company, you know, because they want the product more and more and more. And so that's why a holistic approach, I think, is critical. Ms. Francis, I'd love to ask you a question. Is there any benefit to social media access for kids? And if so, at what age does that benefit outweigh the risk? And the answer might be no, but I'm just kind of curious because I don't know the answer to that question. I'd love to know your thoughts.

Right.

I think my website on this just went live today,

a lot of them have things where they're better than others, but I don't

than all the others.

teen accounts I think was an important step forward.

is that not one of the plan firms right now is all across the board doing the right things across all the different controls. And I think that's where the legislation is needed. That's where like mandated standards and like minimum standards and also parental controls are going to come in as really, really important.

for five minutes between soccer practice and tutoring.

ways problem where kids are expected to be in all these different activities and have no unstructured time to play and to be, just to be free and to be with each other.

technology companies have picked up on sort of a need for kids to want to socialize as teens and to be independent. And I think we have to understand that ecosystem that they're operating in.

is good or social media is good

if we take certain things away and

filled with real life interactions, that that's a problem too. So like this is not really answering

we having the system? And you know, and maybe why is it even that kids want to be in these apps as opposed to being in person. So I thought that was important to mention.

Thank you, assembly member Pellerin.

Yes, we should be. No, we are not.

I love how succinct Ms. Francis is. Okay.

Yeah, I think that usually those harms

very concretely like I think end to

Like children in these chats, like there's

So for bullying and harassment I'm quite concerned about them. Even in imessage like you don't even

question on Apps, actually, there was famously

And I think that tech companies probably

How should they be designed so that the attempts to do so really can actually be successful. And of course, my personal opinion is

is ultimately safe because it will easily

I'm grateful my kids are 28 and soon to be 31. I can't imagine raising young children in this environment right now. And quite frankly, I feel like we should just ban, you know, smartphones for kids age 16 and under. And I know you raised a good point, and that was good, because I need to hear that, because that's just how I feel. I feel like this is an evil device for them and this is hurting them and it's causing kids to take their own lives, and I can't stand by and watch that. I just want to take it all away.

Okay.

It's just not realistic, but I feel the same way.

But I think it depends on. I mean, the thing is, the honest answer is we don't know yet because we would need a lot more data. And these interventions are all so new, and I think there is a good

But there's also kids that are moving

aren't as well regulated, that also aren't part like they're not affected by the regulation.

on is it right or is it not right?

keeping the child with less supervision safe as well. Right.

say this is the right versus the wrong way.

of data behind it when we make those kind of decisions.

where are kids wandering to which kids

And I think those are all very tough questions that need a lot of data support that we just don't have yet. I think it'll be monitoring those countries and sort of what happens there.

Yeah, so I would share a little

Yeah briefly answer.

Kids know that they have to know that sometimes they don't want to report

So I think there's.

What's currently missing I think that on

We built those circle of care and

My answer is screen time works. Taking the phone away works too.

my room at night and I constantly

extent of the parental controls on the device. I think the only one that I really trust actually is the screen time one and all the other ones I think have holes right now.

Me too.

Nine out of ten times.

And I think that some important points were made. I will say that my own children,

would when they were little FaceTime with

and she lives far away and read to them. And it was the most, it was amazing. It was honestly really positive connecting time that was happening through a device. And so I am a huge believer

And I will say that I love what you said about circles of trust

I come from a very large southern family. One of our safety mechanisms is that

And so I watch all my nieces and nephews Instagrams and they know I'm watching but it's different than their parents. And so I do think it is

future in a way that really centers public health. I think is we keep trying to

And I really appreciate all of you being here. Another thing that I wanted to point out was something you said, Ms. Francis, about kids reporting content not getting a response. One of the things we are working on this year that I hope will be successful as a bipartisan coalition is

this for so many other industries and

future when kids do face that they

helps our kids because their lives matter. And so I want to close lastly

both Victoria and Paul, who

I've had many conversations. And you say that coming here and telling your story is part of what empowers you every day.

it because as a mother, as an

California's children, at the end of the

And with that, I will turn to the next panel. Thank you, guys. So the next panel is our industry panel. We're going to hear about these online tools, some of which I know from my own experience, have been updated, so we may get some updates on what is new and exciting online. First, we have Nicole Lopez, who's the director of God Global Litigation Strategy at Meta. You guys can sit wherever you'd like. We have Emily Cashman Kirstein, and I apologize if I'm butchering Kirsten. Thank you. Child safety manager at Google, Lauren Haber, Jonas, head of Youth well being and families at OpenAI, and Eliza Jacobs, senior director of product policy at Roblox.

plan to have all female panels.

not, not mad at it.

over to who is supposed to be first.

First, do I need to press anything here or can you hear me? Okay. All right.

So I also want to thank Victoria and Paul. I appreciated and it meant a lot that you shared your story today. And I'm chairman as well as assembly members. I'm Nicole. I'm here testifying on behalf of Meta. But first and foremost, I like you, I'm a parent. I have two tweens who are online quite a bit. Screen time is the battle that we fight often in our household. I'm also here as a California resident, born and raised in Oakland, where I live five minutes from my parents. Today I joined Meta roughly three and a half years ago, where I've continued to work both in the policy as well as legal side of the house on what I care deeply about, which is the safety and well being of young people. I have done this for the bulk of my career, both in the private and public sectors, including eight and a half, almost nine years as a prosecutor in California, where I did two stints in the domestic violence unit. I worked on child endangerment, child abuse, child exploitation cases, and then I worked in the community violence reduction unit where I focused on violence impacting teens and their families. I care deeply about protecting young people online as well as supporting their parents, which we've touched on today. Parents are supporting their teens navigate these online spaces. I want to talk first about Meta's approach to teen safety. I think it's really important as a backdrop for how we build these features and experiences for teens. At Meta, our teams work together to build safe, positive and age appropriate experiences for teens and their families. But in order, and we've been talking about this today, to design products with the right mitigations to support users who are actually using them. It's critical, it's complicated. That has come up today as well and it's really critical to bring the right voices into the room. And there are a lot of voices that matter. Teens. You have regulators, policymakers like yourselves, internal experts at Meta as well as experts externally who are going to have different focus areas and who are going to come with a very blank slate because they're not actually working at Meta. They have their own experiences to bring to bear. But importantly and relevant to the question that you posed at the beginning, we need to listen to parents. No kid is the same, no teen is the same. I say this from personal experience, having two very different boys who are 10 and 12 and parents know their teens best. In terms of the approach that we take to building, it is not a one and done static experience. As technology changes and assemblymember Wicks talked about this, it's evolving really quickly. It is complex. We have moved into a different era than not just the AOL chats, but even four years ago it's constantly shifting and so we need to continue to listen, to build and to improve. It's not static. And I'll zed discuss. We have to get parents feedback and it's not just about parent controls. I want to make sure this is not a dichotomy. It's parent controls are important, very important. But so are the baseline experiences that need to be protective of all teens who are using the apps. And in terms of how we get parents feedback, we do it in a number of ways. One way that I've been deeply involved in includes listening to parents live in person. Meta's hosted Screen Smart events in California, I hosted one in San Francisco. We've had them in la, we've had them in San Diego where we provide hands on workshops for parents so that they actually understand how the tools and experiences work. We want parents to feel confident about raising their teens in an increasingly digital age. And we also want to make sure that they have boundaries and protections that are going to work for each family. Because again, it's not just that every teen is different, every family is different in what they want. So I want to take a step back and share some of the work that we've done to address parents concerns, some of which actually predates my joining meta. Before I joined, we started building out a number of parent supervision tools. And I'm not going to spend a lot of time on every tool that we've built because there are a lot. I just want to highlight some that I think give you an understanding of how things have shifted over time. We've given parents the ability to view how much time their teens spend on Instagram, set time limits, get notified when a teen reports an account or content, view what accounts their teens follow and the accounts that are following their teens. See who their teen has been speaking to in the last seven days. Again, hoping that parents feel empowered to have conversations with their teens. These conversations, as I said, are ongoing and they're continuing to shape and improve how we design experiences for teens. And so more recently in the last two years, again, this is a trajectory that continues to develop. Parents said they wanted to feel more confident around their teen social media use without having to worry about the top three concerns that again, things shift over time. It's what content their teen is seeing, who their teen is talking to, and how their teen is spending their time. And that's why we launched teen Accounts, which was talked about earlier today in September 2024 for Instagram, Facebook Messenger. And I think this is really important. All teens are defaulted into protective settings that address those three concerns. Who talks to their teens? We limit messaging, we limit the content that teens see and we make sure that time is well spent by putting teens into sleep mode at night. And again, any teen under 16 cannot wiggle out of these defaults, these strict settings, without a parent allowing them to do so. We also heard from parents more recently that they have different views on what's appropriate for their teens. Think about this as a parent. You know, parents look at content on Instagram and they looked at millions of pieces of content and there were thousands of parents who looked at it and they all had different views on what the feedback was and what was age appropriate. We took that feedback and we distilled it into how we draw lines across content that teens can see and that expanded again iterating improving the teen accounts experience. We revamped our content policies inspired by 13 movie criteria and more specifically, parent feedback. That means now that teens under 18 are automatically placed into these 13 plus experiences and they'll see content similar to what they'd see in an age appropriate movie. They also can't see 18 content anywhere, whether it's recommended, posted by a friend if they're searching for it. We also listened to parents and they told us they may not want their teens to see 13/plus experience content because again, not every teen is the same. A 13 year old may not be as mature as another 13 year old. So we created even more restrictive setting that parents can put their teens in. So again, every family's different. We took in that feedback, we implemented that feedback. We've also taken a similar approach to providing age appropriate interactions for teens who use our AI. Teens can access information and educational opportunities through Meta's AI assistant, again with default age appropriate protections in place. And we're continuing our work to give parents insights into those conversations. We're again using content guidelines that are inspired by movie ratings for 13 +, meaning that AI should not give responses that would feel out of place in an age appropriate movie. The other recent announcement that we made that has been highlighted today earlier is that Instagram will start notifying parents in supervision if their teen repeatedly tries to search for terms related to suicide or self harm within a short period of time. The vast majority of teens are not looking for this content, but when they do, we already have a policy in place to block those searches and to direct them to resources should that happen. These new alerts though, are designed to make sure that parents are aware if their teen is repeatedly trying to search for this content and to give them the resources they need to support their teen. And again, we worked with experts on this, but we heard directly from parents that they wanted to know and we incorporated that feedback. I think what's been raised today, and I really want to revisit this because it's been said so many times in a different, you know, variety of conversations, is that parents and myself included are feeling overwhelmed. Teens, and I'm sure Australia will come up at some point during the conversation, are fleeing to apps that we've never heard of. Teens are on average of, according to a University of Michigan study, 40 apps per week and parents have no idea what they're doing. And again, you know, we supported assembly member Wix bill to require operating system providers and app stores to implement an age assurance signal. And that's important because in order to get teens into age appropriate experiences, you absolutely need to know how old they are. And everybody here at the table will tell you it is complicated and it is hard to know how old somebody is. And so we applaud that bill for passing. We supported it. But I think what we're getting at today here is that parents want visibility into what their teens are doing online. They want to be able to decide whether their teen is ready for an app or not. And that's why we've supported OS App Store legislation that requires app stores to get a parent's approval before their teen downloads an app. And under this approach, if a teen attempts to download an app, the parent would get a notification on their phone and it's a one stop shop. They approve it or they don't. And again, it addresses parents concerns that they don't know what's going on and it puts them in the seat. It still requires all of the apps to do the work to create age appropriate experiences. That work is not done. It's work that we're still going to be doing. I want to close that. I actually know the people at this table, I think industry wide. At Meta, we all care. We're all parents. We care about creating safe experiences. We want to make sure that teens who. We've been told by an expert today that teens want to be online. My experience of AOL chat room I did get on when I was 16 is not the experience of my kids today. It is here to stay. We need to support them and we need to do so in a way where we're part of the solution and we're empowering apps to continue doing the work that they're doing, but also making sure that parents are in the loop and that parents have visibility and can support their teens while continuing to require that we develop protective experiences for teens as a baseline. Thank you.

And I'll say as a kid, that

was filth in there too. So I'm Safe

Yes.

Okay.

Kristin. Kirstine. Kirstine.

Nope, not at all.

So I'm Emily Cashman Kirstein. I lead child safety public policy at Google. And I'd also like to thank Mr. And Mrs. Thanks for being here, for sharing your story and for your advocacy. I come to this job from industry today, but I've also worked on the NGO side. I led public policy.

I led public policy work at Thorne, the nonprofit to combat child sexual abuse material online and on the government side, working in the US Senate. I appreciate the opportunity to be with you all today to talk through parental tools, but also how Google frames it in the larger context, how we're thinking about building for kids and families overall. I think you all have slides and we have them up here. As Assemblymember Wick said, there have been a lot of updates and wanted to put those in front of you all today. So our overarching mission at Google is to organize the world's information, make it universally accessible and useful. And when it comes to youth, we want to be doing that in a way that offers them the benefits and the utility of the online world with the appropriate safeguards in place. And that last part, bolded, underlined, underscored all of that. And meaning, of course, we want to protect kids in not from the digital world. And how we're doing that is based on these three pillars here. The first is protect. This refers to everything from baseline protections for for all users, including our industry leading efforts to combat child sexual abuse, material and exploitation online. Two default settings that we have for under 18 users that are backed by age assurance. Respect is the core of what we're talking about today, which is parental tools and knowing that each family has a different relationship with technology, how do we respect that? And third, the empower pillar is how we're building those enriching, not just okay activities, how are we building enriching educational experiences for youth online and building the digital skills of the future, learning to use the latest technologies again in that safeguarded environment. And so starting with protect, you know, we have default settings for under 18 users even before we get to parental tools. And I'm going to go through a little bit of these here. So on search, for example, we have safe search on by default that helps filter explicit content. Location sharing is off by default, 18/apps are blocked on play. We'll get into YouTube and Gemini in a bit more depth, but I do want to emphasize here that Google does not serve personalized ads to minors. And on YouTube, regardless of parental tools, again, for all under 18 users, we've built in protections in our personalized recommendation systems to ensure that teens aren't overly exposed to specific kinds of content. That while they're not violating our policy guidelines, they may be innocuous in a single view, but if they're put in repetition, if they're recommended repeatedly, potentially they could become problematic. And we worked with independent experts, YouTube's youth and family Advisory Council, to develop these Content categories and we continue updating them. We also have take a break and bedtime reminders on by default. The take a break reminder is a full screen takeover that is on the default setting is for an hour, but parents can also adjust that as needed. And to properly ensure that those under

default settings are getting to the right users, we have rolled out age assurance on our own first party platforms and we're also working toward compliance, of course, with AB 1043, the approach to responsibly share signals across the broader app ecosystem. And excuse me, so how do we do that? So first, of course, we're starting with declared age, starting from somewhere. Then we run an inference model. So without taking more information from the user, we're looking at things like, has this account been around for 20 years? Probably not a minor. If they're searching for mortgage rates and tax assistance, again, probably not a minor. That goes into how that inference model works. If the model is unsure that this is an adult and that user tries to access a music video on YouTube that has explicit lyrics, something like that, that would otherwise be age gated, they will be prompted to confirm their age. Whether that's through an id. We know not everyone wants to offer an id. We offer selfie, email lookup, credit card verification, things like that. So getting into the parental tools themselves, right, all the protections I was speaking about before are default under 18, before we even get to parental tools. And the premise being that no one family and no one child is the same. Of course we've talked about this, we've heard about it, and we have to build with that reality. So one of the things, you know, we've had family link since 2017. That's our flagship parental tool for Google. But we have of course heard, as we've heard today, parents are overwhelmed. They want quick and easy setup, they want options that fit their families best. So in addition to Family Link, this past year we announced parental device controls right on the device. So at the point of a parent having the device, they can set up things like screen time, like web filters, approving and blocking apps that exists now. And that's all backed by a pin that a parent knows right there on the phone. If the parent would like a more robust experience with parental tools, that's where Family Link comes in, the ones before, just on the device. This is an app that the parents have, they can have on their phone that is a, you know, a more robust experience remotely, right? So they can, as it is, as it stands now, they can block apps, approve apps, Right through Family Link, they can block or, you know, approve websites, screen time settings, school time. This will make the phone not work during the day at school. All of those exist right now through Family Link.

I heard a question.

And child accounts, I should say, remain in a supervised state after they turn 13 unless the parent approves removing that supervision. This helps make sure that those decisions are made as a family. And again, in talking through all of the ways that parents were incorporating parents feedback, we heard that it took too long to set up YouTube accounts and things like that in the YouTube app. So we rolled out within the past couple months an easier way for parents to set up YouTube accounts. And how to more importantly, just as important to toggle back and forth between a parent's account and a kid's account. It's incredibly important as we know, for minors to be on their own account to be able to take advantage of the default settings we talked about of the parental tools that their parent has set up. And you know, another piece to this is we just rolled out a YouTube shorts timer. So this is allowing the parent to decide how much time may be appropriate for their child to see YouTube shorts. And an important piece to note is that timer can go down to zero and parents can decide if they don't want shorts on at all for their child. And last pillar is in power here.

This is about using technology to help young people learn and create and explore. One of the most important things talking about that is top of everyone's mind of course is related to generative AI. We want youth to have access to the benefits and the opportunities that come with it. But again, as we said before, with those appropriate safeguards in place, a bit on these safeguards themselves. Before rolling out youth experience on Gemini in 2023, we worked with our in house team of researchers, cognitive psychologists, child development experts, in addition to an independent youth advisory council that we have at Google to develop policies and protections for youth. And recognizing that youth could be more vulnerable to developing an emotional connection with AI, we built Persona protections for youth into Gemiini from day one, since 2023. So for younger users, Gemiini is designed not to say I love you, not to say I need you, or any explicit, you know, any explicit claims of humanness or that it feels emotions. We've built protections and additionally against sexually explicit content, dangerous activities, age, restricted substances, violence and gore, medical advice, unhealthy behaviors. Again, those are all baseline protections in Gemiini. Many of these for all users, but especially for under 18. And our suicide self harm protocols refer users to crisis service providers and encourage them to seek real world support and help from a trusted from someone they trust and. Oh, excuse me. So we're committed again to empowering both parents and youth to explore gemiini responsibly. We've heard a lot about parents wanting more resources and I should say for gemiini, parents are in control to decide if it's right for their child or not. But if they would like to get more information, we offer AI literacy guides. Some have been designed specifically for teens for their developmental state and family conversation guides to have this conversation as a family about how to use AI. Both of these help reinforce the importance of knowing the limitations of AI, how to think critically about responses and to double check answers as needed. And we also offer things like podcasts for parents and a video series on how to use AI with your children. We're always looking for new ways to make gemiini usable and useful for youth. As an example, we recently announced a partnership with the Princeton Review to make free on demand SAT prep available within gemiini. So I know I've gone on a little bit.

Yes, there's a lot to go through and this is really complex. But I hope that we're able to show the many different layers we're thinking about this of which parental tools is just one layer and all under the umbrella of the premise of wanting youth to have the benefits of this technology with those appropriate safeguards in place. Thanks.

a lot of this, so I learned myself.

get home and that's the next thing I do. And then is Family Link available even if you're on an Apple device or

Okay, Yep, I was curious about that. Okay.

Now we will turn it over to Lauren Haver Jones, head of Youth well

Thank you so much. First, like my colleagues, I want to thank Victoria and Paul for the time

As a, as a parent, I cannot

Good afternoon. Chair Bauer Kayan and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to

your leadership on youth safety. My name is Lauren Haber Jonas I lead youth wellbeing and families at OpenAI. In particular, I come at this as a builder, so I lead product and engineering. I do not lead only policy for OpenAI. My teams are the one building these things.

assurance technologies, we build age verification. So we understand deeply the technical requirements

and any limitations might be. I have been doing this for 10 years, so this is very much my life's work. I have been building both on the product and the engineering side in youth safety at large companies, at small companies, at my own companies as an entrepreneur for 10 years. So our goal here when I got to OpenAI two years ago, from nearly the moment that ChatGPT launched, was to

start, from the moment that this was

is my life's work and core to

I'm also the mother of three young children. I have three, seven and under. I don't sleep a lot if you see the bags under the eyes, as many have said. So I think about this both professionally and personally. We appreciate the committee's focus on parental controls as AI becomes more integrated into how young people learn, create and explore explore information. The companies that are developing these technologies have a responsibility to build the protections in from the start and also give families meaningful tools. At the same time. It's important to recognize that generative AI systems like ChatGPT operate differently than social media platforms. ChatGPT does not have feeds. We do not have engagement algorithms or public posting. We have only been available since November of 2022. But precisely because this technology is new and so powerful, we have focused on building these strong protections and learning from

I'll talk a little bit today about the approach we're taking, the partnerships that guide our work, the multi layered approach. Again, not just relying on parents as

and parental controls to guide families on how best to make sure that their

So fundamentally at OpenAI our belief is that young people should be able to

learning, exploring ideas or developing new skills. Learning is one of the most common

1 in 3 US students use it to study. Many use it as a learning support tool. Create practice quizzes, study plans, review drafts of assignments. It is a tool that helps them test their knowledge, clarify difficult concepts. And for many students, this kind of personalized support was previously only available through one on one tutoring. These benefits are immense, but they must

One of the things that we said publicly from the start is that our

safety ahead of privacy and freedom for teens, full stop. This is a new technology, it is a powerful technology and we believe minors need significant protection. We have said this, our CEO has said this a number of times before. This is a very serious responsibility that we take both to our teen users and to their parents to have a

I want to talk a little bit about how we partner with experts. One of the things that we have learned from companies that have come before us is that we cannot solve youth safety challenges on our own. We have built two organizations, external third party organizations that we partner with, the first being an expert Council on well Being and AI. These are the folks on that council. These are researchers that study youth development, mental health and the effects of technology. They come from Boston, Children's Hospital, Georgia Tech, Northwestern University of Oxford. We have also built a global physicians network. So this is a network of 250

So the goal here is a global lens, not purely a domestic lens that guide and help evaluate how our systems respond and help guide our policies and our principles and the content restrictions we have in place. Beyond that, we work closely with organizations

American Psychological association aft connect safely. Today, in fact, I'm here and not there, but today, in fact, we're hosting a convening of a cross sector group of leaders, CEOs of the nation's leading mental health firms. So the American Psychological association and others to help guide our work in mental health for youth and for adults are today in our San Francisco headquarters in

Building on this input that we get from third parties, we introduced what we call our Teen Safety Blueprint. The blueprint is meant to serve as both an internal framework for every team building within OpenAI and as a starting point for broader policy conversations about responsible

And it has a number of pillars. The first is, as we've talked about, is identifying users under the age of 18 and that is age estimation as

The second is a default safety layer

The third is a layer on top of that, that offers parents the ability

The fourth is designing systems that support

And then the last is transparency.

transparent as possible about our approach. The moral of the story here is that no single safeguard is sufficient on its own. We have taken a multi layered approach here, all working together. Product design, behavioral policies, parental tools, consultation with experts, and most importantly, we work in the open.

our Model Spec, which are principles that guide how our AI systems behave. So this guides how the model is built and how the model should be

There is a specific section of the

Ooh, backwards one.

in place for teens.

support from trusted adults outside of the

and an engineering team was not to just build a new settings page, but

feel we've done that.

about our parental controls and how we feel that this is empowering families and educators. The protections reduce exposure to the types of content described that research shows may

So this is based on teen developmental psychology. Parents link their account to their teens account manage settings from a single dashboard. It allows parents to tailor the experience. But in particular, the setup process is very straightforward and happens in numerous directions. A teen can invite their parents to parental controls. Parent can invite their teen to parental controls.

If a teen later unlinks their account, a Parent is notified.

setting, a parent is notified. They cannot do that on their own.

a system that encourages communication between parents and teens and is transparent on both sides. A teen can't do anything in terms of editing these controls their parents don't

Once accounts are linked, there are a number of different controls that a parent has. So the goal here is to get as granular as possible. A parent should be able to turn on and off image generation, on and off voice mode, on and off.

Maybe for their family, they're comfortable with more adult content, their child seeing more adult content to receive alerts if the system detects sort of possible signs of suicide and distress. And we'll talk about that in a little more detail. To opt out of model training. The goal is to give parents as granular and flexible options as possible in as simple of a way as possible. All of these parental controls are default on. A parent does not have to opt in. And I want to talk a little bit about safety notifications and how we built this. This launched last fall. We were the first in the industry to build this and we're heartened to see some of our peers follow us in that regard. What this is is the following. It is a safety notification system, it's industry first and it doesn't require an opt in. So if you are in parental controls, you do not have to raise your hand as a parent and say I want to receive safety notifications. It is on by default. And we will notify you in three

We could do it via carrier pigeon

But the goal is to get to a parent and to share that a teen is prompting for distressing content. The content that a teen is prompting for is never shared with the parent. So we understand and value the privacy of teens. We are not sharing the specific prompt

parent to take action for them to

One thing that is important to note is that when a teen is prompting for distressing content before a parent notification is triggered, that content goes to human being full time employees for review, trained full time employees inside OpenAI for review

and we haven't had a false positive, we haven't done this in an incorrect way.

we love that this has become industry norm and this is one of the

pull the industry along in the parental controls space. As some of my colleagues have noted, our work is not done here. We are continuing to learn. We are continuing to improve. We partner with some of our friends over at Common Sense Media. We believe these are first steps. This is not the end. Additionally, because we know that parents need additional support and guidance and teen need support and guidance on how to use our tools, we have family guides on how to use AI responsibly, a set of conversation starters for parents. These resources were developed with input from safety experts and organizations like Connect to

I want to end with recognizing that protecting young people online is an ongoing responsibility. No single company, no product, feature or law will solve these challenges on its own. We believe that progress comes from thoughtful guardrails, transparency, collaboration with experts, and empowering families. In fact, today we joined a group of kids safety advocates, community groups and other organizations as part of the parents and Kids Safe AI Coalition to pass what we hope will be the nation's strongest child safety AI law. We appreciate the committee's work in this area. We look forward to continuing to partner

Thank you.

was, it just gave them a category.

It says.

It'll say your teen is prompting for suicidal.

Yes.

her assistant and very talented government relations colleague is. So Eliza should be online.

Hi, everyone.

Can you hear me?

Hi.

And thank you to all the previous speakers. I think it's just a testament to how much this needs to be a group effort for all these different components to come together and talk about this important issue.

It lets me be home with my

So I really, really appreciate it.

People can connect with their friends and family and play and explore. Molly, you can go to the Next slide.

And we have always been in all ages platform which has really informed our approach to safety for a 20 year history. Next slide.

Okay.

As many people have noted today, there

silver bullet for safety. You have to have many layers and many tools to keep your community safe. And that's what we do at Roblox.

Again because we're an all ages platform.

We don't allow any references to drugs or alcohol on the platform. We are optimizing for the safety of our youngest users and our policies. We also have robust automated moderation systems. At our scale, you need to have AI working in partnership with humans to moderate the content on the platform. We then have teams of human experts doing human moderation for more complex cases. We have a team of deep subject matter experts on all manner of child safety issues, grooming, suicide and self harm, terrorist content, all of that. We have a team of internal investigators that work on those more complex issues.

of safety partnerships with NGOs, with common sense Media. You know, we work with all the people that organizations, people spoken about earlier today.

of users and parents that engage with the platform where we're constantly talking to them about what they want to see, what would be helpful for them.

the teen voice and value the parent voice in all of these conversations.

We have AI models running in the background constantly to monitor for grooming and other critical harms behavior.

at that communication and reaching out to law enforcement where necessary. We think it's really important when we're talking about kids that we're not encrypting communication.

So we're filtering inappropriate communication before it

sharing of personal identifying information.

easier for people to meet up with them offline or online, but on another platform.

As many people have noted, as kids

They often have their own devices.

You know, everyone that has spoken today, our users are on their platforms as well. And we can only control what they do on our platform once they leave the platform. We just don't have visibility into that. So a few things we've built into the product as safety features. First of all, there's no image or video sharing in chat, so you cannot share a photo from your camera roll in chat. On Roblox, you can't forward a video. As I said, we don't encrypt communication. So we're constantly monitoring all communication between users for potential harms.

a little bit more later, we require age checks to access any communication features on the platform. That is a facial age estimation process

fall and is globally required as of January.

You know, the companies that are testifying today are some of the bigger players,

just don't have the resources to build the kinds of systems that we're talking about today. And so we think it's really important to share this technology in an open source way with the whole industry to keep everybody safe. We want kids to be safe, not just on Roblox, but everywhere.

yourself and child safety experts, child development experts, to understand what is necessary, what we need to build in the next generation.

You don't need to engage with parental controls to have any of that be

And we think it's really important that you're starting from a place of default

so that parents and families can personalize their Roblox experience.

that they're the end all, be all, and we don't think that they should be necessary for kids to be safe on our platform.

movies, there are lots of different international

Some of them are here.

which is the International Age Rating Coalition,

Right now, and I'll talk about this a little later, you get our standard Roblox platform ratings. But in the future, kids in the US will get ESRB ratings.

life, you'll recognize those as things like

But in, for example, Germany, there are UK ratings. In the UK there are PEGI ratings. So those will be familiar to parents and will be displayed for their kids when they're accessing Roblox games.

of a remote control for their kids Roblox experience.

often you're making these choices like late at night when you finally sit down after doing the dishes. And so it's really important, we think that you have the ability to have asynchronous control over these things.

kids request a settings change.

house and they want to play a game that you haven't allowed them in their settings to do, they will send a request and you will get that request on your phone and be able to approve or deny it from your phone. But you don't have to be on their device to make that choice.

You can do that either with a credit card or with an id. And once you've done that, you'll have access to the full suite of parental controls.

to get in the game themselves. We really believe that the more you're opening a dialogue with your kids and talking to them about their Roblox experience or any online experience, the easier it will be to hear from them their honest experience. And if they believe that you care

that your instinct isn't just to ban

be open with you about what's happening.

play a game with your kids. We think that's a big component of parental controls and parental involvement.

your age and so it's not an identity marker in an ongoing way. Next slide.

And I can totally understand that as a parent myself, I think what's most important is that we're giving parents the tools that they most want and not a million controls and a million radio buttons that are overwhelming. And that sort of become like an eye chart for parents to have to review. So we really focus on the things that parents have told us they want the most.

time, as well as a few other key controls.

So parents can see who their kids friends are and they can set daily screen time limits. They can block individual connections, which means that your kids won't be able to talk to those users. And once that connection is blocked, kids

Parents can also set daily screen time limit

I think what's just one thing to note, like this might change. You know, like my daughter was home

lot more screen time that day than she would normally get.

Parents can also set spending restrictions.

the money into their account in the first place.

So if you want to get a

Next slide. Content maturity limit. So this is where the ratings come in. We currently maintain a sort of universal Roblox standard of content maturity limits. Think of this like movie ratings. By default, users under nine only have access to minimal or mild content.

have access to moderate content.

But again, just to reiterate, our content policies are just much more restrictive than the rest of the Internet.

alcohol, no sexual content.

out prohibited on the platform.

In terms of content restrictions, parents can block individual experiences that they don't want

And something that we took directly from the research was first we show parents what their kids 20 most played experiences are so that they know where their kids are actually spending time.

And this really, we think surfaces the

be able to play. Next slide.

So we, as I said in November started rolling out and in January globally required that all users who wish to

Once they do so, they will be able to access communication features.

We're very optimistic that this step, though

Internet and for child safety. For a long time, knowing how old

Next slide.

We're very passionate about safety at Roblox and appreciate California's leadership on this issue.

And I'm rushing and I'm sorry that I have one and have another meeting, but this has been such an important topic today and I thank you Chairwoman for bringing this forward. I want to start with the settings. Is there any way we can make these settings to protect ourselves and kids better and more user friendly? I just started like trying to protect myself from being, you know, allowing people to know my location and you know, just privacy things on my own iPhone and it's been taking hours to go through there and try and figure out what to turn off, what to turn on, what to keep on and because I'm nervous about being followed and stuff myself for privacy. And so is there any way that the setting you guys can make these settings more user friendly?

I think the single biggest thing that

the easiest thing to do would be to have all the the default settings on so you don't have to figure out which ones are right. But the baseline safe private experience is on. And that's the approach that we've taken for our parental controls at the very least for parents and teens. We know that parents don't often know what they are. As my Google colleague has mentioned, we

and I think we should, as we've noted. But by default the controls should be on and a parent shouldn't have to turn them on and figure out what they are.

Speaking to the OpenAI, you know ChatGPT experience in particular.

I apologize. So OpenAI, it's on by default for under 18 and then is that self attestation?

Similar to our Google colleagues. 3 Ways Self Declaration of Age First Age Estimation that runs in the background

and then if we are not certain

the age of 18 using age estimation

Got it.

be complying with selling member Wix's bill when the time comes, which I know is not yet.

signaling by their own choice.

I downloaded an app that was choosing to limit it to 18 plus.

my age prior to sending the age signal to get the app.

and it's not technically against the law,

Keep pushing.

heightened risk for suicidal indention, I can start.

try to get out of it.

Thank you.

Well, I think, you know, just when we're talking through how complex it can be and building for every type of child, every type of family, their unique experiences is why this can be hard and why we want to have the ability to have different settings and from the YouTube perspective in particular, we're talking about access to a video library and the way that that can help teens or users in vulnerable situations. Finding authoritative content, finding content that is putting them and validating some of what they may be feeling in a certain family situation or what have you. I think this is also about not cutting off access for some of those teens who may need that information. From a YouTube perspective this is. Teens are using this to listen to music while they're doing homework. This is the largest for younger users, the largest video library of Sesame street for example. So this is a video sharing platform and on top of that there's digital well being pieces built in for if someone is searching for a suicide self harm disordered eating, there's going to be protections defaulted in place that are having the screen takeovers, encouraging them to seek authoritative content and to take a beat and you know, elevate content about self compassion, about you know, grounding exercises, things like that. So there's a variety of different ways that they could be in supportive as

Yes, yes.

So we do, we have age assurance. We rolled that out on our first party platforms and it goes through, we have that inference model that will say whether or not this user we think is above or below the age of 18. Taking into account things like again, how long the account has been in place, are they looking for different kinds of content?

I just will say again, I don't want to put you in the hot seat because my kids are on YouTube and part of the reason they're on YouTube is because my son has learned to play chess on on YouTube. He became a magician on YouTube. I actually think YouTube has really good content that my kids have grown from. And at the same time I will

He's also getting fed incredibly disturbing content every single day. And so I just, I'm like, I'm surprised by some of these answers. Cause it's all great but it's not playing out in my household.

So that's good to see because this

I know Mike dropped there.

I saw you doing that.

think we need to do better. I mean, the fact that you pointed out that, you know, there aren't enough black leaders at companies across the board, not just our companies here today, I think it's something that we need to all work on. It's important. I will say, I can only speak to my experience. I will say that when I used to lead youth safety policy, which I did for two and a half years, we brought a lot of different perspectives into the people who were advising on how we built the products. And it was across race, it was across gender, it was across socioeconomic status, it was across lots of different countries and also different kinds of families and different types of teens and parenting. And I do think, and I believe wholeheartedly that the way that you best design these experiences is making sure that you're getting all sorts of viewpoints in the room and that you're accounting for them and that if you don't feel like you have enough diversity in the room, you have to try better. So that I can speak to in terms of how our team worked, both with experts, parents, policymakers, it was a very, very diverse group of voices.

I am Latin, I'm of Mexican descent, and I don't think that there is

sort of third parties in the mental health space.

health organizations are people of color.

the Global Physicians Network is representative and

taking a very particular approach in the

I also want to address sort of the prior question.

we

And this is something that has come through in some of the third party organizations that we've worked with on mental

So I think a lot of this kind of dovetails together and representative viewpoints from our, you know, our Wellbeing Council

And thank you for that and to the companies that you guys work for in leadership and decision making. We need to see a more diverse group of people so that they could give their input because this is affecting all of our children. And it's great to see women sitting here. That is very good to see women sitting here. But we do need a more diverse perspective.

what I'll be looking at. Like, where are you guys with AI, with online tools? How are you guys making sure that all kids are going to be safe and that this affects our children?

Thank you. Assemblymember, assembly member Ward, thank you for the presentations.

Yeah, I'll speak to OpenAI in particular,

to surface the concept of parental controls.

We point users constantly to our help center, to our notification systems. The goal is to drive as many parents to this as possible. I think industry wide we can do better at education as we've said here today, but the goal is in the product to surface as many sort of notification moments both to parents and to teens as possible, to our literacy resources, to our help centers, to the settings page to engage in these parental.

Well, I'M happy to take that. I think to kind of fuse the two questions, if I'm understanding them correctly, is when a user, for example, starts a Google account, if they're telling us they're under 13, they're automatically going, and it's saying you need a parent and getting that parent involved. And they can't access anything until they connect with the parent. And so they would go through that Family Link flow which would have all of those settings that we had there. But if a user says they're above 18, but then that's when our age assurance things come in and it isn't sure, then before they try to access any age restricted material, they'd have to confirm the age. But in that default setting, if we're seeing that it is indeed a seven year old in that setting, we would send them to Family Link, but say it's a teen. We're putting those default settings in place that would. For the parts of YouTube, I think one of the things that's really important and certainly can't speak to any specific incident, but I think what we're trying to do is elevate high quality content and limit low quality content. And so from the teen experience, we have principles that we've worked through with third party experts for both kids under 13 and teens to figure out what does high quality look like, what does low quality look like and how do we adjust those personalization recommendations accordingly. And I think the other thing, and not to say that this is the case, but I think this is one of the things we hear a lot, is the importance of children being on their accounts. And we made it actually much more easy for parents to toggle between their account. If a parent's on their account, they're not going to necessarily have those default settings that would have those personalization, those high quality principles, more in the feed than they would for a child and making sure that they can take advantage to Only the under 18 default settings that we talked about. But also whatever parental tools are in place. And so we're making it easier for parents to go back and forth and you know, wanting to show the importance of kids being on their own account.

I think that's incredibly important. And when we do talk about the. How parental tools should, you know, different levels of it, that's why, you know, this is a difficult conversation. We need to be balancing the fact that teens do have an increased developmental capacity for autonomy, wanting to make sure they have, of course, all of those default settings, but they're all really good reasons why they should be having a more autonomous experience. And it's really important to think through those exact kind of examples as we're thinking through what public policy looks like and why it's important not to completely cut off access, but to allow access within a safeguarded environment.

bit of a different game here.

The core tenets and principles in the way that we built this is a parent will never have access and will never see the exact prompt and generation text that a teen is putting into ChatGPT. And it's why as we built parental notifications and all of this concept, the general topic of the distressing content being

The exact prompt and generation text does not. Because why that teen is suicidal and everything that surrounds that is their privacy. But we want to give parents enough to have the ability to take an action. So for example, the goal is to preserve the privacy of the teen and allow a parent to have enough information to do something about it. But we recognize and have thought extensively and worked with our third party experts and counsels in the APA and what have you on this exact question. And so I appreciate it.

Instagram that you mentioned that there's a difference for your programs between under 16 and 16 to 18. For example, do you see any distinction between any age groups or Is everything under 18 privacy protected like a 7 year old?

Sorry if I spoke. You're right.

Okay, no, I appreciate that clarification.

As you just mentioned, Today everything under 18 is privacy protected.

We at Roblox, just to jump in there.

We have sort of, you know, kids

of a training wheels approach.

And we know that at Roblox, for

ever have on the Internet.

would be incredibly helpful, and this is from a couple questions ago, but we're all talking about sort of safe by

And that makes it really hard for

that legislation can standardize some of that

We're all engaging with experts and teens

pediatricians and all of that.

Yeah.

somebody, remember Wicks, who had to leave passed the age appropriate design code, which was really intended to get at how

I think, is unclear to me.

Are you just shielding content?

That's a little unclear.

is very minimally now lawful, but mostly not lawful according to the 9th Circuit. So I guess I'm a little bit lost in.

We had an assembly member who's led in the space for a long time.

So is that the gold standard?

Should we be saying what's safe for kids online?

well, but I would say Roblox supported the California age appropriate design code for

And, you know, I can't speak to the legality necessarily and what those arguments were, but I do think industry standards that people can align on would be incredibly valuable.

Well, I think speaking to the purpose of age appropriate design, we are in favor and have been. We had a legislative framework to protect children and teens. I think we released it back in 2023 with things like requiring companies to take the best interest of the child into account, to require companies to have offerings related to prioritizing mental health and well being, things like that. And with regard to age appropriate design, I think there's a lot of things that, you know, where we've, you know, age assurance was part of that. Privacy by design is part of that. We, you know, have those in place. And I think just more broadly, you know, this is, as we've talked about and you know, maybe unsatisfying in some ways. But I think this is, I think my colleague from Meta said this isn't static. This is, you know, an ongoing conversation, an ongoing way that we want to be meeting the moment for both parents and for minors.

just gonna jump in that I agree with Eliza. I think standards are good. And I think you've heard we all have different versions of default settings, different versions of parent controls, different versions of content ratings, I guess if that's what you're going to call it. So we're all solving for the same root issues and we're trying to put in mitigations and we're all working with experts and parents. I mean, we're all facing the same things. I think, though, what we heard earlier today, and I know you're going to have, I think another panel on this too is, you know, as a parent and the fact that Eliza cited the same University of Michigan Common Sense Media research study that showed that teens are on an average of 40 apps per week, it's a lot for parents to be jumping through those hurdles. And frankly, you know, I think parents have said time and time again and teens have said that the digital world is not going away. And there's a lot of good across everything that everybody has said today, it's not going away. But parents should be able to support their teens when they're online. And if a parent doesn't want their teen on 40 apps per week, they should be able to pick the apps and approve if it's too. You like YouTube. If you want your teenager or kid to be on YouTube, that's your choice. It doesn't remove the obligations from all of us, all of our companies to build those age appropriate experiences. They still have to happen. But I think we need to make it easier on parents because every person here has described a different version of what hoopp's parents are Jumping through whether it's streamlined or not to support their teens. And I think think we've pushed for federal legislation and state legislation to get parental consent at the OS App Store. And I think if you can make it easy on parents and the apps continue to build these safeguards as technology changes, you're supporting not only teens but also their parents. So I think it's everything that we've been discussing and then some now.

love hate relationship with it.

work and I didn't know about the

But that's the point.

I also think, look, I'm a big,

why the computer's in the kitchen, is that in my family, my kid will

And it's my job while he is in my home and living under my

And so to not, you know, we

before these spaces existed. But we knew the kids who were sheltered a little bit too much and got to college and with other things

And so I struggle because I think kids should be in these spaces with their parents learning how to navigate them. How do we think critically about content on YouTube when you're being fed something that is maybe toxic or problematic or not factually based, how do you ask questions and look up sources? And that is something people have to learn. But at the same time, when I sit and watch

content, frankly that is different than my son.

And so I think that if we can create spaces where they can learn

critical thinking skills, we are better for it.

not there right now.

I think we've answered the first one. She said, for under 18, are the default settings the strictest? I think the answer was yes for everybody.

Yes.

Can kids override them?

Kids can override them them in some

So some 16, 17 year olds may want to be in parent supervision. If they're not in parent supervision, they can undo some of the settings. Not all.

And then for Google, so we have.

that that's very clear.

So

You said nobody can override it.

Okay.

but can depends on the age.

And then we also have youth mental

We worked with our teen council to

Got it.

And then her next question was, would our prior panel.

She asked tough questions. Would our prior panel believe that the strictest settings, so presuming they keep it

And she gave an example.

She said, for example, Google said you

Can the kids just close that window and keep scrolling?

I want to make sure I get it right.

Okay, so would, I mean, I think

The answer I heard them say themselves was no. So I don't know if you want

share with her, is you're all sitting

yet kids are dying. Right? I mean, kids are being harmed.

they're being fed too much content of that nature.

like every single one of us is moms, I think. Right.

All the same vintage mom. So you're probably getting the same questions we and comments at the soccer games.

We see our teens and our younger children, I mean, addicted, wanting that device so badly, not wanting to go out and play because the iPad is sitting there even if it's turned off. And so I guess the question is like, why, if you're doing all of these things and you think they're best

I think that the I'll sort of answer from an OpenAI ChatGPT perspective, and I think we've all said this, this is a marathon, not a sprint. The way that teens engage with ChatGPT in particular changes over time as they grow, as they age. It's a learning source. It's a teach me quizzes source.

It evolves.

early, at least for us. It's been around since November 2022 that the mitigations and the controls and the content restrictions are constantly changing. And we're evolving them because of the way that teens are using the tool. In the ChatGPT case in particular, it is so new. It is such new technology. The technology changes over time. So for us, the approach of sort of iterative deployment is how we think about this, which is to say we restrict and then learn and evaluate.

learn, we look at metrics, we have dashboards, we at the individual user level and at the aggregate level to understand how our mitigations are working. And so I think, at least for ChatGPT, this is such a new technology that this will be a process. It's a marathon, not a sprint.

Yeah, so 4.0 in particular was deprecated

mostly a sycophancy problem. Is that or am I missing?

Okay, I think.

Sorry, jump in on that.

I totally agree. Look, I think it is a marathon, not a sprint.

I think the other thing about this

different offering and all of our kids

It's not one size fits all at the platform level or at the user level. We're not talking about like car safety. Right.

Same

as was talked about earlier, for some kids, parental controls are incredibly important.

might actually expose them to harm because

private internal life that might cause them to harm them. So it's just so complex and so multilayered that there isn't one solution. Because every kid is different and every platform is different. And that's why it's a never ending problem to solve.

And I think what I struggle with

I've told this story before. When my kids were born, I had a vibrating chair. It was the only place my babies would sleep.

Most days I believe it was five

States of America wouldn't accept five babies. Was it the rock and play

many deaths of children through online harms.

I understand that, but I