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Babies Need People, Not Devices. Stop Giving Them Screen Time.
We know a great deal about what babies and toddlers need to thrive: food, shelter, safety, love and medical care. In addition to those basics, they also require, and actively seek, repeated, positive, real-life interaction with their caregivers — fulfilling an inborn need for relationships that our increasingly online world threatens to disrupt.
Smartphones, tablets and other digital distractions draw the attention of babies and caregivers away from one another to whatever beckons from a screen.
It’s hopeful news that government officials are calling for regulations on tech companies’ marketing to children and adolescents. But the public discourse often leaves out products aimed at babies and toddlers, despite a growing body of research demonstrating that, for children younger than 2, hours of screen time can harm their physical, social, emotional and cognitive development.
The World Health Organization and pediatric associations worldwide recommend avoiding screen time for babies and toddlers. Yet in the United States, almost half of children under age 2 have daily screen time, and about one-third spend more than an hour each day with devices. Eleven percent spend more than two hours per day with screens, and of these, 7% spend more than four hours. Moreover, studies have shown that the more time children spend with screens as babies, the more time they’re likely to spend with devices when they’re older.
Anne Arundel County Schools Files Lawsuit Against Social Media Companies for Role in Youth Mental Health Crisis
Anne Arundel County Public Schools filed a lawsuit against social media companies Meta, Google, ByteDance, and Snap Inc. for their roles in the youth mental health crisis.
The district alleges that its social media platforms increase the mental health crisis for its 85,000 students and place an increasingly large burden on the school system to provide essential mental health resources.
Anne Arundel County, and other districts across the country, say students have been significantly impacted by intense feelings of depression, anxiety, and body image issues, among others.
Anne Arundel joins school districts across the country, including Harford County and Howard County in Maryland, in alleging that increased social media use and addiction is leading to a worsening mental health crisis in the student population.
MSNBC Host Defends School Lockdowns for COVID, Attacks ‘Dangerous Myths’ of Learning Loss
MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan spent a segment of his show on Friday defending school shutdowns during the pandemic and attacked conservatives for spreading “dangerous myths” of learning loss.
Calling it “one of the most important deep dives” he’s ever done, Hasan tackled the “thorny and very emotive issue of kids, schools and COVID” as well as what he considered “a blatant and bad faith rewriting of history on this issue, from a lot of people who should know better.”
“Because the myths about children and COVID, that kids aren’t really harmed by it, that school closures were a massive and avoidable mistake, that they caused learning loss and mental health issues, those myths, and they are myths, dangerous myths have endured for so long, become so ingrained, so pervasive,” Hasan said.
Hasan continued by insisting that the suggestion kids had “immunity” to COVID-19 “wasn’t true then” and is “not true now.” However, a study published by the JAMA Network of medical journals in February found that kids were 100 times less likely to die from COVID-19 than adults.
Pittsburgh Regional Transit Dropping COVID Vaccine Requirements for Employees
Pittsburgh Regional Transit is dropping its COVID-19 vaccine requirement for employees, saying the 84 people fired over it will be given the opportunity to come back to work.
PRT said it achieved 98% compliance. There were 84 people fired, including 43 operators. The agency said they’ll all have the opportunity to return to work. The requirement ends effective Aug. 31.
Meta Says It Disrupted ‘Largest Known Cross-Platform’ China-Linked Disinformation Campaign
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said Tuesday it disrupted the “largest known cross-platform covert influence operation in the world” and found links to Chinese law enforcement.
The social media company took down 7,704 Facebook accounts, 954 Pages, 15 Groups and 15 Instagram accounts tied to the operation, according to Meta’s second-quarter Adversarial Threat Report.
The cross-platform activity used in the operation, known as “Spamouflage,” targeted more than 50 platforms and forums, according to the report. In addition to Facebook and Instagram, the disinformation campaign’s targets included X — the platform formerly known as Twitter — YouTube, TikTok, Reddit and Pinterest.
Despite efforts to conceal their identities, Meta said in the report it found “links to individuals associated with Chinese law enforcement.”
ChatGPT Plays Doctor With 72% Success
As AI capabilities advance in complex medical scenarios that doctors face on a daily basis, the technology remains controversial in medical communities.
The big picture: Doctors are grappling with questions about what counts as an acceptable success rate for AI-supported diagnosis and whether AI’s reliability under controlled research conditions will hold up in the real world.
Driving the news: A new study from Mass General Brigham researchers testing ChatGPT’s performance on textbook-drawn case studies found the AI bot achieved 72% accuracy in overall clinical decision-making, ranging from identifying possible diagnoses to making final diagnoses and care decisions.
What’s next: To allow ChatGPT or comparable AI models to be deployed in hospitals, Succi said that more benchmark research and regulatory guidance are needed, and diagnostic success rates need to rise to between 80% and 90%.
