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Teens turning to chatbots for friendship

A Common Sense Media survey reveals more teens are turning to chatbots for friendship. Michael Robb, a senior director at Common Sense Media, joins "CBS News Mornings" with more details.
Jul 17, 2025 (04:07)

TRANSCRIPT FOR: “MORE TEENS ARE TURNING TO CHATBOTS FOR FRIENDSHIP, SURVEY SHOWS”

EROLL BARNETT:
00:03:02

Quickly, just in our last few seconds, how can we make these companions safer? Yeah, I think if you take a step back and think about what these things are designed for, they are primarily designed to grab your attention and to collect as much information as you can. So if you were going to make them safer, you would try to design them in a way that made it so that it would actually support the things that we know are healthy for child development. So it would support offline social skills. It would not collect vast troves of personal information from teens. It would do a good job of reporting when teens were in really serious or critical risk-- for example, if they were suicidal or showing other kinds of potential self-harm, and there would be mechanisms in place to help platforms support those teens. Well, we encourage folks to take a look at your survey. It is fascinating, and it is where we are in the world. And we wonder why there's such a thing as the Gen Z stare. This is one of the reasons. Dr. Michael Robb, thanks for your time this morning. Thank you very much.

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