President Biden plans to castigate social media companies for contributing to “a national mental health crisis” Tuesday night in his first State of the Union speech — while noting other factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic, which has been blamed for fueling record-high numbers of drug overdose deaths over the past two years.
Biden will host former Facebook worker Frances Haugen, who accused the company of failing to censor misinformation and content harmful to teens, as one of his guests to underscore his attack on tech giants.
“The president believes tech companies should be held accountable for the harms they cause,” a White House official told reporters on a call previewing the portion of his speech.
A White House release said Biden “will announce a strategy to address our national mental health crisis,” including funds for federal programs that promote mental health at colleges and other communities.
Biden also wants “to ban excessive data collection on and targeted advertising online for children and young people,” the release said.
The president’s forthcoming annual budget will request $5 million for “research on social media’s harms, as well as the clinical and societal interventions we might deploy to address them,” according to a fact sheet that also accuses companies of gender bias by delivering pornographic results when people search for “girls” of various races.
Biden wants to “stop discriminatory algorithmic decision-making that limits opportunities for young Americans,” the White House said.
“When a girl searches for jobs online, platforms will too often push her away from fields like engineering that historically have excluded women,” the fact sheet contended. “Searches for ‘Black girls,’ ‘Asian girls,’ or ‘Latina girls’ too often return harmful content, including pornography, rather than role models, toys, or activities.”
The White House statement acknowledged other causes of mental health issues but didn’t specifically mention drug overdose deaths, which surpassed 100,000 in a 12-month period ending in April 2021. The 28.5 percent spike was driven by illicit fentanyl coming largely from China. The potent compound is increasingly cut into non-opioid drugs and pressed into counterfeit prescription pills while also wiping out a generation of addicts unwittingly hooked on painkillers by Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin.
“Our country faces an unprecedented mental health crisis among people of all ages,” the White House statement said.
“Two out of five adults report symptoms of anxiety or depression. And, Black and Brown communities are disproportionately under-treated — even as their burden of mental illness has continued to rise. Even before the pandemic, rates of depression and anxiety were inching higher. But the grief, trauma, and physical isolation of the last two years have driven Americans to a breaking point.”
Although criticism of Big Tech platforms often is bipartisan — with both Biden and former President Donald Trump supporting changes to Section 230 immunity for third-party content — Republicans are more likely to blame US mental health woes on issues such as the mandatory masking of students and remote learning due to COVID-19.
“If you’re a parent of a child with asthma, as one parent shared with me, wearing a mask for now close to two years has been just a very difficult experience,” Virginia GOP Attorney General Jason Miyares said in a recent interview.
“I had another parent who shared with me [that] their daughter, they used to be an all-A student, is now a mostly ‘C’ student because they wear glasses and the school has gone from a joy to complete misery,” Miyares added. “And another parent of a school–age child said how excited their child was, their daughter was, that for the very first time, they could see what their best friend from school actually looks like. I mean, think about the mental health crisis as well [and the effect] that we’re having on our kids.”
