Son's suicide pushes Mesa mom to Congress

Feb. 9—Mesa mom Kristin Bride stood holding a sign with the image of her dead son, staring at Facebook founder/Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other tech giants testifying before a U.S. Senate Committee Jan. 31 about online safety.

At one point, Zuckerberg stood up and turned around to face Bride and dozens of other parents who lost children to sexual exploitation and bullying online and attempted to say, "Sorry."

Bride stood stoically, holding the photo of her son Carson and later declaring:

"It was forced, and an apology from Mark Zuckerberg is not going to bring back our children."

Carson died by suicide in 2020 after he was relentlessly bullied on the Snapchat app by what the family later learned were taunts posted by anonymous schoolmates. He was 16.

Last week's trip to Washington, D.C., was Bride's second.

In testimony before the U.S. Senate last year, she described her son's "beautiful blue eyes, an amazing smile and a great sense of humor."

After the devastating loss of one of her two sons, Bride became a reluctant warrior for making social media safer for kids and holding tech companies accountable.

She said "it all started when I learned Carson had been cyberbullied over YOLO" — a companion app to Snapchat, since discontinued, that allowed anonymous messaging.

Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snapchat's parent company Snap, also attended last week's hearing after senators summoned him under a subpoena.

Carson texted his mom about a suicide note in the middle of the night prior to hanging himself, telling her he had received nearly 100 negative, harassing, sexually explicit and humiliating messages through YOLO, including 40 in one day, Bride testified.

She believes Snapchat's anonymous messaging feature enabled a toxic harassment that ramped up her son's despair to deadly levels and should have never been available to minors.

"You don't know how many people are involved. Is it two kids doing this? Is it multiple? Is it the whole class?" she said in an interview with the Healthy Screen Habits podcast.

She said her son had tried in vain to find who was harassing him, performing an internet search on his phone before he died.

"In speaking to other teens after this happened, who have experienced this, (the cyberbullying) makes you feel so worthless — and like you have no friends, no one cares," she said.

She said her early and repeated overtures to YOLO about its dangers were ignored.

"I had a decision to make," Bride said. "Do I just lay in bed and accept this? Or do I start fighting back?"

"I chose to fight back, and that is the way I am finding a way to live with this level of grief from losing my son — because I don't want any other family to have to go through what we have gone through," she said.

She sued Snapchat in 2021, leading the company, she believes, to drop YOLO and other anonymous messaging apps even though the court eventually dismissed the case.

Bride was far from finished.

She connected with state legislators in Oregon, where Carson was bullied and died before the family moved to Mesa, and through her testimony helped amend state cyberbullying laws.

The bill was named in her son's honor.

Carson's Law requires Oregon school districts to contact the aggressors' parents following bullying incidents, not just the victims' parents.

In October, Bride filed a Federal Trade Commission complaint against a new anonymous messaging app on Instagram called NGL (for Not Gonna Lie).

Bride said she views that app as potentially harmful in similar ways as YOLO.

Now Bride is focused on supporting national legislation to increase online safety for children — the mission that took her to Washington, D.C., last week.

She's advocating for the bipartisan Kids Online Safety Act, sponsored by U.S. Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut).

U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Arizona), is one of the bill's 46 co-sponsors.

The bill would create a "duty of care" for social media companies, a legal obligation to take reasonable measures to prevent harm to minors using their services.

It would also allow minors to disable addictive features like notifications and opt out of algorithmic recommendations.

Under the law, the strongest safety and privacy settings would be the default mode for minors.

Before last week's four-hour Senate hearing, Bride woke up at 5 a.m. EST for an interview on MSNBC's Morning Joe alongside Blumenthal.

After the hearing, she spoke at a rally on the National Mall to support the bill and before more media interviews.

The next day she participated in meetings with representatives on Capitol Hill to tell Carson's story and build support for the Kids Online Safety Act.

"That's always emotionally exhausting," she said, "because you're listening to everyone's horrific story over and over again."

Following last week's hearing, Bride said she was not impressed with the other CEOs' responses to senators' questions during the four-hour hearing.

They often touted the "industry-leading" safety measures their platforms have put in place.

"It was very difficult listening to the hearing and the excuses of CEOs once again," she said. "Hearings are not going to bring back our children or prevent other kids from dying.

"This is the 10th congressional hearing on child online safety, and (the companies) are not making changes. This industry will not self-regulate," she said.

"It is absolutely time to pass the Kids Online Safety Act."

Reached at night after her long day of advocacy, Bride said she was looking forward to her return to Mesa.

The family had long owned a rental home in the city, and after her son's death decided it would be a better place to heal than "the constant rain, the constant gloom" of Oregon winters.

"It was just so hard to live with that grief that I knew I would be happier in a sunny climate," she said.

She's been impressed with the number of kids she sees playing outside in Mesa, away from their phones, interacting with other kids in real life.

Her advice to parents about social media: "I would wait as long as possible to give your child a phone."

When they get one, she said, "have discussions all the time about what can go wrong."

And above all, establish what makes a real friend.

"A friend isn't a number of likes or a follower count," she said. "A friend is somebody who has your back."