FTC plans to hire child psychologist to guide internet rules
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The Federal Trade Commission plans to hire at least one child psychologist who can guide its work on internet regulation, Democratic Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya told The Record in an interview published Monday.
FTC Chair Lina Khan backs the plan, Bedoya told the outlet, adding that he hopes it can become a reality by next fall, though the commission does not yet have a firm timeline.
“Our plan is to hire one or more child psychologists to help us assess the mental health impacts of what children and young people do online,” FTC spokesperson Douglas Farrar told CNBC in a statement. “We are currently exploring next steps including how many to hire and when.”
The FTC’s plan is indicative of a broader push across the U.S. government, focusing on online protections for kids and teens. Federal and state lawmakers have proposed new legislation they believe will make the internet safer by mandating stronger age authentication or placing more responsibility on tech companies to design safe products for young users. The U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory in May that young people’s social media use poses significant mental health risks.
Bedoya, who founded the Center on Privacy and Technology at the Georgetown University Law Center, said the plan is reflective of the FTC’s approach as “an expert agency through and through.” It follows the agency’s earlier decisions to add economists to its ranks of lawyers on staff and, later, technologists.
Bedoya told The Record that it’s “absolutely part of that tradition of systematically expanding our expertise.”
Bedoya envisions an in-house child psychologist to be a helpful resource for commissioners like himself.
“If I have an economic question, I’ve got 80 Ph.D. economists I can ask,” he told The Record. “If someone is making an allegation about mental health harms, I have no full-time staff who are experts in the psychology of it.”
While Bedoya said the FTC can already get advice from ad hoc consultants, hiring a child psychologist on staff “can send a strong signal to other law enforcement agencies in the U.S. by saying we need to have these folks in-house such that it’s a standing capacity.”
Those experts could bring important insights that can link a cause to an alleged harm and inform the appropriate damages the agency seeks, Bedoya said. He added that child psychologists could help the FTC evaluate allegations of how social media may affect mental health, as well as assess the effect of dark patterns or other deceptive features.
Bedoya said the initial hires would likely be “psychological scientists” or “social psychologists,” who conduct research rather than evaluate kids in a clinical setting. While he said he can’t “presuppose anything,” they’d likely work on investigations, strategy and possibly rulemaking.
Read the full interview at The Record.
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The U.S. Postal Service said Wednesday it will resume accepting inbound mail and packages from China and Hong Kong, just hours after it suspended service from those regions.
“The USPS and Customs and Border Protection are working closely together to implement an efficient collection mechanism for the new China tariffs to ensure the least disruption to package delivery,” the agency wrote in a notice posted to its website. The change is effective immediately.
USPS announced late Tuesday it would stop accepting parcels from China and Hong Kong Posts “until further notice.”
The move came after President Donald Trump on Saturday imposed an additional 10% tax on Chinese goods, as part of sweeping new tariffs on the country’s top three trading partners. Trump on Monday agreed to hold off on imposing 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico for 30 days.
As part of the tariffs, Trump also closed a nearly century-old trade loophole, called “de minimis,” which allows exporters to ship packages worth less than $800 into the U.S. duty-free. The suspension of de minimis is widely expected to impact upstart Chinese e-commerce companies Temu and Shein, which have relied on de minimis and grew in popularity in the U.S. due to their cheap clothing, furniture and electronics shipped directly from China.
The U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency has said it processed more than 1.3 billion de minimis shipments in 2024. A 2023 report from the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party found that Temu and Shein are “likely responsible” for more than 30% of de minimis shipments into the U.S., and “likely nearly half” of all de minimis shipments originating from China.
The rise of e-commerce and the influx of low-value packages that occurred alongside it prompted Congress in 2016 to raise the de minimis threshold from $200 to $800.
Yin Lam, an analyst at Morningstar, said late Tuesday the massive volume of daily de minimis shipments into the U.S. creates a “significant challenge” for USPS because “it is difficult to check all the packages – so it will take time.”
Critics have argued the trade loophole has allowed illicit drugs, such as fentanyl, to enter the U.S. through the mail. Trade officials have also said de minimis shipments are subject to less scrutiny, raising concerns around counterfeit and unsafe goods.
— CNBC’s Evelyn Cheng contributed to this report.
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