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Testimony of Kristin Bride United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary Hearing on Protecting Our Children Online February 14, 2023 Thank you, Chairman Durbin, Ranking Member Graham, and members of the committee. My name is Kristin Bride. I am a survivor parent and social media reform advocate, and member of the bipartisan Council for Responsible Social Media. I am testifying here today to bring a face to the harms occurring every day resulting from the unchecked power of the social media industry. This is my son Carson Bride with beautiful blue eyes, an amazing smile, and a great sense of humor, who will be forever 16 years old. As involved parents raising our two sons in Oregon, we thought we were doing everything right. We waited until Carson was in 8th grade to give him his first cell phone, an old phone with no apps. We talked to our boys about online safety and the importance of never sending anything online that you wouldn't want your name and face next to on a billboard. Carson followed these guidelines. Yet tragedy still struck our family. It was June 2020; Carson had just gotten his first summer job making pizzas, and after a successful first night of training, he wrote his upcoming work schedule on our kitchen calendar. We expressed how proud we were of him for finding a job during the pandemic. In so many ways, it was a wonderful night, and we were looking forward to summer. The next morning, I woke to the complete shock and horror that Carson had hung himself in our garage while we slept. In the weeks that followed, we learned that Carson had been viciously cyberbullied by his "Snapchat friends," his high school classmates who were using the anonymous apps Yolo and LMK on Snapchat to hide their identities. It wasn't until Carson was a freshman in high school that we finally allowed him to have social media because that was how all the students were making new connections. What we didn't know is that apps like Yolo and LMK were using popular social media platforms to promote anonymous messaging to hundreds of millions of teen users. After his death, we discovered that Carson had received nearly 100 negative, harassing, sexually explicit, and humiliating messages, including 40 in just one day. He asked his tormentors to "swipe up" and identify themselves so they could talk things out in person. No one ever did. The last search on his phone before Carson ended his life was for hacks to find out the identities of his abusers. Anonymous apps like Whisper, Sarahah, and YikYak have a long history of enabling cyberbullying, leading to teen suicides.' The critical flaws in these platforms are compounded by the fact that teens do not typically report being cyberbullied. They are too fearful that their phones to which they are completely addicted will be taken away or that they will be labeled a snitch by their friends. 1