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By Chris Gleason, Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, Florida

Yesterday I wrote about how Big Tech turns all of us into a product. Today I want to talk about the part that keeps parents up at night, because it is the part that made me angriest when I dug into it.

The apps your children use were engineered to addict them. Not by accident. On purpose.

The infinite scroll that never lets them reach the bottom. The autoplay that starts the next video before they can decide to stop. The notifications timed to pull them back in the moment their attention drifts. None of that is sloppy design. It is the design. It is built by some of the smartest engineers on Earth, paid enormous salaries, with one assignment: keep your kid on the screen longer, because every extra minute is more data to harvest and more ads to sell.

A grown adult struggles to put these apps down. They were tuned in a lab to be that way. Now picture them aimed at a twelve-year-old.

And while your child is scrolling, the surveillance never stops. The same machine that watches adults watches kids, building a profile of a developing child: what they like, what they fear, what makes them insecure, what they will click when they feel bad about themselves. Then it sells access to that profile to anyone willing to pay.

We have laws against selling cigarettes to children. We have laws against selling them alcohol. We let companies sell our children’s attention, their insecurities, and their data to the highest bidder, and we call it innovation.

I am done calling it innovation. It is exploitation, and I am running for the Senate to end it.

This is one of the six parts of the Digital Magna Carta I laid out last week, and for a lot of families it is the part that matters most. Here is the commitment, in plain terms.

Ban commercial surveillance of children. A company has no business building a behavioral dossier on a minor. Full stop.

Outlaw the addiction machine for kids. No infinite scroll, no autoplay, no manipulative notification schemes engineered to hook young minds. If a feature exists to defeat a child’s self-control, it does not belong in a product aimed at children.

Ban targeted advertising to children. Your kid’s data should not be the raw material for an ad campaign aimed back at your kid.

Make platforms liable for the harm they cause. When a company’s negligent design hurts a child, that company answers for it in court. Right now they hide behind their terms of service. That ends.

Bring criminal penalties against adults who use these platforms to exploit minors. The predators who use these tools to reach children should face the full weight of the law, and so should any platform that knowingly looks away.

I have never met a mother or father, Republican or Democrat, who thinks it should be legal to addict their child for profit. This is one of those rare fights where the only people on the other side are the companies making money from the harm.

That is exactly why it has not been fixed. The platforms spend a fortune in Washington, and both parties have taken the money and looked away while a generation of kids got hooked. I will not take that money, and I will not look away.

If you are a parent who has watched a screen take hold of your child and felt powerless to stop it, you are not imagining it, and it is not your failing. It was built to be that way. The answer is not to blame yourself. The answer is to change the law.

Subscribe so the next piece reaches your inbox. Share this with another parent who needs to read it. And if you want to put real muscle behind this fight, donate here or volunteer. The full plan is at voteforgleason.com.

Our children are not inventory. Let’s make the law say so.

- Chris

Tell us how you feel about BigTech’s predatory practices against our children in the comments below.

Our Kids Are Not a Product to Be Farmed

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