US Senate

Sens Ed Markey (D-MA) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) sent a letter to Facebook demanding information about new evidence that the company knowingly manipulated children into spending their parents’ money without permission while playing games on Facebook. Recent findings uncovered by The Center for Investigative Reporting show that Facebook personnel had direct knowledge that children were spending large sums of their parents’ money on in-app purchases without parental knowledge or permission. Specific design features and default settings fostered this practice.

The US Senate unanimously passed the Reliable Emergency Alert Distribution Improvement (READI) Act. The bipartisan legislation will ensure more people receive relevant emergency alerts on their mobile phones, televisions, and radios, explore new ways of alerting the public through online video and audio streaming services, track and study false alerts when they occur, and improve the way states plan for emergency alerts. “When a missile alert went out across Hawai‘i in January, some people never got the message on their phones, while others missed it on their TVs and radios.

Sen Ed Markey (D-MA), author of the Children’s Television Act, led eight of this colleagues in calling on the Federal Communications Commission to maintain essential elements of the “Kid Vid” rules, which ensure access to children’s education programming on over-the-air broadcast television, in accordance with the Children’s Television Act. In the letter, the Sens highlight the need to preserve existing rules requiring broadcasters to air three hours of regularly scheduled educational children’s programming a week on their primary stations.