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Social Media Could Be as Harmful to Children as Smoking or Gambling — Why Is This Allowed?
If we go back to the 1980s and 1990s, parenting was often about keeping children physically safe. A moody 14-year-old wanting to be alone in their room was a normal thing — in fact, this was sufficient to protect them. Parents had clear oversight over who their kids were around at home, and the physical materials they were consuming.
Fast-forward to 2023 and children are in their rooms at home, but while physically safe, they’re exposed to an entire virtual world with almost no regulation over the content they see, how much time they’re spending on devices or the boundary between necessary social communication with friends and a much darker world of harmful or pornographic material, and predatory influencers.
Compounding the problems facing teenagers and parents is the fact that apps are often designed deliberately to be addictive, or used compulsively. They regularly turn social interactions into games — like Snapchat’s “Snapstreak” feature that scores a user for the number of consecutive days they share a picture with each contact, encouraging them to be available on the app constantly.
Apps also come with many safety and oversight concerns. Snapchat popularized disappearing messages, meaning parents can’t check what their child has been viewing or posting, and many apps share the user’s location with others by default. Teenagers and children may not even know that they’re sharing live data on their location throughout the day.
This is exactly what public regulation is for. Like policies for tobacco, alcohol or gambling, it can ensure that when private companies sell a product with potential negative health impacts, they do so in a way that follows certain guidelines and protects vulnerable users from being completely exposed.
Judge: Admin’s Tinkering With COVID Posts Is ‘Orwellian’
A federal judge in Louisiana ruled Tuesday that the Biden administration’s efforts to influence social media posts about COVID-19 likely violated the first amendment, POLITICO’s Matt Berg and Josh Gerstein report.
The Trump-appointed U.S. District Court judge, Terry Doughty, called the administration’s efforts “Orwellian,” issuing a sweeping preliminary injunction that bars a number of federal officials from having any contact with social media firms to discourage or remove First Amendment-protected speech.
The judge’s decision cites a wide range of health topics that he says “were suppressed” on social media at the urging of administration officials, including opposition to COVID vaccines, masking and lockdowns — as well as the lab-leak theory.
Meta’s Threads App Is a Privacy Nightmare That Won’t Launch in EU Yet
Meta’s planned Twitter killer, Threads, isn’t yet publicly available but it already looks like a privacy nightmare.
Information provided about the app’s privacy via mandatory disclosures required on iOS shows the app may collect highly sensitive information about users in order to profile their digital activity — including health and financial data, precise location, browsing history, contacts, search history and other sensitive information.
Given that Meta, the developer behind the app, the company formerly known as Facebook, makes its money from tracking and profiling web users to sell their attention via its behavioral advertising microtargeting tools this is hardly surprising.
But it does raise questions over whether Threads will be able to launch in the European Union where the legal basis Meta had claimed for processing Facebook users’ personal data (performance of a contract) was found unlawful at the start of this year.
Wheelchair Tennis Boss Sacked for Refusing COVID Jab Wins £27,000 Payout
A wheelchair tennis executive was sacked after she refused to get a COVID vaccine despite the Government ending nearly all restrictions at the time, a tribunal heard.
Sarah Synan sued the International Tennis Federation (ITF) after it enforced “particularly severe restrictions” against her when she fell foul of its “hard-line” COVID policy by refusing to get a shot.
Ahead of the U.S. Masters in October 2021, the ITF enforced a strict policy that employees must be double-jabbed to travel — even though there were no requirements to be vaccinated to enter the country at the time. Then on Feb. 22, 2022 — the day after the Government announced the end of the legal requirement to self-isolate after a positive COVID test — Miss Synan was sacked from her £37,500 post as wheelchair tennis “team lead.”
She successfully sued the ITF for unfair dismissal and won £27,465 in compensation, after the tribunal ruled it would have been obvious to the federation that COVID-19 difficulties were clearing up and firing her was unreasonable.
CJEU Ruling on Meta Referral Could Close the Chapter on Surveillance Capitalism
Mark your calendar European friends: July 4th could soon be celebrated as independence-from-Meta’s-surveillance-capitalism-day. A long-anticipated judgment handed down today by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) looks to have comprehensively crushed the social media giant’s ability to keep flouting EU privacy law by denying users a free choice over its tracking and profiling.
The ruling tracks back to a pioneering order by Germany’s antitrust watchdog, the Federal Cartel Office (FCO), which spent years investigating Facebook’s business — making the case that privacy harm should be treated as an exploitative competition abuse too.
In its February 2019 order, the FCO told Facebook (as Meta still was back then) to stop combining data on users across its own suite of social platforms without their consent. Meta sought to block the order in the German courts — eventually sparking the referral of Meta’s so-called “super profiling” to the CJEU in March 2021.
Now we have the top court’s take and, well, it’s not going to spark any celebrations at Meta HQ, that’s for sure.
DeWine Signs State Budget After 44 Line-Item Vetoes Dealing With Vaccine Mandates, Tobacco Regulation and More
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has signed a new $86.1 billion two-year budget after using his line-item veto power to remove 44 provisions passed by the General Assembly.
Items struck from the budget by veto include a provision allowing a student to decline vaccines that are required for enrollment or residence in university dorms at a private college or state college or university.
In his veto message, DeWine wrote that “university and college dormitories and student housing are congregate settings where such policy may be of great importance to ensure resident safety. This item is overly broad and may compromise the overall health and safety of students, residents, staff, and faculty at the institution.”
Spain Calls an End to COVID Health Crisis and Obligatory Use of Masks in Hospitals, Pharmacies
The Spanish government on Tuesday declared an end to the health crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and says people no longer have to wear masks in health and care centers as well as pharmacies.
Over the past two years, Spain has gradually ended mandatory mask-wearing, first in public and then on public transport.
The government approved the measure at a weekly Cabinet meeting. It takes effect once it’s published in the State Gazette in the coming days.
