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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEAugust 13, 2026Contact: Katharina Kopp, 202-836-4621, kkopp@democraticmedia.orgJeff Chester, 202-494-7100, jeff@democraticmedia.orgAI and Platform Companies Are Building an Unaccountable Persuasion Pipeline, and They Are Pointing It at ChildrenHow generative AI changes commercial persuasion, and why privacy law alone cannot fix itWASHINGTON, D.C. - The transformation of media and marketing by artificial intelligence poses serious risks to the public, and especially to young people. Platform companies are embedding AI capabilities, including generative, conversational, and agentic AI, deep into advertising, programming, and commerce, fueling a new wave of commercial surveillance and manipulation that reaches all of us and that falls hardest on communities of color. For children and teens, this is not a distant prospect. These systems are already embedded in the products they use every day. A report released today by the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) documents the harms they pose across children's lives, and finds that a category of AI-driven advertising, built on real-time, cohort-level inference rather than on identifiable personal data, falls into a structural gap that privacy and consumer-protection law was not designed to govern.Generative AI collapses steps that used to be separate. A single system can now produce a commercial message, deliver it as conversation, and adjust it to a particular child in the same moment. It can sort a first-time user into a behavioral cohort, estimate how persuadable she is, and shape what she sees within seconds, drawing on models trained on millions of other people and often without writing any durable record about the child being acted on. Children and teens are among the earliest and heaviest users of these systems, which makes them the most exposed. Sixty-four percent of U.S. teens have used AI chatbots and 30 percent use them daily, with adoption highest among Black and Hispanic teens.Nothing about the technology required these companies to build advertising into their AI products. They chose to. The report examined nine AI products across nine companies - Meta, Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon (Alexa for Shopping), Snap, xAI, Anthropic, and TikTok - and found seven of the nine confirmed or likely to serve advertising inside AI chat, to use chat interactions to target advertising elsewhere, or both. Only one, Anthropic, has committed to remaining ad-free. The ninth, TikTok, has no standalone chatbot, though its platform-wide advertising system is AI-driven."A teenager talking to one of these systems is on the other side of a model trained on millions of people and optimizing against her as she types," said Jeff Chester, CDD's executive director. "She has nothing to match it with, and no way to see it working. Every exchange teaches the system how to sell to the next child a little more effectively. That is not a loophole someone stumbled into. It is the business model these companies chose."The Persuasion Pipeline: How Commercial AI Targets, Shapes, and Sells to a Generation of California's Children and Teens, by CDD Deputy Director and Director for Policy Katharina Kopp, Ph.D., traces commercial influence through six connected layers - data collection, profiling, targeting, creative generation, interaction, and measurement - and finds AI now running all six and linking them in feedback loops that get better at influencing children with every cycle.Where these practices rest on personal data about an identifiable child, privacy law does apply, though first-party exceptions can exempt a platform's own advertising even then. The difficulty is what happens when there is no such record for a right to attach to. Comprehensive federal privacy legislation remains necessary and overdue, but law anchored to the data a company holds about an identifiable person will not by itself close this gap. And while more than three dozen states have adopted over a hundred AI laws, none takes the AI-driven advertising and marketing pipeline as its object, and none requires a company to disclose what these systems are built to maximize."These companies have built the most sophisticated persuasion infrastructure in history and are pointing part of it at children," said Kopp. "We still need a strong federal privacy law and we should pass one. But privacy law alone will not reach this. Lawmakers have to govern what these systems are able to do, not only what they store, and judge companies by their effects on children rather than by what they claim not to have known."The burden is not evenly distributed. The report finds that youth of color and lower-income families face disproportionate exposure at every layer of the pipeline: higher rates of data collection driven by more intensive platform use, profiling that sorts users along racial and socioeconomic lines through behavioral proxies, optimization that steers unhealthy product advertising toward Black and Hispanic audiences, AI-generated creative that embeds raciolinguistic stereotypes, and measurement systems that compound these biases with every cycle. AI did not create these disparities. It formalizes them and runs them at a speed and scale manual marketing could not reach.What This Does to ChildrenThe report documents eight harms, moving from what these systems hold about a child to what they can do to her in the moment. They include children's private disclosures converted into commercial data, discriminatory outcomes produced by optimization, whatever the intent, manipulation through trust the systems are built to earn, emotional exploitation as a business model rather than a side effect, influence pitched below the level a child can recognize, and identity shaped around commercial values. The last two fall on children as a group - the saturation of childhood by commerce and the erosion of independent choice, whose effects compound across a generation and distort the market itself.This Is Already in the Products Children UseIn April 2026 Fenty Beauty launched an AI beauty advisor inside WhatsApp, built in the brand's own words to feel "like a text from a friend." A teenager describing her skin concerns receives product recommendations mixed with creator videos and fan reviews, with no obvious advertisement to recognize. What she does not see is the commercial partnership routing her questions through WhatsApp's business tools, or that Meta has used interactions with its AI tools to personalize advertising across its apps since December 2025, with no opt-out.1 Meta says it does not apply that personalization to users it knows to be under 18, whose ad targeting it limits to age and location. That protection depends entirely on the company correctly identifying who is a minor.In February 2026 OpenAI launched sponsored ads in the free version of ChatGPT, with ad personalization on by default. The company says it will not show ads during this test to users it predicts are under 18, a commitment that covers only the testing phase and rests on its own age-prediction model, which no outside party has audited. In April 2026 Snapchat introduced brand-operated chat agents that sit in a user's Chat tab and behave like any other contact. The only signal that an exchange is an advertisement is a single light-gray "Ad" label. Across all nine platforms the report's appendix examines, the capacity to infer who a young user is, sort them into commercial cohorts, and optimize against them in real time is nearly universal. Almost none of it is visible in what the companies disclose, and the protections that do exist are narrow, self-defined, and concentrated where legal pressure has already been applied. Disclosure should be required, but it is a floor. The harm comes from what these systems are built to do, which is why the law has to reach the capability itself.What the Report Asks ForThe report proposes four principles for legislation, framed as obligations on the companies rather than as restrictions on young people's access or new burdens on parents.1. Make commercial influence legible. Require companies to disclose what their systems are built to maximize, including the advertising-optimization layer, so that regulators, researchers, and advocates can scrutinize what these systems are designed to do.2. Prohibit the most harmful capabilities outright. Bar advertising directed at children in these environments, or at minimum advertising targeted or personalized to them, along with optimizing for persuadability, inferring emotional states for commercial purposes, and running the closed measurement loop.3. Replace knowledge standards with outcomes-based accountability. Trigger obligations on what a system does to minors as a group, not on what a company admits it knew about any one of them.4. Place accountability on the more powerful party. Cut the closed-loop data flows, so targeting data does not flow in and what is generated inside does not flow back out. Reject consent carve-outs and safe harbors, and require independent audits of commercial influence in model behavior.The report is addressed to California, home to roughly 8.4 million children and to the companies building these systems, and its framework is written so that Congress and other states can adopt it. A December 2025 survey found 60 percent of Americans, across party lines, want more regulation of AI.Statement from Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.)"Big Tech should not be allowed to turn children's vulnerabilities into fuel for an AI-powered persuasion machine," said Markey. "This report makes clear that AI companies are building systems that can surveil young people, predict what will move them, and blur the line between trusted conversation and commercial manipulation. We need strong rules of the road that put children's privacy and well-being ahead of corporate profits. The Center for Digital Democracy has provided an important service by sounding the alarm on these AI-driven dangers to our young people. I am committed to ensuring that AI does not become yet another technology that Big Tech uses to exploit kids for profit." The Persuasion Pipeline, with an executive summary in English and Spanish and a platform-by-platform appendix, is available at https://democraticmedia.org/reports/the-persuasion-pipeline. Findings are current as of June 2026.The Center for Digital Democracy is a Washington, D.C.-based public interest research and advocacy organization working on behalf of citizens, consumers, communities, and youth to protect and expand privacy, digital rights, and data justice. CDD's project on commercial AI in advertising and marketing aimed at young people is funded, in part, by the Rose Foundation for Communities and the Environment.###Note to editors1. Fenty Beauty, "Rose Amber" AI advisor, WhatsApp launch, April 2026, as reported by Glossy and Digiday. On Meta's use of AI interactions for ad and content personalization: Meta, "Improving Your Recommendations on Our Apps With AI at Meta," October 1, 2025, effective December 16, 2025, about.fb.com.

EMBARGO UNTIL 5AM EDT, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 18thContact: Jeff Chester, 202-494-7100 Jeff@democraticmedia.org FTC Should Develop Privacy-Protective Age Assurance Standards, Leading Orgs SayThe Federal Trade Commission (FTC) should revise its enforcement policy statement on age verification under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and develop stronger, privacy-protective age assurance standards, three leading advocacy organizations said today.The Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), and Fairplay sent a letter to the FTC today laying out concerns that the commission’s Enforcement Policy Statement Promoting the Adoption of Age-Verification Technology, which was released Feb. 25, “sets a weak federal floor for age verification data practices.”“We welcome the FTC’s efforts to advance children’s safety online … ” the letter says. “The standards the FTC sets now will shape how age verification is implemented nationwide for years to come, whether to comply with COPPA or other frameworks. It is therefore essential that the Commission get this right.”The FTC’s enforcement statement “falls short and should be revised,” the letter says. The statement:●      Sidesteps COPPA’s core protection of requiring parental consent for data collection by allowing operators of mixed audience or general audience websites or online services to collect personal information from every user, including children, without parental consent in order to determine which users are children.●      Applies weaker security standards for sensitive data than the FTC’s own rules and guidance.●      Sets the bar for third-party oversight below the FTC’s own established standards.●      Creates an expansive definition of age verification that undermines meaningful limits on data collection.●      Weakens data retention and deletion requirements.●      Fails to safeguard against bias against different demographic groups.Along with revising the enforcement statement to address these concerns, the letter calls on the FTC to initiate COPPA rulemaking “to provide guidance on recommended approaches to age assurance that are grounded in a risk-based framework, protective of privacy, and consistent with the First Amendment.”Read the letter.Katharina Kopp, Ph.D., Director of Policy, Center for Digital Democracy, said: "Most major platforms, like Meta and Google, already know which of their users are children. The problem has never been identifying who’s a child — it's that identifying children creates obligations companies want to avoid. Instead of holding the industry to the stronger requirements the FTC itself has established for children’s data and biometric data, this enforcement statement gives operators a weaker standard for collecting children's facial scans and behavioral profiles. That is not what protecting children looks like. Families who have lost trust in the online marketplace will rightly ask whose interests is the FTC serving – parents’ or the tech giants’? The FTC must revise this policy statement without delay and proceed with COPPA Rulemaking on Age Assurance Standards.”Suzanne Bernstein, Counsel, EPIC, said: “The Commission should strengthen its recent Enforcement Statement and make clear that if a company chooses to use age assurance to comply with COPPA, it must respect the privacy and speech rights of all users.”Haley Hinkle, Policy Counsel, Fairplay, said: "Now is not the time to lower the bar on protecting children's privacy and safety online. The FTC has already established important standards for safeguarding kids' data, and it is essential that those standards apply in the age assurance context, too. At a time when state and federal lawmakers are advancing critical new online protections for children and teens, strong leadership from the FTC on privacy protective, accurate age assurance measures is paramount."  ###About the Center for Digital DemocracyThe Center for Digital Democracy is a Washington, D.C.-based public interest research and advocacy organization, working on behalf of citizens, consumers, communities, and youth to protect and expand privacy, digital rights, and data justice. https://democraticmedia.org/About EPICEPIC (the Electronic Privacy Information Center) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit established in 1994 to protect privacy, freedom of expression, and democratic values in the information age through advocacy, research, and litigation. EPIC regularly advocates for privacy safeguards for minors online and participates as amicus to help judges understand how to evaluate constitutional challenges to data and design regulation. Visit epic.org for more information.About FairplayFairplay is the leading nonprofit committed to helping children thrive in an increasingly commercialized, screen-obsessed culture, and the only organization dedicated to ending marketing to children. Fairplay works to enhance children’s well-being by eliminating the exploitative and harmful business practices of marketers and Big Tech. Learn more at https://fairplayforkids.org.

For Immediate ReleaseWashington, DCContact: Katharina Kopp, kkopp@democraticmedia.org ###Senate Advances COPPA 2.0 to Curb Targeted Advertising to Young People The Center for Digital Democracy’s Director of Policy, Katharina Kopp, Ph.D., released the following statement today:“We commend the Senate for passing COPPA 2.0 and taking an important step to address the commercial surveillance and targeted advertising practices that dominate today’s digital marketplace. With this legislation, the Senate would extend meaningful privacy protections to teenagers and place clear limits on the ability of online platforms to collect and use young people’s personal data for advertising and marketing purposes. These protections recognize that children and teenagers deserve to participate online without being subjected to constant surveillance, behavioral tracking, and exploitation.“The legislation preserves the ability of states to enact and enforce stronger protections for children and teens, ensuring that states can continue to lead in addressing emerging risks in the digital marketplace.“We thank Senators Markey and Cassidy for their leadership in advancing this legislation. We urge the House to move forward with a strong version of COPPA 2.0 that maintains robust protections for young people online.” ### 

Contact: Jeff Chester, 202-494-7100 Jeff@democraticmedia.org John Davisson, 202-483-1140 davisson@epic.orgAdvocates Urge FTC to Halt Meta’s Plan to Use AI Chatbot Data for Ads
Meta’s chatbot data grab risks normalizing surveillance-driven marketing across the industry, setting a dangerous precedent for privacy and consumer protection.Washington, D.C.                        A coalition of 36 privacy, consumer protection, children’s rights, and civil rights advocates and researchers today called on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate and halt Meta’s recently announced plan to use conversations with its AI chatbots for advertising and content personalization. The letter, sent to FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson and Commissioners, urges the agency to exercise its oversight authority and act under both Meta’s existing consent decree and Section 5 of the FTC Act to stop this practice from moving forward.On October 1, 2025, Meta announced that beginning December 16 it would use chatbot interactions on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to inform ad targeting and personalization. These conversations often contain highly sensitive disclosures - including health, relationship, and mental health information - yet Meta has provided no opt-in consent mechanism and no assurances of heightened privacy or security safeguards.In the letter, the coalition calls on the FTC to:Enforce Meta’s existing consent decrees and require disclosure of risk assessments;Treat the practice as an unfair and deceptive act under Section 5 of the FTC Act;Suspend Meta’s chatbot advertising program pending Commission review;Finalize the long-pending modifications to the 2020 order to strengthen privacy protections, including a proposed prohibition to monetize minors’ data.The groups are also urging the Commission to disclose its findings publicly.The coalition emphasizes that Meta’s initiative is not a marginal product feature but part of a deliberate strategy to expand surveillance-driven marketing. Without FTC intervention, they warn, Meta’s actions will normalize invasive AI data practices across the industry, further undermining consumer privacy and protection.Quotes“The FTC cannot stand by while Meta and its peers rewrite the rules of privacy and consumer protection in the AI era. Chatbot surveillance for ad targeting is not a distant threat—it is happening now. Meta’s move will accelerate a race in which other companies are already implementing similarly invasive and manipulative practices, embedding commercial surveillance deeper into every aspect of our lives.”
 Katharina Kopp, Deputy Director, Center for Digital Democracy (CDD)“The FTC has a sordid history of letting Meta off the hook, and this is where it’s gotten us: industrial-scale privacy abuses brought to you by a chatbot that pretends to be your friend,” said John Davisson, Director of Litigation for EPIC. “And where is the Trump-Ferguson FTC? Slow-walking a critical enforcement action brought under Chair Khan to protect minors from Meta’s exploitative data practices. Meta’s appalling chatbot scheme should be a wake-up call to the Commission. It’s time to get serious about reining in Meta.” SignatoriesThe 36 organizations that signed to the letter include, among others: Center for Digital Democracy; Electronic Privacy Information Center; Public Citizen; Demand Progress Education Fund; ParentsTogether Action; Becca Schmill Foundation; Center for Economic Integrity; Fairplay; National Association of Consumer Advocates; Consumer Federation of America; 5Rights Foundation; Mothers Against Media Addiction (MAMA); and Common Sense Media. * * *The Center for Digital Democracy is a Washington, D.C.-based public interest research and advocacy organization, working on behalf of citizens, consumers, communities, and youth to protect and expand privacy, digital rights, and data justice.The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is a is a 501(c)(3) non-profit established in 1994 to protect privacy, freedom of expression, and democratic values in the information age through advocacy, research, and litigation. For more than 30 years, EPIC has fought for robust safeguards to protect personal information.

June 23, 2025Dear Chairman Cruz, Ranking Member Cantwell, and Members of the Committee,Today we write as a coalition of advocates dedicated to the mental and physical health, privacy, safety, and education of our nation’s youth, urging you to advance the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (S. 836), also known as COPPA 2.0. The children’s data privacy protection law is long outdated. Now, with new and even more powerful technologies, like AI, proliferating, and unscrupulous companies collecting ever more personal information from young people, it is more imperative than ever that Congress prioritize privacy protections for children and teens by updating the decades-old Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and passing COPPA 2.0 out of your Committee.COPPA 2.0 is an effective, widely supported, bipartisan update to its 25-year-old predecessor. And the Senate overwhelmingly approved this bill once already, by a vote of 91-3 in July 2024 as part of the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act.We appreciate the recent rule-making efforts of the FTC to update COPPA. However, certain updates–such as adding protections for teenagers 13 and over–can only be made by Congress, and thus COPPA 2.0 is still desperately needed. COPPA 2.0 extends privacy protections to teens, implements strong data minimization principles, bans targeted advertising to covered minors, gives families greater control over their data, and strengthens the law to ensure covered entities cannot evade enforcement. American families urgently need these protections. Big Tech’s business model relies on the extraction of millions of data points on children and teens, all to rake in record profi ts through design features that maximize engagement and models that interpret youth’s emotional states in order to make more money off of highly targeted ads.The use of targeted advertising results in kids being shown ads for alcohol, tobacco, diet pills, and gambling sites–and there is a growing understanding that platforms use highly detailed information about young users to target them with these inappropriate ads at the moment they are feeling insecure or emotionally vulnerable; precisely the moment at which they are most susceptible.These privacy risks and harms are multiplied because social media platforms are designed to be addictive, so that kids will spend more time online–giving companies more opportunities to take out more information about young users, so they can even better target kids and their familieswith marketing messages, and target kids more often. As the former U.S. Surgeon General has advised, this misuse of young people’s personal information has contributed to a startling mental health crisis among our youth, along with a myriad of online harms, including sexual exploitation, rampant cyberbullying, and eating disorders. The data-driven business model, which is being exacerbated by AI, is directly at odds with the health, safety, and privacy of our nation’s children and teens, and Congress must act to put new safeguards in place.COPPA 2.0 is a critical piece of the puzzle to protect children and teens. America’s youth and families cannot wait any longer. With our utmost respect, we ask that you move COPPA 2.0 forward.Sincerely,American Academy of PediatricsCenter for Digital DemocracyCommon Sense MediaFairplay

January 16, 2025Center for Digital DemocracyWashington, DCContact: Katharina Kopp, kkopp@democraticmedia.org Statement on the Federal Trade Commission’s Amendments to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule The following statement is attributed to Katharina Kopp, Ph.D., Deputy Director of the Center for Digital Democracy:As digital media becomes increasingly embedded in children’s lives, it more aggressively surveils, manipulates, discriminates, exploits, and harms them. Families and caregivers know all too well the impossible task of keeping children safe online. Strong privacy protections are critical to ensuring their well-being and safety. The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) finalized amendments to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA Rule) are a crucial step forward, enhancing safeguards and shifting the responsibility for privacy protections from parents to service providers. Key updates include:Restrictions on hyper-personalized data collection for targeted advertising:Mandating separate parental consent for disclosing personal information to third parties.Prohibiting the conditioning of service access on such consent.Limits on data retention:Imposing stricter data retention limits.Baseline and default privacy protections:Strengthening purpose specification and disclosure requirements.Enhanced data security requirements:Requiring robust information security programs.We commend the FTC, under Chair Lina Khan’s leadership, for finalizing this much-needed update to the COPPA Rule. The last revision, in 2013, was over a decade ago. Since then, the digital landscape has been radically transformed by practices such as mass data collection, AI-driven systems, cloud-based interconnected platforms, sentiment and facial analytics, cross-platform tracking, and manipulative, addictive design practices. These largely unregulated, Big Tech and investor driven transformations have created a hyper-surveillance environment that is especially harmful and toxic to children and teens.The data-driven, targeted advertising business model continues to pose daily threats to the health, safety, and privacy of children and their families. The FTC’s updated rule is a small but significant step toward addressing these risks, curbing harmful practices by Big Tech, and strengthening privacy protections for America’s youth online.To ensure comprehensive safeguards for children and teens in the digital world, it is essential that the incoming FTC leadership enforces the updated COPPA Rule vigorously and without delay. Additionally, it is imperative that Congress enacts further privacy protections and establishes prohibitions against harmful applications of AI technologies.                                                         * * *In 2024, a coalition of eleven leading health, privacy, consumer protection, and child rights groups filed comments at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) offering a digital roadmap for stronger safeguards while also supporting many of the agency’s key proposals for updating its regulations implementing the bipartisan Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Comments were submitted by Fairplay, the Center for Digital Democracy, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and other advocacy groups. The Center for Digital Democracy is a public interest research and advocacy organization, established in 2001, which works on behalf of citizens, consumers, communities, and youth to protect and expand privacy, digital rights, and data justice. CDD’s predecessor, the Center for Media Education, lead the campaign for the passage of COPPA over 25 years ago in 1998. 

Center for Digital DemocracyWashington, DCContact: Katharina Kopp, kkopp@democraticmedia.org  Statement Regarding the FTC 6(b) Study on Data Practices of Social Media and Video Streaming Services -“A Look Behind the Screens Examining the Data Practices of Social Media and Video Streaming Services”The following statement can be attributed to Katharina Kopp, Ph.D., Deputy Director,Center for Digital Democracy:The Center for Digital Democracy welcomes the release of the FTC’s 6(b) study on social media and video streaming providers’ data practices and it evidence-based recommendations.In 2019, Fairplay (then the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC)), the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), and 27 other organizations, and their attorneys at Georgetown Law’s Institute for Public Representation urged the Commission to use its 6(b) authority to better understand how tech companies collect and use data from children.The report’s findings show that social media and video streaming providers’ s business model produces an insatiable hunger for data about people. These companies create a vast surveillance apparatus sweeping up personal data and creating an inescapable matrix of AI applications. These data practices lead to numerous well-documented harms, particularly for children and teens. These harms include manipulation and exploitation, loss of autonomy, discrimination, hate speech and disinformation, the undermining of democratic institutions, and most importantly, the pervasive mental health crisis among the youth.The FTC's call for comprehensive privacy legislation is crucial in curbing the harmful business model of Big Tech. We support the FTC’s recommendation to better protect teens but call, specifically, for a ban on targeted advertising to do so. We strongly agree with the FTC that companies should be prohibited from exploiting young people's personal information, weaponizing AI and algorithms against them, and using their data to foster addiction to streaming videos.That is why we urge this Congress to pass COPPA 2.0 and KOSA which will compel Big Tech companies to acknowledge the presence of children and teenagers on their platforms and uphold accountability. The responsibility for rectifying the flaws in their data-driven business model rests with Big Tech, and we express our appreciation to the FTC for highlighting this important fact. ________________The Center for Digital Democracy is a public interest research and advocacy organization, established in 2001, which works on behalf of citizens, consumers, communities, and youth to protect and expand privacy, digital rights, and data justice. CDD’s predecessor, the Center for Media Education, lead the campaign for the passage of COPPA over 25 years ago in 1998.