James Woods was like many teenagers. He focused on school work, enjoyed chess with friends, and volunteered to mow his elderly neighbors’ lawns. He was a star track athlete at his high school in Statesboro, Ohio, and had dreams of competing in college. And he had a loving family who did everything possible to protect him from harm and prepare him for success.

James had his whole life ahead of him. Yet just days before Thanksgiving in 2022, his life was cut short. Posing as a 19-year-old woman, vicious criminals connected with James on Instagram and lured him into a sextortion scheme. Over the course of 20 hours, James’s tormentors messaged him more than 200 times, threatening to ruin his life if he failed to send them thousands of dollars. Feeling trapped, James tragically took his own life. 

Last week during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on online child safety, I spoke with James’s mother Tamia, who bravely spoke out about the dangers lurking on social media and the desperate need to protect children with the force of the law.

“Parental controls are not enough,” Tamia argued, noting that parents need the law on their side to force Big Tech to make their platforms safe by design and help keep children safe. “I would give anything to have my son back… If it means that I can save your grandchildren, I'm going to do it.”

For years, sextortion schemes like the one that targeted James have spread all across social media, preying on vulnerable children as young as 11 years old. Last year alone, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) received more than 33,000 reports of child sextortion.

During last week’s hearing, NCMEC’s executive director, Lauren Coffren, testified that such exploitation is growing as sadistic predators use online platforms to find and exploit children: “The imagery, the videos, the chats that we are seeing and reading are some of the most graphic that I have ever seen in my 20-year history.”

Yet for far too long, Big Tech platforms such as Meta’s Facebook and Instagram have turned a blind eye to this horrific abuse, choosing time and again to put profit over children’s safety in the virtual space. As I noted in a recent op-ed for TIME, even when Meta knew that its algorithms were connecting children with potential predators and drug dealers, executives refused to invest in the company’s safety teams to save money.

Facing growing outcry from parents like Tamia who have tragically lost their children to dangers on social media, Meta is now racing to save face and escape accountability by rolling out revamped teen accounts. These flimsy protections, however, are nothing more than a PR stunt. As the Wall Street Journal reported last week, predators can easily bypass these “protections” by simply chatting with minors in the comments section of a post.

To finally hold Big Tech accountable, I reintroduced the bipartisan Kids Online Safety Act. The legislation, which recently gained a veto-proof majority with 70 co-sponsors in the Senate, would establish a clear duty of care for online platforms to prevent their algorithms from pushing dangers on minors, including sexual abuse, illicit drugs, and the promotion of suicide and eating disorders.

This duty of care is critical: Requiring Big Tech companies to take responsibility for making their own products safer is essential to protecting kids and giving parents peace of mind.

There are laws in the physical space that protect children: You can't sell them alcohol; you can't sell them tobacco; you can’t expose them to pornography. If you were a liquor store and you were selling to kids, they would padlock your store and take away your license. But in the virtual space, our children are vulnerable 24/7, 365 days a year.

The Kids Online Safety Act would provide children with the same protections in the virtual space as they have in the physical world. Congress should pass this legislation immediately—and ensure that parents like Tamia don’t have to live in a world without their precious children because of Big Tech’s refusal to regulate itself.