Before a car seat can hold a baby, it has to pass a crash test. Before a restaurant can serve a meal, it has to pass an inspection.
The technology products children carry in their pockets, use in their classrooms, and keep on their nightstands have never had to prove they are safe. Tech companies built them first and left the rest of us to deal with the consequences.
I’ve spent twelve years in online child safety, and this spring I testified as an expert witness in the first social media mental health trial to reach a jury, where Meta and YouTube were found liable for harm to a child. And I’m the mother of three boys, trying, like every parent I know, to hold the line at home against products built to be harder to put down than anything else in their lives.
Across all of it, I’ve learned that the decisions that matter most for children are made at the top of these companies, and they are often, if not always, made around growth and profit. The internal documents I reviewed for trial showed harms to children that had been studied, documented, and set aside. Safety teams pushed. Advocates and survivors pushed. Parents did the best they could with what they knew. And whenever protections got in the way of engagement and profit, child safety lost.
For years, our field has focused on reducing harm once children were already on these platforms. That work matters, but no amount of safety work after the fact can keep up with a product whose core design generates harm faster than we can address it. Real protection means addressing safety risks in the core design before a product is launched, not decades after children and survivors have been harmed.
Companies don’t change because someone asks politely. They change when the pressure from outside costs them more than staying the same.
That’s why Heat Initiative exists, and why I’m proud to lead it.
At Heat, we apply that outside pressure by confronting the most egregious harms children face online, starting with child sexual abuse and exploitation. We use research, impact litigation, engagement with accountability stakeholders, and campaigns that ask the most powerful companies on earth to answer for the choices they make about our kids. We stand with survivors who have carried this weight for far too long. And as AI moves into children’s lives, we are demanding what should have been required from the start: products proven safe before they are launched, not years after the harm has occurred.
When Sarah Gardner and Lily Rhodes founded Heat, they built an organization willing to ask difficult questions, challenge powerful institutions, and insist that child safety become a priority instead of an afterthought. That foundation has never been more important.
Across the world, the conversation is changing. Survivors and parents are asking harder questions. Researchers continue to document the realities children face online. Courts are taking these harms seriously. Policymakers are paying attention. And young people themselves are speaking with remarkable honesty about the digital environments they’ve inherited.
The evidence continues to grow, and so does the opportunity to create meaningful change.
To every survivor, parent, partner, and supporter who has stood with Heat: thank you. And to anyone just finding us: there’s a place for you here.
Together, we can make safety the standard, not the exception.
Brooke Istook
Chief Executive Officer
Heat Initiative
