Keeping our kids safe — you don’t have to tell Shama Tolbert about it. 

“My daughter still has nightmares, she still has issues,” she declares. “I don’t think predators, men, should have access to children so freely.”

Tolbert, from Minneapolis, says in October of 2022, her daughter Shamail was contacted online and was forced into a terrible ordeal.

She was just 14.

“A young man who posed as one of her peers, lured her to a location where she was kidnapped and sex trafficked,” Tolbert explains. “What happened to her in a month was horrific.”

Tolbert says through phone data, she was able to locate and rescue her daughter.

She says the case is under investigation.

Tolbert says Shamail, now 17, is back at school and is in recovery.  

“I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy,” she says. “Every day is a struggle, dealing with the ordeal as well as the behaviors from the traumas.”

The relationship between children and social media is being watched closely by the group Suicide Awareness Voices of Education, or SAVE, for short.

“It is a public health crisis,” says Erich Mische, the executive director. “We have called it a clear and present danger.”

The Bloomington nonprofit works to raise awareness about suicide prevention and provides support for suicide survivors.  

Mische says SAVE is supportive of the ‘Kids Online Safety Act,’ passed by the U.S. Senate on Tuesday.

The bill, which passed 91-3, had been lobbied for by parents of children who died by suicide after online bullying or who have otherwise been harmed by online content.

“The goal here is to ensure that young people continue to have access to social media, but that there are guardrails in place,” Mische says. “Make sure vulnerable kids, particularly those who are sex trafficked, who are targeted by adults posing as kids — and that others are given full protection that big tech and its technology can afford for them.”

Under the bill, social media platforms would have to provide minors with options to protect their information, disable addictive product features and ban collection of personal information from users under 17. 

“It says you can’t design products and things like that to hook kids onto your products, and then finally of course, the tools to keep them from getting addicted in the first place,” notes Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) the bill’s co-sponsor. “The bill is going to allow parents more tools, so they can stop their kids seeing this stuff.”

Klobuchar says she is optimistic the bill will pass in the House.

But since Congress is beginning its August recess, any vote wouldn’t take place until after Labor Day.

Tolbert says she hopes if the bill becomes law, it will protect other young people like her daughter. 

Her advice to other parents? “I would say keep a location on your kids, monitor their online activity, make sure that they’re safe online,” Tolbert says. “I am overjoyed there (may be) precautions put into place, that things like this won’t happen.”