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By TRÂN NGUYỄN SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California, home to some of the largest technology companies in the world, would be the first U.S. state to require mental health warning labels on social media sites if lawmakers pass a bill introduced Monday. The legislation sponsored by state Attorney General Rob Bonta is necessary to bolster safety for children online, supporters say, but industry officials vow to fight the measure and others like it under the First Amendment. Warning labels for social media gained swift bipartisan support from dozens of attorneys general, including Bonta, after U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called on Congress to establish the requirements earlier this year, saying social media is a contributing factor in the mental health crisis among young people. “These companies know the harmful impact their products can have on our children, and they refuse to take meaningful steps to make them safer,” Bonta said at a news conference Monday. “Time is up. It’s time we stepped in and demanded change.” State officials haven’t provided details on the bill, but Bonta said the warning labels could pop up once weekly. Up to 95% of youth ages 13 to 17 say they use a social media platform, and more than a third say that they use social media “almost constantly,” according to 2022 data from the Pew Research Center. Parents’ concerns prompted Australia to pass the world’s first law banning social media for children under 16 in November. “The promise of social media, although real, has turned into a situation where they’re turning our children’s attention into a commodity,” Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, who authored the California bill, said Monday. “The attention economy is using our children and their well-being to make money for these California companies.” Lawmakers instead should focus on online safety education and mental health resources, not warning label bills that are “constitutionally unsound,” said Todd O’Boyle, a vice president of the tech industry policy group Chamber of Progress. “We strongly suspect that the courts will set them aside as compelled speech,” O’Boyle told The Associated Press. Victoria Hinks’ 16-year-old daughter, Alexandra, died by suicide four months ago after being “led down dark rabbit holes” on social media that glamorized eating disorders and self-harm. Hinks said the labels would help protect children from companies that turn a blind eye to the harm caused to children’s mental health when they become addicted to social media platforms. “There’s not a bone in my body that doubts social media played a role in leading her to that final, irreversible decision,” Hinks said. “This could be your story.” Related Articles National News | Biden creates Native American boarding school national monument to mark era of forced assimilation National News | How should the opioid settlements be spent? Those hit hardest often don’t have a say National News | ‘Polarization’ is Merriam-Webster’s 2024 word of the year National News | Supreme Court rejects appeal challenging Hawaii gun licensing requirements under Second Amendment National News | Supreme Court rejects appeal from Boston parents over race bias in elite high school admissions Common Sense Media, a sponsor of the bill, said it plans to lobby for similar proposals in other states. California in the past decade has positioned itself as a leader in regulating and fighting the tech industry to bolster online safety for children. The state was the first in 2022 to bar online platforms from using users’ personal information in ways that could harm children. It was one of the states that sued Meta in 2023 and TikTok in October for deliberately designing addictive features that keep kids hooked on their platforms. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, also signed several bills in September to help curb the effects of social media on children, including one to prohibit social media platforms from knowingly providing addictive feeds to children without parental consent and one to limit or ban students from using smartphones on school campus. Federal lawmakers have held hearings on child online safety and legislation is in the works to force companies to take reasonable steps to prevent harm. The legislation has the support of X owner Elon Musk and the President-elect’s son, Donald Trump Jr . Still, the last federal law aimed at protecting children online was enacted in 1998, six years before Facebook’s founding.None
NoneStarting in 2010, Tess Waresmith spent three years working on a cruise ship, first as a high-diver and acrobat, and then as a shopping guide for vacationers. For someone who had graduated from college a year earlier, it was a huge opportunity, Waresmith says. Not only was this a paying gig in an economy otherwise ravaged by recession, but food and living expenses on the ship were covered. “Over a couple year period, I thought to myself, ‘This is my chance to save as much as possible ,” Waresmith says. Know the news with the 7NEWS app: Download today After a couple years of dutifully socking away cash, a friend aboard the ship suggested that she could be doing more with her funds than let them sit in the bank. “He was just like, ‘Tess, you can use the money you’re hoarding to buy things that make you more money,’” she says. “I knew that investing was a thing, but I’d never thought about it from that frame.” Waresmith, now 36, took that advice and ran with it. She currently has more than $US1 ($A1.6) million in stocks, real estate and other investments. In 2021, she founded financial education firm Wealth with Tess , with the aim of helping others follow her path while avoiding some of the pitfalls. In those early years, Waresmith remembers one pitfall in particular. “With stock market investing, I was really afraid to do it wrong, so I hired a financial adviser, and they made a lot of really bad decisions on my behalf,” she says. “I was paying over 2 per cent in fees. They sold me an annuity better suited for people in their 50s. I was 26.” Here’s how she says you can avoid falling into a similar trap. Educate yourself: ‘It’s tough to identify red flags if you don’t have basic knowledge’ Waresmith did what a lot of experts might have suggested: hire a professional. But since she wasn’t too familiar with finance, Waresmith didn’t know that the advisor she chose was running a suboptimal strategy on her behalf. “It’s tough to identify red flags if you don’t have basic knowledge of investing. And when I say basic knowledge, I mean reading one or two books or taking one course,” she says. “You don’t have to have a Ph.D. in investing or be an analyst, but I didn’t really see red flags, because I wouldn’t have even been able to recognise them back then.” It took her a while to realize that her portfolio was lagging the market — both because her adviser had chosen underperforming mutual funds and because high fees were eating into her returns . Rather than charging a flat rate , her adviser charged a fee equivalent to 1 per cent of the value of her portfolio, plus a 0.25 per cent to use the adviser’s online investing platform. Some of the actively mutual funds her adviser chose came with expense ratios north of 0.75 per cent. The strategy, Waresmith eventually realised, was meant to make things more complicated than necessarily. “These were actively managed mutual funds and there were dozens of them,” she says. “It was way over-engineered.” Then there was the annuity, an often expensive financial instrument meant to provide income for retirees in exchange for fronting a lump sum of money. Waresmith put $US20,000 in — money she hasn’t been able to recoup. “When I turn 60, I’ll get a couple of bucks a month, or something from that,” she says. “It was a big mistake. No one should have sold me that.” Keep things simple: ‘Index funds are a great way to get started’ Once she realised she was being charged for an overly complex, underperforming plan, Waresmith cut ties with her adviser and endeavoured to keep things simple. Instead of paying an expensive adviser to manage expensive funds, she opened her own account and invested in low-cost index funds. The advantages of investing this way are well documented. Index funds aim to replicate the performance of a market index, rather than trying to outperform it. While some active managers manage to beat the market, the vast majority don’t. Over the 10 years that ended in June 2024, about 29 per cent of active funds survived and outpaced their average indexed peer, according to Morningstar . Funds that track popular indexes, such as the S&P 500, give investors exposure to a broad array of stocks and come with very low costs. “Index funds are a great way to get started and to understand the basics of the stock market and to get your money invested in a really diversified, low-fee way,” Waresmith says. Advice given in this article is general in nature. Always seek your own professional advice taking into account your personal circumstances before making any financial decisions.
Provocative Book Challenges Political Norms - The Ranting of an Uneducated Reactionary
