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Addiction, Suicides and Cyberbullies: Senate Confronts Kids’ Online Horror Show
“The last search on his phone before Carson ended his life was for hacks to find out the identities of his abusers,” said Kristin Bride, the parent of a child suicide victim and a social media reform advocate. Bride testified before a panel of senators about the cyberbullying that led to her son’s death and the other problems that plague kids online. “These are not coincidences, accidents or unforeseen consequences. They are the direct result of products designed to hook and monetize America’s children.”
In a grim hearing Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee heard testimony from victims and experts on the ways that social media contributes to addiction, cyberbullying, sexual abuse and suicides among children on the internet. Politicians on both sides of the aisle echoed the call for change and discussed proposals that would create new responsibilities and oversight for technology companies.
Americans tend to agree that big tech needs more regulation, but things fall apart when you get down to specific legislation. However, the horrors kids meet on the web are one of the rare issues with clear bipartisan agreement from both republicans and democrats.
Social media companies are well aware of the tragedies children face on their platforms. On Tuesday, Gizmodo published the latest batch of the Facebook Papers, leaked internal documents from the social media giant that Gizmodo is in the process of releasing. In these documents, employees at Facebook (now known as Meta) discuss how Instagram encourages eating disorders and body image issues, and different strategies to address the problem. At the same time, other employees debate over the best ways to keep kids hooked on Facebook and Instagram.
Lawsuit Accuses Cedars-Sinai Hospital’s Website of Sharing Patient Data With Meta, Google
A lawsuit against Cedars-Sinai Health System and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles claims the hospital shared patient data with third parties.
Filed by plaintiff John Doe, the proposed class action lawsuit claims his and other patients’ private information — including data related to their medical inquiries — was shared with marketing and social media platforms including Google, Microsoft Bing and Meta, the parent company of Facebook.
“Cedars-Sinai transmitted to third parties portions of the patients’ private communications with it through pieces of tracking code that it embedded in its website, for the sole purpose of sharing such information with marketing entities,” the lawsuit reads. “This code served as real-time wiretaps on patients’ communications.”
NYC Teachers Who Refused COVID Vaccine Slapped With ‘Scarlet Letter’ in Personnel Files: Lawyer
Fired city teachers and other school employees who refused to get the COVID-19 vaccine were blacklisted with a “scarlet letter” in their personnel files by Mayor Eric Adams’ administration — hindering their ability to find work elsewhere, says the lawyer repping a slew of them.
The city Department of Education put a special “code” indicating wrongdoing in the files of the terminated workers, most of whom declined to get the vaccine because of religious beliefs, said their lawyer, John Bursch.
“Loosely speaking, it is like a scarlet letter,” Bursch told The Post on Tuesday. “The employee’s personnel file shows a [generic] problem code that could just as easily be [for] committing a crime as declining to take a vaccine for religious reasons. In some instances, when plaintiffs tried to obtain employment elsewhere, they were told that they were red-flagged because of the problem code.”
The suit claims the city engaged in religious discrimination by terminating nearly 2,000 employees who refused to get COVID-19 shots.
North Dakota House Passes Several COVID Vaccine Bills
The Bismarck Tribune reported:
Several bills dealing with COVID-19 vaccinations passed the North Dakota House of Representatives on Tuesday and moved to the Senate.
House Bill 1200, introduced by Rep. Jeff Hoverson, R-Minot, passed in a 78-13 vote. The bill would ban colleges and universities from requiring or promoting COVID-19 shots for students, specifically exclude COVID-19 vaccines from the state’s school immunization requirements, and extend the state’s COVID-19 “vaccine passport” ban for another two years.
House Bill 1207, brought by Rep. Dick Anderson, R-Willow City, passed 86-5. The bill would require Health and Human Services to publish online data of “vaccine adverse events.” The department may use the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System data. Hoverson’s House Bill 1502 passed 87-4. The bill would prohibit hospitals from denying care to a patient based on his or her COVID-19 vaccination status.
Hoverson’s House Bill 1406 failed 32-59. The bill would have required the state Department of Health and Human Services to cover the costs of a person’s treatment and diagnostics if they suffered “any physical injury due to receiving” a messenger RNA or COVID-19 vaccine.
I Am a Student and Activist. I Won’t Be Silenced
“America’s public schools are the nurseries of democracy,” the Supreme Court wrote in the 2021 Mahanoy v. B.L. opinion, a case involving student free speech off-campus and on social media. That’s a beautiful sentiment for a country that sees itself as a beacon of freedom to the rest of the world. If only it could be true.
Freedom of expression is under threat in schools across the U.S. Students who were already fighting for the right to express themselves freely and fairly in student publications, without interference from administrators, now face an additional obstacle: A slew of new, oppressive state laws aimed at controlling what students can learn about and discuss in the classroom.
GenZ activists, like me, who have been advocating for states to pass New Voices legislation codifying student free speech protections for school news outlets are alarmed. Only 16 states currently have legislation that protects student journalists’ First Amendment rights.
How will the nation’s schools produce the next generation of voices committed to facts and truth while under the constant threat of censorship? It is up to GenZ to demand that our schools remain the place where we can learn to exercise our constitutional right to free speech. And we won’t stay quiet.
Youngkin Opposes Effort to Shield Menstrual Data From Law Enforcement
The administration of Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) helped defeat a bill this week to put menstrual data stored on period-tracking apps beyond the reach of law enforcement, blocking what supporters pitched as a basic privacy measure.
Millions of women use mobile apps to track their cycles, a practice that has occasionally raised data-security worries because the apps are not bound by HIPAA, the federal health privacy law. New concerns arose after the Supreme Court gave states the right to ban abortion in June, with some abortion rights groups warning that the information could be used to prosecute women or doctors who violate a state’s restrictions on the procedure.
A Republican-led House subcommittee voted along party lines Monday to “table” the bill — essentially killing it — after Maggie Cleary, Youngkin’s deputy secretary of public safety and homeland security, detailed the administration’s concerns that the measure could restrict subpoena powers.
Amazon Subject of New Investigation Over iRobot Acquisition
Following Amazon’s deal to buy iRobot — the company that put Roomba on the map — for $1.7 billion, the European Union is gearing up to investigate the purchase. Not only will regulators look into the details of the acquisition, but they’re also likely to go over privacy concerns.
The Financial Times reported today that EU regulators in Brussels have sent Amazon a series of detailed questions, which indicates that the union is gearing up for a full-fledged investigation of the company’s August 2022 acquisition of iRobot.
The EU’s European Commission also reportedly has privacy concerns over Amazon’s business move, more specifically, over what Amazon can do with all of those photos that Roombas and Braavas can take of your home.
Yes, that’s right, smart vacuums of course need to see, and when Amazon purchased iRobot it’s very likely it wasn’t merely just interested in cornering the home goods market — it was reportedly also interested in your data.
Online Content Policing Loses Steam
On tech’s biggest platforms, efforts to limit undesirable content are splintering as corporate priorities change. Why it matters: Major online platforms that once competed to display their vigilance against misinformation, abuse and hate speech are now choosing decidedly different roads on how to police their content.
Driving the news: The Oversight Board that handles appeals of Facebook‘s content decisions announced Tuesday it would speed up some of its processes and take on more cases.
The big picture: After the 2016 U.S. presidential election and Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica controversy, large social media platforms all sought to show the public and lawmakers that they were cracking down on what critics identified as a deluge of misinformation and toxic posts. But that consensus approach is ebbing today.
Our thought bubble: It’s not surprising that, at a moment when an economic slowdown is triggering widespread layoffs in the industry, companies would pick content moderation as a prime area for cutbacks. After all, these departments are not directly responsible for revenue.
