Blog

SEATTLE — The public school district in Seattle has filed a novel lawsuit against the tech giants behind TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat, seeking to hold them accountable for the mental health crisis among youth.

Seattle Public Schools filed the lawsuit Friday in U.S. District Court. The 91-page complaint says the social media companies have created a public nuisance by targeting their products to children.

It blames them for worsening mental health and behavioral disorders including anxiety, depression, disordered eating and cyberbullying; making it more difficult to educate students; and forcing schools to take steps such as hiring additional mental health professionals, developing lesson plans about the effects of social media, and providing additional training to teachers.

Read more here.

Twitter accounts that offer to trade or sell child sexual abuse material under thinly veiled terms and hashtags have remained online for months, even after CEO Elon Musk said he would combat child exploitation on the platform.

“Priority #1,” Musk called it in a Nov. 20 tweet. He’s also criticized Twitter’s former leadership, claiming that they did little to address child sexual exploitation, and that he intended to change things.

But since that declaration, at least dozens of accounts have continued to post hundreds of tweets in aggregate using terms, abbreviations and hashtags indicating the sale of what Twitter calls child sexual exploitation material, according to a count of just a single day’s tweets. The signs and signals are well known among experts and law enforcement agencies that work to stop the spread of such material.

The tweets reviewed by NBC News offer to sell or trade content that is commonly known as child pornography or child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The tweets do not show CSAM, and NBC News did not view any CSAM in the course of reporting this article.

Read more here. 

?!

Here’s one more reason to limit the amount of time your child is spending in front of a screen. Social media could be reprogramming children’s brains and making them hooked on “likes,” a new study out of the University of North Carolina reveals.

Apps such as Instagram or Snapchat could be making teenagers almost constantly checking their phones to see if they have positive or negative reactions to their online posts, experts say. The more young people check social media, the more sensitive they become to “social feedback” in the form of likes and comments, psychologists saidSocial feedback includes social rewards and punishments such as thumbs up and down, tagging, reporting content or star ratings. This increasing anticipation and sensitivity to receiving these kind of responses makes it hard for adolescents to fight the urge to check their accounts, according to researchers.

Read more here. 

Despite — or rather because of — its ubiquity, TikTok finds itself in the crosshairs. The app has long raised concerns for the ways its parent company, the Chinese tech firm ByteDance, may employ the mountains of data it harvests from its users. Just before Christmas, a report unearthed evidence that ByteDance employees — already criticized for suppressing content such as Black Lives Matter posts — had taken an even more Orwellian turn, using location data to track journalists. Some university campuses in the U.S. have banned the app from their networks and numerous states prohibit it on government devices. And a newly signed federal law has extended the ban to all government devices.

Read more here. 

The number of young kids who ate marijuana-laced candy rose sharply over five years, putting many in hospital, according to the latest study warning against America’s experiment with legal pot.

Between 2017 and 2021, US poison control centers witnessed a 14-fold increase in calls about youngsters who got their hands on cannabis edibles, according to a study in the journal Pediatrics on Tuesday.

Though many of the children experienced only minor symptoms, like excessive sleepiness, researchers say nearly a quarter ended up in hospital and warn about the emergence of a new household safety hazard.

Read more here.

Add one more grim figure to the toll exacted by disastrous COVID-era school closures: a huge penalty to the lifetime earnings of students forced to suffer through remote schooling, totaling possibly as much as $28 trillion (more than the nation’s entire GDP) over the remainder of the 21st century.

Those figures come from a new study by Eric Hanushek, a Stanford University economist and expert on education, following on his own 2020 study, as well as work published by professors at Harvard and Dartmouth in October.

The new study analyzes the hideous nationwide decline in 8th-grade math scores on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress, a k a the nation’s report card. The average drop in math scores amounted to eight points — the largest ever recorded, erasing all gains since 2000, equal to as much as 0.8 missed years of school and a likely lifetime penalty of 5.6% to earnings.

Read more here.

Listen Here.