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AUSTIN (AP) – As school districts struggle to control the spread of cyberbullying, sexual abuse images and online exploitation among their students, Texas lawmakers could consider banning social media from minors, among other sweeping measures, in the upcoming legislative session.

Over the last decade, Texas lawmakers have attempted to slow the spread of social media’s harmful effects by criminalizing cyberbullying and preventing online platforms from collecting data on minors, the latter of which has faced court challenges by social media companies.

While law enforcement and prosecutors have traditionally been responsible for cracking down on these online dangers, lack of resources in those agencies has meant enforcement has fallen onto educators, who already struggle to meet the demands of instruction, let alone stay knowledgeable on all the ways children use the internet.

“Almost every kid comes to school these days, regardless of background, regardless of socioeconomic status, they have some type of smartphone device in their hand. So they will have access to unfettered content most of the time, no matter what we try to do,” said Zeph Capo, president of the Texas American Federation of Teachers.

Lawmakers have suggested several initiatives next session to address the online dangers affecting Texas children, including a bill filed by Rep. Jared Patterson, R-Frisco, that would prohibit minors from creating accounts on social media sites and require age verification for new users. Other options include adding funds to internet crimes units in law enforcement agencies, banning the use of people’s likeness in artificially created sex abuse images, and making people aware of the dangers of the internet.

“Social media is the most dangerous thing our kids have legal access to in Texas,” Patterson said in a news release.

While they welcome any efforts to reduce harm to children, school officials and cybercrime investigators say more needs to be done to hold social media companies accountable for enforcement.

“We need these businesses to be responsible business people and throttle some of this tremendously negative content, particularly when it comes to kids,” Capo said. “But, you know, they don’t want to do anything like that.”
Schools are hunting grounds

During a Senate Committee on State Affairs hearing in October, lawmakers listened to a litany of stories about how social media has affected young people in Texas: a middle school girl who developed an eating disorder after watching a TikTok video, a middle school boy addicted to cartoon pornography after his YouTube algorithm took him to a porn site, and a woman who testified to being groomed for sex work in high school as her images were posted on social media applications.

Most of these incidents had a starting point at school where children have frequent access to technology and teachers and administrators are too busy to provide oversight. Add in the fact that they know ways to circumvent campus firewalls, students are being groomed via social media on school grounds, said Jacquelyn Alutto, president of Houston-based No Trafficking Zone, during the hearing.

“Right now, schools are a hunting ground,” she said.

The Texas Tribune requested interviews with several school districts about online dangers in schools, including the Austin, Round Rock, Katy and Eanes school districts, but they did not respond. The Plano school district declined to be interviewed.

Last year, the American Federation of Teachers and the American Psychological Association, among other national organizations, called out social media platforms for undermining classroom learning, increasing costs for school systems, and being a “root cause” of the nationwide youth mental health crisis. The admonishment came after a report detailed how school districts across the country are experiencing significant burdens as they respond to tech’s predatory and prevalent influence in the classroom.

The same year, in an attempt to hold social media companies more accountable, Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law House Bill 18, known as the Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment Act. The SCOPE Act requires covered digital service providers to provide minors with certain data protections, prevent minors from accessing harmful content, and give parents tools to manage their child’s use of the service.

It also required school districts to obtain parental consent for most software and social media applications used in the classroom and to look for alternatives to the internet for instruction.

However, many of the family-friendly websites and games that children might use for entertainment are also rife with potential sexual predators who pretend to be children.

“A little boy can be playing Robloxs in the cafeteria, and during that lunch break, a trafficker can target him, and he can be sexually groomed or exploited within a few weeks or months,” Alutto said.

And even harder to control is when students share sexual images of themselves online, a reason why some child welfare groups want social media platforms restricted or outright banned for minors.

“This has also helped human traffickers groom and recruit children,” Alutto said.
Unknown damage

Studies show 95% of youth ages 13 to 17 report using social media, with more than a third saying they use social media “almost constantly.”

Nearly 40% of children ages 8 to 12 use social media, even though most platforms require a minimum age of 13 to sign up, according to a study by the U.S. Surgeon General.

This has created a generation of chronically online children, and the medical community is still unsure of their longterm effects.

Although the SCOPE Act was passed to restrict kids from seeing harmful online content and give parents more control over what their children do online, social media companies have watered it down.

A federal district court judge earlier this year temporarily blocked part of the law that required them to filter out harmful content, saying it was unconstitutional under the First Amendment free speech right.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced in October that he was suing TikTok by allowing their algorithm to affect minors. TikTok denied the state’s allegations, pointing to online information about how parents in certain states, including Texas, can contact TikTok to request that their teen’s account be deleted.

This lawsuit, like dozens of others across the country, is playing out in court, forcing Texas lawmakers to wait and see what more they can do in the upcoming session to hold social media companies accountable.

Australia recently banned social media from children under the age of 16.

“The state needs to ensure that if technology providers want to do business, they must protect our children, stop the flow of (child sexual abuse material and child sexual assault) and report it,” Brent Dupre, director of law enforcement at the Office of the Attorney General of Texas, told The Texas Tribune.
Potential solutions?

Dupre’s department is one of three Internet Crimes Against Children Task Forces in the state, and his agency alone covers 134 counties. His office receives 2,500 cyber tips per month for investigation from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, an overwhelming number of cases for an agency with only 11 officers.

The problem is so persistent that Dupre said his office was conducting a live training session with law enforcement officers a few months ago on how to pose in chat rooms as a minor when the trainer noticed a real adult was already trying to solicit their fake minor for sex.

“These proactive investigations aren’t done as frequently as we like because of the sheer caseload that we got,” Dupre said, noting how they work with other law enforcement agencies who are suffering with staff shortages.

Christina Green, chief advancement and external relations officer for Children’s Advocacy Centers of Texas, said her agency serves more than 60,000 child victims yearly, with a majority of these connected to online incidents that happened in school while using social media applications. She said law enforcement agencies as well as hers need more resources to protect children.

“This field is rapidly developing, and the tools needed to continue must also develop,” she said.

Echoing school officials, Dupre said social media companies should enforce more restrictions on what minors can do on their platforms. He said companies should be required to track attempts to upload child sexual abuse material and other internet harm and be held accountable for allowing sexually explicit content to stay on their websites.

Dupre suggested lawmakers require chat and social media companies use artificial intelligence to scan for child sex abuse images and child sexual assault material and block users from sending this kind of material on their platforms.

“To me, children who try to upload self-produced material should automatically have their accounts disabled,” he said. “Many technology providers scan for these photos and videos, which are then quarantined and reported, but not all providers lockout or cancel that user end-to-end encryption.”

However, the most essential place to stop cyberbullying, sexual exploitation and other internet-based crimes on minors is at home, Green said.

She suggested teaching children in schools as early as the third grade about online risks and repeating training yearly.

She also wants the same education extended to parents. “We have been talking to parents about when you drop your kid off at someone’s house, do you know if devices will be used there? It’s like asking if there is a pool in the backyard. These types of questions need to become commonplace,” Green said.

AUSTIN (AP) – Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick announced Wednesday that lawmakers in the state Senate would move to ban all forms of consumable tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, in Texas.

Patrick, who presides over the Senate and largely controls the flow of legislation in the chamber, said the THC ban would be designated as Senate Bill 3 — a low bill number that signals it is among his top priorities for the upcoming legislative session.

The Republican-controlled Legislature was widely expected to take aim at Texas’ booming hemp market, which has proliferated with thousands of cannabis dispensaries since lawmakers authorized the sale of consumable hemp in 2019.

That law, passed one year after hemp was legalized nationwide, was intended to boost Texas agriculture by permitting the commercialization of hemp containing trace amounts of non-intoxicating delta-9 THC. But Patrick contends the law has been abused by retailers using loopholes to market products with unsafe levels of THC, including to minors.

“Dangerously, retailers exploited the agriculture law to sell life-threatening, unregulated forms of THC to the public and made them easily accessible,” Patrick said in a statement announcing the measure late Wednesday. “Since 2023, thousands of stores selling hazardous THC products have popped up in communities across the state, and many sell products, including beverages, that have three to four times the THC content which might be found in marijuana purchased from a drug dealer. ”

Texas has not legalized marijuana in any form for broad use.

Critics of the current hemp market point to a lack of testing requirements, age restrictions, and regulation, arguing that the proliferation of products — ranging from gummies and beverages to vapes and flower buds — has posed health risks and disrupted access for medical cannabis patients. Consumable hemp products are required by law to contain no more than 0.3% THC — the intoxicating part of the cannabis plant that comes in forms known as delta-8, delta-9 and THCA — but Patrick asserts that some items sold in Texas far exceed this limit.

The Texas hemp industry, meanwhile, has argued in court that delta-8’s high is minimal, and if delta-8 and delta-9 products are banned, it would do irreparable harm to the industry and the state’s economy.

Patrick said the bill to ban THC would be carried by state Sen. Charles Perry, the Lubbock Republican who previously carried the 2019 agricultural hemp bill. Perry has expressed dismay about the exploding market for cannabis products from the many hemp dispensaries that have popped up since lawmakers authorized the sale of consumable hemp.

Consumable hemp products come in forms that include smokable vapes and flower buds, oils and creams, baked goods, drinks, gummies and candies.

They contain industrial hemp or hemp-derived cannabinoids, including the non-intoxicating cannabidiol known as CBD, and are required to stay under the 0.3% THC threshold.

The difference in the legal and illegal products lies in the plants from which they come. Hemp and marijuana plants are both cannabis plants. Marijuana plants have high THC. Hemp has low THC.

The Legislature is scheduled to reconvene Jan. 14.

HEMPHILL (AP) — A father has been charged with fatally shooting his son at a home in East Texas after claiming he had mistaken him for an intruder and then later burning his body, authorities said.

Michael C. Howard, 68, who is an attorney in Houston, told investigators he was at a home he owns in Sabine County on Sunday when he accidentally killed his 20-year-old son, Mark Randall Howard, with a shotgun after believing he was an intruder, according to a news release from the Sabine County Sheriff’s Office.

Howard did not call the sheriff’s office until Monday, after he had taken his son’s body to a remote area on his property and placed the body on a wood trash pile and then “cremated” his son, according to the sheriff’s office.

Deputies found body parts and bones in the trash pile and sent them to a medical examiner’s office.

Howard told investigators that the whole thing was a “horrible accident.” The news release did not say if Howard indicated why he allegedly burned his son’s body after the shooting.

An investigator with the sheriff’s office did not immediately return a call seeking comment. The sheriff’s office was set to have a news conference later Thursday afternoon with more details about its investigation.

Howard remained jailed in Sabine County after being charged with murder and tampering with evidence. It was not immediately known if Howard had an attorney who could speak on his behalf.

BEAUMONT – Texas Lawbook reports a plaintiff’s lawyer in Beaumont has been sanctioned by a federal judge for submitting a response brief that included citations to “nonexistent cases” and “nonexistent quotations” generated by artificial intelligence. In the underlying lawsuit, James Gauthier sued Goodyear Tire & Rubber in Jefferson County district court in June 2023 alleging that, after working for the company for 24 and a half years, he was fired after he “refused to alter” the timeline of events related to a June 2021 release of hydrocarbons at the company’s Jefferson County plant, which he reported. Gauthier alleges the company wanted him to revise his timeline so it could “avoid a violation for releasing hydrocarbons and failing to timely report and respond to the release.” Goodyear removed the suit to federal court in July 2023.

In a brief in support of its motion for summary judgment, Goodyear explained that it had concerns about the case law Gauthier cited. “Although Gauthier ostensibly cites cases to support his opposition to Goodyear’s motion, the undersigned has been unable to locate two of the cases and several other cases Plaintiff relies upon do not contain the quoted language and/or stand for the propositions for which they are cited,” Goodyear argued. “Based upon actual, applicable authority, the court should grant Goodyear’s motion for summary judgment” U.S. District Judge Marcia Crone issued a six-page order Nov. 25 noting that Gauthier’s counsel, Brandon Monk of The Monk Law Firm in Beaumont, failed to respond to arguments from Goodyear that “specifically identified the nonexistent legal authorities contained in the response.” “He failed to withdraw or otherwise address these issues when raised by Goodyear,” Crone wrote. “In fact, Monk’s sur-reply to Goodyear’s reply makes no mention of the problems inherent in the response. … It was only after the court entered the show cause order that Monk sought leave to amend the response.”

HOUSTON – The Houston Chronicle reports that Jimmy Glotfelty plans to resign from the Public Utility Commission of Texas effective Dec. 31, the second commissioner to share an intention to leave the five-member body in as many months. A commissioner since August 2021, Glotfelty said in letter to Gov. Greg Abbott Wednesday that he would leave his post nearly a year before his six-year term was set to expire on Sept. 1, 2025. “It has been an honor and privilege to serve the people of Texas in this capacity. I am proud of the work we have accomplished to address the challenges that face the Texas electric system during this time of change,” Glotfelty wrote to Abbott in a letter reviewed by the Chronicle.

Glotfelty’s notice to the governor follows Commissioner Lori Cobos’ announcement two weeks ago that she plans to resign from the state agency, which oversees Texas’ electric, water and telecommunications utilities and the state’s power grid, by the end of the year. The departures come as the Electric Reliability Council of Texas has warned that January could see an elevated risk of outages amid a higher chance of extreme cold. They also leave the commission shorthanded as the Texas Legislature convenes in Austin next month. Lawmakers are expected to focus on legislation to reform how electric utilities prepare for extreme weather and to boost natural gas and nuclear power generation on the ERCOT grid. Glotfelty said in an interview that he isn’t leaving the PUC because he has another job lined up, as “it’s pretty hard, in my view, to go and look for a job when you’re a state official.”

DALLAS (AP) – Texas’ grid operator warned that the state should prepare for extreme cold this winter but said the state’s main power grid is better equipped than in previous years to withstand a powerful winter storm.

At a board meeting on Tuesday, officials from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas said that while winter presented a greater risk of outages, new power generation added to the grid in the past year has lowered the probability that extreme cold will trigger emergency conditions.

ERCOT meteorologist Chris Coleman’s forecast predicted above normal temperatures this winter, but a “greater-than-average” chance of extreme cold events.

Extreme cold events have occurred more frequently in recent years, he said, despite abnormally warm temperatures overall in Texas.

Scientists agree that climate change is causing more extreme weather. But the phrase “climate change” did not appear in any of the presentations at the ERCOT meeting.

Coleman’s presentation to the board said 2023 and 2024 are poised to become the hottest years on record in Texas.

“You can have a warm winter in Texas and have a cold extreme, and that’s becoming more frequent,” he said. “Five of the last eight winters, we’ve had temperatures that met those thresholds.”

Coleman’s forecast said ocean temperatures, atmospheric patterns, soil moisture and other measures this year closely resemble those of 2021. In February 2021, Winter Storm Uri brought days of freezing temperatures that crashed the state’s grid, knocked out power and heat to millions of Texans and led to nearly 250 deaths.

“That doesn’t mean we’re going to have Uri, but it does, again, state that we’re in a pattern that supports something like a Uri this winter,” Coleman said. “The conditions are there.”

Another major winter storm would test the improvements made to the ERCOT grid since 2021.

ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas said, winter demand for power has also increased in recent years, with the grid seeing record-breaking demand of 78,349 megawatts in January.

Texas’ grid has seen more than 10,000 megawatts of new generation come online since November 2023, helping to reduce the chances of an outage, Vegas said.

The new supply includes around 5,155 megawatts of solar power and 3,693 megawatts of electricity storage capacity — which is more solar and power storage added in a year than the total for many states. Texas also added 724 megawatts of natural gas and 616 megawatts of wind power.

The added capacity has helped lower the risk of emergency conditions during peak demand times from 11.6% last winter to 8.7% this winter, according to Vegas’ presentation.

At a news conference on emergency preparedness Tuesday, Gov. Greg Abbott said Texas is “fully prepared as a state to make sure we have the power available to keep the power on through whatever storm is going to arise.”

Abbott also pointed to legislation the state passed to strengthen the grid and the growing supply of power. “We are working nonstop to make sure the power stays on regardless of what type of winter storm hits,” he said.

ERCOT estimates that 1 megawatt of electricity serves around 250 Texas homes during peak demand — though some energy experts have argued that less efficient heating systems in many homes means that number is lower.

Weatherization efforts have also strengthened the grid ahead of this winter, Vegas said. ERCOT has carried out 2,892 inspections of generation and transmission facilities since the Texas Legislature codified a set of weatherization standards in 2021 after Uri.

The requirements, Vegas said, have “markedly changed the risk profile of the ERCOT grid, particularly during the winter seasons.”

Still, he noted that solar and wind sources produce less power in the winter, and that demand for power increases in the cold.

During Uri, the extreme cold knocked out all forms of power sources around the state as wind turbines, equipment at gas-powered plants and natural gas supply equipment froze.