NORTH CAROLINA (WTVD) — A new committee of the North Carolina Child Fatality Task Force started its first meeting on Wednesday with a grim statistic: the number of child injury deaths has increased over the last five years in North Carolina.
“Homicide and suicide are consistently in the top five,” Katie McDaniel, of the NC Division of Public Health, said.
State data shows one child dies by suicide every week.
The Intentional Death Prevention Committee discussed how factors, such as social media, are playing a part.
“If the algorithm notices that they like certain types of content that is bad for their mental health, the recommendation algorithm will keep on feeding them that type of content,” Alex Dray said.
Crisis of loneliness.
Alex Dray, Young People’s Alliance
Dray is a member of the Young People’s Alliance, which advocates for young people.
He said there is a “crisis of loneliness” that’s impacting his generation, including the use of AI companions and Chatbots.
At the NC Capitol, there is a bill called “Social Media Control in IT Act,” also known as SB 514, that addresses addictive social media algorithms that harm kids. The committee made a motion to repeat the language of the 2024-2025 recommendation to endorse this piece of legislation.
“The idea is that by specifically prohibiting the data usage from being used in personalized recommendation systems, we’re cutting off their source of information to target us with hyper-specific things,” Ava Smithing of Young People’s Alliance said.
Legislators have also passed a bill this year that restricts cellphones in the classroom.
Parents, social media experts weigh in on new bill restricting phones in NC classrooms
“They passed that bill to really prohibit phones in the classroom, which helps reduce phone addiction and subsequently social media addiction,” Dray said. “These state leaders have been great partners in this fight.”
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