US band The Strokes used their Coachella set to showcase the US-Israeli destruction of universities in Gaza and Iran, including Gaza’s al-Israa University.
Published On 20 Apr 202620 Apr 2026
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April 13 (UPI) — Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are considering more than a dozen bill proposals to protect children online and many approaches face free speech and privacy challenges.
At least 19 bills have been introduced and remain under consideration, proposing measures like age verification, restricting addictive designs, increasing parental controls and addressing content.
Jennifer Huddleston, senior fellow in technology policy for the Cato Institute, told UPI that the volume of proposals before Congress demonstrates the seriousness and complexity of issues related to child safety online.
“First, it does show that there are large public and policymaker questions about how young people are using social media,” Huddleston said. “However, that volume also shows that there’s not a general consensus on what, if anything, should be done in response to those concerns.”
Risks to children online
Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay, a nonprofit advocacy organization that supports policies to make the Internet safer and less addictive for children, told UPI that online platforms’ addictive designs are one of the key harms he hopes to see Congress address.
“Designing for compulsive use or addiction is at the top of the list,” Golin said. “With that, there’s the fact that the way these platforms are designed often makes kids more vulnerable to sextortion attempts or sexual predators. It makes it easier for drug dealers to prey on kids. It makes it more likely that kids are going to experience cyber bullying. So there’s a lot of ways in which these platforms are designed that lead to unsafe conditions for young people.”
The experts who spoke to UPI largely agree that the proposals in Congress are well intentioned, but striking a balance between protecting children and not infringing on the rights of all remains a difficult task.
“It’s not always an easy thing to do because there’s a lot of nuance that needs to go into it when you consider what information you’re collecting about the user,” Sara Kloek, vice president of education and youth policy for the Software Information Industry Association, told UPI. “How do you protect the safety and security of users, both children and adults, while protecting privacy and civil rights online?”
Paul Lekas, SIIA’s executive vice president of global public policy and government affairs, testified before the House subcommittee on commerce, manufacturing and trade in December when a slate of 18 online child safety bills were advanced. He shared SIIA’s recommendations for measures to improve safety, including minimizing the collection of data on minors and enhancing tools for users to protect their data.
Kloek said data minimization is a key tenet SIIA is calling for in Internet safety laws.
One of the more common proposals in Congress and internationally is the institution of age verification measures.
Australia implemented age requirements for popular social media platforms in December, banning children under the age of 16 from Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X, Reddit, YouTube, Twitch, Kick, Snapchat and Threads.
Kloek cautions that age verification requires more data collection of all users, including adults. In order to ban children under 16, users older than that must also verify their ages, often sharing personal information like government-issued identification.
“We are thinking about this in a way that bans aren’t necessarily the answer,” Kloek said. “We want to make sure there are safe spaces for youth online and a strict ban would likely drive some minors to places that are not safe.”
Golin agrees that outright banning children from social media could have an adverse effect.
“Approaches that require safety and privacy by design are better than trying to do social media bans,” he said. “I worry that what happens is if you just try and keep the kids off the platforms, they find a way of getting on anyway and then they’re on and they’re not protected at all.”
Kids Online Safety Act
There are at least two bills in Congress that Golin believes would be effective measures to curb the risks children may encounter online: the Kids Online Safety Act and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act.
The Kids Online Safety Act orders online platforms to take measures to mitigate bullying, violence, sexual exploitation and promotion of suicide. Social media platforms would be required to include options to disable addictive features, protect personal information and opt out of personalized recommendations.
The bill was introduced by Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. It has bipartisan support with 62 senators endorsing it.
“The Kids Online Safety Act is so important because it has that duty of care that says you have to ensure that the design of your platform is not contributing to compulsive use or cyberbullying or anxiety and depression or sexual exploitation,” Golin said. “Having that broad duty — it allows you to adapt. It allows the law to be flexible and adapt to how the platforms may evolve.”
The broad nature of the Kids Online Safety Act is also what has drawn criticism.
Aliya Bhatia, senior policy analyst for the Center for Democracy and Technology, told UPI that newer iterations of the Kids Online Safety Act are much improved over what was introduced in 2022, but it could carry unintended consequences.
“The duty of care has been narrowed and now is replaced with a section called ‘Addressing Harms to Minors. While that’s a really good sign, it is still overbroad and open to subjective interpretation,” Bhatia said. “I worry that we are, under the guise of protecting children, equipping political actors to decide what our kids should and should not see.”
When forced to make judgments about what content constitutes causing anxiety or mental distress to children, Bhatia says social media companies may limit access to a wide list of information, driven by partisan viewpoints.
“Anything from climate change to conflicts, to puberty to LGBTQ identity, depending on what they think the political actors that be don’t want them to see,” Bhatia said. “It also doesn’t address the root issue of a lot of the harms that we see online, which is privacy, which is the vast data collection on minors, on all users.”
Safety scorecard
Public Knowledge, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., that advocates for free expression and an open Internet, created a scorecard to evaluate the effectiveness of Internet safety bills in Congress. It grades the bills based on preserving Internet access, promoting safe design, risk-based approach, avoiding bans, encouraging autonomy of youth, meaningful enforcement mechanisms and research and transparency.
Sara Collins, director of government affairs for Public Knowledge, told UPI that the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act 2.0 is among the bills that would do the “least harm,” particularly the version that is under consideration in the House chamber.
“It is a very classic privacy bill, especially if you’re talking about the House version,” Collins said.
The Senate unanimously passed its version of COPPA 2.0 last month.
The bill expands on 1998’s Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act to incorporate children between the ages 13 and 16. The 1998 law only focuses on children 13 and under.
COPPA 2.0 bans targeting advertisements directed at children under 17, requires consent from parents before collecting information on minors, prohibits designs meant to encourage compulsive use and expands the definition of personal information to include biometric markers and geolocation.
Where the bill falls short on Public Knowledge’s scorecard is in transparency requirements and allowing researchers to access platform data for further study.
Among the proposals Collins has the most concern about is Sammy’s Law. The bill establishes a comprehensive infrastructure for parental surveillance of children’s online activity, including real-time tracking of messages, friends lists and usage.
“It’s very hard to see the long-term consequences of it,” Collins said. “The idea that surveillance infrastructure should be built into the Internet, social media, gaming platforms et cetera, so parents can better monitor their children is a very appealing one in the American political sphere.”
Collins said parental surveillance capabilities as proposed in Sammy’s Law has the potential to create two problems: taking autonomy away from children and normalizing surveillance.
“A child having different views or different beliefs than their parent is not harmful to the parent,” Collins said. “It also normalizes surveillance for children in a bad way. I don’t want the U.S. population to be normalized to constant ever-present surveillance of their communications, their posting, their movements throughout all of cyberspace.”
“If the entire U.S. child’s experience is mediated through that, as they become an adult, instead of your parent doing it, your government, your company or whatever starts doing it, that just becomes the climate you grew up in rather than what it is, which is a serious invasion of your privacy and your anonymity,” she continued.
Swiss musician To Athena has performed inside a cave in a melting glacier to highlight accelerating ice loss in the Alps. Scientists say the Morteratsch glacier is shrinking by around 50 metres a year, with the cave itself unlikely to survive another summer as temperatures rise.
Published On 12 Apr 202612 Apr 2026
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WASHINGTON — As President Trump assembled his Cabinet last week, he asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance to give an update on the Iran war.
Rubio, known for his hawkish views, gave an impassioned defense of the war, calling it “a favor” to the United States and the world.
Vance, who has long pushed for restraint in U.S. military intervention overseas, was more sedate. He said that the U.S. now has “options” it didn’t have a year ago and that it is important Iran does not get a nuclear weapon — before redirecting his remarks toward wishing the troops a happy Easter.
The exchange was a distillation of their diverging postures toward the war that their boss has launched in Iran. And it comes as some would-be Republican presidential candidates begin quietly courting officials in key states like New Hampshire in the early stages of the GOP’s next nomination fight.
With Vance and Rubio seen as the party’s strongest potential candidates in a 2028 primary, the two have to balance their roles in the Trump administration with their future political plans.
“It’s very obvious from the way that Rubio talks about Iran and the way that Vance talks about Iran that they are of different casts of mind,” said Curt Mills, the executive director of “The American Conservative” magazine and a vocal critic of the war. The Cabinet meeting episode was telling, he said, because it seemed as though Vance, discussing Easter, was “literally trying to talk about anything else other than the war.”
The White House addressed the Rubio-Vance relationship on Wednesday in an unsolicited statement after the initial publication of this article.
“President Trump has full confidence in both Vice President Vance and Secretary Rubio, who continue to be trusted voices within the administration,” said White House spokesperson Anna Kelly. “He values both the vice president and the secretary’s opinions and wealth of expertise.”
It’s too soon to forecast how Republican voters might feel about the war next spring, when the 2028 contest is expected to begin in earnest, but the risks for both Vance and Rubio are acute. Rubio’s full-throated support for the war could come back to haunt him depending on how the conflict develops. Vance, meanwhile, would risk accusations of disloyalty if he were to stray too far from Trump, but struggles to square an appearance of support for the war with his past comments.
Vance, who served in the Marines in the Iraq war, has said that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, but he’s long been skeptical of foreign military interventions.
Trump seemed to allude that Vance may have held onto that position in private discussions about Iran, telling reporters that Vance was “philosophically a little bit different than me” at the outset of the conflict.
“I think he was maybe less enthusiastic about going, but he was quite enthusiastic,” Trump said.
Though Vance has been careful in how he speaks about the war, what he’s not saying has been conspicuous. On a March 13 trip to North Carolina, he was twice asked by reporters if he had concerns about the conflict. Each time, he said it was important that Trump could have conversations with advisers “without his team then running their mouths to the American media.”
A few days later at the White House, when Vance was again asked if he had concerns, he accused the reporter of “trying to drive a wedge between members of the administration, between me and the president.”
For Rubio, long before he became the country’s chief diplomat, he voiced support for muscular foreign policy and American intervention abroad.
Days into the war, he told reporters that it was “a wise decision” for Trump to launch the operation, that there “absolutely was an imminent threat” from Iran and that the operation “needed to happen.”
State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott pointed to last week’s Cabinet meeting as evidence that “the entire administration is in lockstep behind President Trump.”
“Secretary Rubio is proud to be on the team implementing President Trump’s policies, and he has a great relationship, both professionally and personally, with the entire team,” Pigott said.
The apparent split between Rubio and Vance on the Iran war is emblematic of the divide starting to cleave within the Republican Party. A recent survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found some divisions within the GOP on Iran, with about half of Republicans saying the U.S. military action has been “about right.” Relatively few Republicans, about 2 in 10, say military action has not gone far enough, while about one-quarter say it’s gone too far.
While some conservatives have described the war as a betrayal, many other Republicans have cheered on the president’s actions.
Alice Swanson, a 62-year-old who attended Vance’s event in North Carolina, said she wants Vance and Rubio to run together in 2028 but favors the vice president.
“I think he fully believes and supports exactly what his convictions are,” Swanson said.
Swanson acknowledged, nonetheless, that Vance has been an outspoken opponent of interventionist policy but has been quieter on the subject since the war. “I can see both sides,” Swanson said after expressing full support for Trump’s decisions.
Tracy Brill, a 62-year-old from Rocky Mount, spoke highly of Rubio, but declared, “I love JD Vance.”
She made it clear she sides with the president, calling the course he’s taken “spot on.” But she defended the vice president if he seems at odds with his past statements, noting politicians do it frequently. “They’ve all changed their positions at one point or another,” she said.
However, Joe Ropar, attending the Conservative Political Action Conference last week, said Rubio’s unequivocal support for the Iran war helped crystallize his preference for the secretary of state for 2028.
“I’m not looking at JD Vance for president, and it’s for stuff like that,” said Ropar, a 72-year-old retired military contractor from McKinney, Texas. “I don’t 100% trust him.”
Benjamin Williams, of Austin, Texas, said at CPAC that both Trump and Vance are “tied to this war.” The 25-year-old marketing specialist for Young Americans for Liberty is looking elsewhere for a candidate.
Whether the war becomes a political problem for Vance and Rubio depends on who ultimately enters the GOP’s next presidential primary.
While Vance and Rubio are currently considered the overwhelming front-runners, former New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu expects a half dozen high-profile Republicans to enter the contest.
Sununu and former RNC Committeewoman Juliana Bergeron told The Associated Press that multiple Republican presidential prospects have reached out to them in recent weeks to discuss the political landscape in the state that traditionally hosts the opening presidential primary; they declined to name them.
Republican strategist Jim Merrill, a top New Hampshire adviser for Rubio’s 2016 presidential bid, predicted that Iran would become a flashpoint in 2028 — just as the Iraq war was for Democrats in 2004 and 2008.
“If for some reason things don’t go as anticipated, there will be contrasts drawn,” he said.
Still, Sununu is doubtful that Iran would become a meaningful dividing line in a prospective Vance-Rubio matchup given their status as prominent members of the Trump administration. Both will likely take credit if the conflict ends well, and both would look bad if it does not, he predicted.
“They’re tied together with the success or failure of Iran. It doesn’t really separate one versus the other, at least I don’t think that’s how the electorate will see it,” Sununu said.
Price and Peoples write for the Associated Press. Peoples reported from New York. AP writers Matthew Lee in Washington, Bill Barrow in Rocky Mount, N.C., and Thomas Beaumont in Grapevine, Texas, contributed to this report.
ABC’s Sunday telecast of the 98th Oscars averaged 17.9 million viewers, ending a four-year streak of audience increases.
The figure from Nielsen is down 9% from the 19.7 million viewers who watched the telecast on ABC and Hulu in 2025.
After ratings for the Oscars cratered to an all-time low of 10.5 million viewers in 2021, the event’s audience levels ticked back up in recent years.
But the show has not topped 20 million viewers since 2019, as younger viewers are content to watch highlights of the ceremony on social media, rather than sit through a three-hour-plus telecast on traditional TV.
The awards held at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood honored “One Battle After Another” for best picture, Michael B. Jordan for lead actor in “Sinners,” and Jessie Buckley for lead actress in “Hamnet.” Conan O’Brien was the host for the second straight year.
Critics said the ceremony was light on political statements about President Trump, whose name was not mentioned during the telecast. The show’s highlight was an extended “In Memoriam” segment that gave extra tribute to legendary actor and filmmaker Robert Redford and slain actor, director and producer Rob Reiner.
ABC had success in selling out the commercials for the Oscars, which is perennially the most watched non-sports telecast of the year. But the network will only have the event for two more years as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences chose to take a better financial offer from YouTube for the rights to the telecast starting in 2029.
O’Brien poked fun at the YouTube move. He closed with a video that shows him being appointed Oscars “host for life.” As he takes in the honor, poison gas seeps into the office he is given. After O’Brien’s lifeless body is wheeled out, a name plaque with a new host is put on the door. His successor is YouTube star Mr. Beast.