The report is based on questions the FTC sent to nine companies in December 2020 under section 6(b) of the FTC Act, which lets the commission conduct studies without a specific law enforcement purpose. The orders were sent to Amazon (which owns Twitch), Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, X, Snap, ByteDance (owner of TikTok), Discord, Reddit, and WhatsApp and focused on these companies’ data collection and retention practices as well as how these practices affect children and teenagers.