CAI’s Ed Howard, Senior Policy Advocate, Quoted on Social Media Protections in California by The Los Angeles Times

SAN DIEGO – University of San Diego (USD) School of Law Children’s Advocacy Institute’s (CAI) Ed Howard, Senior Policy Advocate, was quoted in a story reported in The Los Angeles Times titled, “Online child safety advocates urge California lawmakers to increase protections.”

California is leading the way in legislative restrictions on social media and artificial intelligence. During the recent legislative session, Governor Newsom signed a slate of legislation intended to make the internet safer, particularly for minors.  However, Newsom vetoed what was the most aggressive bill saying it was too broad and could prevent children from accessing AI altogether.

According to the article, Assembly Bill 1064 would have prohibited making companion chatbots available to minors if the chatbots were “foreseeably” capable of promoting certain behaviors, like self-harm, disordered eating or violent acts. It would also have required independent safety audits on AI programs for children.

Ed Howard, senior counsel and policy advocate for CAI, said one of its goals for next year is to give more teeth to two current laws.

The first requires social media platforms to provide a mechanism for minors to report and remove images of themselves being sexually abused. The second requires platforms to create a similar reporting mechanism for victims of cyberbullying.

Howard said the major platforms, like TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, have either not complied or made the reporting process “incredibly difficult.”

“The existence of such imagery haunts the survivors of these crimes,” he said. “There will be a bill this year to clean up the language in [those laws] to make sure they can’t get away with it.”

Howard believes legislators from both sides of the aisle are committed to finding solutions. “I’ve never before seen the kind of bipartisan fury that I have seen directed at these [tech] companies,” he said.

Read the full article by Katie King in The Los Angeles Times.

About the Children’s Advocacy Institute

The Children's Advocacy Institute (CAI), founded at the nonprofit University of San Diego School of Law in 1989, is one of the nation's premiere academic, research, and advocacy organizations working to improve the lives of children and youth, with special emphasis on improving the child protection and foster care systems and enhancing resources that are available to youth aging out of foster care.

In its academic component, CAI trains law students and attorneys to be effective child advocates throughout their legal careers. Its Child Advocacy Clinic gives USD Law students three distinct clinical opportunities to advocate on behalf of children and youth, and its Dependency Counsel Training Program provides comprehensive training to licensed attorneys engaged in or contemplating Dependency Court practice.

CAI's research and advocacy component, conducted through its offices in San Diego, Sacramento, and Washington, D.C., seeks to leverage change for children and youth through impact litigation, regulatory and legislative advocacy, and public education. Active primarily at the federal and state levels, CAI's efforts are multi-faceted—comprehensively and successfully embracing all tools of public interest advocacy to improve the lives of children and youth. To support CAI’s work, please visit law.sandiego.edu/caigift.

About the University of San Diego School of Law

Each year, USD educates approximately 800 Juris Doctor and graduate law students from throughout the United States and around the world. The law school is best known for its offerings in the areas of business and corporate law, constitutional law, intellectual property, international and comparative law, public interest law and taxation.

USD School of Law is one of the 88 law schools elected to the Order of the Coif, a national honor society for law school graduates. The law school’s faculty is a strong group of outstanding scholars and teachers with national and international reputations and currently ranks 34th nationally among U.S. law faculties in scholarly impact and 35th nationally in past-year faculty downloads on the Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN). The school is accredited by the American Bar Association and is a member of the Association of American Law Schools. Founded in 1954, the law school is part of the University of San Diego, a private, independent, Roman Catholic university chartered in 1949.