Video

Meet the Teens Lobbying to Regulate Social Media

Dec 2022 🇺🇸 60 Minutes / CBS News

This 60 Minutes segment profiles Emma Lembke and fellow teen advocate Aliza Kopans, both college sophomores who founded the youth group Tech(nically) Politics to push lawmakers toward regulating social media platforms. Lembke describes joining Instagram in middle school and says she and people around her experienced rising anxiety, depression, and body-image concerns she associates with time spent on the app. The segment follows the two students collecting and forwarding peer testimonials to elected officials and arguing for specific design changes, including ending targeted advertising to minors and disabling autoplay for teen accounts. CBS also connects their organizing to California's 2022 Age-Appropriate Design Code Act. TechKids Foundation cites this piece as a mainstream television record of youth-led lobbying translating personal experience into concrete policy proposals.

California AB 2273 (2022)

The segment reports that youth advocacy including Lembke and Kopans's organizing contributed to momentum behind California's Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, passed in 2022.

CITATION

"Meet the Teens Lobbying to Regulate Social Media." 60 Minutes, CBS News, December 11, 2022.

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