TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube, all social media sites popular with teens and young adults, answered to Congress Tuesday about how well they protect kids online and what needs to change to make things safer.

It’s the first time testifying before the legislative body for both TikTok and Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, despite their popularity and Congress’s increasing focus on tech industry practices. By contrast, Facebook representatives have testified 30 times in the past four years, and Twitter executives including CEO Jack Dorsey have testified on Capitol Hill 18 times total.

Tuesday’s hearing, convened by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) in front of the Senate Commerce Committee’s consumer protection panel, drilled into kids’ experiences on social media, how the company’s features and product changes affect their privacy and mental health, and what laws may need to change to protect teens and kids.

Blumenthal warned the testifying companies that simply being different from Facebook is not a defense.

“That bar is in the gutter,” he said. “What we want is not a race to the bottom, but really a race to the top."

Facebook has been under fire for the past several weeks for the way its sites, particularly Instagram, negatively affect teenagers’ mental health after a whistleblower revealed a trove of internal Facebook documents. Some documents showed that some teen girls reported Instagram made their body image issues worse.

The Wall Street Journal first reported on those documents.

Last month, Facebook executive Antigone Davis testified in front of Congress, facing accusations from senators that the company buried internal research about how its products may harm children. Facebook has defended its track record, and Davis said at the hearing that the company’s research in fact showed that teen girls struggling with mental health issues largely reported that they found Instagram to be more helpful than not.

When Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen testified before the subcommittee earlier this month, lawmakers said her disclosures could mark a turning point in efforts to regulate the tech giants. “I think the time has come for action, and I think you are the catalyst for that action,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) told Haugen during the session.

“There has been a deafening … drumbeat of continuing disclosures about Facebook. They have deepened America’s concern and outrage and have led to increasing calls for accountability, and there will be accountability,” Blumenthal said in his opening remarks. “This time is different.”

Snap and TikTok have faced far less scrutiny from the government, including for how they affect kids, despite having huge numbers of users. TikTok says it has more than 1 billion monthly users, though it does not break down their ages. Snapchat has 500 million monthly active users, and says more than 80 percent of its U.S. users are over 18.

Even YouTube, where billions of videos are watched everyday, is often overlooked by government tech investigations. Experts say this hearing is a good start at examining companies other than the biggest few.

“Facebook is just not the only game in town,” said Harvard Law School lecturer Evelyn Douek, who studies the regulation of online speech. “If we’re going to talk about teen users, we should talk about the platforms that teens actually use. Which is TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube.”

The three companies have faced a fair amount of public backlash for the way they treat kids online — YouTube parent Google agreed to pay $170 million to settle allegations that it illegally collected data about children younger than age 13 who watched toy videos and television shows on YouTube in 2019.

Snapchat and TikTok have both faced pressure to stop illegal drug sales and connections on their sites, particularly as overdose deaths have soared. Parent groups have called on the sites to do more to stop drug trafficking as kids die of fentanyl poisoning.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn) questioned Snapchat executive Jennifer Stout on the company’s actions to rid the app of drug dealers — something Stout said was a priority for the company that it was committed to.

Still, Klobuchar suggested changing the law to hold companies liable could speed up the process.

“So maybe that will make you work even faster so we don’t lose another kid,” she said.

The company executives defended their approach to protecting kids online on Tuesday, arguing that they continually build features to better protect young users.

While the tech executives all broadly expressed support for legislation to boost protections for kids online, including on privacy, senators expressed frustration that companies wouldn’t commit to supporting specific proposals they have proposed.

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), a top advocate for kids’ online safety who has introduced a bill to expand safeguards under federal kids’ privacy laws, hammered some of the companies for not taking a firm stance on the measure.

After Snap’s Stout declined to affirmatively support his measure, Markey said, “This is just what drives us crazy. ‘We want to talk, we want to talk, we want to talk.' This bill’s been out there for years and you still don’t have a view on it. Do you support it or not?”

Stout replied, “I think there are things we would like to work with you on, senator.”

TikTok executive Michael Beckerman said the company would be “happy to support” the bill if lawmakers made an “improvement” to how it deals with verifying children’s age online.

Several senators also brought up teen’s mental health online, especially as it relates to eating disorders. The companies all said any material encouraging eating disorders violates their content, and they work to keep it off their sites and instead point users to expert sources on the issues.

“We again prohibit the type of content that glorifies or promotes these issues such as eating disorders,” YouTube executive Leslie Miller said.

TikTok also addressed its ownership — its parent company is Chinese firm ByteDance — after ranking member Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Sen. John Thune (R-SD) brought up concerns about data privacy.

Beckerman said TikTok’s information about U.S. users is stored within the country, echoing what TikTok has said in the past.

“We know that trust must be earned through action, and we continue to build age-appropriate experiences for teens throughout their development and empower families with parental controls,” Beckerman said in a statement before the hearing.

TikTok disables direct messages for accounts whose owners are under 16, and sets direct messages off by default for 16- and 17-year-olds.

Snap is expected to emphasize its safety features, including planned tools to allow parents more oversight of their kids’ settings.

Stout also sought to differentiate the platform from some of its competitors. In her opening remarks. She said social media “evolved to feature an endless feed of unvetted content, exposing individuals to a flood of viral, misleading and viral information. Snapchat is different. Snapchat was built as an antidote to social media.”