Congress Must Pass KOSA to Address the Silent Youth Mental Health Crisis

By Sharon Winkler, mother of Alex Peiser, forever 17

By the time my son, Alex Peiser, was 17, he had turned into a happy well-adjusted kid. He was fun and sensitive and deeply engaged with the world around him. He was active in Boy Scouts, theater, band and his church youth group. He was doing well in school and getting good grades. I wasn’t particularly worried about him in any way.

But everything changed in 2017 over the course of only a few days in the fall of his junior year. 

Alex had broken up with his girlfriend and went on social media looking for support. What he got was the exact opposite. Strangers wrote to him saying awful things. “You are ugly,” they told him, “you are unlovable,” and “you will never find love in your life.” Simultaneously, the algorithm began pushing him pro-suicide content. Three days later, Alex died by suicide. I only learned of these hateful messages from his suicide note. And to this day, it remains utterly incomprehensible to me how such content, and such cyberbullying, which both so clearly violate the policies of many, if not all, social media platforms, continue to run rampant online. 

KOSA would require Big Tech to prevent and mitigate cyberbullying and pro-suicide content. I can only hope that this Congress will finally have the courage and resolve to make it law.

Yet, it does. And, for my youngest son, it was lethal. The best way for me to honor him this Mental Health Awareness month, I want to share Alex’s story. Because no family should ever experience this kind of grief and certainly not because their child was simply scrolling through some social media app like Instagram or Facebook. 

Tragically, however, for too many families across this country, what happened to Alex is not unusual. In fact, research has shown that children who are victims of cyberbullying are more than twice as likely to self-harm, show suicidal behaviors, have suicidal thoughts or attempt suicide. 

According to the Social Media Victims Law Center, there are also several other ways social media use has been linked to teen depression and suicide rates. One is overuse, specifically spending two or three hours or more every day on social media platforms. The other is the content children see posted by others, especially posts that encourage unhealthy challenges and entice kids to physically harm themselves. These can lead to suicide, too. A 10-year longitudinal study conducted at Brigham Young University (BYU) also found that just following other users with a negative influence and scrolling passively will have worse health outcomes for young people than being a more active and engaged user and poster. 

The fact is, social media platforms, as they are currently designed, with algorithms specifically intended to addict children and glue them to their feeds for hours at a time so that the Big Tech companies can rake in millions, are dangerous spaces. Even kids know this and acknowledge the benefits of putting their phones down. A 2024 report from the Pew Research Center found that 74 percent of teens said they are often or sometimes happy when they don’t have their smartphones, and 72 percent said they often or sometimes feel more peaceful when they don’t have their smartphones. That’s a lot of young people echoing what research is telling us: screens are causing harm, sometimes irreparably. 

Just six months before Alex died, the United Kingdom launched the #StatusofMind public health initiative that warned teens of the possible negative mental health outcomes associated with social media use. But I only learned of this program four years later. It haunts me to this day that I didn’t know of it sooner. Had I been aware of a government effort intended to educate young people about the risks of social media, I might have asked Alex more about his own use and maybe I could have kept him safe.

The recent reintroduction of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) here in the U.S., the first legislation in more than 25 years in this country to set guardrails on social media companies that will actually protect kids and their mental health, gives me hope. It would require Big Tech to prevent and mitigate cyberbullying and pro-suicide content, among other things, which seems like a pretty easy and obvious place to start. I can only hope that this Congress will finally have the courage and resolve to make it law. Doing so would be just about the most meaningful recognition of this year’s Mental Health Awareness Month I can think of.