Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti led a bipartisan coalition of 31 state attorneys general in sending a letter to Congressional leadership on Monday urging the passage of U.S. Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Richard Blumenthal’s (D-CT) Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) before the end of the year.
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Massive government-funded media outlets and other information powerbrokers are keeping Americans in the dark about the prevalence of illegal voting by non-citizens.
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U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) released a memo this week clarifying elements of her and U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal’s (D-CT) Kids Online Safety Act, which passed the Senate in July, amid what the senator is calling “lies” being circulated about the legislation.
The Kids Online Safety Act seeks to “protect minors from online harms” by requiring social media companies to “take reasonable measures” to “prevent and mitigate” children from being harmed while using their platforms, including through sexual exploitation or online bullying.
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Elon Musk’s X was reinstated Tuesday in Brazil after more than a month-long ban, which a judge issued after the platform refused to block certain accounts the country argued were disseminating false information.
The platform, which has been suspended in Brazil since late August, was reinstated after complying with orders to remove certain accounts, paying fines and appointing a new legal representative in the country, The New York Times reported.
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Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti filed a motion on Tuesday in the Twentieth Judicial District of Tennessee as part of his office’s ongoing investigation into the social media platform TikTok.
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Former first lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Saturday that if social media companies don’t moderate content on their various platforms, “we lose total control.”
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Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti provided an update on prominent lawsuits his office has filed under his leadership and discussed his goals for the remainder of his eight-year term during an exclusive sit-down interview this week on The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
Skrmetti, who began serving as attorney general in 2022 after being appointed by the Tennessee Supreme Court, said, “I’ve been blessed with a great team and there is a lot of work for us to do.”
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Republican legislators are calling on Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to condemn a comment Attorney General Keith Ellison posted to social media on Monday that seemingly endorsed a court ruling in Brazil to block its citizens from accessing the X social media platform.
Ellison posted “Obrigado, Brasil!” from one of this two X social media accounts, just hours after the Supreme Federal Court of Brazil upheld a measure which bans Brazilians from using X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
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Two campaign staffers for Vice President Kamala Harris were previously involved in efforts to censor Americans for spreading purported “disinformation” about COVID-19 while working in the Biden-Harris White House.
Then-administration officials Rob Flaherty and Aisha Shah are named as having been involved in the government’s efforts to censor Americans in legal filings related to the Murthy v. Missouri lawsuit, which alleged that the federal government violated the First Amendment by pressuring social media companies to censor content related to the pandemic and other hot-button topics. On the Harris campaign team, Flaherty is now a deputy campaign manager and Shah is the director of digital partnerships, according to their respective LinkedIn profiles.
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Elon Musk’s social media company X was banned in Brazil on Friday, after the company failed to name a new legal representative by the Brazilian court’s deadline.
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After the resounding success of Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s bipartisan Kids Online Safety Act, she has exclusively released to The Tennessee Star a guide for parents to keep their children safe online as they head back to school.
“When children are online, they are the product, and Big Tech is trying every method possible to keep them scrolling, clicking ads, and sharing every detail of their lives,” the guide says. “Social media platforms put children at risk of being exposed to eating disorders, suicidal ideation, sexual exploitation, and advertisements for illegal substances. Now is the perfect time to study up on how you can keep your kids safe online.”
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Since 1998 — the last year Congress passed a major law to reform the tech industry and protect children in the virtual space — a lot has changed.
In the last 26 years, more than 100 million Americans were born during the internet’s profound transformation from dial-up to near constant connectivity, especially with the emergence of the biggest social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and more.
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Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) celebrated on Tuesday after the U.S. Senate passed the Kids Online Safety Act with bipartisan support.
Blackburn wrote in a post to the social media platform X that the legislation passing the Senate is “a big step to protect” minor children from online harms, and noted Congress last passed legislation with that goal in 1998, when it passed the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.
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Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) Tuesday announced that a bipartisan bill she cosponsored with Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) called the “Kids Online Safety Act” is headed to the Senate floor for a vote.
“It’s official: the Kids Online Safety Act is getting a vote on the Senate Floor. This progress is a testament to the incredible work of parents and young people whose personal experiences are the heart of this bill,” Blackburn said in a press release. “They came to DC over and over again, told their stories to lawmakers, wrote letters, and never gave up on demanding change. We are grateful to be in this fight with such brave and tenacious friends and allies.”
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A leaked video being shared over social media shows presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump on a golf cart predicting President Joe Biden will drop out of the race.
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U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) joined many elected officials and conservative leaders who expressed disappointment with the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Murthy v. Missouri on Wednesday.
The Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana and five individual plaintiffs brought this court case.
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Ohio Governor Mike DeWine signed House Bill 250 on Wednesday, requiring schools to implement official policy governing students’ use of cellphones during school hours.
The bill aims to “minimize student use of cellphones in K-12 schools” by requiring school districts to create a policy that reduces cellphone-related distractions in classroom settings.
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Social media companies in Tennessee will need to verify parental consent before allowing minors to create accounts in the state starting Jan. 1.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee signed the bill, which along with age verification and parental consent, requires social media companies to allow parents access to monitor the account with privacy settings, daily time restrictions and creating breaks where the minor cannot use the social media.
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NetChoice, a “trade organization fighting to protect free expression and free enterprise online,” asked Tennessee Governor Bill Lee to veto a bill that would require minors to have parental consent before downloading social media applications.
The bill, filed as HB 1891 and called the “Protecting Children from Social Media Act,” passed the Tennessee General Assembly and was sent to the governor for final action last week.
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While Natalie Sanandaji escaped the brutal Oct. 7 attack during the Israeli music festival, she is now dealing with doxxing and death threats from pro-Palestinian supporters.
Earlier this week, Sanandaji announced that she had her personal information leaked in an unnamed Telegram group.
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The Trump Media & Technology Group Corporation, which runs the social media platform Truth Social, announced on Tuesday that it is formally launching a “new live TV streaming platform and will begin scaling up its own content delivery network,” according to a news release.
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As the 2024 election heats up, now is the time for campaigns to invest wisely. Questions abound: Do you invest in cable news advertising? Door-to-door canvassing? Social media? Something else?
For answers, I look back to the past. In 2000, I oversaw the South Carolina Republican Party’s history-making effort to post real-time presidential primary results online. The election night vote-counting for the epic Bush vs. McCain battle played out on screens across the world – not just in the South Carolina GOP’s vote tabulation center. On that night, the ground shifted beneath our feet.
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Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a controversial new bill into law on Monday that will prohibit the use of social media platforms by children.
House Bill 3 requires that social media platforms be regulated to prohibit minors under age 14 from having a social media account if the platform allows users to upload content and view content from other users, uses algorithms and has certain addictive features to keep young children scrolling.
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Mike Benz, former Trump State Department official and current executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, said the Supreme Court is going to have to exercise “bravery” as opposed to “wisdom” in its ruling of Murthy v. Missouri for the government censorship complex to be dismantled.
Murthy v. Missouri seeks to determine whether the government’s “challenged conduct transformed private social media companies’ content-moderation decisions into state action and violated respondents’ First Amendment rights” related to COVID-19 and the 2020 presidential election.
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Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti has joined a coalition of 26 other state attorneys general in sending a letter to Meta, the parent company of social media giants Facebook and Instagram, demanding that Instagram stop monetizing child exploitation content.
Citing reporting from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, the coalition of attorneys general expressed concern over news that Instagram has “actively promoted” to “likely pedophiles” content created by “adults seeking to profit from exploiting their own children.”
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Learning to read is trending. The most fundamental of K-12 subjects is fueling YouTube videos and feature stories in People magazine and is now the subject of a report from Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., ranking member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. Let’s hope the renewed interest spreads, because a shocking proportion of American children cannot read, and the data have profound implications for these children’s futures—and the entire criminal justice system.
Oliver James is the former convict who announced on social media that he taught himself to read as an adult, which sparked media coverage on how learning to read changed his life. As a student, James had been passed along from grade to grade without learning this basic skill.
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The Florida state House and Senate on Thursday approved legislation to impose tight restrictions on social media access for minors.
Under the plan, young Floridians under 16 years old would be barred from access several social media platforms, which in turn would be required to delete the accounts of underaged persons, Politico reported. It would also require that websites producing sensitive content, such as pornography, work to verify the age of users.
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Chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio Algenon L. Marbley granted NetChoice’s request for a preliminary injunction that stops the state’s Social Media Parental Notification Act from being enforced on Monday.
Last month, NetChoice sued Ohio to block the Social Media Parental Notification Act from taking effect.
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A U.S. Senator from Tennessee took to Fox News to slam Big Tech companies over the dangers their platforms pose to America’s youth.
“You know, I wish that each one of those [tech executives] would have taken their turn at apologizing to those parents,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) told Harris Faulkner on “The Faulkner Focus.” “You look at the amount of pornographic material on X, you look at what Snap has done, connecting kids to pedophiles and drug dealers, TikTok, with the kids that have done these TikTok challenges and lost their lives, Discord which is used for chats and gaming, and kids are meeting really bad actors. Every one of them owed those parents that were in that room an apology and those kids – friends of kids – who had lost their lives that showed up wearing those t-shirts. Some were worth more than $230 which is what [Meta CEO Mark] Zuckerberg said a teen was worth to them on social media.”
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In the dynamic landscape of global entertainment, the influence of Beijing over Hollywood has long been a topic of heated discussion. While the box office power of the Chinese market has waned, giving a breath of creative freedom back to our filmmakers, there looms a new and more pervasive form of influence on Hollywood and well beyond: TikTok.
Beijing may have lost theatrical market leverage, but it has more than made up for that with an overpowering social media presence that has become an epidemic, not just in Hollywood but throughout the United States. In fact, the Chairman of Congress’s Select Committee on China, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), accurately labels TikTok as “digital fentanyl” and has been aggressively campaigning to ban the social media app.
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Tennessee U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn addressed the CEOs of five social media companies during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing entitled, “Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis” on Wednesday.
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A bill introduced in the Tennessee General Assembly would require minors to have parental consent before downloading social media applications.
HB 1891, filed by State Rep. William Lamberth (R-Portland) is called the “Protecting Children from Social Media Act.”
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Tennessee U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) released a statement on Wednesday slamming a new report detailing the Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok’s interest in permanently moving its Nashville operations into a new office building in Music Row.
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The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was aware of the issues with mail-in voting during the 2020 election cycle but censored social media narratives about the risks as alleged disinformation, according to agency documents.
CISA documents were released on Monday by America First Legal, showing the agency’s concerns about mail-in voting while it was also monitoring online opinions about such concerns.
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Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti told The Tennessee Star in a Thursday phone interview that his office’s unredacted lawsuit against Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, shows the company is using strategies to increase Instagram user engagement which are “catastrophic” to teenage girls, and warned that other social media companies may soon land within his crosshairs.
Speaking to The Star, Skrmetti explained that his office’s unredacted complaint against Meta, which it released last week, outlines “a very sophisticated effort by a very sophisticated company to design a product that kids would have a hard time not using.” Meta’s focus on children, Skrmetti said, was motivated by a desire to keep them using the platforms into adulthood, when the company will have collected years worth of data that can be used by advertisers.
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U.S. Senators JD Vance (R-OH) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) have sent a letter to Gary Gensler, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), demanding answers after the commission’s X account tweeted false information leading to “drastic swings in the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.”
On Tuesday, the SEC’s X account published a post announcing that it had approved Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) to be listed on all registered U.S. securities exchanges.
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Turkish smugglers appear to be using social media platforms to help migrants from across the globe enter the U.S. illegally through the southern border, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation review of Telegram and TikTok posts.
The advertisements offer arrangements for travel, visas and transportation directly to the U.S.-Mexico border for migrants in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Border Patrol encounters of migrants crossing the southern border illegally have hit numerous records in recent years, with more than 2.2 million encounters in fiscal year 2022 and more than 2 million in fiscal year 2023, according to federal data.
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The State of Ohio has been sued by a company representing multiple social media platforms in order to block the Social Media Parental Notification Act from taking effect.
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TikTok might be popular among America’s youth, but a majority of voters view it as a threat to the United States. An even higher percentage favor a federal ban of the social media platform.
RMG Research, a polling firm led by Scott Rasmussen, shared its latest survey data exclusively with The Daily Signal. The poll was conducted Dec. 18-19 among 1,000 registered U.S. voters.
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The Social Media Parental Notification Act, signed into law by Ohio Governor Mike DeWine earlier this year, is set to take effect next month in the Buckeye State.
The bill was passed as part of DeWine’s 2023-24 executive budget presented to the Ohio General Assembly.
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Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) said in a Friday news conference that he will introduce legislation to the Virginia General Assembly to ban TikTok for minors, restrict other social media from gathering data about children, and expand state-funded mental health initiatives in public schools and colleges.
Youngkin revealed four new legislative efforts he intends to champion during the upcoming legislative session, after first calling for an additional $500 million to address youth mental health in a Friday press release.
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A new study from Pew Research Center reveals that 1 in 5 American teenagers are on social media websites “almost constantly.”
As reported by Axios, the Pew survey, an online poll with a sample size of 1,453 kids in the 13-17 age range, recorded a significant rise in social media use among that particular age group compared to a previous survey in 2014 and 2015.
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President Joe Biden’s administration has recently taken unprecedented action to exert influence over Americans’ digital lives, including broadband internet, net neutrality, social media and artificial intelligence (AI).
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In episode 38 of his newest production, “Tucker on X,” host Tucker Carlson interviewed Douglass Mackey, the man sentenced to seven months in prison for sharing deceptive, anti-Hillary Clinton social media posts during the 2016 presidential election.
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A West Central Area (WCA) School District board member resigned effective Thursday after it was discovered he posted a video of himself engaging in a lewd sexual act to his social media account.
Jared Olson, a WCA school board member, posted a video to his SnapChat “stories” Wednesday of himself masturbating.
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Tennessee’s Attorney General is leading a bipartisan coalition of 42 states in suing Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, alleging that Instagram causes mental health harms to its young users.
“Meta has known for years that Instagram causes psychological harm to young users,” said General Skrmetti in a Tuesday press release. “Rather than take steps to reduce or disclose the harm, Meta leaned further in to its profit-maximizing approach that hurts kids. Targeting kids with a harmful product and lying about its safety violates the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act. Meta knows every last design decision that made Instagram addictive to kids and that means it knows exactly how to fix the problem. We’re suing to make the company fix the problem.”
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Long time national political reporter Neil W. McCabe connects the strategic dots he sees the candidates following into the first Republican presidential debate in Milwaukee tonight on Wednesday’s episode of The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy.
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Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti filed a motion to compel the Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok to comply with an earlier court order requiring it to produce relevant evidence in response to a multi-state investigation.
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Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito on Thursday temporarily blocked an order limiting the Biden administration’s contact with social media firms as litigation proceeds.
Alito’s stay will last until 11:59 p.m. on Sept. 22, the Washington Examiner reported. The Department of Justice has asked the Supreme Court to lift the order from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in Missouri v. Biden. That decision largely upheld a lower court order barring the government from working with social media companies to censor disfavored viewpoints online. Litigants have until Sept. 20 to file responses to the DOJ.
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A federal judge blocked an Arkansas law Thursday that requires age verification for social media users.
Arkansas’ Social Media Safety Act, which restricts minors from creating social media accounts without parental consent, was scheduled to take effect Friday. U.S. District Court Judge for the Western District of Arkansas Timothy Brooks, an Obama appointee, sided with NetChoice, a group that includes companies like Google and TikTok, and temporarily blocked the law from being enforced.
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