The Kids Online Safety Act, which you'll hear viewpoints for and against ahead, seeks to hold social media companies accountable when they recommend content to children that promote self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, and sexual exploitation.

Here in Las Vegas, Meghan Stuhmer believes the bill also known as KOSA could have prevented a deadly car accident that seriously injured her daughter.

It happened in June 2021 in South Carolina right before she and her daughter planned to move to Las Vegas.

I'd like to start by going back to June 17, 2021.

What happened on that day?

(Meghan Stuhmer) On Wednesday, June 16, that was the last day of my daughter's sophomore year of high school.

She had recently gotten her license.

We were getting ready to move in a few days.

She and two of her friends decided to take the speed challenge.

So after I went to bed, she snuck out with her two friends.

They got my Hyundai up to over 100 miles per hour.

The speed challenge was like 130 to 200 miles per hour.

They hit a tree, and her friend passed away instantly.

And then both girls in the driver's and passenger seat were severely hurt.

-Tell me about this speed challenge.

-So during the quarantine, we'd spent a lot of time with defensive driving, driving to the DMV--the DMV had a little obstacle course--and it gave us practice on the highway, on, you know, the dark country roads, things like that.

So they-- and my daughter had a smartphone.

So did I.

So we-- I didn't realize it, but they were tracking her location.

And with that, they knew that she was a new driver.

They knew she was a high school student who was working from home.

She wasn't going in person.

And they develop their algorithms.

Well, the algorithm, one of the algorithms that they chose to send to my daughter, started when she was 15 and then 16, has to do with speeding.

And so when I was on her phone following the accident, I realized how many ads she got where it was like 20 seconds of crazy driving.

And the speedometer always would go up, and it was always 150, 180.

It would go over 200 miles per hour in certain scenes.

Or it would be like this little clip of a very young looking girl with like these little stars, looking pouty, and saying, "My face when my boyfriend says he's driving safe."

Then it would flip and it would say, "150 miles per hour."

I never saw anything less than 130 miles per hour.

That seems to be the starting point of the speed challenge or the speed algorithm.

And then it would be followed by an advertisement.

For instance, Tesla, "More affordable than ever.

200 miles per hour."

I didn't-- just constant normalization of speed.

And so they took the car out, they hit the tree, and it ended horrifically.

When I asked my daughter about it later, "Why did you do this"-- she'd gotten straight A's for the first time in her life and just never mentioned a fast car, never mentioned even a car that she liked.

It was so far out of my radar.

And her response was, "I was really scared, but I wanted to take my turn."

So the speed challenge is just the normalization and the incentivizing of driving 130 to 200 miles per hour that's being sent to kids.

-How did you find out about what happened?

-So after the phones were released back to the families, we all looked at the phones.

And I got onto the different social media accounts.

My daughter had Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram, along with different gaming apps and a few different ones.

So she had been using them to chat specifically during when we were all quarantined.

It was like they were using the chat features within social media platforms more so within the texting feature.

So when you text, you're not getting all these ads.

But in order to read what she had been talking about with her friends, I was trying to figure out where did this influence, where did this idea to go 130 miles an hour, where did it come from?

And at the time, it never occurred to me that companies were pushing it.

I thought it was a peer influence.

But in order to go back and read all the months of chat, which never found any peer influence for it, in order to read that, I had to watch.

There's like 20 seconds of crazy in this reel and then the advertisements that came through.

And at one point, I realized I was like, just being on her phone for all these hours, I was like, I think it's normal to go 130 miles per hour with my adult brain, based on all the information they were sending her.

-Do you think you could have prevented this as a parent?

-I-- So we've talked about KOSA and having more regulation for social media.

I was not ignorant.

And I don't like the narrative that parents have to stop giving their kids screens and telling them-- and letting them raise their kids.

That's not what happened here at all.

Absolutely.

Had I understood that they were going to track my daughter's location and they were going to use that to determine her algorithm, I would absolutely turn off her phone.

She could still have the smartphone.

I would absolutely would have had her turn off the phone, though, whenever we left the house.

Like whenever we left the house.

Because I wouldn't have necessarily wanted her off of social media.

I hate to say that, but it's part of our problem now and part of the reason we need more regulation.

It's what kids use to connect.

So right now, she doesn't want to be on the different platforms, but it creates an isolation.

And so, yes, I could have prevented it had I been more informed, but I wasn't uneducated and I was not hands off.

-How would the Kids Online Safety Act have prevented this, in your opinion?

-One of the biggest things for me would have been transparency.

If there's accountability and they have to disclose a certain amount of information, then as a parent I would have understood a little bit more that they are tracking the location.

That would have been a huge thing for me if I had understood that, because what I did is I put a bull's eye on my daughter's back because I spent all this extra time with defensive driving.

It's like it kills me how many times I said, If you ever hurt somebody, if you ever hit somebody's dog or child ever runs out, you'll never forgive yourself.

We spent so much time on these defensive driving lessons and practicing, and really what I was doing was setting her up to be targeted.

-How is your daughter doing now?

-She's a fighter, but she's not doing-- I mean, I don't know how to describe the pain that-- she just, she's just doing good.

Like she's going to school, she's doing the best that she can do.

She's not-- she's had nerve pain every single day since 2021.

More, like recently, it's gotten worse.

So physically, there's only so much healing that will take place.

And then you look at mental and spiritual, and you just-- we've had a ton of support.

You know, I mean, family, friends.

The little girl who passed away, their family has just stood by us.

And so she's doing as good as she could be doing.

But one of the things that I've shared with a lot of people is I asked Carly one time, like, If you were to promote speeding, like a speeding advertisement the way that you received it, if you were to have your own advertisement, get the message out there so kids could see what speeding really looked like, what would you, how would that look?

And she said, I would show pictures of myself and the other little girl that got hurt.

She was like, But I wouldn't even mention that anyone had passed away, because no one would believe anything that bad could happen.

And I still wake up, and you're just like, how did that happen?

You know?

And how are they still doing it, and how are they still profiting from it?

-Meghan Stuhmer, thank you for your time.

-Thank you.