David Dunmoyer’s testimony on the social media-driven youth mental health crisis before the Texas House Public Health Committee.
Dunmoyer details how social media platforms’ “choice architecture” and algorithmic designs are not bugs but deliberate features engineered to maximize profit, engagement, and data collection at the direct expense of children’s mental health and safety.
He highlights consistencies in the industry such as making accounts trivially easy for children to open (while claiming ignorance of users’ true ages), offering parents superficial oversight tools as a false sense of security, harvesting every data point to refine compulsive algorithms, and then denying responsibility by invoking Section 230 immunity or COPPA technicalities when harm occurs.