What Brazil can teach CA when it comes to kids and tech

Compared to the rest of the country, California has been a pioneer in regulating potentially harmful uses of technology.

But how does it compare to the rest of the world?

That’s a question we’re increasingly interested in answering at CalMatters — and that we try and answer today, with a wide-angle look at how laws protecting children online have evolved in California and how they compare not only to what has come out of the U.S. Congress but to a package of laws that has emerged in Brazil.

We reported this story in partnership with Agência Pública, Brazil’s first nonprofit investigative newsroom. Pública’s Maria Martha Bruno worked with CalMatters’ Colin Lecher to show how California’s laws stack up against the ECA Digital, a comprehensive children’s privacy act enacted this year in the face of tech industry lobbying.

One policy California might be well served to steal, according to an expert: Granular controls for parents on social media features in content, which allow limits on several distinct types of activity, like automatic playback and messaging.

But the bigger lesson for the state may be in what not to do, according to some observers: Bending to tech industry influence.

• Ed Howard, of the University of San Diego, to CalMatters: “Our system is uniquely vulnerable to the power of that money.”

That influence will be tested later this year as the Legislature and governor consider the fate of bills to further safeguard children’s use of chatbots and to keep them away from addictive social media feeds.

Read more.

California college professors are carefully navigating how to teach students about César Chávez following accusations of sexual abuse committed by the labor rights leader, writes Khadeejah Khan of CalMatters’ College Journalism Network.

In March The New York Times published a bombshell investigation that revealed Chávez had allegedly raped and sexually abused women and girls who were part of the United Farm Workers. California colleges moved swiftly to remove his name from campus memorials, statues and student centers. 

Alina Mendez, a professor of Chicano and Latin American studies at Fresno State, is changing her approach to focus more on local leaders and histories of the farmworker movements. She and her students agreed that they should still learn about Chávez while holding him accountable.

• Mendez: “There’s this collective grief … of ‘If César Chávez is no longer our hero, then who do we look up to?’ That’s why I’ve been insisting that (we) look at our local communities. Let’s look around us and see other people who very much sacrificed a lot of time, a lot of resources, a lot of sweat, to make those successes possible.”

Read more.

Federal agents used racial slurs — including “wet” and “tonk” — to identify people to target while conducting sweeps in Los Angeles, report CalMatters’ Sergio Olmos and Wendy Fry.

On Monday the American Civil Liberties Union cited that language in its ongoing lawsuit over last year’s raids, arguing that agents operated outside the law by racial profiling Latinos when conducting “suspicionless and discriminatory” detentions.

The filing included body camera footage and dispositions from agents. In text messages, agents described people as “tonks,” a derogatory term Border Patrol agents have used, reportedly derived from the sound a heavy item, like a flashlight, makes on a migrant’s skull.

The filings show new evidence that undermines the administration’s argument to the U.S. Supreme Court that agents relied on specific intelligence about individuals instead of race when deciding who to stop, according to the plaintiffs’ legal team.

Read more.

A new ruling by the state’s Supreme Court upholds limits on how much cashed-out vacation public employees can count toward their pensions. Read more from CalMatter’s Adam Ashton.