KIMT 3

By Alek LaShomb

Senator Amy Klobuchar and New York's 8th Congressional District Congressman Hakeem Jeffries led a virtual roundtable with parents about social media privacy protections and Facebook's algorithm on Wednesday at 1 p.m. 

Parents from Minnesota and New York voiced their concerns over the content their kid's view on Facebook and Instagram.

Instagram in particular has made thoughts of suicide worse for 13% of teenage girls due to unrealistic body image content, according to Klobuchar. 

Jeffries stressed that social media companies are looking to sell Americans, the consumer, as the product, while telephone providers look to sell phones. 

Facebook earns $51 per user. per quarter, according to Klobuchar.

More than 2.8 billion people worldwide use Facebook, according to Pew Research Center, which earns Facebook roughly $143 billion per quarter. 

While addressing the four parents, Jeffries said Congress has two options. 

"We can allow the wild west to continue thinking somehow that they are going to change their behavior because they come to the hill and promise to do so and as Amy pointed out, they never do, or we can act decisively based on all of the concerns the four of you have raised to us in such a powerful way and others and I think we have to choose that latter course of action," Jeffries said. 

Klobuchar said Congress is already working on privacy protection bills. 

"It is everything from improving the children's privacy bill that my colleague Ed Markey has in the Senate. It is finally getting a privacy bill. We have not passed federal privacy legislation," Klobuchar said. 

Klobuchar and Jeffries' social media roundtable come after the Senate Commerce Committee's Facebook whistleblower hearing, where former Facebook employee Frances Haugen laid out how the company pushes content to kids and spreads false information. 

###