Written Testimony Before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce

In written testimony to the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection and Commerce, for a hearing on social media's role in radicalization, Tim Kendall — Facebook's first director of monetization — testified that he and colleagues deliberately built engagement techniques into the platform, drawing an extended comparison to methods he associated with the tobacco industry's history of engineering cigarettes for potency. He said features such as status updates and photo tagging were, in his words, part of what he called groundwork for a teenage mental health crisis, and argued that Section 230's liability shield lets platforms avoid accountability for the incendiary content their algorithms amplify. He called for regulatory change while acknowledging his own past role. TechKids Foundation includes this testimony as Kendall's most-cited public statement, presented here as his own claims rather than independently verified findings.

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