Children and Media

A mother’s viral post criticizing Meta’s AI for compiling details about her young daughters has sparked a debate on what privacy looks like in a future where technology can instantly build dossiers on people by crawling the internet. Kalie Robins, a Utah mom who posts videos about her family’s travels, uploaded a clip of herself singing in the car, her daughter in the background, when she saw a prompt underneath the post asking: “Who’s the child passenger?” Robins thought Meta wanted to verify her daughter’s identity, and she clicked to deny the request.

Rep Michael McCaul (R-TX)—founder and co-chair of the Congressional Childhood Cancer Caucus—introduced the 

Reps Mark DeSaulnier (D-CA) and Jimmy Patronis (R-FL) introduced the Sunset Section 230 Act, which would repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, making it possible for Americans to bring legal action against big tech companies responsible for online harm. Section 230 was created in 1996 as part of the Communications Decency Act to help encourage innovation and growth among new social media companies, but 30 years later as these companies have become inordinately powerful, Section 230 has become obsolete and dangerous.

TikTok has rejected ads from Meta that call on TikTok and other tech platforms to join Meta in settling with U.S.

In what has been described as social media’s “Big Tobacco moment,” Meta announced a settlement with 47 states, the District of Columbia, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and Puerto Rico over claims that the company endangered children with intentionally addictive social media platforms.

Governor Gavin Newsom signed landmark bipartisan legislation strengthening California’s nation-leading protections for children online and when using artificial intelligence (AI). The new laws strengthen safeguards for companion chatbots, prohibit social media platforms from offering addictive features to users under 16, and expand privacy protections for children. The bills will protect children by:

After years of studying how human beings write, the cognitive psychologist Ronald T. Kellogg concluded that drafting a basic persuasive essay was as mentally taxing as digging a ditch was physically exhausting. Writing well requires a command of vocabulary, spelling and grammar. It forces writers to comprehend a subject, to sift through their working memory of that topic, to organize and plan. Writing an essay is so difficult that a person in the throes of it can do hardly anything else—as anyone who has shushed a spouse or child while trying to compose a decent sentence can attest.

For more than thirty years, American communications users—really, American consumers—have been charged roughly $1 billion to $3 billion a year to subsidize Internet and related services for schools and libraries through the government's E-Rate program, which is one component of what's called the “Universal Service Fund.” That is a lot of compulsory generosity. Yet only now are policymakers asking the obvious question: Is this money helping students learn—or is it doing harm? Some treat that question as out of bounds. It is not.

Long the epicenter of the global tech industry, California is taking more action to shield its children, communities and workers from the threats posed by the very industry that’s become central to the state’s identity and enviable economy. State lawmakers passed new safeguards around social media, artificial intelligence and data centers at a time when technology has become intertwined with people’s daily lives.

Internal documents show Meta knew for years that its youngest users were the most likely to be targeted by bullies, extortionists and sexual predators. Yet the company excluded the majority of those harms from its public reports, designing its metrics so that many of the worst encounters were never captured. The case was a big wake-up call for families, who may not yet know the extent of the horrors children have faced on the apps. Angst over Meta’s public reputation likely played a role in the decision to settle so early, experts said.