Children and Media

The Federal Communications Commission updated its children’s television programming rules. This action provides broadcasters greater scheduling flexibility, enables them to offer more diverse and innovative educational programming, and relieves unnecessary burdens while ensuring that educational programming remains available to all children. The updates reflect the myriad changes in the media marketplace since the FCC first adopted children’s programming rules nearly 30 years ago.

The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing "Protecting Innocence in a Digital World" July 9 on protecting kids online, and Big Tech came in for further criticism over its handling of the issue. Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said he hoped to learn a lot from the witnesses about the perils of social media sites, and the internet in general, for children. He also signaled there would be a follow-on hearing where Big Tech was called to account. 

According to the Senate Joint Economic Committee, there are 12 million kids all across the country who lack the internet access they now need for nightly schoolwork.  According to the Associated Press, nearly one in five students nationwide falls into the Homework Gap. We are a nation that finds problems and fixes them. Here are my ideas. First, we need to gather data locally and raise awareness. I think every city and town can build their own local assessments to understand what is behind their Homework Gap.

Consumer advocates are pushing for the Federal Trade Commission to come down hard on YouTube’s handling of children’s videos after conversations with the agency’s leadership prompted concerns about how regulators would be approaching a settlement with the video-sharing site. The Center for Digital Democracy and the Center for a Commercial-Free Childhood sent a letter to the FTC, urging the FTC to force YouTube to separate the children’s videos from the rest of the platform in order to better crack down on illegal data collection of younger viewers.

Sen Ed Markey (D-MA.) led eight of his Democratic 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. The letter, a response to the Commission’s recently-released draft order, urges FCC Chairman Ajit Pai to preserve existing rules requiring broadcasters to air three hours of regularly scheduled educational children’s programming a week on their primary stations.

Sens Ed Markey (D-MA) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) sent a letter to Facebook urging the company to institute policy changes in light of evidence that third party game developers manipulated children into spending their parents’ money. Previous reporting by the Center for Investigative Reporting demonstrated 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. New evidence now reveals that Facebook has still not instituted key policy changes to address this issue.

Perhaps the biggest news of the week was the agenda for the Federal Communications Commission's July 10 Open Meeting, which FCC Chairman Ajit Pai laid out in a blog post on June 18, 2019. I'm traveling to New York this week; below is a shorter-than-usual weekly that takes a look at how Chairman Pai plans to take education out of the Educational Broadband Service -- and broadcast television.

Apparently, the Federal Trade Commission is in the late stages of an investigation into YouTube for allegedly violating children’s privacy, in a probe that threatens the company with a potential fine and already has prompted the tech giant to reevaluate some of its business practices. The FTC launched its investigation after numerous complaints from consumer groups and privacy advocates.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai announced that the items below are tentatively on the agenda for the Open FCC Meeting scheduled for Wednesday, July 10, 2019: