Protecting children online has become a key policy challenge of the AI era. Amina Fazlullah is the Head of Tech Policy Advocacy at Common Sense Media, where she leads efforts to advance children’s online safety, digital privacy, and responsible AI policy. In this 5 Questions interview, Fazlullah discusses the growing bipartisan support for legislation that promotes children’s online safety, the importance of building safeguards into AI from the start, and what the future of responsible AI should look like.
What do you do?
As the Head of Tech Policy Advocacy at Common Sense Media, my work touches all aspects of our policy initiatives relating to tech and kids’ safety and well-being. I spend the majority of my time focused on protecting kids and teens from unsafe AI chatbots, also called AI companions. I also work on kids’ online safety related to social media, and I work on digital equity issues, like ensuring low-income families have access to affordable and high-speed internet at home and in school. As a policy expert, I have been cited in a variety of media outlets including Time, the Associated Press, Axios, and Mashable.
Why is this work important?
Young people are facing an unprecedented mental health crisis, driven in part by the ruthless monetization of social media platforms and constant online tracking and targeting of kids and teens. There is now enormous momentum across the country to address these problems and the harms that kids and teens experience from social media — and now from AI. We advocate for privacy legislation that would limit the amount of kids’ data companies can collect, share, and store, and for changes to social media and AI platform feature designs to reduce harm to kids and their families.
When it comes to AI, we firmly believe that we must establish strong and enforceable safeguards. These safeguards will increase transparency and ultimately protect children, teens, families and all consumers, as well as students and teachers in schools, while allowing for important innovation in the field. Without guardrails, AI may “supercharge” some of the challenges and pitfalls we’ve seen with social media, and create new risks. The only way to protect kids and teens from the potential harms of AI is to build it with safety and ethics by design, continually assess its quality and performance, and prioritize data privacy protection.
What’s been the biggest surprise so far?
I don’t know if I would call this a surprise, but the most important development over the past few years has been the bipartisan, or really nonpartisan, support for kids’ online safety issues and legislation. There is a large and growing coalition of organizations, from very conservative to very liberal, to ideologically neutral, that is working very well together to pass legislation in the states to protect kids online and to prevent Congress (so far) from passing a law to preempt the states from doing their job to protect their residents. During a time when there is so much partisanship, it is very encouraging to see people from many different points of view sharing the same goal of protecting kids online.
Where do you see your work in five years?
The rapidly evolving nature of AI makes it difficult to predict what the next couple of years will look like, let alone five. What we do know is that while AI presents many exciting opportunities for learning, discovery, innovation, and economic growth, the status quo within the industry fails to prioritize the safety and privacy of children and teens. Successful AI should be developed with safety, responsibility, ethics, and inclusion by design.
I expect the focus will be around how we can expand coalitions across sector interests, to ensure proper safety guidelines and frameworks are built into the development of new technologies. Making AI safe for kids is a collective challenge — and there are other threats that AI poses beyond just those to kids. It will take researchers, policymakers, and industry all pulling in the same direction.
What else should people know?
At Common Sense Media, we understand that AI is reshaping childhood and adolescence at breathtaking speed. That’s why we launched the Youth AI Safety Institute, the world’s first independent lab dedicated to making sure the AI kids use is safe and developmentally appropriate for kids. The Institute is bringing resources and technical expertise to close the growing gap between AI use and youth safety. It will set rigorous safety standards, independently test whether AI products meet those standards, and publish the results to provide the transparency and accountability that don’t exist today.
The Youth AI Safety Institute will apply the same crash-test model to AI, testing the products children use most, showing parents the results, and holding industry accountable to meet a high standard of youth safety. It will also study the impact of AI on K-12 education, addressing questions about academic integrity and critical thinking.
