The clear takeaway from the U.S. Senate’s recent hearing, “Big Tech and the Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis,” is that social media is not safe for children. Senators from both sides of the aisle questioned social media CEOs about the harms their platforms cause to kids. Democratic Senator Dick Durbin noted, “As early as 2017, law enforcement identified Snapchat as the pedophile’s go-to sexual exploitation tool.” Republican Ted Cruz chided Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg for Instagram allowing users to view child sexual content.  

For years, social media companies have claimed that better parental controls would protect children, but as CEO of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation Dawn Hawkins argued in a Heritage Foundation panel after the hearing, “[T]he parental controls … do not work. … They’ve designed these platforms without parents in mind.” 

The conclusion is obvious. Tech companies cannot (and will not even if they could) protect kids. Parents have to.