Q&A with FTC Commissioner and digital privacy expert Alvaro Bedoya on the agency's plan to hire child psychologists to understand social media's impact on kids
I saw and I heard stories from parents about the mental health issues that their children were experiencing and how both the parents and …
Context & Ripple Effects
Bedoya’s privacy-focused appointment had already put children’s online protections on the FTC agenda, alongside reports that the agency was considering stronger rules without waiting for Congress. Hiring child psychologists would add developmental expertise to that enforcement and policymaking work.
The move sits in a longer arc from the FTC’s scrutiny of children’s-video privacy practices to its later proposal for tighter youth data limits, including opt-in targeted advertising for children under 13.
First-order effects
- The FTC can incorporate child-development expertise when assessing how social-media design and data practices affect minors, strengthening the factual basis for its work.
- Social-media companies face a regulator that is building capacity to evaluate child harms beyond conventional privacy compliance.
Second-order effects
- Platform compliance, product, and policy teams may need to better document how features aimed at young users affect engagement, notifications, and data use as the FTC’s child-focused scrutiny deepens.
- The hiring complements the FTC’s earlier consideration of stronger online privacy protections for children, increasing pressure for youth-safety measures that do not depend solely on new legislation.
Third-order effects
- If the agency sustains this approach, US digital regulation could increasingly treat child protection as a combined privacy, product-design, and developmental-harm question rather than a narrow data-collection issue.
- That would favor governance regimes built around evidence of user impact, while leaving the scope of any future enforceable requirements uncertain.
The trend: The FTC is broadening child online-safety oversight from privacy enforcement toward evaluating how digital products may affect young users’ well-being.