Emma Lembke
Youth Leaders · LOG OFF, Design It For Us
Founded a teen-led movement against compulsive social media use, then carried the case to the U.S. Senate.
Emma Lembke started LOG OFF in 2020 while still in high school, building a peer network for teenagers rethinking their own relationship with social media. She went on to co-found Design It For Us, a youth coalition pushing platforms and lawmakers toward safer-by-design products for young users. In February 2023, Lembke testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, putting a young person's firsthand account into a hearing otherwise dominated by parents, researchers, and executives. Her work anchors the youth-leader lane of this library: kids and teens organizing each other rather than waiting for adults to act first.
WORKS IN THE LIBRARY (10)
VIDEOS
Meet the Teens Lobbying to Regulate Social Media
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.
Teen Activist on Social Media, Self-Esteem and Why It's Important to "Log Off"
Released alongside CBS Reports' documentary 'Are the Kids All Right?: The Internet,' this companion interview segment features Emma Lembke speaking directly with CBS News anchors Mola Lenghi and Tanya Rivero about why she founded the LOG OFF Movement. She discusses the connection she sees between constant platform use and self-esteem pressure among her peers, and explains LOG OFF's premise that young people are better positioned than adults to build peer-support and organizing spaces around their own social media habits. The segment functions as a standalone explainer of her advocacy rather than a recap of the full documentary. TechKids Foundation cites this clip as a concise, on-record statement of Lembke's own framing of why she started her organization, distinct from the longer documentary it accompanies.
Emma Lembke (Life 360 with Kristi K.)
In this October 2023 episode of the PBS business-affairs program 'Life 360 with Kristi K.,' host Kristi K. interviews Emma Lembke, then a student at Washington University in St. Louis, about founding the LOG OFF Movement and her broader youth-advocacy work. The conversation covers how Lembke moved from her own early experience with social media into organizing other young people, and touches on the privacy, safety, and mental-health themes her advocacy focuses on. As a longer-form business-program interview rather than a short hard-news clip, it gives more room for her own account of her motivations and goals than typical news segments allow. TechKids Foundation cites this interview as a documented, dated public appearance in which Lembke explains her advocacy largely in her own words.
Log Off Movement Founder Calls Social Media Addiction Trial Verdict a 'Watershed Moment'
In this CBS News segment, Emma Lembke — identified as LOG OFF Movement founder and Gen Z advocacy director at the Sustainable Media Center — joins anchors to react to a Los Angeles County jury verdict in K.G.M. v. Meta Platforms and Google, in which jurors found the companies liable on claims that they designed social media and video products in ways associated with compulsive teen use. The segment describes the verdict as the first time a jury has held major technology companies liable on this kind of claim. Lembke calls it a 'watershed moment' for the youth-advocacy movement she has spent years building, framing it as validation of years of youth testimony to lawmakers rather than treating the underlying design questions as newly settled. TechKids Foundation cites this segment as her documented public reaction to a specific, named legal outcome.
STUDIES
Design It For Us Statement on Federal Endorsement Package
In this May 2023 press statement, Design It For Us co-chairs Emma Lembke and Zamaan Qureshi announced the youth coalition's formal endorsement of three federal bills: the Kids Online Safety Act, the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act, and the Kids PRIVCY Act. The statement frames the endorsements as a coordinated policy position from a coalition of young people and youth-serving organizations pressing lawmakers to add legally enforceable safety and privacy duties for platforms used by minors, rather than relying on voluntary industry commitments. It ties the endorsement to the coalition's broader argument that product design choices, not any single piece of content, are the primary lever regulators should target. TechKids Foundation cites this statement as a documented, dated policy position taken publicly by Lembke's coalition on named legislation, rather than a general mission statement.
Teens Say Social Media Are Stressing Them Out. Here's How to Help Them.
In this NPR feature by health reporter Michaeleen Doucleff, Emma Lembke discusses how founding the LOG OFF Movement grew out of her own anxiety disorder and OCD, which she says social media use amplified rather than caused. She describes a personal habit-change approach — a timed 'five-minute power scroll' paired with a friction-adding browser tool called HabitLab — that she credits with cutting her own screen time by roughly 80%. The article situates her account alongside Pew Research figures on how widely and heavily US teens use social media, and offers practical, non-clinical strategies parents and teens can use to build more intentional habits. TechKids Foundation cites this piece for its first-person account of a youth advocate's own behavior-change approach, distinct from her policy-focused testimony and statements.
'An Unfair Fight': The U.S. Surgeon General Declares War on Social Media
This NPR news feature, distributed via Alaska Public Media, covers then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy's push for a warning label on social media platforms as part of a broader youth mental-health advisory. The piece opens with Emma Lembke's account of noticing, around age 12, that friends who joined social media began pulling away from in-person time with her — an anecdote the reporting uses to frame the generational shift the advisory addresses. The article places her personal account alongside national survey data on teen social media and screen-time patterns before turning to policy debate over the proposed warning label. TechKids Foundation cites this piece as documented national coverage in which Lembke's own early experience is used to illustrate a public-health policy debate she has since become an organizer around, rather than as a central investigative profile of her.
Design It For Us on White House Report to Address Online Youth Safety
In this July 2024 statement, Design It For Us core team member Emma Lembke responds to a Biden administration interagency task force report on online youth safety. She argues that engagement-driven platform business models have put corporate profit ahead of young users' safety and privacy, associating that design choice with the harms her coalition has documented, and expresses support for the report's recommendations. The statement links the administration's findings to Design It For Us's own legislative priorities, including the Kids Online Safety Act and COPPA 2.0, and references Lembke's earlier Senate Judiciary Committee testimony as part of the coalition's ongoing case for federal action. TechKids Foundation cites this as a dated organizational response connecting a specific government report to Lembke's coalition's policy agenda, rather than a general mission statement.