How Common Sense Media Is Fighting for Kids in the Age of AI

Artificial intelligence is already changing young people’s lives. Students are generating essays with a few clicks. Young people are becoming entangled in emotionally-manipulative relationships with chatbots. Seven out of 10 teens have used a generative AI tool — systems that can amplify bias and misinformation. Parents and teachers can’t keep up.

Common Sense Media is stepping in to help. Since 2003, the nonprofit has successfully advocated for young people through huge shifts in media from TV and video games to social media, earning the trust of parents and educators along the way. The group says that each year more than 150 million people worldwide use its detailed entertainment and tech ratings and reviews that help parents and caregivers make informed choices about what media kids should consume. Its classroom curriculum and reports on kids’ media use have made the group an influential and authoritative resource in education and academic circles. It has become a powerful voice for state-level policy change.

“We’re really three nonprofits rolled into one,” says Jim Steyer, Common Sense Media’s co-CEO and founder. “We rate, educate, and advocate.”

As head of the $34 million organization, Steyer has cultivated close relationships with Silicon Valley CEOs and courted big-name foundations, a rare straddling of cultures and funding streams. Big grant makers like the Gates and MacArthur foundations and Craig Newmark Philanthropies have been drawn to the group because of its reach. Lucrative partnerships with tech companies have helped diversify revenue and further expand Common Sense’s audience.

Now, as Common Sense jumps into the AI fray, it is using a lesson learned from the rise of social media: Wait too long to get in front of a new technology, and the playing field gets defined for you.

“No one regulated social media until it became so ubiquitous and powerful,” Steyer says. “The moment Sam [Altman] announced ChatGPT, I said to the team, ‘We’re going to go big. We’re just going to plant the flag and say, we are going to be a big player in AI. We’re gonna try to regulate these guys from the beginning.”

The group is reviewing AI apps for parents and advising educators on how the technology can be used safely and ethically. It’s rolling out AI literacy curriculum in classrooms around the country and publishing reports that raise alarms about the risks posed by some of these new technologies. It’s pushing companies to implement safeguards and lawmakers to regulate.

“We could not be working on a more urgent issue,” says Ellen Pack, a longtime Common Sense leader who became co-CEO in January. “The core concepts are the same, but with the acceleration and the complexity and the implications of the technology, the stakes get higher and higher.”

Filling Gaps in the Market

Common Sense has a knack for seeing around corners — identifying gaps in the market and finding ways to fill them well and quickly. The expertise and drive of its staff and powerhouse board — which includes former HUD Secretary Julian Castro and Silicon Valley Community Foundation CEO Nicole Taylor — and the relationships it has with the companies shaping the future of tech, have been key, Pack says. “We have a very entrepreneurial nature at Common Sense.”

Before it came along, “there wasn’t an easy way to assess whether videos, and eventually video games, were going to be good for kids,” says Lisa Guernsey, director of the Learning Sciences Exchange program at New America and the author of several books about technology and learning. “They really were able to get into that space early.”

But the ratings and reviews couldn’t reach all families. To connect with kids whose parents were not actively seeking out the group’s materials, Common Sense had to get a foothold in schools. In 2006, shortly after social media giants like Facebook and YouTube introduced new risks to young people online, the nonprofit Common Sense Media began a low-tech program delivering online student safety notebooks to schools. By 2008, that effort had grown into Common Sense’s digital literacy and citizenship curriculum, a free program delivered by teachers that filled a much-needed gap to help kids navigate digital life.

“We wanted to create a driver’s ed for the internet,” Steyer said.

It expected to reach 500 schools. By the end of its first year, the curriculum was in 5,000. Today that curriculum reaches some 1.4 million educators working in more than 91,000 schools — about 70 percent of all schools in the country. “We just kept building and building,” says Pack, the co-CEO. “And the topics just kept coming.”

Some of the biggest and most influential grant makers have supported Common Sense over the years — only about half its revenue comes from philanthropy — helping it get key programs off the ground. In the late 2010s, Common Sense raised $3.48 million from the Hewlett, MacArthur, and Sherwood foundations to develop curriculums working alongside educational psychologist Howard Gardner and Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation is a financial supporter of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.)

While other media-literacy organizations have emerged, “none have the reach that Common Sense does on a national scale,” said Ambika Kapur, program director for education at the Carnegie Corporation. Carnegie has given $7.4 million to Common Sense since 2014 in an effort to help bridge gaps between learning at home and school.

Teachers have found Common Sense programs, which are tailored by grade level, to be a lifeline as they help students navigate a changing and perilous landscape of new tech.

Melissa Donnelly-Gowdy, an English and gender-studies teacher at River City High School in West Sacramento, Calif., has used Common Sense curriculums in her classroom for nearly a decade. She used lessons about “digital footprints” in her tenth grade classroom as many of her students got their first smartphones and the school was tracking a rise in bullying and inappropriate behavior on social media. When her 11th-graders were doing a career research project, she was able to draw on those lessons and remind students that their social-media posts could affect their future ability to get a job.

“Common Sense helped set that up for me, and then I just continued to adjust to it for the kids,” she said. In addition to her colleagues, “Common Sense would be my first resource.”

There’s new evidence that the curriculum is effective. A 2024 study from the London School of Economics assessed areas such as media literacy and attitudes towards misinformation in 215 students ages 6 to 16 before and after they were taught Common Sense’s Digital Citizenship Curriculum for as little as six weeks. Researchers found that in three out of four age groups, half or more of the students showed meaningful improvement in their ability to navigate the online world.

Several grant makers are supporting Common Sense’s work to update its curriculum with lessons that help young people identify how AI, misinformation, and social-media algorithms shape their understanding of the news.

Sam, Laurene, and Sundar: Courting the Big Names

Steyer is on a first-name basis with many of Silicon Valley’s most wealthy and powerful — Sam (Altman), Laurene (Powell Jobs), and Sundar (Pichai), “a Common Sense power user.” And then there’s Mark (Zuckerberg), whose company Steyer calls “the poster child for irresponsible behavior, period.”

Steyer has been an early and vocal antagonist against Meta. In 2012 he published “Talking Back to Facebook: The Common Sense Guide to Raising Kids in the Digital Age,” which detailed social platforms’ negative impact on child development and offered advice for parents. When a whistleblower testified that the company was aware of the harm its products had on teens and continued to prioritize profits over safety, Common Sense teamed up with her to advocate for policy solutions.

Many tech CEOs are familiar with Common Sense because they refer to its ratings and reviews at home. “These guys all use it for their own children,” Steyer says. He tells them to “put on your parent shoes, not your ‘CEO of Google’ shoes, and tell me you won’t want us to advocate for your children.”

That approach has also helped the group to develop important partnerships with the very same companies — an approach that might raise eyebrows.

Every partnership is different, but they usually involve some level of financial and program support. For example, in January, Common Sense announced it was working with OpenAI to create teacher training and resources that support safe and responsible use of AI in K-12 classrooms. So far, one introductory course is available online, with more in-depth resources being developed for back-to-school in the fall.

Common Sense declined to detail the financial arrangement with OpenAI but said it’s one of 21 business distribution partners who together contributed about $10 million last year, just under a third of overall revenue. These arrangements provide an important source of revenue, but also a key way of expanding Common Sense’s reach. Other partners, like cable providers and streaming companies, license the nonprofit’s ratings and reviews of TV shows and movies to make them accessible within their platforms.

But Steyer and his team are clear that Common Sense will not be compromised by a business relationship. “My argument to them is: We’ll work with you on some stuff, but we’re also going to criticize you,” he says. “You don’t like it? Don’t work with us.”

Common Sense maintains editorial and advocacy independence when working with media partners, a spokeswoman said.

The group tries to strike a balance as it both works alongside tech companies and leaders and pushes to regulate their power. “They’ve been able to walk the line of not being against technology, but to push an agenda of harnessing technology for the betterment of kids and families,” says Gary Knell, a longtime board member and former CEO of National Geographic, NPR, and Sesame Workshop.

Some advocacy groups tell you to turn off the computer or put your phone away, and Common Sense does do a little of that, he says. But its approach is more focused on working with the major players in Silicon Valley “to instill a conscience around their impact on kids, teens, and families, and do the right thing,” Knell says.

Steyer’s connections to those tech leaders have been critical to the nonprofit’s success. “He’s very persuasive in a way that works with people who make decisions,” says Craig Newmark, who has given Common Sense $10.5 million in recent years.

After graduating with a law degree from Stanford, Steyer worked as an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and launched his first advocacy venture, Children Now, in 1988. His younger brother, the hedge fund billionaire and former Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer, helped connect him to the business world.

In its early days, Common Sense drew financial backing and leadership from executives in finance, advertising, television, and publishing. Many of them, like Steyer, were also parents of young kids. For them, the concerns were personal.

That was the case for Liz Perle, a former publishing executive who co-founded the organization and who, as its first editor-in-chief, was instrumental in creating the Common Sense voice. “The key was to create a voice that was not judgmental and didactic,” Steyer says. The reviews, which are written by a stable of freelancers, now include movies, games, books, podcasts, apps, educational websites, and TV shows, along with newer efforts like AI risk assessments

Always Observing and Learning

Common Sense leaders looked to a range of nonprofit and for-profit organizations for guidance. Steyer pitched the young organization as part Consumer Reports, part AARP for kids; a consumer-facing platform with a broad membership base and lobbying power. He met with the heads of those model organizations early on. The founding team also enlisted help from the publishers of the Zagat guides when developing their ratings and reviews.

Common Sense also took cues from other nonprofits, like Mozilla, AARP, and National Geographic Society, when it launched a for-profit entity in 2020. Common Sense Growth was created as a for-profit subsidiary to incubate and invest in educational-technology companies aligned with the nonprofit’s mission. So far it has launched two products — a short-form video platform with kid-friendly content and a platform to evaluate corporate privacy policies to protect kids — and made small investments ($250,000 or less) in about 10 companies. The hope is that proceeds from those investments, if successful, will return to the nonprofit.

“We’re always observing and learning and trying to see what could be applicable here,” says Pack, the co-CEO, who focuses on day-to-day operations and management of the roughly 140 staff members.

Policy Success in the States

Common Sense leaders always understood that providing resources to parents and educators — important as that is — would never be enough. With media so rooted in kids’ lives, changes in public policy would be necessary. Advocacy has only become more important as the tech environment has changed.

To lead those efforts, the nonprofit has recruited people with a strong track record. Danny Weiss, former chief of staff to former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, leads overall advocacy efforts. Bruce Reed, a longtime Democratic policy operative, recently joined Common Sense as head of AI.

In recent years, as public opinion about social media companies has become more critical, Common Sense has focused more attention on reducing harms of these technologies through policy changes, says Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay, which advocates for child safety on the internet.

Both groups have tried but failed to get big change done at the federal level. They are part of a broader coalition of advocates that pushed for the Kids Online Safety Act, a major piece of legislation that was reintroduced in the Senate in May after failing to pass last fall. That bill includes updates to the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which would give parents control over what information websites can collect from their kids.

When it comes to passing meaningful tech laws, “Congress has been missing in action for 30 years,” Steyer says. “It’s a disgrace.”

But once Common Sense turned its attention to the states, it had a string of successes in California. An “eraser button” law requires websites to make it easy for minors to remove content they post online. A student-privacy law prohibits educational websites and apps from using kids’ personal information for profit. Common Sense helped craft and advocated for the landmark California Consumer Privacy Act, passed in 2018, which gave consumers sweeping protections over their personal data and made it more difficult for companies to share or sell data on kids under age 16.

AI: Common Sense’s Biggest Challenge

Artificial intelligence is the next looming challenge, and how successful Common Sense can be is an open question. Its AI strategy is still in the early stages.

The group is using its playbook of working closely with tech giants — and leaning into its role as a watchdog — in its initial approach to AI.

In May, Common Sense released an alarming report assessing the risk of AI companions — essentially chatbots designed to serve as “digital friends”—finding that they can offer dangerous advice, role play sexual scenarios, or lead vulnerable youth into unhealthy emotional attachments.

The report recommended that no one under 18 use AI companions and called on the companies to limit harmful features. Right now, there are no federal regulations that require companies to warn users of the risks. The group is supporting legislation in California and New York that bans or restricts interactions between minors and AI companion chatbots.

Last week, Common Sense and a coalition of other advocates celebrated the defeat of a measure in the Republican policy bill that would have prevented states from regulating AI for the next decade. Common Sense reiterated its commitment to “working with lawmakers at every level of government to establish meaningful safeguards on AI.”

Steyer says by 2030, the nonprofit will have played a key part in “setting a framework for the AI revolution.” Their user base will “probably double” as it expands abroad. The school platform will be all about AI literacy.

In five years, the world may look different, he says, but “We are gonna do what we always do. We’re gonna rate, educate, and advocate. I don’t see any big change in mission.”

Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.