i m anderson cooper. you may have heard the u.s. surgeon general issued a warning that social media carries what he called a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescence. it s something all of us who are parents are worried about. because of a law passed in the mid-1990s, social media companies are shielded from almost all responsibility for the content their users post, no matter how untrue or harmful it may be. but now with billions of people online, the question is, have things spiraled out of control? we spoke with three families who are taking on some of the biggest social media companies in an uphill legal battle in an effort to change the way the internet works. some of the topics in the next hour including eating disorders and suicide and can be disturbing to watch. good morning. are you getting on, mom? yeah, let s get on. reporter: a tour bus through washington in spring is typically full of kids. oh, my. reporter
human behind the humor. thanks for joining us for the whole story. i m anderson cooper. you may have heard the u.s. surgeon general issued a warning that social media carries what he called a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescence. it s something all of us who are parents are worried about. because of a law passed in the mid-1990s, social media companies are shielded from almost all responsibility for the content their users post, no matter how untrue or harmful it may be. but now with billions of people online, the question is, have things spiraled out of control? especially when it comes to kids. we spoke with three families who are taking on some of the biggest social media companies in an uphill legal battle in an effort to change the way the internet works. we want to mention some of the topics in the next hour including eating disorders and suicide and can be disturbing to watch. good morning. are you getting on, mo
and me and my dad started walking and i started trying to eat better. and i was like, what if i could lose as much weight as possible. when getting on social media, i was like, okay, how can i do this? reporter: did you just type recipes? i typed inspiration for losing weight. i looked up negative calorie recipes and it started snowballing into i was getting sick, but i was looking up sickly things. it kind of it got sick with me, if that makes sense. reporter: that snowball led to an avalanche of images of thinner bodies, of progressively wider thigh gaps and more and more pronounced collar bones until her feed was no longer about losing a few pounds. but hiding the pounds she had already lost on the way to an eating disorder. i was comparing myself to these models, recipes and i was saying, i m not eating like that. i have to be eating like that. i m fatter than this person. reporter: do your parents
all those years when you were doing treatment where she was getting that information? no. no. and that makes me just plum stupid, i think. you know, because honestly, i thought we had things in place through our government that would protect children on this level. i didn t think that was legal. i went online to do my own research to find out what was going on when ceecee said it affected her. i saw images of thigh gaps and bridge gaps. and someone had wrote fat, scraped with a knife fat across their stomach. you know what my daughter did when she got home from north carolina after being there for three months, eight hours away from me, that s what she did. she carved fat on her stomach. at that minute, my mama bear, i was like, oh, my gosh, this is the most evil shit i ve ever
give us any results. so that s a good sign. but you can get the same thinspo content on instagram by typing in other search words. you re seeing these pick of people with really large thigh gaps. tiktok gave us warnings when we typed in words associated with eating disorders. on tiktok, you re often getting that pop-up, you re more than your weight, and you re still seeing all of the content underneath that. in a statement, the company cold cnn the safety of the tiktok community is of the utmost importance, and more than 40,000 global trust and safety professionals work diligently to protect our community. good morning. it s so nice to see so many people here today in support of suicide awareness and prevention. but any changes are too late for selena. good morning. how you? what team you registering for? steps for selena. thank you.