After the Memorials: Parents Say Congress Is About to Get Kids’ Online Safety Wrong

The day after Social Media Victims Remembrance Day, the conversation shifted from remembrance to accountability.

On this week’s Sustainable Media Center Substack Live, Emma Lembke spoke with Amy Neville and Kristin Bride, two mothers whose sons died from harms connected to social media. Their losses were different. Their mission has become the same.

Both women have spent years walking the halls of Congress, meeting with lawmakers, speaking in schools, supporting families, and pushing technology companies to build products that put children’s safety ahead of engagement and profit.

But this conversation came at a particularly consequential moment.

As Congress considers the latest version of the Kids Act, both advocates argue that lawmakers are moving in exactly the wrong direction.

Kristin Bride didn’t mince words.

“This is not a bill that protects kids and American families. It protects Big Tech.”

For years, parents and youth advocates fought for legislation built around a simple principle: if companies knowingly design products that harm children, they should have a legal duty to prevent those harms.

That “duty of care” was at the heart of earlier versions of the Kids Online Safety Act.

According to Bride and Neville, the current House proposal removes that protection while making it harder for families to seek justice in court.

The irony, they argue, is impossible to ignore.

The legal system has become one of the only forces that has actually changed company behavior.

Bride pointed to her lawsuit against Snapchat and the anonymous apps YOLO and LMK. She noted that the day after the lawsuit was filed, Snapchat removed the anonymous apps from its platform.

“It took my son dying and a lawsuit to make that happen.”

For both women, litigation has become one of the few mechanisms capable of forcing meaningful safety changes. Weakening families’ ability to sue, they argue, removes one of the only incentives companies have to redesign dangerous products.

Their criticism wasn’t reserved for Washington.

Asked how social media companies have responded to families over the past several years, neither saw meaningful progress.

Amy Neville described many recent safety features as cosmetic rather than substantive.

Teen accounts, parental dashboards, and voluntary safety tools, she argued, do little to address platforms fundamentally designed around engagement rather than child protection.

“Until they make it safe by design, they are doing nothing.”

Still, there were signs of progress.

Both advocates agreed that lawmakers today understand technology far better than they did four years ago. Congressional staff increasingly include young adults who grew up with Snapchat, anonymous apps, algorithmic feeds, and online harassment. Many have lived these experiences themselves.

That generational shift matters.

It also mirrors one of the Sustainable Media Center’s central ideas: solving technology’s biggest problems requires an intergenerational movement.

Throughout the discussion, Emma Lembke emphasized that the most effective advocacy brings together parents, survivors, researchers, and young people who have lived through these systems.

Bride agreed.

Some of the most powerful meetings on Capitol Hill, she said, are those where parent survivors sit beside youth advocates.

Together, they represent both the children who were lost and the generation still living with these products every day.

Perhaps the most revealing question came near the end of the conversation.

If they could spend a day with every social media CEO, what would they ask?

Bride wished executives would imagine their own children using the products they build.

Neville went further.

She proposed an “Undercover Boss” experience, where executives would spend a week alongside teenagers navigating today’s online world, seeing firsthand the bullying, exploitation, extortion, drug sales, and manipulation that have become routine experiences for too many young users.

Maybe then, she suggested, empathy would become part of product design.

Despite years of setbacks, neither mother sounded defeated.

Both pointed to something that didn’t exist six years ago.

There is now a national movement.

Organizations, youth advocates, researchers, families, and lawmakers are working together in ways that would have been unimaginable when their sons died.

Public awareness has shifted dramatically.

Parents now routinely delay smartphones and social media.

Schools are reconsidering phone policies.

Young people themselves increasingly recognize that these platforms are shaping mental health, relationships, and childhood.

For both women, that growing awareness is what keeps them going.

Social Media Victims Remembrance Day honors children who are no longer here.

But as this conversation made clear, it is also becoming something else.

A growing movement determined to make sure fewer families have to create memorials of their own.