LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — Lake County Animal Care and Control has more new dogs ready to be adopted this week.
Dogs available for adoption this week include mixes of Alaskan husky, Australian cattle dog, Australian shepherd, border collie, boxer, bulldog, chihuahua, Doberman pinscher, English bulldog, German shepherd, hound, Labrador retriever, pit bull, poodle, Queensland heeler, Rottweiler, shepherd and terrier.
Dogs that are adopted from Lake County Animal Care and Control are either neutered or spayed, microchipped and, if old enough, given a rabies shot and county license before being released to their new owner. License fees do not apply to residents of the cities of Lakeport or Clearlake.
Those dogs and the others shown on this page at the Lake County Animal Care and Control shelter have been cleared for adoption.
Call Lake County Animal Care and Control at 707-263-0278 or visit the shelter online for information on visiting or adopting.
The shelter is located at 4949 Helbush in Lakeport.
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
CLEARLAKE, Calif. — Clearlake Animal Control has dozens of dogs waiting to be adopted this week.
The Clearlake Animal Control website lists 45 adoptable dogs.
The adoptable dogs include “Rock,” an American Staffordshire terrier mix with a white and brown coat. He has been neutered.
There also is “Dandelion,” a female Doberman pinscher mix with a tricolor coat. She has been spayed.
The shelter is located at 6820 Old Highway 53. It’s open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.
For more information, call the shelter at 707-762-6227, email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., visit Clearlake Animal Control on Facebook or on the city’s website.
This week’s adoptable dogs are featured below.
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — The East Region Town Hall, or ERTH, will meet on Wednesday, Feb. 7.
The meeting will begin at 4 p.m. at the Moose Lodge, located at 15900 Moose Lodge Lane in Clearlake Oaks.
The meeting will be available via Zoom. The meeting ID is 986 3245 2684, pass code is 666827.
Guest speakers include Lake County Public Works Director Scott De Leon, who will discuss the road rehabilitation plan and a response to the ERTH letter dated Dec. 4.
Also speaking to the group will be Community Development Department Director Mireya Turner and Code Enforcement Manager Marcus Beltramo, who will give an update on the Clearlake Oaks Roadmap Task Force, scheduled to end in April.
Other discussion topics include crosswalk Safety at East Lake School and Highway 20; updates on Spring Valley, commercial cannabis and the Shoreline Area Plan update.
Other scheduled speakers are Northshore Fire Protection District Chief Mike Ciancio, who will give an update on the district, and Supervisor EJ Crandell who will give the group a general report.
ERTH’s next meeting will take place on March 6.
ERTH’s members are Denise Loustalot, Jim Burton, Tony Morris and Pamela Kicenski.
For more information visit the group’s Facebook page.
Planets orbit their parent stars while separated by enormous distances – in our solar system, planets are like grains of sand in a region the size of a football field. The time that planets take to orbit their suns have no specific relationship to each other.
But sometimes, their orbits display striking patterns. For example, astronomers studying six planets orbiting a star 100 light years away have just found that they orbit their star with an almost rhythmic beat, in perfect synchrony. Each pair of planets completes their orbits in times that are the ratios of whole numbers, allowing the planets to align and exert a gravitational push and pull on the other during their orbit.
This type of gravitational alignment is called orbital resonance, and it’s like a harmony between distant planets.
I’m an astronomer who studies and writes about cosmology. Researchers have discovered over 5,600 exoplanets in the past 30 years, and their extraordinary diversity continues to surprise astronomers.
Harmony of the spheres
Greek mathematician Pythagoras discovered the principles of musical harmony 2,500 years ago by analyzing the sounds of blacksmiths’ hammers and plucked strings.
He believed mathematics was at the heart of the natural world and proposed that the Sun, Moon and planets each emit unique hums based on their orbital properties. He thought this “music of the spheres” would be imperceptible to the human ear.
Four hundred years ago, Johannes Kepler picked up this idea. He proposed that musical intervals and harmonies described the motions of the six known planets at the time.
To Kepler, the solar system had two basses, Jupiter and Saturn; a tenor, Mars; two altos, Venus and Earth; and a soprano, Mercury. These roles reflected how long it took each planet to orbit the Sun, lower speeds for the outer planets and higher speeds for the inner planets.
Resonance happens when planets or moons have orbital periods that are ratios of whole numbers. The orbital period is the time taken for a planet to make one complete circuit of the star. So, for example, two planets orbiting a star would be in a 2:1 resonance when one planet takes twice as long as the other to orbit the star. Resonance is seen in only 5% of planetary systems.
In the solar system, Neptune and Pluto are in a 3:2 resonance. There’s also a triple resonance, 4:2:1, among Jupiter’s three moons: Ganymede, Europa and Io. In the time it takes Ganymede to orbit Jupiter, Europa orbits twice and Io orbits four times. Resonances occur naturally, when planets happen to have orbital periods that are the ratio of whole numbers.
Musical intervals describe the relationship between two musical notes. In the musical analogy, important musical intervals based on ratios of frequencies are the fourth, 4:3, the fifth, 3:2, and the octave, 2:1. Anyone who plays the guitar or the piano might recognize these intervals.
Orbital resonances can change how gravity influences two bodies, causing them to speed up, slow down, stabilize on their orbital path and sometimes have their orbits disrupted.
Think of pushing a child on a swing. A planet and a swing both have a natural frequency. Give the child a push that matches the swing motion and they’ll get a boost. They’ll also get a boost if you push them every other time they’re in that position, or every third time. But push them at random times, sometimes with the motion of the swing and sometimes against, and they get no boost.
For planets, the boost can keep them continuing on their orbital paths, but it’s much more likely to disrupt their orbits.
Exoplanet resonance
Exoplanets, or planets outside the solar system, show striking examples of resonance, not just between two objects but also between resonant “chains” involving three or more objects.
The star Gliese 876 has three planets with orbit period ratios of 4:2:1, just like Jupiter’s three moons. Kepler 223 has four planets with ratios of 8:6:4:3.
The red dwarf Kepler 80 has five planets with ratios of 9:6:4:3:2, and TOI 178 has six planets, of which five are in a resonant chain with ratios of 18:9:6:4:3.
TRAPPIST-1 is the record holder. It has seven Earth-like planets, two of which might be habitable, with orbit ratios of 24:15:9:6:4:3:2.
The newest example of a resonant chain is the HD 110067 system. It’s about 100 light years away and has six sub-Neptune planets, a common type of exoplanet, with orbit ratios of 54:36:24:16:12:9. The discovery is interesting because most resonance chains are unstable and disappear over time.
Despite these examples, resonant chains are rare, and only 1% of all planetary systems display them. Astronomers think that planets form in resonance, but small gravitational nudges from passing stars and wandering planets erase the resonance over time. With HD 110067, the resonant chain has survived for billions of years, offering a rare and pristine view of the system as it was when it formed.
With exoplanets, sonification can convey the mathematical relationships of their orbits. Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory created what they call “music of the spheres” for the TOI 178 system by associating a sound on a pentatonic scale to each of the five planets.
A similar musical translation has been done for the TRAPPIST-1 system, with the orbital frequencies scaled up by a factor of 212 million to bring them into audible range.
Astronomers have also created a sonification for the HD 110067 system. People may not agree on whether these renditions sound like actual music, but it’s inspiring to see Pythagoras’ ideas realized after 2,500 years.
The recent appellate court decision by the First Appellate Department of the California Court of Appeals in Spears v. Spears, 97 Cal. App. 5th 1294, 2023 Cal. App., is an important change to how creditors of a decedent’s estate could satisfy their creditor’s claim against the decedent’s trust estate, under certain conditions, in the California First Appellate Department.
Previously, a decedent’s creditor needed first to file a timely creditor claim in the decedent’s probate estate and obtain either a judgment or approval of the claim, and, if there were insufficient assets in the decedent’s probate estate to pay the claim, then proceed against the decedent’s trust estate to pay the unpaid balance.
An important exception to the foregoing rule is when the trustee elects to open the optional trust creditors claim procedure (analogous to a probate proceeding), under sections 19000 of the Probate Code, in the absence of a probate. This allows the creditor to file the claim in the trust creditor claims proceedings.
A trustee may elect this procedure when the trust beneficiaries are located in California and they wish to avoid being chased by the decedent’s creditors after the creditor’s claim becomes a judgment; a judgment creditor has the right to proceed against the beneficiaries who have received distributions when the trust has insufficient assets on hand.
In the Arluk Medical Center Industrial Group, Inc. v. Dobler, 89 Cal.App.4th 530 (Second Dist., Div. Seven, May 25, 2001), the Second Appellate Department, held that, “if the claimant prevails and obtains a judgment in its favor, the judgment is payable in the ordinary course of the administration of the estate. If the estate is inadequate to satisfy the judgment, the judgment creditor may proceed against the assets in the settlor's revocable living trust. The judgment creditor ‘need only establish it has a money judgment against the decedent/settlor; thereafter, the judgment is paid in the normal course of administration of the trust.’”" 89 Cal.App.4th at pp. 540-541.
Under the Arluk decision the trustee does not have to keep a reserve to pay pending creditor claims filed in a probate proceeding.
In Arluk, the creditor’s judgment came after 5 years of probate litigation, by which time the trust was insolvent as the assets were essentially distributed.
In Spears, however, no probate proceedings were open. Thus, there was no probate proceeding in which the creditor could file a claim. Instead, the creditor filed a claim in a trust proceeding directly against the decedent’s trust estate even though the trustee had not opened a trust creditors claim proceeding. The trustee followed the decision in Arluk and denied the claim stating that the creditor needed to file a creditor’s claim in a probate estate.
However, the appellate court in Spears ruled that, “if there is no probate proceeding to administer the decedent's estate, it is impossible for the creditor to obtain a judgment against the settlor's estate.
Arluk also ignores section 19402 and its implicit requirement that a creditor must first proceed against the assets of a trust before seeking recovery from trust beneficiaries who received distributions. (§ 19402, subd. (b).)
In any event, in Arluk, a probate proceeding was opened for the settlor's estate and the creditor obtained a judgment against the estate. (Arluk, supra, 116 Cal.App.4th at pp. 1329–1330.)
Arluk's comment about what happens when there is no proceeding to administer an estate is therefore dicta.” Spears v. Spears, 97 Cal. App. 5th 1294, 1304.
The decision then discussed how the creditor could pursue its claim against the trust: “[the creditor] had two methods available to him through which to assert his claims. If there is no probate administration and the trust claims procedure is not initiated, the creditor may file suit against the trustee to enforce a debt, claim, or action against the deceased settlor. … [¶] Alternatively, a creditor of the deceased settlor or a person who claims that the trustee is in possession of real or personal property belonging to the claimant may file a petition under [Probate Code] §850(a)(3)(A) or (C).” Spears v. Spears, Id..
The foregoing discussion is not legal advice. Consult a qualified attorney or accountant for guidance. Dennis A. Fordham, attorney, is a State Bar-Certified Specialist in estate planning, probate and trust law. His office is at 870 S. Main St., Lakeport, Calif. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and 707-263-3235.
Sen. Bill Dodd, D-Napa, has introduced legislation to help ensure electrical utilities are pursuing the fastest and most cost-effective infrastructure improvements, safeguarding the public from future wildfires and saving money for ratepayers forced to cover the cost of more expensive repairs.
“As utilities make upgrades to their systems to keep us safe from wildfire, we must ensure they identify projects that have the biggest impact and can be completed in the shortest amount of time for the least amount of money,” Sen. Dodd said. “In other words, utilities need to get the biggest bang for the buck when they do projects. That way, we protect our communities from wildfires sooner and avoid unwarranted rate increases as we’re forced to absorb the cost of these improvements.”
Recently, the California Public Utilities Commission approved a $13.5 billion rate increase requested by PG&E to pay for the undergrounding of 1,230 miles of electric utility lines over the next three years.
This is a fraction of the more than 10,000 miles of undergrounding PG&E proposes for the next decade in hopes of reducing the risk of its utility infrastructure sparking wildfires. The cost per mile is estimated at $3 million.
However, there are alternatives such as insulating existing utility cable, an option favored by The Utility Reform Network, or TURN.
Insulating wires costs an estimated $800,000 per mile, and in certain circumstances may be as effective in preventing wildfire ignitions as undergrounding, and achievable in far less time.
“Undergrounding lines in high risk areas is important and needs to continue in a targeted manner, but we also need to advance faster, cheaper methods to maximize safety today,” said Sen. Dodd. “It’s all about maximizing benefit, while minimizing ratepayer costs.”
Sen. Dodd’s Senate Bill 1003 would direct the Office of Electrical Infrastructure Safety to consider the timeliness of investor-owned utility electrical infrastructure upgrades when reviewing the utilities’ wildfire mitigation plans to ensure that the maximum amount of risk from utility sparked wildfires is reduced in the shortest amount of time.
“Safety today is not the same as safety in three or 10 years,” said Michael Wara, director of climate and energy policy at Stanford University. “This bill will force the utilities to account for the long implementation delays of some strategies as an additional cost to their customers. Delivery of adequate service today — including the ‘service’ of safety — is an important value that all Californians deserve from their electric utilities. This bill will compel utilities to evaluate not just how safe a system they can create in the long run, but will push them to do it as quickly as possible.”
Dodd represents the Third Senate District, which includes all or portions of Napa, Yolo, Sonoma, Solano, Sacramento and Contra Costa counties.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — Forecasters said another major storm — one of the largest of the winter season so far — is set to hit Lake and Mendocino counties on Sunday and continue through much of the coming week.
AccuWeather’s meteorologists said the storm, which originated near Hawaii, will tap into moisture from atmospheric rivers, heightening flood risk.
Called a “pineapple express” because it brings moisture from the tropical pacific, the storm is forecast d to drop the heaviest rain from San Francisco south to Los Angeles.
However, at the same time heavy rain is expected throughout Lake County.
The National Weather Service has issued a flood watch and wind advisory for most of Lake County, as well as a winter storm warning for the northern third of the county, all of them in effect through Sunday.
The forecast calls for the storm to begin late on Saturday or early Sunday.
Moderate to heavy rain — up to 2.5 inches on Sunday in parts of the county — will fall along with strong and gusty winds and snow in the higher elevations. On Monday, close to another inch of rain could fall.
From Tuesday through the rest of the week, chances of showers remain in the forecast, although rain is expected to taper off during that time.
Due to the already saturated soils, the National Weather Service issued the flood watch for southern Lake County, which will last much of the day on Sunday.
The rain so far this year has caused the level of Clear Lake to quickly rise.
Since Jan. 1, the lake has risen from 3.02 feet Rumsey — the special measure for Clear Lake to 6.16 feet Rumsey as of early Saturday. That’s more than a foot and a half higher than this time last year.
For context, the lake is full at 7.56 feet Rumsey.
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
What's up for February? Venus and Mars make quite the pair, Jupiter and the Moon are each other's Valentine, and observing M81, aka "Bode's Galaxy."
Venus is still a brilliant beacon in the morning, rising in the couple of hours before the Sun. It has been steadily sinking lower in the sky for the past couple of months, though, and by the end of February it's pretty much getting lost in the light of sunrise.
It will start making its return as an evening sight in July. You can catch the bright planet together with a slim crescent Moon on the morning of February 6th, just as the sky starts to brighten.
Next, Valentine's Day brings a nice pairing to enjoy with someone special. That evening, look for the crescent Moon near Jupiter, high in the southwest following sunset. They're just a couple of finger widths apart on the sky, meaning most binoculars will show them in the same field of view.
And speaking of the Moon, NASA's VIPER moon rover is planned to launch later this year, and you can send your name to the Moon along with it! Visit nasa.gov/send-your-name-with-viper for details.
Returning to the inner planets, as Venus begins its exit, we find Mars returning to view. The Red Planet left the evening sky last September, passing through conjunction, where it was on the opposite side of the Sun from Earth, and thus not visible for a few months.
It's now just starting to be visible in the predawn sky. In February it's quite low, and not super bright, but you can observe it brightening and rising ever earlier in the coming months. Those with an unobstructed view toward the southeast horizon can look for a close approach of Mars and Venus as the pair are rising during the last week of February.
February is a good time to view one of the famed "Messier objects" known as M81.
This is a spiral galaxy similar to our own Milky Way, but just a bit smaller, and it's one of the brightest galaxies in the night sky. It's located about 11.8 million light years away from us, which means, if you're able to observe it, those photons of light hitting your eye have been traveling through space for more than 11 million years to reach you.
It was discovered by astronomer Johann Bode in 1774, which is where it gets its other common name, "Bode's Galaxy." At the time, it was simply cataloged as a nebula or faint, fuzzy patch. It wouldn't be until the work of Edwin Hubble in the 1920s that many such faint, fuzzy objects were understood to be self-contained galaxies of stars, outside the Milky Way and incredibly distant from us.
M81 is a bit too dim to see with the unaided eye, but it's visible with binoculars or a small telescope, where it appears as a dim patch of light. With a 6-inch telescope you can resolve the galaxy's bright core, and with an 8-inch telescope, you can begin to make out the spiral arms.
Locating M81 is not too difficult, with the Big Dipper (or the Plough) to guide you. Starting with the star on the end corner, called Dubhe, imagine a line twice the distance from the star on the opposite corner of the Dipper, Phecda. Pointing your telescope or binoculars in that area ought to put you pretty close to M81.
You might also notice its faint, fuzzy companion nearby, which is M82. This is another galaxy, but seen edge-on, and it gets its other common name, the "Cigar Galaxy," from this appearance.
This pair of galaxies is "circumpolar" in the Northern Hemisphere, meaning they rotate around the north celestial pole and never set. (Unfortunately, this means they're not really visible from the Southern Hemisphere.) Although it's visible all year in the Northern Hemisphere, from about February through May, you'll find M81 high in the northern sky in the first half of the night, making it easier to observe.
So grab your telescope, or find a local astronomy event with NASA's Night Sky Network, and check out M81, Bode's Galaxy, a distant cousin to our home galaxy, the Milky Way.
Stay up to date on NASA's missions exploring the solar system and beyond at science.nasa.gov.
Preston Dyches works for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Millions of people were under flood alerts and winter storm warnings on Jan. 31 and Feb. 1, 2024, as a series of atmospheric rivers brought heavy downpours and the threat of flooding, mudslides and avalanches to the Pacific Northwest and California. Another powerful storm was expected a few days later.
While these storms are dreaded for the damage they can cause, they are also essential to the region’s water supply, particularly in California, as Qian Cao, a hydrologist at the University of California, San Diego, explains.
What are atmospheric rivers?
An atmospheric river is a narrow corridor or filament of concentrated water vapor transported in the atmosphere. It’s like a river in the sky that can be 1,000 miles long. On average, atmospheric rivers have about twice the regular flow of the Amazon River.
When atmospheric rivers run up against mountains or run into local atmospheric dynamics and are forced to ascend, the moisture they carry cools and condenses, so they can produce intense rainfall or snowfall.
Atmospheric rivers occur all over the world, most commonly in the mid-latitudes. They form when large-scale weather patterns align to create narrow channels, or filaments, of intense moisture transport. These start over warm water, typically tropical oceans, and are guided toward the coast by low-level jet streams ahead of cold fronts of extratropical cyclones.
Along the U.S. West Coast, the Pacific Ocean serves as the reservoir of moisture for the storm, and the mountain ranges act as barriers, which is why the western sides of the coastal ranges and Sierra Nevada see so much rain and snow.
Why are back-to-back atmospheric rivers a high flood risk?
The first heavy downpours saturate the ground. As consecutive storms arrive, their precipitation falls on soil that can’t absorb more water. That contributes to more runoff. Rivers and streams fill up. In the meantime, there may be snowmelt due to warm temperatures, further adding to the runoff and flood risk.
California experienced a historic run of nine consecutive atmospheric rivers in the span of three weeks in December 2022 and January 2023. The storms helped bring most reservoirs back to historical averages in 2023 after several drought years, but they also produced damaging floods and debris flows.
The cause of AR families is an active area of research. Compared with single atmospheric river events, AR families tend to be associated with lower atmospheric pressure heights across the North Pacific, higher pressure heights over the subtropics, a stronger and more zonally elongated jet stream and warmer tropical air temperatures.
Large-scale weather patterns and climate phenomena such as the Madden-Julian Oscillation, or MJO, also play an important role in the generation of AR families. An active MJO shift occurred during the early 2023 events, tilting the odds toward increased atmospheric river activity over California.
A recent study by scientists at Stanford and the University of Florida found that storms within AR families cause three to four times more economic damage when the storms arrive back to back than they would have caused by themselves.
How important are atmospheric rivers to the West Coast’s water supply?
I’m a research hydrologist, so I focus on hydrological impacts of atmospheric rivers. Although they can lead to flood hazards, atmospheric rivers are also essential to the Western water supply. Atmospheric rivers have been responsible for ending more than a third of the region’s major droughts, including the severe California drought of 2012-16.
They also contribute to the snowpack, which provides a significant portion of California’s year-round water supply.
In an average year, one to two extreme atmospheric rivers with snow will be the dominant contributors to the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada. Together, atmospheric rivers will contribute about 30% to 40% of an average season’s total snow accumulation there.
That’s why my colleagues at the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, part of the University of California, San Diego, work on improving atmospheric river forecasts and predictions. Water managers need to be able to regulate reservoirs and figure out how much water they can save for the dry season while still leaving room in the reservoirs to manage flood risk from future storms.
How is global warming affecting atmospheric rivers?
My research also shows that more atmospheric rivers are likely to occur concurrently during already wet conditions. So, the chance of extreme flooding also increases. Another study, by scientists from the University of Washington, suggests that there will be a seasonal shift to more atmospheric rivers earlier in the rainy season.
There will likely also be more year-to-year variability in the total annual precipitation, particularly in California, as a study by my colleagues at the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes projects.
This article was update Jan. 31, 2024, with flood alerts and winter storm warnings posted.
“I’m sorry for everything you have all been through.”
These quotes, the first from Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., speaking to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and the second from Zuckerberg to families of victims of online child abuse in the audience, are highlights from an extraordinary day of testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee about protecting children online.
But perhaps the most telling quote from the Jan. 31, 2024, hearing came not from the CEOs of Meta, TikTok, X, Discord or Snap but from Sen. Graham in his opening statement: Social media platforms “as they are currently designed and operate are dangerous products.”
We are university researcherswho study how social media organizes news, information and communities. Whether or not social media apps meet the legal definition of “unreasonably dangerous products,” the social media companies’ business models do rely on having millions of young users. At the same time, we believe that the companies have not invested sufficient resources to effectively protect those users.
Mobile device use by children and teens skyrocketed during the pandemic and has stayed high. Naturally, teens want to be where their friends are, be it the skate park or on social media. In 2022, there were an estimated 49.8 million users age 17 and under of YouTube, 19 million of TikTok, 18 million of Snapchat, 16.7 million of Instagram, 9.9 million of Facebook and 7 million of Twitter, according to a recent study by researchers at Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health.
Teens are a significant revenue source for social media companies. Revenue from users 17 and under of social media was US$11 billion in 2022, according to the Chan School study. Instagram netted nearly $5 billion, while TikTok and YouTube each accrued over $2 billion. Teens mean green.
Social media poses a range of risks for teens, from exposing them to harassment, bullying and sexual exploitation to encouraging eating disorders and suicidal ideation. For Congress to take meaningful action on protecting children online, we identify three issues that need to be accounted for: age, business model and content moderation.
How old are you?
Social media companies have an incentive to look the other way in terms of their users’ ages. Otherwise they would have to spend the resources to moderate their content appropriately. Millions of underage users – those under 13 – are an “open secret” at Meta. Meta has described some potential strategies to verify user ages, like requiring identification or video selfies, and using AI to guess their age based on “Happy Birthday” messages.
However, the accuracy of these methods is not publicly open to scrutiny, so it’s difficult to audit them independently.
Meta has stated that online teen safety legislation is needed to prevent harm, but the company points to app stores, currently dominated by Apple and Google, as the place where age verification should happen. However, these guardrails can be easily circumvented by accessing a social media platform’s website rather than its app.
New generations of customers
Teen adoption is crucial for continued growth of all social media platforms. The Facebook Files, an investigation based on a review of company documents, showed that Instagram’s growth strategy relies on teens helping family members, particularly younger siblings, get on the platform. Meta claims it optimizes for “meaningful social interaction,” prioritizing family and friends’ content over other interests. However, Instagram allows pseudonymity and multiple accounts, which makes parental oversight even more difficult.
On Nov. 7, 2023, Auturo Bejar, a former senior engineer at Facebook, testified before Congress. At Meta he surveyed teen Instagram users and found 24% of 13- to 15-year-olds said they had received unwanted advances within the past seven days, a fact he characterizes as “likely the largest-scale sexual harassment of teens to have ever happened.” Meta has since implemented restrictions on direct messaging in its products for underage users.
But to be clear, widespread harassment, bullying and solicitation is a part of the landscape of social media, and it’s going to take more than parents and app stores to rein it in.
Meta recently announced that it is aiming to provide teens with “age-appropriate experiences,” in part by prohibiting searches for terms related to suicide, self-harm and eating disorders. However, these steps don’t stop online communities that promote these harmful behaviors from flourishing on the company’s social media platforms. It takes a carefully trained team of human moderators to monitor and enforce terms of service violations for dangerous groups.
Content moderation
Social media companies point to the promise of artificial intelligence to moderate content and provide safety on their platforms, but AI is not a silver bullet for managing human behavior. Communities adapt quickly to AI moderation, augmenting banned words with purposeful misspellings and creating backup accounts to prevent getting kicked off a platform.
Human content moderation is also problematic, given social media companies’ business models and practices. Since 2022, social media companies have implemented massive layoffs that struck at the heart of their trust and safety operations and weakened content moderation across the industry.
Congress will need hard data from the social media companies – data the companies have not provided to date – to assess the appropriate ratio of moderators to users.
The way forward
In health care, professionals have a duty to warn if they believe something dangerous might happen. When these uncomfortable truths surface in corporate research, little is done to inform the public of threats to safety. Congress could mandate reporting when internal studies reveal damaging outcomes.
Helping teens today will require social media companies to invest in human content moderation and meaningful age verification. But even that is not likely to fix the problem. The challenge is facing the reality that social media as it exists today thrives on having legions of young users spending significant time in environments that put them at risk. These dangers for young users are baked into the design of contemporary social media, which requires much clearer statutes about who polices social media and when intervention is needed.
One of the motives for tech companies not to segment their user base by age, which would better protect children, is how it would affect advertising revenue. Congress has limited tools available to enact change, such as enforcing laws about advertising transparency, including “know your customer” rules. Especially as AI accelerates targeted marketing, social media companies are going to continue making it easy for advertisers to reach users of any age. But if advertisers knew what proportion of ads were seen by children, rather than adults, they may think twice about where they place ads in the future.
Despite a number of high-profile hearings on the harms of social media, Congress has not yet passed legislation to protect children or make social media platforms liable for the content published on their platforms. But with so many young people online post-pandemic, it’s up to Congress to implement guardrails that ultimately put privacy and community safety at the center of social media design.
CLEARLAKE, Calif. — The Clearlake City Council on Thursday night considered whether or not to continue to allow community members to give input during meetings virtually following an incident last month in which several Internet trolls took over public comment in order to make profane and racist statements.
Despite their concerns about the “Zoom bombers” — three of whom disrupted the Jan. 18 council meeting to make racist and antisemitic comments — the council stopped short of taking staff’s recommendation to end Zoom comments by anyone outside of contractors or other city-approved users.
Instead, council members asked staff to research implementing tighter controls on Zoom, the virtual meeting platform that has become ubiquitous out of necessity since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March of 2020.
Gov. Gavin Newsom implemented emergency orders that rolled back Brown Act rules in 2020 in order to allow for elected officials to use Zoom to meet safely in response to concerns over health as the pandemic was taking shape.
City Manager Alan Flora outlined the temporary changes to the Brown Act and explained that the city didn’t use Zoom before then but staffers have continued to use it since because of its convenience for some community members.
Flora said the state’s emergency orders have been rolled back. One key example — governing board members are no longer allowed to attend via Zoom unless under specific circumstances.
City Clerk Melissa Swanson said the city began live streaming via Zoom in August 2020.
Swanson said a poll of Calfiornia’s city clerks found that 50 of 70 agencies reported experiencing Zoom bombing.
Of those, 42 agencies said they either no longer allow comments via Zoom or use it in very limited fashion for presenters and staff. Four others are considering discontinuing it.
City Attorney Ryan Jones said his firm, Jones and Mayer, works with a number of government jurisdictions, a lot of which he said are scaling back use of the platform due to Zoom bombers. He said nothing precludes people from commenting through email.
Flora said the city uses Zoom to record meetings and stream them to Youtube, which is a convenient way to get a recording. He suggested reserving commenting for consultants.
Councilmember Joyce Overton asked if they could still do a chat room with Zoom and use that function to filter out inappropriate comments. Flora said he doesn’t know if it’s common practice, and he didn’t want to put staff in the position of having to read comments and be seen as censoring people.
Councilmemember Dirk Slooten said it was important to be as open as possible while doing the people’s business, and he wasn’t in favor of shutting down Zoom comments over one incident.
Councilmember Russell Cremer said he liked Overton’s suggestion about a chat room, but that he never wanted to hear again what he heard on Jan. 18.
“It was obscene and beyond totally inappropriate as far as I'm concerned,” he said, explaining that his first thought was to eliminate Zoom commenting except for presenters and that he had no problem doing away with using Zoom for general public input.
Calling it “a really touchy subject,” Councilmember Russell Perdock said he was concerned about the anonymity Zoom affords. After the Jan. 18 meeting, he received calls from community members offended by the comments from the Zoom bombers.
He suggested implementing more control along the lines Overton suggested in order to take away the anonymity.
“We live in a world where trolls exist,” said Mayor David Claffey, who added that for him the bar has to be higher before they take away a very valuable tool for the community to access public comment.
He asked staff about limitations, and Swanson said the city can set up Zoom with registration and a pass code, which they don’t currently use, and work on getting tighter security.
Claffey asked about the ability to ban Internet addresses, which Jones said he wasn’t sure could be done unless the commenter had threatened the city and the city had a restraining order. Zoom bombing wouldn’t rise to that level.
Jones also noted that it’s a “voluntary ask” to request that people give their names and where they live, and no way to verify they are real, and attempts to verify them could be inappropriate for the city to pursue.
Perdock asked if it was all or nothing — allow Zoom commenting or not.
“Not necessarily,” said Jones.
Supervisor Bruno Sabatier said Senate Bill 1100 could be part of the discussion. That legislation, which the governor signed into in the summer of 2022 and became law in January 2023, amended the Brown Act to give guidance on how government bodies can handle members of the public who are disruptive at open meetings. They must be warned and then they can be removed from the meeting.
Sabatier said the county has a script to use when an individual is causing issues in a meeting.
He emphasized the platform’s value and urged them to set up mechanisms to continue to use it rather than taking it away from even one person who could be bed-bound and otherwise unable to participate in a public meeting.
Flora said that, based on some quick research during the meeting, it appeared that Zoom can be configured for more controls, and that a chat etiquette tool can ban certain words and phrases. He added that they will need to make sure that chat feature is compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The council directed staff to do additional research in order to find ways to continue to allow Zoom comments.
Before reaching that consensus, they asked for public comment. There was none in the chambers and none on Zoom.
In other business, the council presented a proclamation in honor of February being Black History Month to Rick Mayor, president of the Lake County Chapter of the NAACP, and Chief Tim Hobbs gave the annual Clearlake Police Department report.
The council also held a special meeting two hours ahead of the regular meeting in which it considered, and ultimately denied, the Koi Nation’s appeal of a new subdivision approved by the Clearlake Planning Commission.
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CLEARLAKE, Calif. — The second annual Lake County Restaurant Expo brought together members of the local restaurant industry for a day of training and networking.
The expo took place on Monday at the Lake County Campus of Woodland Community College, known for its acclaimed Culinary Arts Program headed up by Chef Robert Cabreros.
The event was organized by the Lake County Economic Development Corp., or Lake EDC, with the assistance of the Lake County Chamber of Commerce.
The Restaurant Expo is a one-day training and networking event focused on providing expert support to new and existing owners of restaurants, food trucks, catering companies, and other food industry businesses.
They heard from industry experts, participated in sessions on aspects of the business, and ended the day with a mixer.
In the video above, hear from organizer Nicole Flora of Lake EDC about the motivation for the event, and from Cabreros and student participants in the expo.
The expo took place ahead of the second annual Lake County Restaurant Week, which will span the week of Feb. 4 to 10.