In November, former Congressman Lou Barletta alerted Kooth, a UK-based for-profit mental health program for children, which received a $3 million grant from the Pennsylvania state government. While the platform’s parent company describes Kooth as “[a] a nonjudgmental forum to get advice, help others and share your story,” its chat feature is ripe for abuse, raising serious questions about Pennsylvania’s multimillion-dollar investment in the program.
The Kooth app allows children to log in anonymously and exchange messages with a mental health counselor; in most Pennsylvania school districts, access is restricted to persons 14 and older. As Barletta notes, Pennsylvania does not require mental health providers to disclose a patient’s mental health records to his or her parents after the patient turns 14 — meaning the app could be used as a “means to withdraw parental rights and experience to retain even more information about their children than parents.” Given that even left-of-center politicians like Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams have acknowledged the harm of social media to children, it’s puzzling that the Pennsylvania Legislature would outsource some pediatric mental health services to a social media chat-style app function.
Another troubling feature of Kooth is the app’s discussion boards, where kids can chat with “peers” about their struggles. It’s questionable whether struggling kids need this feature, as kids are already inundated with messaging apps, social media feeds, and endless sources of online chatter. More troubling, however, is Barletta’s discovery that Kooth does not verify users’ identities. According to Barletta, anyone can enter basic contact information, select a participating school district and communicate freely with the suffering minors on the Kooth platform. The platform also promotes privacy, as Barletta claims Kooth will only inform the school district (not the child’s parents) if a user says something disturbing.
Kooth’s website admits many of these disturbing features. The FAQ page acknowledges that the app encourages children not to disclose Kooth use to their parents. It notes that Kooth has no age or identity verification system and that its users are anonymous, and even acknowledges that it is “possible for adults to sign up with an account claiming to be a young person.” Although the site claims that all posted content is moderated, these policies are easily abused, and Pennsylvania school boards and the state legislature have never formally discussed the risks of introducing such an anonymous platform to school-aged children .
What’s more, progressives in other states have been willing to use platforms like Kooth for political and ideological purposes. In Arizona, for example, the state Department of Education linked on its website to a “Q Chat Space,” which facilitated anonymous conversations between children and adults about homosexuality and gender identity. Leftist therapists could use Coote to spread radical racial and gender ideology to children, especially given Coote’s policy of withholding information from parents.
What is Pennsylvania’s motivation for promoting this potentially disruptive technology initiative? Are they trying to isolate children with mental health issues in a poorly vetted social media platform where abusive users can groom and encourage them to accept various lies about their sexual identity? Is it pure incompetence, a failure of state legislators to examine the programs they fund? Whatever the answer, it won’t matter much to the vulnerable children of Pennsylvania, whom the app is driving further into despair.
Photo: AntonioGuillem/iStock/Getty Images Plus
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