Blog

New York City is suing a handful of social media networks, alleging their platforms’ designs exploit young users’ mental health and cost the city $100 million in related health programs and services each year.

In the lawsuit against TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube, the city of New York said the platforms are responsible for an uptick in mental health issues among young people, including depression and suicide ideation. These issues, the lawsuit states, impose a “large burden on cities, school districts and public hospital systems that provide mental health services to youth.”

The lawsuit comes shortly after executives from social media platforms faced tough questions from lawmakers during the latest congressional hearings over how their platforms may direct younger users – and particularly teenage girls – to harmful content, damaging their mental health and body image.

Read more here. 

McDonald’s, Costco and other major brands say they are stepping up efforts to keep minors from the grueling, often dangerous work that goes into their products.

Many major U.S. companies — including some of the country’s biggest consumer brands — say they are taking steps to eliminate child labor in their domestic supply chains amid revelations that children are working throughout American manufacturing and food production.

As hundreds of thousands of migrant children have crossed the southern border without their parents since 2021, growing numbers have ended up in dangerous, illegal jobs in every state, including in factories, slaughterhouses and industrial dairy farms, The New York Times has reported in a series of articles.

Working to exhaustion, children have been crushed by construction equipment, gotten yanked into industrial machineryand fallen to their deaths from rooftops.

Read more here. 

There’s a new wave of dark content, often featuring occultic or satanic elements, taking over on cable and streaming services.

Recently Amazon Prime Video dropped a new animated series called Hazbin Hotel, which centers on Charlie Morningstar, the cheerful, optimistic and kind-hearted daughter of… Lucifer and Lilith.

Move over Andy Griffith, Hollywood has a new favorite father figure: The devil.

This plot device was most recently used for FX’s Little Demon, another animated series which featured the devil as the relatable “everyman” who is just trying to forge a relationship with his rebellious teenaged daughter. And last year Disney+ announced plans to import Pauline, a German “coming-of-age” story about a teenaged girl who becomes pregnant after a one-night-stand with the devil.

Hollywood’s fascination with the occult is nothing new, of course; films like Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen, and The Exorcist are proof enough of that. What has changed is the way these stories are told, and what they suggest about the nature of good and evil.

Read more here. 

The survivors whose stories we share come from different backgrounds and experiences. What they have in common is that they were vulnerable, at one point in their lives, to manipulation by someone who claimed to love them, and that they found the strength to break free and begin to heal. Hear about their experiences in their own words.

Learn more here. 

A dozen victims of Jeffrey Epstein filed a lawsuit on Wednesday accusing the FBI of covering up its failure to investigate the late financier, enabling his sex trafficking to continue for more than 20 years.

The victims, using Jane Doe pseudonyms, said the FBI received credible tips as early as 1996 that Epstein trafficked young women and girls, yet failed to interview victims or share what it knew with federal and local law enforcement.

Read more here. 

Parental controls have failed—and it’s not parents’ fault.

For years, I’ve written about the tools that tech companies offer up when parents and lawmakers complain that their apps aren’t safe for children. In the past five years or so, the major players have rolled out software to give parents more say over when kids can use devices and services and what shows up on their screens.

But these tools are optional and often buried, and sometimes broken. Most parents don’t use them, according to a poll conducted last year by the market research firm Ipsos.

Read more here.

.