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Today, two nurses from the Providence St. Joseph Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners Team tell about the free service they provide to the community, assisting victims of rape or other forms of sexual assault. It’s a fairly powerful conversation and you might want to avoid it if those topics disturb you. But these women are amazing professionals.

If you’ve been sexually assaulted, call law enforcement and/or the North Coast Rape Crisis Team. The Rape Crisis hotlines are open 24/7. Here are the numbers to call:

• In Humboldt: (707) 445-2881
• In Del Norte: (707) 465-2851

Above: The Outpost’s John Kennedy O’Connor speaks with nurses Jennifer Hovie and Kristen Hansen of the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners team. A transcript can be found below.

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JOHN KENNEDY O’CONNOR:

Well, welcome to another Humboldt Conversation. I’m here today in Providence St. Joseph Hospital with Jennifer and Kristen, who are practice nurses. Thank you so much for joining us today. And here at the hospital, there is an incredible group of practice nurses, of which these two ladies are part of the team, who make up the SANE team, and that’s the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners. And you work, actually, in the wider community as well with the SART team. But tell us a little bit about the role that you have within this particular practice group.

JENNIFER HOVIE:

So our role is to provide medical care to people that have been sexually assaulted. So what we’re doing is just providing trauma-informed care to people that have experienced a sexual assault, and then as part of that medical care we’re also collecting evidence that we then pass on to law enforcement so that it can be analyzed for DNA.

O’CONNOR:

And you do in fact work very closely with law enforcement because this is part of the wider Humboldt SART effort, but this is something very much hospital-specific, isn’t it, that within here we are within your particular practice group.

KRISTEN HANSEN:

So we coordinate with law enforcement and North Coast Rape Crisis to perform evidentiary exams for victims of sexual assault in Humboldt and Del Norte counties and occasionally outside of that scope too. And we are the only group locally that does this. And so victims are not required to interact with law enforcement. When they are interacting with law enforcement, law enforcement will contact the team and schedule an exam for evidence collection. And for people who don’t feel safe reporting to law enforcement or interacting with law enforcement, Rape Crisis will coordinate with us to do an exam to collect evidence in the event that the survivor later feels comfortable pursuing the case.

O’CONNOR:

I suppose in my head I always think of sexual assault against women, but of course you do actually have experienced sexual assault against men as well, don’t you, in your line of work?

HOVIE:

So our team and our services encompass everything from birth to death. And so we have children that come in for exams, we have adolescents, adults, we have elderly people that have been assaulted — anyone who needs the services. 

HANSEN:

Regardless of gender or sexual orientation.

O’CONNOR:

When we arrived at the hospital today, you took us on a little bit of a tour, but there’s a very good reason for that, isn’t there? Privacy is obviously very important for anybody who is coming to the hospital in these circumstances.

HOVIE:

Absolutely. So one of the things that we emphasize to the survivors that come forward is that this encounter is very private, that we do take photos during our exam. These photos aren’t available to every medical provider, that they are closely guarded and they actually just go to law enforcement. That the details of their exam are not available to every person who ever accesses their chart. That it’s it’s a very private thing that we’re doing and we guard it closely.

HANSEN:

Even though it’s at the hospital, it’s not part of their medical record. None of this information is shared with anybody here. If they go to their doctor next week, their doctor wouldn’t know that they were here, couldn’t access any of that. And the other thing that we like to really emphasize with this is that this is all about choice and respecting survivors needs and their need to report. So of course, we wanna help people and empower them. But everything they do here is with respect to their choice, what they wanna do. If they can refuse any part of the exam, they can stop the exam at any time. They’re not forced to interact with us. They’re not forced to do anything that they’re not comfortable with. They’ve already had their choices taken from them. So it’s very important to us as nurses to respect that and support them in any way that we can — through privacy, through making sure nobody has to know, no one has to be involved. And they don’t have to tell us or participate in any part of the exam that they’re not comfortable with.

O’CONNOR:

And that, I think, as you were saying earlier, is one of the reasons why this particular space is very private, etc., because obviously if it took place in say the A&E area you run the risk of people being recognized.

HOVIE:

Absolutely. And then we’re doing an interview — they’re telling us what happened — and so we don’t want them to be overheard, either.

O’CONNOR:

You did say earlier that sometimes children are accompanying the victim, but you do make sure there is a policy for that as well.

HOVIE:

Right, and if the victim is a child, or the survivor is a child, then we make sure that we’ve separated the parent and the child for the interview portion, because there is a concern that if the child hears the parent’s concerns over and over, that they will incorporate that into their own memories, essentially, and kind of believe that that was true and correct, and it just kind of influences them. So we try and make sure that we’re separating them for that interview portion.

O’CONNOR:

Now, you were saying earlier that this is … obviously, you’re taking evidence, you’re gathering evidence, but you’re also providing medical care and medical support for somebody who may be seriously injured through an assault.

HOVIE:

So if we have someone who does require medical care, then obviously that takes precedence over evidence collection. So a lot of what we’re doing is just ensuring that if someone … and sometimes because of a trauma response, people’s recollection of what happened exactly and what events took place is a little spotty and it comes back in little bits and pieces. And so sometimes during my interview, I’ll find out that they were indeed strangled and that they had X, Y, and Z symptoms. And so that will just alert me that they need to be screened by a medical provider and we’ll take care of that. Sometimes we find injuries that would actually require, like, sutures or if there’s a foreign object that has been left behind and needs removal from someone other than me, then I would definitely enlist a higher level of medical care for those concerns.

O’CONNOR:

One thing I think to stress is you are not, although you obviously work hand in hand with law enforcement, you’re not law enforcement, you really are looking at the patient and the patient care and whatever happens in the next stage is really the next stage.

HANSEN:

Part of the clarification of our role is we are not … Sometimes people come and they want to know did something happen to me or did something happen to my child. And that’s not our determination or that’s not what we’re here for. We’re not here to do, like, a well child check and let you know if something happened. In most cases there is no physical evidence of sexual assault. Particularly in children. It’s very hard to do a physical exam and definitively prove sexual abuse or sexual assault. and particularly.

In adults, we can report our findings, but we can’t tell you yes, you someone was raped or yes, someone was sexually assaulted, except an extremely limited child cases. So we perform an exam, we look for medical conditions that need to be treated, we collect DNA evidence, but we we don’t make a determination. We can’t tell you, “Yes, something definitely happened.” If someone has had a complete blackout of events and they don’t remember anything or perhaps they’re too traumatized remember exactly what happened. We collect evidence. We take pictures of injuries we report that to law enforcement. And then what happens from there is up to the law enforcement investigation and so on and so forth.

O’CONNOR:

And you are a team of five, I believe, practice nurses, and this is a service that’s 24-7. People can just walk in, they don’t need to make any sort of appointment or anything.

HOVIE:

Well, saying that they can just walk in as a little … they do need to contact us ahead of time via law enforcement or through North Coast Rape Crisis. And if they’re not interested in participating with either of those entities, then we can certainly still do an exam for them.

HANSEN:

So our team is comprised of five nurses. We all have full-time jobs that we do as well. So we cover 24 seven call, but in that time we also have to work. Jen works three 12-hour shifts. I work five eight-hour shifts. So we do have to schedule, pre-schedule exams around our regular. And luckily we don’t do enough exams to need people here 24 hours a day, but that does mean that they have to be scheduled.

And because there’s only five of us, we keep our personal contact information private. There’s a single line that people call to schedule an exam and only Rape Crisis and law enforcement have that contact information. And they should be the only people really contacting us.

O’CONNOR:

That is the first protocol always, law enforcement or the Rape Crisis line.

HOVIE:

If someone presents to the emergency department reporting a sexual assault and says that they’d like an exam but that they don’t want to participate with law enforcement or rape crisis, and we can certainly accommodate that as well. We really do encourage them to participate with rape crisis because the level of support, emotional support and follow up with legal if that’s what they’re doing, counseling…

I mean, Rape Crisis, is an invaluable resource within our community and just having the exam done is probably not going to actually encompass or satisfy all of the needs of a survivor. I mean there’s a huge emotional component that isn’t going to be addressed entirely by doing this exam.

O’CONNOR:

Well Jennifer, Kristen, this has been very interesting. It’s very traumatic to listen to but certainly I think this is an incredible service and I think people really do need to know that this is available at the hospital. So thank you very much indeed for joining us today. Very much appreciate it.

Thank you for joining us for another Humboldt Conversation and join us for another one very soon.

The California Reparations Task Force published documents Monday indicating it plans to recommend the state apologize for racism and slavery and consider “down payments” of varying amounts to eligible African American residents.

The documents, numbering more than 500 pages, do not contain an overall price tag for reparations, but they do include ways the state could calculate how much money African Americans in California have lost since 1850, when the state was established, through today due to certain government practices.

The loss calculations would vary depending on type of racial harm and how long a person has lived in California. The loss estimates range from $2,300 per person per year of residence for the over-policing of Black communities, to $77,000 total per person for Black-owned business losses and devaluations over the years.

The state-appointed task force faces a July 1 deadline to make reparations recommendations to the Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom. Task force leaders have said they expect the Legislature to come up with actual reparations amounts.

The task force also is recommending a variety of policy changes to counteract discrimination.

“It is critical that we compensate, but not just compensate. We also need to evaluate policy that continues to hold us back,” said Monica Montgomery Steppe, a San Diego city council member who is on the task force. She spoke at a “listening session” in San Diego Saturday.

Who would get reparations?

The task force documents discuss two kinds of reparations: those arising from particular instances of discrimination or harm that require an individual to file a claim, and those that involve distributing money or benefits to all eligible Black Californians for racial harm the entire community experienced.

A recent example of an individual claim was Bruce’s Beach, a beachfront property and resort that the city of Manhattan Beach seized from a Black family nearly 100 years ago. Recently, partly because of the task force, government leaders returned the land deed to descendants of the Bruce family, who re-sold it to Los Angeles County for $20 million.

It is one of the few times a Black family was restored property taken by a local government.

“It is critical that we compensate, but not just compensate. We also need to evaluate policy that continues to hold us back.”
— Monica Montgomery Steppe, Reparations Task Force and San Diego city councilmember

Eligibility for reparations continues to be a controversy. The task force in March 2022 voted to limit potential compensation to descendants of free and enslaved Black people who were in the United States in the 19th century. The group narrowly rejected a proposal to include all Black people, including recent immigrants, regardless of lineage.

Everyone in the eligible class should be compensated, the task force report says, even if they can’t prove they suffered a specific harm.

“The State of California created laws and policies discriminating against and subjugating free and enslaved African Americans and their descendants,” the report says. “In doing so, these discriminatory policies made no distinctions between these individuals; the compensatory remedy must do the same.”

The final report, much like the task force’s previous interim report, lays out the history of systemic racism and ongoing injustices in California.

Costs of racial damage

The latest batch of documents also urges that eligible people be compensated in cash, sooner rather than later. The records instruct the Legislature to begin with “down payments” rather than waiting for full loss calculations.

The final report suggests dollar figures for certain categories of racial damage:

• For mass incarceration and the over-policing of Black communities, it estimates a loss per person of $115,260, or $2,352 for each year they lived in California from 1971 to 2020, corresponding to the national War on Drugs.
• For housing discrimination, it offers two methods of loss calculation. One method based on gaps between Black and white “housing wealth” would peg losses at $145,847 per person. The other method, based on governments’ “redlining” history, including discriminatory lending and zoning, would calculate Black residents’ losses at $148,099 per person — or $3,366 for each year they lived in California from 1933 to 1977.
• For injustices and discrimination in health, it estimates $13,619 per person for each year lived in California, or $966,921 total for someone living about 71 years — the average life expectancy of Black residents in California in 2021.

The reparations program would be overseen by a new state agency that would determine eligibility and distribute funds, the report says. The agency also would be responsible for helping individuals document and provide evidence for specific injustices.

Eligible Black residents should not expect cash payments anytime soon. The state Legislature and Newsom will decide whether any reparations are paid, and it’s unclear what they will do with the task force recommendations.

“This is the time where we really need the voice of the public,” said Khansa T. Jones-Muhammad, also known as Friday Jones, a member of Los Angeles’ reparations advisory commission. “This is the time to get your churches together. This is the time to get your school boards together.”

Jones made the comments during the listening session in San Diego.

Non-cash reparations

Some task force members have been dismayed at the amount of attention paid to the dollar figures under discussion. The final report provides dozens of policy recommendations aimed at preventing further discrimination and harm against Black residents.

“The biggest fight is implementation of all these recommendations, “ Montgomery Steppe said. “After the task force issues its final report, those recommendations need strong support in California’s Legislature and the government. It will take all hands on deck to ensure we push for a policy change from our state legislature.”

The task force is scheduled to meet again at 9 a.m. Saturday at Lisser Hall at Northeastern University, 5000 MacArthur Blvd., in Oakland. The meeting will be live streamed.

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CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

HUMBOLDT TODAY: A local woman has been crowned Miss Indian World 2023!; the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors will consider an anti-hate resolution; plus, your latest weather and our daily poll in today’s online newscast with John Kennedy O’Connor.

FURTHER READING: 

• In its Second Report of the Year, the Humboldt County Civil Grand Jury Tackles the ‘Dysfunctional’ State of Child Welfare Services in the County and the ‘Toxic’ Work Atmosphere Within the Department
• Humboldt Supervisors to Brainstorm Ways to Maintain Roads, Consider an Anti-Hate Resolution in Response to ‘Vicious and Hateful’ Message Aimed at Black, LGBTQ+ Communities
• YÉESHIIP! Local Woman Brings Home Miss Indian World Title
• California’s Next Housing Crackdown Could Force Cities to Plan More Homeless Shelters
• Lawmakers Want More Social Media Regulation. Here Are the Legal Hurdles They Could Face

Image from the title page of the report

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PREVIOUSLY:

• ‘IT’S OK TO VOTE’: Grand Jury Issues Its First Report of This Cycle, Focused on Humboldt County Election Integrity

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Today, the Humboldt County Civil Grand Jury released the second of its reports for the 2022-2023 year — and if anyone expected it to continue on in the celebratory vein of the first one, on the county’s election systems .. well, they are in for a disappointment.

This second report takes aim at what the GJ calls the “dysfunctional” state of child welfare services in Humboldt County — and not just the county department nominally in charge of those things, but the county’s entire system for handling children who are victims of abuse or neglect.

In short, while the Grand Jury found that the people who work for the county’s Child Welfare Services division care deeply about the health and welfare of the children they work to protect, there are serious problems with morale, stress, overwork and burnout among employees — much of it, according to the Grand Jury, caused by understaffing. 

Not only has this led to what several people characterized as a “toxic” work environment within the department; additionally, it has led directly to the missing of state-mandated paperwork deadlines dealing with cases of abuse or neglect.

What to do? The GJ’s main recommendations all revolve around beefing up and streamlining the recruitment process for new employees. Currently, the jury says, the Child Welfare Services department only has a recruitment relationship with the Social Work department at Cal Poly Humboldt. There are many more pools to draw from.

Download the complete Grand Jury report here. Press release from the Humboldt County Grand Jury:

The 2022-23 Humboldt County Civil Grand Jury) Grand Jury has just released its first report of the year entitled Humboldt County Child Welfare Services and the Courts: Late Reports, Dysfunctional Systems, and Traumatized Children.

The 2022-23 Humboldt County Civil Grand Jury received a complaint that Child Welfare Services routinely misses statutory deadlines for submitting reports to the Humboldt County Superior Court.

These delays create unnecessary stress for children and families.

Over the last decade the Humboldt County Civil Grand Jury has investigated numerous complaints about the Department of Health and Human Services. While the nature of those complaints have differed, the introduction to the 2015-2016 Humboldt County Civil Grand Jury report stating—“those complaints conveyed dysfunctional work guidelines, distrustful working relationships, unresponsive upper management, mass resignations, and an unsupportive work environment” —largely reflects the essence of our current report. This 2022-23 report argues for significant changes in Child Welfare Services.

Child Welfare Services is charged with one of the most valued functions of our county government. Their job is to intervene when abuse or neglect is suspected or evident and make the best decisions for that child’s well-being. Not having enough social workers has resulted in case overload and missed mandated court reports. Institutional roadblocks regarding staffing, overtime, and child and family attorney interactions with County Counsel have all slowed the court process and possible family reunification.

Everyone we interviewed connected with CWS for this investigation has demonstrated a genuine passion for improving the lives of children here in Humboldt County. However, they all confirmed that the lack of staffing, recruitment and retention, lengthy hiring and vetting processes, high caseloads, long hours, high staff turnover, absenteeism, moral injury, and bureaucratic red tape is causing job burnout.

This report examines the causes and effects of the court report delays and the understaffed departments at CWS. It looks at ways CWS can employ non-traditional ways to improve staff recruitment, hiring, and retention, which ultimately will lead to the timely permanent placement of our children, Humboldt County’s most precious resource.

The intent of the 2022-23 Humboldt County Civil Grand Jury is to support an understaffed and overworked Child Welfare Services agency and the child dependency legal system by informing the citizens of Humboldt County of its findings and making long-term positive impacts with its recommendations.

Today Humboldt County is insanely proud of Eureka resident Tori McConnell, who was named Miss Indian World 2023 at this weekend’s Gathering of Nations powwow in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

McConnell, who is of Karuk and Yurok descent, tells us in the video above that she’s a graduate of the Native American Studies program at UC Davis, and was just accepted into the graduate program in Community and Environment at Cal Poly Humboldt, where she’s planning a course of study on traditional tattooing techniques.

Congratulations, Tori!

All over California, cities are falling far short when it comes to providing enough shelter for their homeless communities.

More than 69,000 homeless residents live in Los Angeles County, for instance, but that county has just over 21,000 beds in shelters and temporary housing programs.

It’s a similar story in Sacramento County, which counted nearly 9,300 unhoused residents in its last census, but has just over 3,000 shelter and temporary housing beds.

Those massive gaps – which ensure thousands of people remain homeless – are visible in cities throughout California. But despite constant reassurances from Gov. Gavin Newsom and lawmakers that getting people off the street is a top priority, there’s no state requirement for cities and counties to make sure they have enough shelters or housing for homeless residents.

A bill working its way through the Legislature could change that, and potentially lead to sanctions against local governments that fail to plan for the needs of homeless Californians.

Senate Bill 7 would — for the first time — require cities and counties to plan enough beds for everyone living without a place to call home. It would go beyond just temporary shelter, also including permanent housing placements.

Its author, Sen. Catherine Blakespear, a Democrat from Encinitas, called it a “transformational idea” that could help move the needle on homelessness where other attempts have failed.

“Everything we’re doing currently, it will result in homelessness growing,” Blakespear said in an interview. “It will not result in homelessness going down.”

California cities’ housing goals

Currently, the state makes sure every city and county plans for new housing through a process known as the regional housing needs allocation. In all, the state requires cities and counties to plan for 2.5 million new homes over the next eight years — about 25% of which must be affordable for very low-income occupants.

But this method doesn’t require cities and counties to plan any housing that is specifically for homeless residents.

If the bill passes, local officials would have to include homeless housing in their plans. How much is yet to be determined, but it would be based on each city’s point-in-time census count of its homeless population. Ideally, Blakespear said, the plans would require a unit for every single person counted.

The idea comes at a time when the state is forcing local governments to take more responsibility for providing housing.

Newsom’s administration sued the Orange County coastal enclave of Huntington Beach earlier this year for failing to adopt a housing plan. And cities that flout state housing law also are subject to the “builder’s remedy,” which allows developers to bypass local zoning laws for certain projects.

Blakespear’s bill has gained some early support from housing activists, and recently passed out of the Senate Governance and Finance Committee by a 6-2 vote. While some local leaders are sure to chafe under yet another state-imposed housing requirement, several big-city mayors are tentatively supportive.

“The final details in the bill matter,” Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg said in an emailed statement, “but any bill that moves the state and cities closer to making housing and services for the homeless a mandatory obligation for government is a step in the right direction.”

Data collected by Sacramento County’s homeless services agencies shows the county has 3,080 beds in its year-round shelters and transitional housing programs — 6,198 fewer than its estimated total number of unhoused residents.

Los Angeles County has 21,100 placements in its temporary housing, safe parking and motel programs, according to a county dashboard — not enough to accommodate even a third of its unhoused population.

Advocates want more money for homeless housing

At a recent hearing, some bill critics wondered where the money would come from to build all this extra housing.

“The funding’s going to be incredibly critical,” said Jason Rhine, assistant director of legislative affairs for the League of California Cities. “If we do not have the money, we will not be able to house individuals.”

The league hasn’t officially opposed the bill, but says it has concerns.

Blakespear wants to pair her bill with a new state fund, which would help cities, counties and nonprofits build housing for people who are homeless or at risk of losing their homes. But it remains to be seen how much — if any — money the Legislature allocates, as the state faces a budget deficit of at least $22.5 billion this year.

Some aspects of the legislation are still up for negotiation. It’s unclear what type of homeless housing cities and counties could use to fulfill the new requirements. Blakespear envisions it would include both permanent and temporary — meaning apartments, but also shelters, RV sites, single-room-occupancy hotels, and more.

It’s also unclear exactly what each city and county would be on the hook for under the new bill, and what the penalties would be for noncompliance. The state’s current process requires cities to plan for housing, including zoning for it and removing roadblocks from its construction, but doesn’t require them to get it built.

Much of the housing cities plan for during that state-mandated process never gets constructed. And low-income housing fares the worst. In the last eight-year planning cycle, just 20% of the very-low-income units needed statewide were permitted.

The California Building Industry Association opposes Blakespear’s bill, worrying money to fund it would come from raising taxes and fees paid by homebuilders. Furthermore, existing law already requires cities and counties to assess their need for emergency shelter, said Cornelious Burke, the association’s vice president of legislative affairs.

Blakespear said she has no intention of using construction fees to cover the cost of her bill. And she disagreed the state’s existing shelter-assessment requirement renders her bill unnecessary.

“Those are just words,” she said. “That is not an actual obligation to provide anything for people who are unhoused.”

Ray Bramson of Destination: Home, a nonprofit that helps spearhead the homelessness response in Santa Clara County, said the bill could help get more homeless housing built. But it depends on how the details of the bill shake out, he said. For one thing, the bill should focus on permanent housing that comes with supportive services like mental health care – not on temporary shelter, Bramson said.

And, the bill must come with funding.

“If not,” he said, “then it’s just another goal that we’re going to struggle to meet collectively.”

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CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

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When Sophie Szew first downloaded Instagram at her 10th birthday party, she was exposed to a flurry of information that “promoted eating disorders,” she told California lawmakers. By 15, she said, she was following “every starvation regimen recommended” by Instagram’s “explore” page.

Szew, now 20, spoke in Sacramento at a Senate hearing in April in support of an expansive bill making its way through the Legislature. It would hold companies legally responsible for using algorithms and design features that addict young people.

“Standing with me today is a generation that knows all too well what it is like to be harmed by flawed systems,” she said.

The past few years have seen a steady drip of research and reporting about the effects of social media on teens. That has translated into a stream of legislative activity across the country, with several states passing or considering laws that regulate how social media companies do business.

In 2022, when researchers for a nonprofit created TikTok profiles posing as 13-year old girls in the U.S., U.K., Australia and Canada, they scrolled through videos served to them, stopping to watch and like videos about eating disorders, body image, and mental health. They found that TikTok recommended suicide content within 2.6 minutes and eating disorder content within 8 minutes.

In 2021, after a whistleblower leaked documents, the Wall Street Journal reported that researchers at Meta, formerly known as Facebook, found that 32% of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse. Meta owns Instagram..

CalMatters reached out to Twitter, Reddit, Mastodon, TikTok and Meta, which also owns WhatsApp, for comment. Twitter’s press inbox responded automatically with a poop emoji. Reddit, Mastodon, and TikTok did not respond.

In a statement, Meta’s Global Head of Safety, Antigone Davis, wrote that Meta wants teens to be safe online: “We don’t allow content that promotes suicide, self-harm or eating disorders, and of the content we remove or take action on, we identify over 99% of it before it’s reported to us.”

Rachel Holland, a Meta spokesperson, offered information on a variety of features teens and parents can use to shape what young people see, like a setting that makes new teen users less likely to encounter sensitive content, and a feature that nudges teens when they’ve been scrolling through the same kind of content for a while.

What the California bill does

The bill takes aim at how social media companies serve up content to young people under 18. Specifically, it prohibits social media companies from using a design, algorithm, feature, or practice, that companies know (or should know) causes young people to:

• Develop an eating disorder, inflict harm on themselves or others, or become addicted to the social media platform;
• Receive content that facilitates the purchase of controlled substances, like opioids; that facilitates suicide by offering information on how to die by suicide; or facilitates the sale of guns illegally.

It covers social media companies that earn more than $100 million in revenue per year and have users in California. Companies that violate the law could get sued by public attorneys, and would face penalties of as much as $250,000 per violation.

But the bill also builds in a way for companies to protect themselves from lawsuits: By auditing their designs, algorithms, features, and more at least quarterly for their potential to cause the harms listed in the bill and correcting issues within 30 days.

“If you look at a bill like this, the crux of the problem is content.”

— Sophie Cope, Senior Staff Attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation

California isn’t the only state where legislators are aiming to regulate social media platforms. In March, Utah’s governor signed a similar bill into law, plus another law that institutes a social media curfew for Utah teens under 18 and requires teens to get their parents’ permission to set up social media accounts. Arkansas also passed a law requiring parental permission for teens to set up social media accounts. State legislators in New Jersey are considering a bill that prohibits social media companies from using features that addict kids, and lawmakers in Minnesota are also mulling a social media bill. Then, there are the bills that would regulate social media with a different aim: Texas passed a law that made it illegal to ban users based on their “viewpoints,” and Florida also passed a law restricting platforms’ ability to ban users.

On top of all the new proposals, there are a bevy of lawsuits ping-ponging their way through the courts that could reshape social media regulation. The Texas and Florida laws were challenged for violating the First Amendment; the Supreme Court will decide their fate. More than 80 cases have been grouped together in one jumbo lawsuit, in which plaintiffs say that the social media platforms are essentially defective products — like an exploding toaster — because they addict children.

California bill could face legal hurdles

If the California bill became law, would it be able to dodge and weave its way through legal challenges?

Tech industry lobbyists, as well as some digital rights advocates and internet law experts, say that the bill would immediately bump up against the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and federal law. Both outrank or “pre-empt” in lawyer-speak, California laws.

The bill runs afoul of the Constitution because the Supreme Court has generally interpreted the First Amendment as protecting the editorial decisions of publishers, said Sophie Cope, a senior staff attorney at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, which opposes the bill. Newspapers decide their layout, what goes on the front page and which images to use, Cope said. Social media platforms are doing similar things as online publishers when they make decisions about how content is displayed, shared, or promoted, she said.

This bill “goes directly at the heart of the editorial discretion of these platforms,” Cope said.

“It’s the First Amendment that restricts the ability of legislators to control the flow of information at children” to the degree legislators might want, agreed Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law and an expert on internet law. His example: a Supreme Court case from 1997 about whether a law prohibiting the transmission of porn or “obscene or indecent” messages to kids violated the first amendment. The Supreme Court decided unanimously that it did.

Ed Howard, senior counsel for the Children’s Advocacy Institute at the University of San Diego School of Law and a supporter of the bill, disagrees, and argues that the bill doesn’t violate the First Amendment, in part because the algorithms that prioritize what content gets displayed don’t have their own First Amendment rights. And, he said, “there is no blanket immunity to harm people through your speech.”

Then, there’s a federal law that could pose a problem for the California bill. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act generally protects tech companies from legal responsibility for content posted by users on their platforms. If, for example, someone posts a defamatory review of a restaurant on Yelp, the restaurant owner could sue the poster, but Yelp itself would be protected, said Cope.

So, a key question is whether the California bill is taking aim at features and algorithms that a social media company has designed — for which it may not be protected by Section 230 — or if it’s really requiring platforms to be accountable for content that users upload.

State Sen. Nancy Skinner, an Oakland Democrat who authored the bill, argues that the bill holds companies liable for their own products and practices, so it wouldn’t be preempted by Section 230. Part of the government’s job, she said, “is to protect consumers from harmful business practices. That’s a very classic role of government.”

But, said Cope with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “if you look at a bill like this, the crux of the problem is content.” The bill is structured to make platforms “responsible for bad content reaching young people,” so the federal law should pre-empt it, she said. The features, in other words, aren’t a problem when they’re showing #vanlife and knitting videos to young users, but when they’re serving up starvation diet tips, they are.

Public may be left in suspense

Last week the bill was sent to the Senate Appropriations Committee and added to a special pile of bills that the committee will analyze for costs and benefits. That pile of bills — known as the “suspense file” — is officially about budget analysis. Unofficially, it’s also a politically expedient place for lawmakers to kill bills without taking any heat. That’s because, unlike other votes that state legislators take, votes on suspense file bills are kept secret. If a bill never makes it out of the special pile, the public doesn’t know whose votes led to its demise.

A version of the bill was introduced last year. No legislator voted against it publicly, but the bill was put on suspense file and died there.

This year’s bill “could suffer that fate,” said Skinner, “but I’m hopeful that the amount of increased awareness, increased evidence and action by other states will hopefully put it in much better shape,” she said.

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CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.