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Do Not Disturb: Mobile Phone Ban Sweeps American Schools
Cellphone bans are becoming commonplace in U.S. schools, with numerous states bringing in restrictions on children having devices on them during education hours.
The debate over phones in schools has been ongoing since they became a significant part of everyday life in the mid-2000s.
These days you would struggle to find many American teenagers who don’t own some sort of device, with parents usually giving their child their own phone when they are 13 years old, according to research by Prodigy Education.
That doesn’t mean that they are permitted to use them whenever they like. Across the country, some 76% of schools prohibited phones for nonacademic use in the 2021-2022 school year, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
Policy decisions regarding phones are often made by the school or its district.
But now, high-level lawmakers are advocating for — and indeed implementing — policies that restrict how much, if at all, American youngsters are able to use their devices on school grounds.
Why Is This Michigan School District Suing Social Media Companies?
Anyone who has attended a K-12 school or has a child, friend, or loved one who has attended one in the past decade knows one thing for sure — teachers and administrators are not fond of social media.
One school is so critical of social media that it is suing the companies themselves.
The Lansing School District, which includes 25 schools in Michigan, filed a complaint against Meta, TikTok, Google and Snap, Inc. on Sept. 12 for not providing “adequate warnings” to children about how harmful social media can be, according to the Lansing State Journal.
The school filed its complaint in the Northern District of California.
Meta, TikTok, Google and Snap did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mashable.
Ben Shuldiner, the superintendent of the Lansing School District, said in a statement emailed to Mashable that social media is an “incredible tool” that can “be used to learn and to teach.” However, he argues, it can “also be used to harm, to threaten, and to intimidate.”
How Covid Destroyed Our Lives, From Newborns to Pensioners
A growing body of evidence shows that the impact of lockdown continues to affect every generation — and will do for decades to come.
Jostled by others on a packed commuter train, or crowding into a noisy pub, it’s easy to forget that recent inflection point when the world pressed pause on normal life.
It is scarcely four and a half years since the U.K. Government, along with others globally, imposed the first national lockdown to reduce the spread of the coronavirus.
But, in some ways, the trauma of that time was swiftly forgotten. We moved on with relief, and shudder today at those distant, bewildering memories of social distancing.
Yet a growing body of evidence suggests we haven’t truly turned the page on what now sounds more like a chapter from dystopian fiction.
Instead, the effects of the COVID-19 lockdowns endure, and will continue to be observed and charted for many decades to come.
“We’ll probably be studying the impact of this for as long as we live,” says Adam Hampshire, professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at King’s College London.
New York’s Governor Wants to ‘Liberate’ Kids — by Taking Their Phones
There’s a hot new trend this back-to-school season: cellphone bans.
At least eight states have enacted regulations limiting cellphone use in schools so far this year, and many more individual districts and schools have implemented similar policies on their own.
The changes are driven by bipartisan concern that teenagers are unable to break away from their phones and concentrate in class, or even just talk to people in real life, as well as growing concern about the pervasive mental health challenges posed by social media.
“At first I thought it was going to be really annoying, but it’s actually not that bad,” said Lev Zitcer, a freshman at Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, which is limiting phone use this year. “I think there’s like a different level of communication that comes with, like, being bored.”
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul agrees. She’s been campaigning to enact a cellphone ban across the Empire State.
AOC Calls for More ‘Media Literacy,’ but It Sounds a Lot Like Censorship
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) called for more “media literacy” in a recent video posted to social media — but when she elaborated on the topic, it sounded as though what she was really calling for was censorship.
The congresswoman said that she had been in conversation with other members about the steps they might need to take to “rein in” media in order to prevent them from spreading “disinformation and misinformation.”
“You know, I do think that — several members of Congress in some of my discussions have brought up media literacy because that is a part of what happened here,” she said.
“And we’re going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment so that you can’t just spew disinformation & misinformation.”
“It’s one thing to have differing opinions, but it’s another thing entirely to just say things that are false,” she added. “And so that’s something that we’re looking into.”
US Needs Facial Recognition Legislation, NIST Guidance to Protect Civil Rights: Report
Facial recognition’s benefits for law enforcement and civil applications run by America’s federal government could be outweighed by its negative impact on civil rights if the right safeguards are not introduced, according to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
The new 194-page report on “The Civil Rights Implications of the Federal Use of Facial Recognition” acknowledges the usefulness of facial recognition for federal agencies, but also raises a range of concerns, and identifies several areas where improvement is needed to safeguard against civil rights violations.
The Commissioners heard from many stakeholders and experts, heavily citing Patrick Grother of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the report, and visited Department of Homeland Security’s Maryland Test Facility to learn about biometrics testing.
The report considers how facial recognition is used by the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
What TikTok Ban? Advertisers, Employees, and Creators Seem Unfazed by Its Increasingly Precarious Future
TikTok seems to be losing its battle to stay in the U.S., but the app’s key stakeholders aren’t panicking.
Much like the orchestra on the Titanic, TikTok users, advertisers, and employees appear to be waiting until the last possible minute to abandon ship despite the threat of a ban in the U.S.
TikTok is currently challenging the government’s divest-or-ban law in the D.C. Circuit’s appeals court, but it’s not going well.
A former Department of Justice attorney told Business Insider this week that the court seemed poised to rule against TikTok.
This would mean that its owner ByteDance would need to sell its U.S. operations to a non-Chinese company or else see it booted from app stores as early as January.
Even with that bleak outlook, TikTok’s most important stakeholders are largely acting as if things are normal.
How Breaking up Google Could Lower Your Online Shopping Bill
As the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) aims to break up Google’s alleged ad tech monopoly, experts say that remedies sought in the antitrust trial could potentially benefit not just advertisers and publishers but also everyone targeted by ads online.
So far, the DOJ has argued that through acquisitions, Google allegedly monopolizes the ad server market, taking a substantial cut of every online ad sale by tying together products on the buyer and seller sides.
Locking publishers into using its seller-side platform to access its large advertiser demand, Google also allegedly shut out rivals by pushing advertisers into a corner, then making it hard for publishers to switch platforms.
This scheme also allegedly set Google up to charge higher “monopoly” fees, the DOJ argued, allegedly putting some publishers out of business and raising costs for advertisers.
But while the harms to publishers and advertisers have been outlined at length, there’s been less talk about the seemingly major consequences for consumers perhaps harmed by the alleged monopoly.
Those harms include higher costs of goods, less privacy, and increasingly lower-quality ads that frequently bombard their screens with products nobody wants.
DHS Issues RFI for Input on Ongoing Biometric R&D
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Office of Procurement Operations issued a Request for Information (RFI) seeking data from academia, scientific, technical, and engineering sources as well as industry “to support current and future technical and operational biometric outcomes.”
DHS said responses to the RFI will “be reviewed by government technical experts drawn from federal employees and contractor subject matter experts supporting the effort.”
The collection of this data is being carried out under DHS’s Biometric Identity Research and Development initiative by the Office of Biometric Identity Management (OBIM), which the RFI says “is interested in experienced and capable vendors to respond to [the] RFI.”
The information obtained by respondents “may be utilized in the preparation of a Request for Quote, provided DHS finds it in its best interest,” the department said, adding that “vendors are encouraged to review this RFI and determine if their competency meet the DHS requirements.”
DHS said that OBIM is collaborating with the Office of the Chief Information Officer to transition the Automated Biometric Identification System to the Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology system.
No More TikTok FYP? California Social Media Bill Could Totally Reshape Kids’ Online World
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill on Friday that could entirely reshape how kids in the state use social media.
Among the potential changes: A requirement that could effectively reshape the TikTok “For You Page” as minors now know it.
The bill, SB976, is set to take effect in 2027 in the state home to many of tech’s biggest companies.
There are two major components.
One: It would bar social media platforms from providing “addictive feeds” — defined as feeds based on info given by or collected on the user — to minors with parental consent.
And two: It would bar social media platforms from sending notifications to minors (sans parental approval) between 12 a.m. and 6 a.m., and between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. on weekdays during the school year.
X Is Capitulating to Brazil’s Supreme Court
Brazilian fan account owners might have a reason to rejoice, as X could be returning to Brazil.
According to The New York Times, in a court filing Friday night, the company agreed to abide by the Supreme Court’s request in order to have the countrywide ban lifted:
Now, X’s lawyers said the company had done exactly what Mr. Musk vowed not to: take down accounts that a Brazilian justice ordered removed because the judge said they threatened Brazil’s democracy.
X also complied with the justice’s other demands, including paying fines and naming a new formal representative in the country, the lawyers said.
The company has spent the last three weeks fighting the ban and continuing to distribute content from members of the far-right community in Brazil.
This led to X being blocked by Brazilian ISPs and eventually trying to get around the blocks with some help from Cloudflare.
