The Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., was the latest act in a bipartisan effort to bolster federal regulations on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok amid a growing chorus of parents and adolescent mental health experts warning the services have harmed youth well-being and, in some cases, pushed them to suicide. 

In an unprecedented moment, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, at the urging of Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, stood up and turned around to face the audience, apologizing to the parents in attendance who said their children were damaged — and in some cases, died — because of his company’s algorithms. 

“I’m sorry for everything you’ve all gone through,” said Zuckerberg, whose company owns Facebook and Instagram. “It’s terrible. No one should have to go through the things that your families have suffered.”

Senators argued the companies — and tech executives themselves — should be held legally responsible for instances of abuse and exploitation under tougher regulations that would limit children’s access to social media platforms and restrict their exposure to harmful content.

“Your platforms really suck at policing themselves,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, told Zuckerberg and the CEOs of X, TikTok, Discord and Snap, who were summoned to testify. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which allows social media platforms to moderate content as they see fit and generally provides immunity from liability for user-generated posts, has routinely shielded tech companies from accountability. As youth harms persist, he said those legal protections are “a very significant part of that problem.” 

Whitehouse pointed to a lawsuit against X, formerly Twitter, that was filed by two men who claimed a sex trafficker manipulated them into sharing sexually explicit videos of themselves over Snapchat when they were just 13 years old. Links to the videos appeared on Twitter years later, but the company allegedly refused to take action until after they were contacted by a Department of Homeland Security agent and the posts had generated more than 160,000 views. The by the Ninth Circuit, which cited Section 230. 

“That’s a pretty foul set of facts,” Whitehouse said. “There is nothing about that set of facts that tells me Section 230 performed any public service in that regard.”

In an opening statement, Democratic committee chair, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, offered a chilling description of the harms inflicted on young people by each of the social media platforms represented at the hearing. In addition to Zuckerberg, executives who testified were X CEO Linda Yaccarino, TikTok CEO Shou Chew, Snap co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel and Discord CEO Jason Citron.

“Discord has been used to groom, abduct and abuse children,” Durbin said. “Meta’s Instagram helped connect and promote a network of pedophiles. Snapchat’s disappearing messages have been co-opted by criminals who financially extort young victims. TikTok has become a, quote, ‘platform of choice’ for predators to access, engage and groom children for abuse. And the prevalance of [child sexual abuse material] on X has grown as the company has gutted its trust and safety workforce.” 

Citron testified that Discord has “a zero tolerance policy” for content that features sexual exploitation and that it uses filters to scan and block such materials from its service. 

“Just like all technology and tools, there are people who exploit and abuse our platforms for immoral and illegal purposes,” Citron said. “All of us here on the panel today, and throughout the tech industry, have a solemn and urgent responsibility to ensure that everyone who uses our platforms is protected from these criminals both online and off.” 

Lawmakers have introduced a slate of regulatory bills that have gained bipartisan traction but have failed to become law. Among them is the Kids Online Safety Act, which would require social media companies and other online services to take “reasonable measures” to protect children from cyberbullying, sexual exploitation and materials that promote self-harm. It would also mandate strict privacy settings when teens use the online services. Other proposals would to report suspected drug activity to the police — some parents said their children overdosed and died after buying drugs on the platforms — and a bill that would hold them accountable for hosting child sexual abuse materials. 

In their testimonies, each of the tech executives said they have taken steps to protect children who use their services, including features that restrict certain types of content, limit screen time and curtail the people they’re allowed to communicate with. But they also sought to distance their services from harms in a bid to stave off regulations. 

“With so much of our lives spent on mobile devices and social media, it’s important to look into the effects on teen mental health and well-being,” Zuckerberg said. “I take this very seriously. Mental health is a complex issue, and the existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health outcomes.” 

Zuckerberg by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which concluded there is a lack of evidence to confirm that social media causes changes in adolescent well-being at the population level and that the services could carry both benefits and harms for young people. While social media websites can expose children to online harassment and fringe ideas, researchers noted, the services can be used by young people to foster community. 

In October, 42 state attorneys general , alleging that the social media giant knowingly and purposely designed tools to addict children to its services. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warning that social media sites pose a “profound risk of harm” to youth mental health, stating that the tools should come with warning labels. Among evidence of the harms is which found that Instagram led to body-image issues among teenage girls and that many of its young users blamed the platform for increases in anxiety and depression. 

Republican lawmakers devoted a significant amount of time during the hearing to criticizing TikTok for its ties to the Chinese government, calling out the app for collecting data about U.S. citizens, including in an effort to surveil American journalists. The Justice Department is reportedly investigating allegations that ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, used the app to surveil several American journalists who report on the tech industry. 

In response, Chew said the company launched an initiative — dubbed “Project Texas” — to prevent its Chinese employees from accessing personal data about U.S. citizens. But employees claim the company has . 

YouTube and TikTok are by far the platforms where teens spend the most hours per day, according to a 2023 Gallup survey although Neal Mohan, the CEO of Google-owned YouTube, was not called in to testify.

Mainstream social media platforms have also been exploited for domestic online extremism. Earlier this month, for example, a teenager accused of carrying out a mass shooting at his Iowa high school reportedly maintained an active presence on Discord and, shortly before the rampage, commented in a channel dedicated to such attacks that he was “gearing up” for the mayhem. Just minutes before the shooting, the suspect appeared to capture a video inside a school bathroom and uploaded it to TikTok. 

Josh Golin, the executive director of Fairplay, a nonprofit devoted to bolstering online child protections, blasted the tech executives’ testimony for being little more than “evasions and deflections.” 

“If Congress really cares about the families who packed the hearing today holding pictures of their children lost to social media harms, they will move the Kids Online Safety Act,” Golin said in a statement. “Pointed questions and sound bites won’t save lives, but KOSA will.” 

The safety act, known as KOSA, has faced pushback from civil rights advocates on First Amendment grounds, arguing the proposal could be used to censor certain content and . Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee and KOSA co-author, said last fall the rules are important to protect “minor children from the transgender in this culture” and cited the legislation as a way to shield children from “being indoctrinated” online. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, endorsed the legislation, that “keeping trans content away from children is protecting kids.” 

Snap’s Evan Spiegel and X’s Linda Yaccarino both agreed to support the Kids Online Safety Act.

Aliya Bhatia, a policy analyst with the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology, said that although lawmakers made clear their intention to act, their directives could end up doing more harm than good. She said the platforms serve as “peer-to-peer learning and community networks” where young people can access information about reproductive health and other important topics that they might not feel comfortable receiving from adults in their lives. 

“It’s clear that this is a really tricky issue, it’s really difficult for the government and companies to decide what is harmful for young people,” Bhatia said. “What one young person finds helpful online, another might find harmful.”

South Carolina’s Sen. Lindsey Graham, the committee’s ranking Republican, said that social media companies can’t be trusted to keep kids safe online and that lawmakers have run out of patience.

“If you’re waiting on these guys to solve the problem,” he said, “we’re going to die waiting.” 

Ever since the mass school shooting in May at a Uvalde, Texas elementary school, families nationwide have been on high alert about the very real concern of such attacks decimating communities. But as South Carolina parents converged on their children’s schools and educators released students early, police statewide reached the same conclusion: This time, there was no real threat.

Instead, officials said the calls appeared to be part of a nationwide “swatting” hoax that’s played out at hundreds of K-12 schools in more than a dozen states since classes resumed this fall. Weeks earlier, dozens of schools in Minnesota, Virginia and Ohio became targets. Now, as the police connect the dots and report commonalities, experts with years of experience chasing down swatting perpetrators believe that many — if not most — of the recent incidents targeting U.S. schools are connected. After all, similar swatting sprees have been coordinated in shady internet outposts for years. 

“If they’re hitting 12 or 15 schools in a particular jurisdiction or a particular state all at once, that is absolutely a coordinated attack,” said James Turgal, a former executive assistant director for the FBI Information and Technology Branch. Turgal is a 21-year veteran of the FBI, which is actively investigating the latest swatting attacks on schools. 

Given its size, he suspects the most recent surge at schools is likely being coordinated by a group of people including foreign actors and swat-for-hire cybercriminals who carry out hoax emergency calls for money. While he does not necessarily believe it’s a government-sponsored attempt to sow chaos on American soil, Turgal thinks U.S. teens may still be pulling the strings with low-level foreign actors.

“Swatting is not something a nation state is going to get involved in,” said Turgal, now the vice president of cyber risk and strategy at Optiv Security. “These are smaller organizations that are trying to sell their services, not what I would call really sophisticated.” 

With the recent wave of swatting incidents targeting schools, news outlets have identified several commonalities across communities and states, including , state-by-state of hoax calls and similar , 

Such hallmarks are consistent in at least a half dozen states, , which noted that multiple local police officials had reportedly traced the calls back to Africa. 

In Minnesota, 17 false calls were placed by someone with a distinct accent using the same voice over IP technology, Drew Evans, superintendent of the state bureau of criminal apprehension, told Wired. 

“There’s a lot of different technology that could make it appear to be a single person,” Evans said. “But all the indications we have are that it’s either one person or a single entity.” 

Conceptually, swatting is straightforward and in many ways follows the bomb-threat playbook that’s pushed schools into lockdowns and panic for generations. Often using technology to mask their true identities and locations, threat actors call the police to report an emergency like an active shooting or a hostage situation with the goal of forcing tactical SWAT teams to descend on a target and cause panic. In several cases, these malicious false alarms have ended in death.

Fame, notoriety and callous oneupmanship has long motivated swatting attacks, which have their origins in the video gaming community. The slew of and in recent months is likely a motivating factor, Turgal said.

In previous swatting cases — , like Ashton Kutcher and Justin Bieber and — many of the perpetrators turned out to be kids. Other swatting attacks have been politically motivated, ranging from those on extremist Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green to outspoken gun control advocate David Hogg, who survived the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida. 

In the last eight years, Los Angeles Police Detective Edward Dorroh has worked on hundreds of swatting incidents —  that . Of those, roughly 90% were carried out by children and teens, he told ����Ӱ��. Dorroh, who is currently assigned to the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, is assisting in police investigations on the latest swatting incidents targeting schools. For that reason, Dorroh said he couldn’t comment on current cases, but discussed his deep experience with these shadowy crimes and how police confront them. 

Among the gaming community which latched onto the practice, Dorrah said the act is considered even more rewarding if they can get a heavily armed, tactical police response on camera as gamers livestream their gameplay on platforms like — a particular swatting attack “in the category of ‘for the LOLs,’ for the entertainment,” Dorroh said. 

“They’re looking for influence,” he said. “They brag about it and they build up a reputation and then what happens is people start to hire them out to do swattings. That’s where a lot of your school stuff comes in.”

Such paid swat-for-hire schemes, he said, aren’t relegated to the dark web; they’re openly promoted on the instant messaging platform popular among gamers and young people generally, with more than . 

In a statement, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division said that while the recent emergency calls “are believed to be a hoax,” it has encouraged local law enforcement agencies “to take any and all threats seriously” while they partner with state and federal law enforcement agencies to investigate. 

The FBI has acknowledged in a statement to ����Ӱ�� and other media outlets that they’re probing the surge in incidents, but they’ve provided little specific information. 

“The FBI takes swatting very seriously because it puts innocent people at risk,” the bureau said in the statement. “While we have no information to indicate a specific and credible threat, we will continue to work with our local, state, and federal law enforcement partners to gather, share, and act upon threat information as it comes to our attention.”

Swat for profit 

Law enforcement officials have been grappling with swatting attacks against schools for years. In 2015, sounded the alarm on swatting attacks against schools, shopping malls and private homes designed to capture national media attention, wage revenge on video game rivals or to make a profit.

“Incidents of swatting across the country are commonly linked, and investigations often lead to groups of malicious actors outside the U.S.,” the New Jersey Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Cell noted in a bulletin. “These foreign actors are often contacted and paid to conduct the swatting act by a student of the targeted school.” 

Amy Klinger, the co-founder and programs director of The Educator’s School Safety Network, has been tracking school threats and violence incidents for years to provide educators real-time information on emerging trends. Beginning in late August, data indicated the start of an unprecedented school swatting spike. Leaders at every school in the U.S., she said, should assume “at least in the short term” that their campus is likely to become the target of a false active-shooter report and they must be prepared for the call. 

“It is not necessarily within the control of the schools to prevent these events, because clearly they’re happening,” Klinger said.” But I do think it is within the control of the school to anticipate ‘What would we do if that happened to us?’ Being proactive is the responsibility of the school, especially knowing that these are happening at such a high level of frequency.”

Even though the school shooting threats are false, it’s important that educators and police remain diligent in responding to active-shooter calls without overreacting, said Kenneth Trump, president of the Cleveland-based National School Safety and Security Services. While “knee-jerk reactions” like swift school closures can embolden threat actors to carry out additional attacks, he said, failure to react could get someone killed. When school officials receive an emergency call, he said they should “assess and then react, not react and then assess.”

“It’s not a prank, it’s not a joke, it’s a cruel hoax and it’s really causing a lot of anxiety in communities, even more so post-Uvalde,” said Trump, offering a stern message to whomever is targeting schools nationwide. “When law enforcement catches up with you, which they will, you’re facing some very serious consequences — stuff that’s going to stay with you for the rest of your life.” 

Swatting presents real-world dangers

Dorroh, the LAPD detective, knows firsthand the fear that comes with reports of an active school shooting. Just last month, a school in suburban Los Angeles where his wife is a teacher was forced into lockdown when someone swatted a nearby high school. He said that knowledge of the national trend allowed him to offer a measured emotional response.

Aside from psychological harm, there haven’t been any reports of widespread injuries stemming from the school swatting surge. Last month in Georgia, a police officer and another driver were as the cops raced to the scene of a school that was targeted in a swatting attack. 

But several swatting incidents outside of schools have led to deaths, highlighting the dangers the hoax presents to educators and students. Of two high-profile swatting cases where people died, Dorroh helped investigate both. 

Last year, 20-year-old Shane Sonderman of rural Tennessee was after he helped carry out a swatting attack on a 60-year-old computer programmer who refused to give up the coveted Twitter handle “@Tennessee.” When police officers surrounded his house, the father of three and grandfather of six suffered a fatal heart attack. Sonderman, who began swatting as a teenager, with others, including a minor in the United Kingdom, to wage the attack. Dorroh said that for Sonderman, swatting was his only social outlet. 

Another swatting attack, carried out by Tyler Barriss of Los Angeles, led to the fatal police shooting of an unsuspecting man in Wichita, Kansas. Dorroh said his first run-in with Barriss was during an earlier investigation into hoax bomb threats targeting schools — phone calls that were never recorded. In that earlier case, police were able to pin him down after he made a hoax call to a television station. 

Then, in 2017, Barriss called police and told them he was at a house in Wichita, where he shot his father and was holding his family hostage. Except it wasn’t his house — it was the home of an unsuspecting 28-year-old man who police said became confused when they arrived. Amid the commotion, an officer shot and killed him.

Barriss had carried out the attack on behalf of two video gamers who were in a feud after a “Call of Duty” match ended in one’s defeat. One gamer used Twitter to recruit Barriss to carry out the attack on a second gamer — who provided Barriss with the Kansas address. All three were charged criminally, and in 2019 in prison. 

“I was charging people, depending on how much of a stranger they were to me, anywhere from $20 to $50 per swat,” Barriss said in a recent episode of the Netflix documentary series Web of Make Believe: Death, Lies and the Internet. “But, quite frankly, I enjoyed the thrill of swatting, I just enjoyed doing it, having it appear on the news and bragging about it on Twitter.” 

Between 2015 and 2017, Barriss had been connected to false calls in Ohio, Nevada, Illinois, Indiana, Virginia, Texas, Arizona, Massachusetts, Missouri, Maine, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Indiana, Michigan, Florida, Connecticut and New York.

“When we had the fatal swatting in Wichita, they thought [Barriss] might be a suspect so when we heard the audio recording it was like ‘Ya, that’s him,’ right off the bat,” Dorroh said. “It was just the matter of finding him and getting him into custody.”