CHICAGO -- Rose and Rob Bronstein were blindsided by their 15-year-old son Nate’s suicide in early 2022.

The Bronsteins say Nate was a funny, athletic and well-liked kid. What they didn’t know, they said, is that in the weeks leading up to his death, Nate was being harassed by other Latin School of Chicago students on the social media platform Snapchat.

They believe a bill under consideration this spring by Illinois legislators could have saved his life.

The Let Parents Choose Protection Act is also referred to as Sammy’s Law after 16-year-old Sammy Chapman, who died from a fentanyl overdose in his California home last year after taking drugs he found advertised on Snapchat. If passed, the bill would prohibit popular social media platforms such as Snapchat from blocking outside safety software that detect and notify parents of potential threats including substance abuse and suicide.

Rose Bronstein said in a recent interview that if she knew about such safety software when giving her kids their first phones, “that’s the first thing I would have done.”

“I did not monitor anything,” she said. “He (Nate) liked looking at sports statistics and followed all the fantasy football leagues and stuff, so he was always like looking at sports things, but intuitively he was such a good kid, like I didn’t worry. But it’s just the fact that he got caught up in this and he was being attacked so harshly.”

The Bronsteins are suing the Latin School and current and former board members and staff for wrongful death, alleging Nate notified the school that he felt the messages about him constituted bullying. According to the lawsuit, students sent messages saying “kill yourself” and spread a “death threat involving smoking Nate’s ashes.” A Latin School representative has said the school acted responsibly and that the allegations in the lawsuit are “incomplete and misleading.”

Third-party safety software such as Bark, which charges users $14 per month to track activity on apps including YouTube, X and Reddit, are programmed to send parents email and text notifications of potential threats their children encounter on some social media platforms. Instagram and Facebook, both owned by parent company Meta, permit the use of third-party safety sites for data aside from a user’s direct messages. Other apps popular with young people, including Snapchat, Discord and TikTok, currently block all third-party software access, something that wouldn’t be allowed under Sammy’s Law.

“This would address so many harms,” Rose Bronstein said. “It would be an immediate, life-saving impact.”

Children’s use of social media has been a high-profile issue nationwide in recent years, though deciding how to regulate platforms has proven tricky for lawmakers as they grapple with such issues as data security, free speech and privacy. For those reasons and others, Sammy’s Law has prompted opposition from technology groups as well as the American Civil Liberties Union.

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