Latest news with #ParentalControl
CBS News
28-05-2025
- General
- CBS News
Bill advancing at Texas Capitol gives school boards, parents process to remove books in public school libraries
New bill would give Texas parents more control over books in public school libraries New bill would give Texas parents more control over books in public school libraries New bill would give Texas parents more control over books in public school libraries Texas lawmakers are taking a step closer to passing a bill that will give local school boards the ability to pull books from school library shelves. Parents will also be able to challenge books in the school libraries under the legislation. The Texas House passed Senate Bill 13, authored by Senator Angela Paxton, R-McKinney, along party lines Monday. Lawmakers in the House were set to give final approval Tuesday, but that has been pushed back until Wednesday morning. From the House, the measure will return to the Senate to review changes made by the House. Under the legislation, the state will establish a definition for harmful materials. According to legislative records, indecent content would portray sex organs or activities in a way that's patently offensive. Profane content would include grossly offensive language considered a public nuisance. There is a difference between the House and Senate versions in at least one provision, which allows the creation of a school library advisory council. The Senate version says it should be mandatory, while the House version says it should be optional. Republicans, including Representative Brad Buckley of Salado, support the bill because it gives more local control. "Senate Bill 13 understands that too often, for too long, libraries have been filled with agendas," said Buckley. "It's time to end that. But the way to end it is to empower our local leaders and our parents locally to find some resolution." Democrats, including Representative Mihaela Plesa of Dallas, expressed concerns over the legislation and said she opposes it. "Senate Bill 13 may not call itself censorship, but in effect is the same thing: giving the government the authority to decide what stories are too uncomfortable, too complicated or too real for our students to read," Plesa said. In addition to Senate Bill 13, the Texas House gave final passage to Senate Bill 6. It will allow ERCOT, the power grid operator, the ability to shut off power to large customers, such as data centers, during emergency situations. Those customers would have to have backup power. It comes as ERCOT has forecast that demand for power will surge in Texas by 2030. The bill will have to go back to the Texas Senate to work out differences. Watch Eye On Politics at 7:30 Sunday morning on CBS News Texas on air and streaming
Yahoo
15-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
TikTok is trying to be better for children. Parents are skeptical.
TikTok has introduced new safety features to protect children. TikTok is facing a series of state lawsuits that claim it's harmful to children's mental health. Child safety advocates say TikTok's efforts are welcome but not enough to solve the problem. TikTok's algorithm is so masterful it's difficult to look away. While that's good for TikTok, it might not be so good for anyone else. Mental health professionals have long warned about the dangers of social media in general, and TikTok in particular. TikTok is also now facing a series of lawsuits that say the app is dangerous to children's mental health. In response, TikTok has added features to encourage more responsible use of the app. But while child safety advocates welcome the effort, some of them say it's not enough to solve the root problem. TikTok announced its latest safety features this week. They give parents more control over — and insight into — what their kids watch. TikTok also now allows parents to set time limits. "No teen or family is the same, and whether it's during family time, school, at night, or a weekend away, caregivers can use our new Time Away feature to decide when it's best for their teens to take a break," TikTok said in its announcement. TikTok expanded its family pairing function, which lets parents see who their kids are following on TikTok, who follows them, and what accounts their child has blocked. The feature will also soon let children choose to alert a parent when they report content they think violates TikTok's rules. Titania Jordan, the chief marketing officer of parental control app Bark and author of the book "Parental Control," told Business Insider there is one problem with the new features: A kid can easily just turn them off. "I was like, 'Wow, maybe TikTok is really going to do something meaningful,' and they didn't," Jordan said. Last year, attorneys general from 14 different states sued TikTok, accusing the app of being harmful to children. The coordinated lawsuits resemble the strategy used to take down Big Tobacco and Purdue Pharma, putting TikTok in some unsavory company. Jayne Conroy, an attorney at a firm that represents some 50 plaintiffs in a separate class-action lawsuit accusing social media platforms of harming children, previously told BI that the state investigations into TikTok showed it is designed to "relentlessly engage and exploit the adolescent brain." Ariana Hoet, the executive clinical director at the Kids Mental Health Foundation, said children who spend several hours a day on social media are at an increased risk for mental health conditions like anxiety and depression. However, she said the impact social media has on children depends on how much time they spend scrolling online, what they look at, and with whom they engage. "One of the things that we always recommend is making sure that the parents are involved," Hoet said. "If you decide to give access to your child, you want to continue monitoring, you want to continue conversations, and then you want to teach them digital literacy." Hoet said it's important for parents to monitor their children's social media activity, especially given that children's brains aren't yet fully developed. "Even as adults with fully formed brains, we have a hard time disengaging," Hoet said. "Kids are never going to win. There's no way that they're going to beat out these algorithms that are created to keep them on there." TikTok has denied accusations that it is addictive to children, but has nonetheless added features like default screentime limits, family pairing, and default private accounts for children under 16. TikTok has also added a "wind down" feature for teen accounts. After 10 p.m., a pop-up will encourage teens to log off for the night with "calming music." The pop-ups are optional, however, and the teen can continue using TikTok after dismissing them. TikTok also says it will add "meditation exercises" to the wind-down prompts in the future. Jordan told BI that the wind-down and meditation features seemed like surface-level fixes that do not address the root of the issue: that social media content is addictive to children. "I don't know what child or adult is going to opt into meditating within an app that succeeds at delivering the most viral, engaging content that's personalized," Jordan said. "What do I want to do? Do I want to meditate? Or do I want to keep consuming this addictive content?" Omar Gudiño, the deputy clinical director and senior psychologist at the Child Mind Institute, said the parental controls are a step in the right direction. "It's a complex problem," Gudiño said. "We also want to be thinking about what messages we are sending at a family level and what messages we are sending in schools, so there's multiple points for interventions. There's probably more that apps can be doing themselves." Hoet said the onus for protecting young social media users' mental health typically falls on the parents. "Right now, those burden falls on parents, and that's unfair," Hoet said. "We need the tech companies to be more responsible in their design, and we need them to be more responsible in sharing the data that shows how it's impacting kids." Politicians also need to step up and create laws focused on protecting children's mental health during the digital age, she said. "We are at a place where the technology developed fast and we're catching up," Hoet said. Gudiño said tech companies designing social media apps with young audiences in mind could help. "If apps could do more to think about what content kids are exposed to or how the app is set up to keep them on for longer, there might be more to be done to help bring the risk down," he said. Gudiño said designing apps that balance children's mental health and social media's quest for user engagement might seem "incompatible," but the challenge presents an opportunity for tech companies and families to work toward a common goal. "What's the best for children's development? How do we design content and set up families for success in a way that's going to work for everyone?" Gudiño said. Read the original article on Business Insider
Yahoo
12-03-2025
- Yahoo
A day after TikTok launches new parental controls, digital safety expert shows a major flaw that would allow teens to bypass them
If you're the parent of a teen, you might have noticed that TikTok just announced new parental-control safety measures—including a meditative shut-down prompt that teens will face if they're scrolling past 10 p.m., as well as a way for the adult in charge to block their kid from the app during set times. That was on Tuesday. On Wednesday, a digital safety expert and mom to a 16-year-old demonstrated on social media just how easy it would be for a savvy (and even not-so-savvy) teen to bypass. "I can't believe that all the smart people working at TikTok think that the general population of parents will, A, accept this; B, use this; C, find this meaningful in any way, shape, or form," Titania Jordan, chief parent officer at online safety company Bark Technologies and author of a brand-new book about raising kids in the digital age, Parental Control, posted in the caption of an Instagram reel. "Seriously, what are they thinking?" The new parental-control features are designed to work within an existing Family Pairing safety framework, through which parents link their account with their child's to better monitor and control their use of the app. Some experts have already weighed in on the features with Fortune, with Jill Murphy of Common Sense Media calling them "a step in the right direction" while emphasizing they are not the only answer. "In general," she said, "parental controls are just not a set-it-and-forget-it solution.' Jordan, meanwhile, begins her new reel by declaring, "TikTok must think that every parent is just a complete idiot." She goes on to explain how a Google alert about the new safety features piqued her interest on Tuesday, prompting her to examine the details. "I read it over, it seemed super fluffy, especially the meditation part," she said. "Like, no, you're not going to get kids to meditate within Tiktok—especially if you've curated an addictive algorithm of things they are most interested in!" What she really wanted to investigate, though, was the new family pairing feature that "supposedly" gave parents more tools, such as controlling kids' time spent on the app. Jordan demonstrated how, to test it, she created the new TikTok account of a fictitious 15-year-old and then had that account follow her real adult account. She then linked her adult account to the fake teen account through the new pairing feature. "I was really hoping that TikTok finally did something right. They did not," she said, reporting that, within a few taps, the 15-year-old account was able to unlink the account that the parent, a.k.a. Jordan, had just linked. "No warning, no blocker, no 'Hey, you need a PIN code password to make this happen.' No permission needed." TikTok did not immediately respond to Fortune's request for comment about Jordan's reel, but we will update with any response. But TikTok's parental controls, Jordan concludes, "are the biggest load of you-know-what that comes out of a bull. You can do better, TikTok," she says. "It's not that hard." More on teens and smartphones: Exclusive: Prince Harry and 'The Anxious Generation' author talk social media and mental health Is teen social media use a crisis or moral panic? How 'big back,' 'fatty,' and other 'fatphobic' slang is damaging your teen's mental health This story was originally featured on
