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Can one mother's loss transform online safety?

This newsletter discusses sexual assault, substance abuse, cyberbullying, and the death of a young person. Please take care when reading.

When Deb Schmill lost her 18-year-old daughter Becca in 2020 to fentanyl poisoning purchased through a social media platform, she made a choice to channel her grief into action.

A self-described introvert with no prior experience writing legislation, in a few short years, Schmill has become one of the fiercest and most dedicated advocates for online safety legislation in the United States.

Her story is one of tragedy and heartbreak, but it is also a story of how passion and conviction can create lasting, nationwide change.

// Becca Schmill

A teenager with an adventurous spirit, Becca Schmill had a gift for making people feel seen and loved.

But at 15, her world shattered when she was sexually assaulted by an 18-year-old boy she met through social media—her first trauma. The second came soon after, in the form of cyberbullying that amplified her pain. The two traumas left Becca with what she described as a hole in her chest. She soon started self-medicating as a way to fill that hole and cope with her pain. Like many young people navigating trauma, she turned to self-medication.

Social media made it easier for her to access drugs. “She could go on anytime, and she could find something to make her feel better,” Schmill said about her daughter. On September 16, 2020, Becca purchased what she thought was one substance but received something laced with fentanyl. She was 18 years old.

What Becca experienced is not uncommon for teens today. Online risks are manifold—from cyberbullying to access to dangerous drugs to sycophantic AI companions.

Dr. Jonathan Haidt, a Project Liberty Institute Fellow, has chronicled the dangers to kids online in his book The Anxious Generation. And organizations like MAMA (Mothers Against Media Addiction), Fairplay, 5Rights Foundation, Design It For Us, and many others in the Project Liberty Alliance are leading the charge in making social media safer and more private by design.

// Writing legislation to change a nation

In the wake of Becca’s death, Schmill refused to be idle. Her family launched the Becca Schmill Foundation, with a mission to prevent what happened to Becca from happening to other kids.

Schmill was one of the family members who held up a picture of her child in the Senate Judiciary Committee meeting when Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, testified last year.

Raising awareness wasn’t enough. Schmill wanted real change. “To me, the fastest, most impactful way to change something is through legislation, even as slow as it is," she said. “If you can find the levers where you can actually get something passed, it's universal.”

Deb Schmill

Schmill had never written a piece of legislation before, but she started attending webinars, interviewing experts, and taking public policy classes. “I never thought I’d be doing this,” she said. But she kept going, searching for a leverage point where legislation was feasible. “You've got to find those areas where you can make your way in and start the change,” she said.

She settled on writing legislation to advance phone- and device-free school laws in Massachusetts. With her newfound expertise, she wrote a bill herself and identified a state legislator, Senator John Velis, to introduce it. By the time the legislative session had opened, there were 12 similar bills on the floor. Next week, the bills will be heard by committee, and Schmill expects that lawmakers will combine the best features of the different bills to develop a new bill that will pass. A movement had begun.

She then worked with Dr. Haidt’s team to develop a model bill for bell-to-bell phone and device-free schools across the country. That model bill has been introduced in several states and has been used to amend existing bills in others. (For more on the movement to make schools phone-free, check out our recent newsletter.)

Schmill was also working on getting the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) passed at the federal level. In 2023, she rented an apartment in Washington, D.C., to be close to the action. For three months, she went to the Senate every day to advocate for the bill. With her leadership, KOSA passed the Senate by a historic 91-3 bipartisan vote before getting stalled in the House last year. It was recently reintroduced.

Today, the Becca Schmill Foundation presses on. They are a leading organization in the phone-free school movement (through the Distraction-Free Schools Policy Project), and they’ve also worked on a media literacy bill and age verification legislation. Schmill believes that KOSA will eventually get passed.

// A blueprint for citizen advocacy

Schmill’s story provides a blueprint for anyone seeking to make change on the biggest stages. Here are five takeaways for anyone seeking to champion policy change.

1. Find the leverage point. Schmill focused on what was feasible. The timing, the awareness, the momentum, it was all leading to phone-free schools. So she concentrated there because legislation was possible. She cautioned that you have to be careful not to just spin your wheels on a bill that has no chance of passing. Not every issue is ready for legislative action.
2. Focus on learning and seek collaboration. It sounds like a poster you’d see in an office hallway. But Schmill was relentless. She studied legislative processes, pored over bills, and obsessed with the details. Then she didn’t go alone. “Learn from other people who've done it and let them show you the way,” she said.
3. Embrace compromise. “When I was working on KOSA, some of my favorite people to work with were on the other side of the aisle. That was a surprise and provided valuable perspective,” she said. “Despite the times we live in, there is opportunity to work together when both sides are willing to listen and are open to reasonable compromises.”
4. Start with passion, not experience: “Experience is always helpful but it’s your passion for an issue that is most important. The issue is what motivates me every day to go outside of my introvert comfort zone, to meet with many different people, to be open to other points of view, and to find solutions that will get us to the end goal of protecting children. You don’t need to be an expert—you need to be committed.”

Today, Becca's legacy lives on not just in her mother’s work or the foundation that bears her name, but in every piece of online safety legislation, every phone-free school, and every citizen who takes the message that lasting change is closer and more possible than we imagined.

Project Liberty updates

// Project Liberty founder Frank McCourt spoke on CBS Mornings about his potential bid to buy TikTok. The deadline for China-based ByteDance to either sell TikTok's U.S. business or face a nationwide ban is June 19th. Watch the 5-minute segment here.

// Frank McCourt will be speaking at the influential Brussels Forum on Thursday, June 12th. This year's Forum explores and debates the issues and ideas shaping the transatlantic outlook for prosperity, democracy, and security against a backdrop of unprecedented disruption. You can watch the livestream (and recordings) here.

Other notable headlines

// 🤔 An article in the Atlantic explored what happens when people don’t understand how AI works. (Paywall).

// 🕵 Anthropic released a custom AI chatbot for classified spy work. "Claude Gov" is already handling classified information for the US government, according to an article in Ars Technica. (Free).

// 📱 An article in the Wall Street Journal uncovered how criminals are exploiting the trust teens have in iPhone messaging, using the platform to make relentless demands for money. (Paywall).

// 🔎 AI can now stalk you with just a single vacation photo. Artificial intelligence could weaponize the data we’ve been sharing for decades, according to an article in Vox. (Free).

// 🚫 Meta found a new way to violate your privacy. It only stopped once researchers exposed tactics that alarmed privacy veterans, according to an article in the Washington Post. (Paywall).

Partner news & opportunities

// Join Kara Swisher, Joseph Gordon-Levitt & more at Aspen Digital’s AI Forum

June 13, 9am - 4:30PM ET in Washington, D.C.

Aspen Digital, in partnership with the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, is hosting Shared Futures: The AI Forum. The event will explore how AI is reshaping culture, governance, and human connection. Featured speakers include Baratunde Thurston, Yasmin Green, and Refik Anadol—with sessions on AI and faith, dating, storytelling, ethics, and more. Join virtually here.

// Webinar: Agentic AI: Technical and policy considerations 

Leaders from All Tech Is Human and the Center for Democracy & Technology are hosting a webinar to discuss the emerging technical and policy considerations for Agentic AI systems. The panelists will unpack emerging issues such as agent security and misuse, user privacy, user control, technical and legal infrastructure for agent governance, the impact of human-like agents, and responsibility for agent harms. Register here.

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