Sammy Chapman was 16 years old, an A student who loved to make people laugh, when a stranger reached him through Snapchat with a pill that would kill him within hours on Feb. 7, 2021.
“We’re doing this to save other children from Sammy’s fate and to save other families from the devastation that we have to live with every day,” his mother, Dr. Laura Berman, told ABC News.
Sammy snuck out after his parents fell asleep to take what he thought was a normal pill, according to Bark, the parental-monitoring company his family has since partnered with. It was laced with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid so potent that a microscopic dose can kill. His parents had no way of seeing the danger coming, because the platform where it started gave them no window into it at all.
That blind spot is exactly what Sammy’s Law, now moving through Congress as H.R. 2657 in the House and S.4159 in the Senate, aims to close. The bipartisan bill would require the largest social media platforms, those with more than 100 million monthly users or over a billion dollars in annual revenue, to let parents connect trusted, FTC-registered safety software like Bark to their child’s account.
Once a parent or child opts in, that software could flag real-time warning signs: drug activity, sexual exploitation, trafficking, self-harm and suicidal ideation. It wouldn’t hand over a teenager’s entire digital life to a stranger. Bark describes it less as surveillance and more like a smoke detector, one that doesn’t watch every room but goes off when something is actually on fire.
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The bill picked up real momentum this year. In March, the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 36-16 to send Sammy’s Law to the full House, with Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Buddy Carter leading the charge from opposite sides of the aisle. Sens. Jon Husted, Mark Warner and Katie Britt introduced a matching bill in the Senate.
Sammy’s father, Sam Chapman, has testified before Congress alongside other grieving parents, including the family of James Wood, an Ohio teenager who died after being targeted in a sextortion scheme on social media.
“There can’t be justice for our 16-year-old child being murdered,” Berman told ABC News. “There is no justice that will make that OK.”
A committee vote isn’t a finish line, though. Sammy’s Law still has to clear the full House, then the Senate, before it ever reaches the President’s desk, and tech companies have deep pockets to slow that walk down. Bark is asking parents to sign a petition through the Organization for Social Media Safety and to contact their representatives directly.
Movieguide® has tracked this fight for years, from the Kids Online Safety Act to COPPA 2.0 to state-level bans in Florida and California. Sammy’s Law fits the same pattern Scripture has always described: children are a gift worth guarding, and the people entrusted with their care deserve better tools than a locked door and a prayer.
Parents can’t out-supervise an algorithm built to keep kids scrolling past bedtime, and no filter catches every danger. But a law that lets a mother or father see the smoke before the house burns down looks like protection worth fighting for, one testimony, one vote, one family at a time.
Read Next: Dr. Laura Berman Celebrates the Introduction of Sammy’s Law to Congress
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