Inside the Investigation: Texas Governor vetoes Botox patient safety bill
AUSTIN (KXAN) — On the last day of the 2025 Texas legislative session, Gov. Greg Abbott vetoed a bill aimed at enhancing safety and transparency for Texans getting Botox.
This week on Inside the Investigation, Investigative Reporter Arezow Doost explains why, at the last minute, the state's top leader rejected the measure.
Backroom Botox is a 'wild west' in Texas
'Botox party' bill heads to governor
On the final day of the session, Gov. Abbott vetoed the Botox patient safety bill filed after a KXAN investigation
Join KXAN Investigative Reporter Kelly Wiley every Friday at 10:30 a.m. on KXAN+, YouTube, Facebook, or KXAN.com for a recap of the latest reporting from the KXAN Investigates team.
You can also listen to KXAN's investigative podcast, highlighting some of our award-winning team's latest reports exposing corruption, safety concerns, and system failures across Texas. We also feature audio versions of our weekly 'Inside the Investigation' discussion with the journalists working on those stories.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New York Times
26 minutes ago
- New York Times
Texas OK's $50 Million for Ibogaine Research
When Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas approved legislation this week to spend $50 million in state money researching ibogaine, a powerful psychedelic, he put the spotlight on a promising, still illegal drug that has shown promise in treating opioid addiction, traumatic brain injury and depression. Interest in ibogaine therapy has surged in recent years, driven in large part by veterans who have had to travel to other countries for the treatment. The measure, which passed the Texas Legislature with bipartisan support, seeks to leverage an additional $50 million in private investment to fund clinical trials that supporters hope will provide a pathway for ibogaine therapy to win approval from the Food and Drug Administration, a process that could take years. The legislation directs the state to work with Texas universities and hospitals and tries to ensure that the state retains a financial stake in any revenue from the drug's development. 'You can't put a price on a human life, but if this is successful and ibogaine becomes commercialized, it will help people all across the country and provide an incredible return on investment for the people of Texas,' said State Senator Tan Parker, a Republican who sponsored the bill. The initiative, one of the largest government investments in psychedelic medicine to date, is a watershed moment for a field that continues to gain mainstream acceptance. Regulated psilocybin clinics have opened in Oregon and Colorado, and ketamine has become widely available across the country as a treatment for depression and anxiety. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
As disinformation and hate thrive online, YouTube quietly changed how it moderates content
YouTube, the world's largest video platform, appears to have changed its moderation policies to allow more content that violates its own rules to remain online. The change happened quietly in December, according to The New York Times, which reviewed training documents for moderators indicating that a video could stay online if the offending material did not account for more than 50 per cent of the video's duration — that's double what it was prior to the new guidelines. YouTube, which sees 20 million videos uploaded a day, says it updates its guidance regularly and that it has a "long-standing practice of applying exceptions" when it suits the public interest or when something is presented in an educational, documentary, scientific or artistic context. "These exceptions apply to a small fraction of the videos on YouTube, but are vital for ensuring important content remains available," YouTube spokesperson Nicole Bell said in a statement to CBC News this week. But in a time when social media platforms are awash with misinformation and conspiracy theories, there are concerns that YouTube is only opening the door for more people to spread problematic or harmful content — and to make a profit doing so. YouTube isn't alone. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, dialled back its content moderation earlier this year, and Elon Musk sacked Twitter's moderators when he purchased the platform in 2022 and rebranded it as X. "We're seeing a race to the bottom now," Imran Ahmed, CEO for the U.S.-based Center for Countering Digital Hate, told CBC News. "What we're going to see is a growth in the economy around hate and disinformation." WATCH | Experts warn Meta's moderation move will likely increase misinformation: YouTube's goal is "to protect free expression," Brooks said in her statement, explaining that easing its community guidelines "reflect the new types of content" on the platform. For example, she said, a long-form podcast containing one short clip of violence may no longer need to be removed. The Times reported Monday that examples presented to YouTube staff included a video in which someone used a derogatory term for transgender people during a discussion about hearings for U.S. President Donald Trump's cabinet appointees, and another that shared false information about COVID-19 vaccines but that did not outright tell people not to get vaccinated. A platform like YouTube does have to make some "genuinely very difficult decisions" when moderating content, says Matt Hatfield, executive director of the Canadian digital rights group OpenMedia. LISTEN | How Canada has come to play an outsized role in far-right misinformation: He believes platforms do take the issue seriously, but he says there's a balance between removing harmful or illegal content, such as child abuse material or clear incitements to violence, and allowing content to stay online, even if it's offensive to many or contains some false information. The problem, he says, is that social media platforms also "create environments that encourage some bad behaviour" among creators, who like to walk the line of what's acceptable. "The core model of these platforms is to keep you clicking, keep you watching, get you to try a video from someone you've never experienced before and then stick with that person." And that's what concerns Ahmed. He says these companies put profits over online safety and that they don't face consequences because there are no regulations forcing them to limit what can be posted on their platforms. He believes YouTube's relaxed policies will only encourage more people to exploit them. In a recent transparency report, YouTube said it had removed nearly 2.9 million channels containing more than 47 million videos for community guideline violations in the first quarter — that came after the reported policy change. The overwhelming majority of those, 81.8 per cent, were considered spam, but other reasons included violence, hateful or abusive material and child safety. LISTEN | Why you're being tormented by ads algorithms and AI slop: Hatfield says there is a public interest in having harmful content like that removed, but that doesn't mean all controversial or offensive content must go. However, he says YouTube does make mistakes in content moderation, explaining that it judges individual videos in a sort of "vacuum" without considering how each piece of content fits into a broader context. "Some content can't really be fairly interpreted in that way." Ahmed says companies should be held accountable for the content on their platforms through government regulation. He pointed to Canada's controversial but now-scuttled Online Harms Act, also known as Bill C-63, as an example. It proposed heavier sentences, new regulatory bodies and changes to a number of laws to tackle online abuse. The bill died when former prime minister Justin Trudeau announced his resignation and prorogued Parliament back in January. Ahmed says he hopes the new government under Prime Minister Mark Carney will enact similar legislation. Hatfield says he liked parts of that act, but his group ultimately opposed it after it tacked on some other changes to the Criminal Code and Human Rights Act that he says were unrelated to the platforms. He says groups like OpenMedia would have liked to see a strategy addressing business models that encourage users to post and profit off of "lawful but awful" content. "We're not going to have a hate-free internet," he said. "We can have an internet that makes it less profitable to spread certain types of hate and misinformation." WATCH | How people can become more discerning news consumers:
Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Yahoo
Texas Governor Greg Abbott is heading to Denton to sign this bill into law
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott will be in Denton Monday to sign a property tax relief bill alongside state and local officials. Key property tax proposals passed this legislative session include measures increasing the homestead exemption on school property taxes. Senate Bill 4 increases the exemption by $40,000 to $140,000. Senate Bill 23 raises the exemption to $200,000 for homeowners who are disabled or 65 or older. The increases would still need to be approved by Texas voters in the November constitutional amendment election. Voters overwhelmingly approved a similar measure increasing the school property tax homestead exemption in a November 2023 election. Houston Republican Sen. Paul Bettencourt, University Park Republican Rep. Morgan Meyer and Denton County Commissioner Dianne Edmondson will be a few of the officials at the 3 p.m. bill signing.
