America’s Families Need a Strong Federal Trade Commission Under Trump

The new Donald Trump administration has already signaled in many ways that it wants to prioritize the parent-child relationship and to protect that relationship from outside intrusion, like prohibiting gender education in schools.

One of the greatest threats facing the parent-child relationship today comes through smartphones and social media, Big Tech’s digital products, that have taken over childhood and family life.

One government agency in particular, the Federal Trade Commission, could be leveraged by the Trump administration to play a pivotal role in protecting childhood and family relationships from the intrusion of Big Tech companies. Parents need this help.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, rightly said that “[e]very parent with a young child or a teenager either worries about, or knows first-hand, the real harms and dangers of addictive and anxiety-inducing social media.”

Smartphones and social media have caused an epidemic of anxiety, loneliness, and depression, as well as other psychological harms, among tweens and teens. Addictive features like constant notifications, daily streaks, immersive environments, infinite scrolling, and recommendation algorithms all release constant hits of dopamine, a pleasure chemical in the brain, that creates a constant craving for more. The end result is that a brain exposed frequently to social media closely resembles a brain hooked on the most highly addictive drugs. These are not products that are safe for children’s developing brains.

Beyond the addictive design, these technologies also knowingly promote dangerous (and in some cases criminal) content to children. Nylah Anderson, a 10-year-old girl, died from a blackout challenge promoted to her through TikTok’s “For You” Page. And she is not the only one. Deadly challenges, dangerous sexual and drug-related content, and predators all fill these apps. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn.,  described Meta’s Instagram as the “premier sex trafficking site in this country,” easily helping predators find and connect with their child victims, according to reports from The Wall Street Journal.

The companies deceptively advertise “parental controls” as the solution. But they aren’t. The word control is laughable because the parent has no real control or insight into what their child is doing or seeing in the app, on its feed or in its messages. Controls offered by the platforms merely allow parents to adjust a few privacy settings or set time limits, and the minor can end the parental supervision tools at any time; nor do such controls address the underlying addictive design of the technology.

And how can the average parent whose child is harmed by a digital product possibly stand up to these giant corporations? They can’t. They need the government’s help. The Federal Trade Commission, the federal agency responsible for protecting consumers, can and must come to their aid.

The FTC plays an important role in ensuring that concentrated market power does not threaten competition in our economy and that monopoly power does not hurt American consumers. The private market concentration of Big Tech companies today no doubt requires the FTCready to employ its antitrust authority.

But the FTC’s recent focus on antitrust enforcement under former Chair Lina Khan must not eclipse another vital power of the agency–consumer protection–that should be rightly wielded to help protect America’s children in the digital age. And while it is vital for Congress to pass laws to better protect children online, (given that the last such law was over 25 years ago in 1996 with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act), the FTC does not need to wait on Congress to act. It can use the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, and other existing laws, today to hold tech companies accountable for their harm to children.

To date the number of lawsuits brought by the FTC against tech companies for violating the children’s online protection law, which requires companies to obtain parental consent for collecting data on minors under the age of 13, has been extremely minimal. While it is clear that minors ages 8-to-12 are all over Instagram and Snapchat, there have been no lawsuits brought against these two major companies. It is worth noting, there are a few recent stand-out examples of Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act enforcements against social media platforms, such as a case brought against Google and YouTube in 2019 (which resulted in a record $170 million settlement) and a recent suit against TikTok in 2024 that is ongoing. But we need much more of these. The Trump FTC should more aggressively enforce the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.

And it has undisputable grounds to do so. As recent enforcement actions from state attorney general offices reveal, companies like Meta and TikTok not only know they have minors under the age of 13 on their platforms, but also, as the attorneys general allege, they see kids as a “strategically lucrative class of users.” They are actively recruiting the youngest users to their products, despite this being a clear violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. That children’s online protection law has served as an invaluable legal tool for state attorneys general to bring their lawsuits.

The FTC should critically build off state’s actions to stop Big Tech’s predatory practices of forming contracts with minors under 13 against or without their parent’s consent. The idea that trillion-dollar companies can be contracting with minors is antithetical to the FTC’s stated mission to protect consumers. Indeed, if consumer protection is to mean anything in this digital age, this practice must be stopped.

Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act is just one of many tools in the commission’s toolkit. The FTC can also do more to utilize the unfair and deceptive trade practices section[CM3]  of its statute (the FTC Act) to bring actions against tech companies. When companies unlawfully engage in targeted advertising to children, deceptively rate their apps, circumvent parental controls to collect data on kids, or deceive parents about the addictive nature of their products, they give possible grounds for the FTC to investigate.

Trump has appointed strong commissioners to lead the FTC, who are ready to step up and help families and children with the challenges they face from predatory businesses. Mark Meador, whom President Trump has appointed to be a commissioner for the agency, explains that “multi-billion dollar, international companies want to profit off our children … and parents have the right to set the terms of engagement for that relationship.” He has also noted that “one parent against a multi-billion-dollar company is a David and Goliath.” And Trump’s appointment for FTC Chair,  Andrew Ferguson, asked the Biden FTC to clarify that the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act is “not an obstacle to the use of children’s personal information solely for the purpose of age verification.” Clarifying this would help ensure that state and federal legislatures can impose needed age verification requirements on Big Tech platforms or adult websites, without running into the children’s online protection law as a potential barrier. 

These recognitions are a strong sign that the commission is eager to stand with parents to ameliorate the concerns caused by unregulated digital markets. Under a new FTC with Chair Ferguson and Commissioner Meador at the helm, we can hope to see enhanced consumer protection, especially of the youngest Americans, with more aggressive enforcement of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and the FTC Act’s “unfair and deceptive trade practices” provision.

A strong Federal Trade Commission that takes consumer protection seriously is what we need to strengthen America’s families in this digital age. Nothing less than the future of our self-governing republic is at stake.

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