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HARRISBURG Despite bipartisan interest in setting ground rules for social media companies, Pennsylvania lawmakers are struggling to reach a consensus amid privacy and other concerns that don't neatly break down along party lines.

In recent months, the legislature has debated bills that would mandate disclosure of artificial intelligence-generated images, ban TikTok from state-owned phones, and require monitoring of minors' social media. The debate around the latter most clearly demonstrates the balancing act legislators are trying to achieve.

Social media can help young people find community, but can also expose them to disinformation and hate speech, and encourage them to self-harm, according to the American Psychological Association.

From California to Ohio, red and blue states alike have passed laws that attempt to combat this by requiring age verification and parental consent to use apps.

NetChoice, a tech industry group whose members include Meta, TikTok, and X, has challenged many of these laws in federal court, sometimes with the backing of civil liberties groups like the ACLU. Several suits have succeeded.

In one, a federal judge last August issued an injunction blocking an Arkansas parental consent law from going into effect until the courts settled the matter.

In his opinion, U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks wrote that NetChoice was likely to succeed in its First Amendment challenge. He added there was no evidence that the law would protect minors from materials or interactions that could harm them online.

Regulating speech is tricky under the First Amendment, says Megan Iorio, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonpartisan advocacy group in Washington, D.C. In a March interview with Marketplace, she argued there is no privacy-protective way to verify a user's age.

But placing the onus on parents to mitigate the harm of opaque social media algorithms is also not how things should work, she added.

The government should be able to pass regulations to prevent harms to kids, Iorio said.

This session, legislative leaders in Pennsylvania have attempted to thread this needle with two bipartisan bills. But both efforts have stalled amid tech lobbying and a wide swath of concerns from both major parties.

In March, state House Democrats advanced a bill sponsored by state Rep. Brian Munroe (D., Bucks), who represents a suburban Philadelphia swing district.

Like other states proposals, the bill would require social media companies to verify users ages and obtain parental consent before anyone 16 or younger opens an account. It would also allow parents to restrict how much their children use an app by allowing parents to view their kids' privacy settings or set time limits on an accounts use.

Additionally, it would prohibit the collection or sale of a minors browsing history, require that such users opt in to algorithmic recommendations, and make it unlawful for a social media network to intentionally, knowingly, recklessly or negligently cause or encourage a minor to access content which the social media company knows or should have known subjects one or more minors to harm. The provisions would be enforced by the state attorney general.

Munroe told Spotlight PA the idea for his proposal came from a project by local high school students on social medias mental health impacts.

Parents, Munroe said, do give a level of consent to tech companies when they provide a phone to a child. But once I give that to you, it's a jungle, he said.

We need to be able to offer tools that are going to make it more mainstream for parents to be able to have a say in what their children are involved in, Munroe added.

Controversially, the bill accomplishes this in part by requiring social media companies to monitor any group chats on their platforms that involve two or more individuals aged 16 or younger. If the company finds any chats, posts, videos and images that are deemed sensitive or graphic under a platform's terms of use, the company must report the content to the minors parent or legal guardian.

That provision drew the opposition of the Pennsylvania chapter of the ACLU, which argued in a memo to lawmakers that the bill would invite parental surveillance, define harm in broad, subjective, and unenforceable ways, and likely have dire consequences for young people.

One of techs biggest lobbies, TechNet, also opposed the language. In a statement, Margaret Durkin, the groups mid-Atlantic executive director, told Spotlight PA that the bill will have unintended consequences that could jeopardize Pennsylvanians privacy and data.

Beyond allowing parents or legal guardians to access direct messages between users, social media platforms might overregulate and remove accounts that could undermine the free speech rights of users when attempting to comply with the law, Durkin wrote.

Despite these concerns, a state House committee advanced the proposal in March with bipartisan support.

State House Majority Leader Matt Bradford (D., Montgomery) planned to bring the bill up for a vote by the full chamber a week later, according to a schedule shared by his spokesperson at the time. But in a closed-door meeting, progressive Democrats raised concerns about the chat-monitoring provision, legislative sources told Spotlight PA.

Commonwealth Media Services

In response, Bradford urged lawmakers to stick together despite their concerns, sources said.

But that evening, health care provider Planned Parenthood PA announced its opposition in an email to state House Democratic lawmakers, arguing that the proposal threatened youths free speech and access to information on their sexual and reproductive health.

That seemed to sink the bill. Bradford took it off the voting calendar the next day, and state House Democrats canceled a related news conference to tout the proposal scheduled for that week.

A spokesperson for Bradford did not reply to a request for comment.

Munroe told Spotlight PA that he has since convened a working group with Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and his progressive colleagues to find a compromise. He suggested lowering the age for chat monitoring to 13, or removing the provision altogether while leaving the data protections, parental controls, and age verification in place.

Both groups, he noted, are OK with the bills intent but disagree on the language. He plans to keep working on the issue.

I don't represent the ACLU. I don't represent Planned Parenthood. I represent the parents and the citizens of 144th District in this commonwealth, Munroe said. And I can tell you, from all the conversations I've had, they want something done.

A similar bill has also struggled in the state Senate.

A proposal nearly identical to Munroes, minus chat monitoring, advanced out of a state Senate committee with unanimous support last year. Republican leadership, however, has not brought the legislation up for a final vote.

We were having difficulty crafting language that was going to get the support of the majority of our colleagues, state Sen. Kristin Phillips-Hill (R., York), a member of the GOP leadership team and the prime Republican sponsor of the bill, told Spotlight PA.

She added that members of both major parties have opposed it, with some arguing it goes too far and others arguing it doesnt go far enough. Those positions dont break down along party lines, she added.

If you're more of a libertarian on the Republican side, you may express some of the similar concerns as we heard by some of our most progressive colleagues in the House, Phillips-Hill told Spotlight PA.

The chat-monitoring provision is also opposed by Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, said his spokesperson Manuel Bonder.

Noting that nothing is close to reaching the governors desk, Bonder still said that there are some pretty serious concerns with that bill.

Overall, Bonder added, Shapiro believes we have to take action to lean in on innovation and approach these technologies in a way that is responsible and ethical.

There appears to be more agreement in the General Assembly on another tech issue: banning TikTok from state devices. Shapiro has so far been opposed.

The popular app is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. Pennsylvania billionaire Jeffrey Yass, a major Republican donor, has a personal stake in the company, as does Susquehanna International Group, which he co-founded.

Some national security experts worry the Chinese government could demand the company turn over user data.

Under a bill sponsored by Phillips-Hill, any app owned by a foreign adversary would be banned from devices owned by public agencies, including school districts. The bill as originally drafted applied specifically to TikTok and passed the state Senate unanimously.

In a bipartisan vote, the state House agreed to amend the bill to expand its scope in late March. The proposal has not come up for a full, final vote in the chamber.

The bill would affect the Shapiro administration, which uses TikTok to tout the governors agenda to almost 43,000 followers. A February video in which Shapiro promised to protect abortion rights set to Beyonces Texas Hold Em had garnered 1.7 million views as of April 2.

We try and balance the need to reach people where they are, but also take the necessary precautions that the IT department has advised us on, Shapiro told PennLive in a March interview.

Those precautions, Bonder said, include having TikTok on a single device that does not connect to the states WiFi network or have any other apps or data on it. That phone is used only to create the governors official TikTok videos, Bonder added.

The governor has talked many times about how he believes there should be no wrong door for accessing state government,, Bonder told Spotlight PA.

For some people thatll mean coming to the Capitol and having a meeting. For some that's sending an email. And for some, thats engaging on social media.

In a statement, a TikTok spokesperson echoed that sentiment, arguing that "bans on state government devices and networks prevent state agencies from reaching a wider audience.

Bills like these are being pushed through without regard for the facts, the spokesperson added.

The legislation is mostly redundant. The Office of Administration effectively the commonwealths human resources and IT department for tens of thousands of state employees currently blocks TikToks URL on its WiFi network, and the app cannot be downloaded from the states application portal, according to a Shapiro administration memo to lawmakers viewed by Spotlight PA.

However, the governors administration said it opposed the bill, citing a need for flexibility that it achieves through executive orders or management directives instead of waiting for legislation.

Today the issue is TikTok. In three months, six months, or a year, it could be another app that needs to be addressed, the memo said.

Shapiro isnt the only skeptic. State Rep. Tarik Khan (D., Philadelphia) was one of two Democrats to vote no on the updated TikTok ban. He argued that the language set a precedent of guilt by association that we should not be establishing in the commonwealth.

But Khan, who has introduced bipartisan legislation that would ban the use of AI to misrepresent the words, actions or beliefs of the current or former candidate, also argued that inaction is not an option.

We have to be nimble, and we have to be ready to set guardrails, Khan told Spotlight PA. And the worst thing we can do is just do nothing.

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TikTok ban, social media rules for kids weighed in PA - Spotlight PA

Suddenly, with that theme put right there, the whole film feels different, and weird, kind of, and you're not sure what's coming up, set against the visuals, Reznor says.

But according to Reznor, when Fincher showed them the first thirty or so minutes of the movie, he'd used a very different song under the opening titlesan Elvis Costello and the Attractions song that Reznor says gave the sequence a we're on a college campus feeling. Reznor doesn't name the Costello song in his GQ interview, but in past interviews where he's the Social Network score, he's identified it as Beyond Belief, the leadoff track on Costello's acclaimed 1982 album Imperial Bedroom.

Curious about how the title sequence of The Social Network would have played if Costello and the Attractions had ended up in the final cut? So were weand it turns out the YouTube channel INDEPTH Sound Design had us covered, via this 2018 video, which paired the Social Network's credits sequence with the Costello song in question. (Skip to 6:06, right after Rooney Mara finishes brutally but accurately de-friending Jesse Eisenberg's Mark Zuckerberg.)

The Costello version (famously rearranged in the studio around an inspired one-take drum track by a hung-over Pete Thomas) makes it feel like we're about to watch a completely different movie, one that will feel more The Breakfast Club than Fight Club. Hearing the same sequence set to Hand Covers Bruise, Reznor says, "was a huge moment of realizing the possibility of what could be done with music and film. Realizing how much, in a godlike way, you can influence how people feel about a thing. Wildly exciting to us.

Reznor goes on to say that he finds the importance of providing a soundtrack of a film is less about the love of making music, and more so about tapping into the story of the film and the development of its characters, in this case, the isolation (and asshole-ness) of Jesse Eisenberg's Mark Zuckerberg. Where Beyond Belief offers up a more hopeful introduction to The Social Network, the final soundtrack highlights the anxiety, melancholy, and tension that Fincher builds throughout the film.

The threesome of Reznor, Ross, and Fincher would work together again across films like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl, and Mank, and there's no telling how different those films would've been had Nine Inch Nails not got their hands on them.

See more here:
'The Social Network' Might Have Been a Very Different Movie Without This Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross Cue - GQ

Social media is a powerful influence on our lives and our culture, driving decisions from what we eat for lunch to where we go on vacation. Now, a new study from Georgia Tech's School of Economics is the first to tie high levels of social media exposure to increased visitors to the U.S. National Parks and the increased crowding and ecological damage they bring with them.

"There's been a general idea that social media exposure matters for visitation, but this research shows that it matters to a very strong degree," said Casey Wichman, an associate professor of economics and the author of the study, published in April in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "It's one of the main drivers of the huge increase in visitation to national parks."

However, he says, the overall picture is much more nuanced than its often portrayed in media accounts.

Wichman found that parks with high social media exposure saw a 16 to 22% increase in visitors compared to locations that received less attention on social media. The growth began in 2013 when Instagram and Twitter started to gain popularity.

While well-known parks such as Yosemite, Grand Canyon, and Yellowstone saw big jumps tied to social media exposure, smaller, less well-known properties also saw significant jumps. For example, the number of travelers to Lake Clark National Park and Preserve in Alaska increased by more than 180%.

Parks in the Southeast saw little change on average because a decrease at parks in Florida and the Carolinas offset an increase at Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the nations most visited national park. The biggest increases on a percentage basis occurred in the Western U.S., particularly in Alaska, the Rocky Mountain region, and Utah.

"It seems like there may be some reshuffling of where people go because there are a lot of parks that don't see increases in visitation despite being pretty cool, interesting parks in similar areas," Wichman said. But people end up seeing the parks with higher exposure online and are more likely to get pushed into visiting them."

Wichman used five measurements to create an index of social media exposure: Instagram followers, Instagram mentions, Twitter followers, Twitter mentions, and the total number of likes and retweets on Twitter. Then, he ranked the parks based on the average of these five metrics, with a lower rank indicating greater social media exposure.

"Social media serves as advertising for parks in a way that's targeted to an individual's network," Wichman said. "However, not all exposure increases visits it has to be good exposure."

Wichman also looked at the type of posts and their effects, finding that tweets with photos or videos drove increased visits in the year after they were posted, while tweets with negative sentiment decreased visits over the following year.

The increase in visitation due to social media is a double-edged sword, Wichman says. More visitors can result in overcrowding, frustrating traffic jams, and difficulty accessing campsites or other amenities. More traffic also means more pollution. But tourists also pay entrance fees and buy things at gift shops, restaurants and other concessions revenue that can help support park operations, wildlife conservation efforts, and local economies. And, those pretty pictures of nature can also get people excited about going outside, which has its own benefits for travelers, Wichman said.

"If you look at news articles, social media is largely pitched as driving overcrowding and being a negative thing. But it's not clear to me that that's the case, he said. Yes, we spend a lot of time on our phones, especially younger demographics, but this also suggests that social media can actually get us outside more. I don't know if it's good or bad, but it's much more nuanced than many sensationalist stories have made it out to be."

Wichmans paper, Social Media Influences National Parks Visitation, was published in April 2024 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It is available athttps://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2310417121

More here:
Social Media Driving Force Behind Increased Visits to National Parks | News Center - Georgia Tech News Center

Four of the largest school boards in Canada are suing the companies behind popular social media apps Instagram and Facebook, Snapchat and TikTok. According to the Ontario boards, students are experiencing an attention, learning and mental health crisis because of prolific and compulsive use of social media products.

The school boards are collectively seeking over $4 billion in damages. Boards say theyre facing financial strain due to providing increased mental health supports for students as well as diverting resources to monitor social media related to threats or harassment.

Some observers have suggested it should be the responsibility of parents and teachers to control childrens social media use. But the problem is that for too long we have been trying to individualize solutions to a collective problem.

How social media negatively impacts kids mental health has been meticulously outlined in a new book by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt of New York University, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing and Epidemic of Mental Illness. In the book, Haidt discusses four ways social media is harming children:

Social deprivation, whereby the time children spend on social media has displaced opportunities to form more authentic personal connections;

Sleep deprivation, as social media use has been tied to reduced sleep duration and poorer sleep quality;

Attention fragmentation, as students are continually bombarded by messages and notifications, compromising their ability to focus.

Finally, addiction: tech companies are intentionally designing their social media apps in ways that exploit the vulnerabilities of children.

Haidt documents how internal documents revealed by former Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen show an employee presentation about why teens and young adults choose Instagram (owned by Facebook):

Teens decisions and behaviour are mainly driven by emotion, the intrigue of novelty and reward. While these all seem positive, they make teens very vulnerable at the elevated levels they operate on. Especially in the absence of a mature frontal cortex to help impose limits on the indulgence of these.

In Haidts analysis, its no mystery why we are seeing such sharp declines in youth mental health.

Read more: Excessive social media use during the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated adolescent mental health challenges

According to the 2021 Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey, the proportion of students reporting poor or fair mental health and the proportion of students experiencing serious psychological distress have both more than doubled since 2013.

As claimed by the Canadian school boards, it has largely fallen on schools to address these issues. To their credit, schools have tried to provide students with access to psychologists, social workers, youth workers and mental health specialists, but there is only so much they can do given their resource constraints.

According to data from the Annual Ontario School Survey, 95 per cent of schools report needing additional resources to support the mental health and well-being of students.

Boards allege the conduct of social media companies has been negligent and they are unfairly bearing the brunt of the learning and mental health epidemic caused by their apps.

Phones and social media use are also clearly having a detrimental impact on student learning: The most recent results of the OECDs PISA study show that math, reading and science scores have been plummeting over the last decade in Canada and other developed countries, due in large part to technology used for leisure rather than instruction, such as mobile phones.

This corresponds with a 2023 study led by researchers from the University of Michigan that tracked the phone use of 200 children (ages 11 to 17) over the course of a week.

It found that during the school day, the devices were used for educational purposes less than two per cent of the time. Rather, the most common uses of phones during school hours were social media (32 per cent), YouTube (26 per cent) and gaming (17 per cent).

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has expressed surprise at the lawsuit, stating: We banned cellphones in the classroom, so I dont know what the kids are using.

However, the reality is that Ontarios ban has been mostly symbolic. The reason for this is twofold. First is the way the ban was constructed: it allowed an exception for when the phones were being used for educational purposes.

Second, many students are unable or unwilling to comply with restrictions on their use something hardly surprising since social media apps are designed to be as addictive as possible. That means it has been left up to individual teachers to enforce restrictions in their classrooms, and resistant students arent provided with clear and consistent expectations. Meanwhile, some parents say their children need their devices.

While some say its up to individual children to fight these temptations, individual parents to better monitor their kids and individual teachers to get control of their classrooms, we must remember that the companies behind popular social media platforms are among the wealthiest on the planet. They use their enormous resources to render attempts at individual willpower futile.

Read more: 'Never-ending pressure': Mothers need support managing kids' technology use

Change may come from the courts or through the court of public opinion. Apart from whether companies are legally held responsible, reversing the harms being inflicted on our children by social media is going to require collective action among educators, parents and policymakers.

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School board social media lawsuits: For too long we've sought individual solutions to a collective problem - The Conversation Indonesia

Donald Trumps social media platform, Truth Social, went public on Tuesday March 26. Shares in parent company Trump Media & Technology Group surged 15% after its first day of trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange, adding US$1.1 billion (876 million) to the companys value.

Trump wrote I LOVE TRUTH SOCIAL on the platform, echoing the sentiment of I just like the stock from the GameStop share rally that occurred in January 2021. For those who do not remember the GameStop case, shares in the Texan computer games retail chain experienced an unprecedented surge in prices following the activity of retail investors on the social media platform, Reddit.

Millions of investors from Reddits WallStreetBets community pushed GameStop shares from US$20 to US$480 during the January short squeeze, in which they drove some hedge funds into heavy losses after forcing them to liquidate massive bets against the stock. The power of small, amateur investors to outplay Wall Street giants was celebrated all over the internet, and even inspired the 2023 film Dumb Money.

It appears that the Trump Media stock is yet another example of a so-called meme stock, whose popularity is driven by social media activities and memes posted on various platforms, such as Truth Social.

However, while similarities with GameStop are apparent, the Trump Media movement looks unlikely to be as successful. On Monday April 1, less than a week after it began trading, shares of Trump Media fell by more than 20%.

The social media hype around GameStop originated from within a community of retail investors that took a David v Goliath mentality. The firm behind Truth Social has tried to cultivate a similar sentiment of small guys resisting Big Tech censorship.

Devin Nunes, the CEO of Trump Media, stated: As a public company, we will passionately pursue our vision to build a movement to reclaim the internet from big tech censors.

However, Trump Media stocks are directly linked to the exceptionally famous persona of Donald Trump, who owns 58% of the shares. Thus, parallels could be drawn with PR campaigns that have been launched for crypto assets, such as NFTs (non-fungible tokens), where celebrities are often used to attract investors to the projects.

Read more: From GameStop to crypto: how to protect yourself from meme stock mania

The Trump media stock is undoubtedly appealing to his loyal supporters, who appear to have fuelled the surge in price. But meme stocks may attract a broader range of investors due to the social media hype.

That is why it is important to understand that investing in any meme stock or meme coin is a risky endeavour. Surges in price that cannot be explained by any company fundamentals are called asset price bubbles. Speculative bubbles are quite common in financial and cryptocurrency markets and offer opportunities to generate abnormal returns in a short period of time.

However, they can be risky for investors as they have a tendency to burst. Participating in such speculative behaviour is typically considered irrational since it is extremely hard to justify the growth of the price.

More importantly, it is nearly impossible to predict exactly when the bubble will burst. Retail investors should be cautious and definitely should not make decisions based solely on social media announcements regarding public figures.

The share price of Trump Media has now dipped to almost pre-surge levels. For many retail investors, it is fair to assume that it is yet again too late to get abnormal returns on this surge. This is because the price of a meme stock tends to simply fluctuate after the initial surge.

Trump Media stock plummets within a week of going public

Only the long-term growth potential of an asset should be assessed to generate somewhat stable returns in the future. However, the long-term stock performance is rarely assessed when it comes to meme stocks, as investors in these stocks tend to have a very short investment horizon.

Following the cryptocurrency market crash in 2022, many retail investors lost their savings as the bubble burst. Many of the collapsed crypto assets were meme coins that had been promoted by celebrities. Dogecoin, for example, was promoted by Elon Musk.

Celebrities have immense power to influence the public. But when it comes to financial decisions, the ethical implications of those campaigns are often not considered.

At the time of writing, there is yet another bullish trend in cryptocurrency prices, particularly in Bitcoin. Yet there is still no clarity in regulation or consumer protection, and there has been no regulatory response to concerns about the environmental impacts of Bitcoin mining.

Some experts who invest in cryptocurrency and have direct financial benefit from surges in prices would, of course, argue that the rally is not a bubble and prices will keep growing. However, it might be unethical to expose consumers to unjustified risks.

According to some studies, awareness of the green critiques associated with cryptocurrency markets is growing. But recent research that I conducted with my colleagues shows that retail investors generally do not care. Understanding that crypto is unsustainable and somewhat unethical does not decrease the odds of investing in crypto assets among retail investors.

The movement in Trump Medias share price will have been backed by Trump supporters. But it will also have attracted some investors who simply wanted to partake in this share rally, even if they do not share Trumps political views. The desire to make money quickly is one of the main driving factors of meme stock investments, and social media campaigns are great fuel for this sentiment.

Excerpt from:
Truth Social: why Donald Trump's social media 'meme stock' surged and fell by over US$1 billion within a week - The Conversation Indonesia