Hillary Clinton, former secretary of state, encouraged lawmakers to focus on making the internet a safer place for users during a Saturday appearance on CNN.
“There are people who are championing it, but it’s been a long and difficult road to getting anything done,” Clinton said, crediting California and New York for enacting social media regulations but emphasized the need for action at a national level.
“We need national action and sadly, our Congress has been dysfunctional when it comes to addressing these threats to our children,” the diplomat stated.
Clinton argued that social media safety regulations should be “at the top” of every legislative agenda.
“There should be a lot of things done. We should be, in my view, repealing something called section 230, which gave platforms on the internet immunity because they were thought to be just pass-throughs, that they shouldn’t be judged for the content that is posted,” Clinton later argued.
Her comments were all addressed in her new book entitled “Something Lost and Something Gained” which says social media content increases the presence of anxiety and depression in children.
“Whether it’s Facebook or Twitter or X or Instagram or TikTok, whatever they are, if they don’t moderate and monitor the content we lose total control and it’s not just the social and psychological effects it’s real harm, it’s child porn and threats of violence, things that are terribly dangerous,” Clinton explained.
She even went as far as saying phones should be removed from schools.
“We’ve conducted a big experiment on ourselves and particularly our kids and I think the evidence is in,” she said. “We’ve got to do more, take phones out of schools. I’m so happy to see schools beginning to do that where kids turn their phone in when they walk in the door.”
