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Youth participation should reflect a broad range of ages, lived mental health experiences, cultural backgrounds and gender and sexual identities, with appropriate compensation and safeguards. Policymakers can also partner with youth-led coalitions that already have youth participation structures in place, like GoodforMEdia, Design It For Us and the Center for Youth and AI.

The event, called “Hard Reset: It’s Not You, It’s Them,” was hosted in partnership with Her Campus and Design It For Us, and included a fireside chat with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

Whitmer’s comments came in response to a question posed rhetorically towards Zuckerberg by Zamaan Qureshi, the co-founder and director of campaigns and policy at Design It For Us, the other organization hosting the event, who asked, “Is this the world that he wants us to be growing up in? Is this the world that he wants his kids to be growing up in?”

Governor Gretchen Whitmer called for stronger federal action to protect children from addictive practices by social media companies to keep kids online.

On April 7, Her Campus Media hosted ‘Hard Reset’ with Design It For Us (DIFU), an invite-only technology summit that brought together influential Gen Z voices, advocates, and changemakers. The purpose? To uplift Gen Z voices and ‘admit Big Tech is a red flag.’

“In some cases, seemingly benign animations can turn out to be sexual or violent in nature,” said Sebastian Mahal, co-chair of youth-led lobby coalition Design It For Us. “Young people don’t want to be targeted with this type of experience by YouTube’s algorithm. After a California jury found YouTube liable for failing to protect young people on its platform, one would think YouTube would finally take its responsibility to its young users seriously.”

Two seismic court decisions in the US have intervened where legislators have failed to defend social media users from exploitation, writes campaigner Zamaan Qureshi.

Nikki Iyer, co-chair of Design It For Us, also applauded the decision, calling it a “major milestone for every young person and family whose pain has been minimized by Big Tech.”

“Today’s decision ends an era of plausible deniability — Meta and YouTube knew their products were harming us, and now so does every legislature, parent and young person in America,” Iyer said.