In the last month sprint of the formal legislative session, expect to see an increased pace of action in the MA State House.
Today, the MA House is voting on its economic development bill, and tomorrow, the MA Senate is voting on a bill to address addictive design from social media companies.
Read on for more information about what your state rep and state senator should be hearing from you.
Tell Your State Rep: Support Amendments to Expand Economic Opportunity and Access to Affordable Housing
The MA House is voting TODAY on its economic development bill. Our allies are supporting a number of amendments to strengthen the bill in ways that promote economic opportunity and increase access to affordable housing.
Email your state rep to urge them to support amendments that strengthen the bill.
- Amendment #25, which would eliminate the requirement that a household provide a notice to quit or utility shutoff notice for a household to be eligible for Residential Assistance for Families in Transition (RAFT), removing a significant barrier to accessing this critical homelessness prevention resource
- Amendment #71, which would allow cities and towns a local option to provide tenants in multi-family buildings the right to match a third-party offer when their homes are being sold
- Amendment #136, which would ensure worker-owned businesses are recognized in economic development program selection criteria, helping broaden access to state economic development tools for cooperative and shared-ownership models
- Amendment #155, which would allow qualified, job-ready people to fully participate in the workforce by automating the CORI-sealing process to seal records that are already eligible after the required waiting periods
- Amendment #226, which would provide $15,000,000 in bonding authorizations for a pilot program to fund the construction of small to medium sized (1-25 unit) permanently affordable home ownership developments
- Amendment # 438, which would ensure that the executive order-created Office of Access and Opportunity is codified into Massachusetts statutes to uphold the Governor’s commitment to language access in our state agencies
- Amendment #636, which would ease access to Massachusetts IDs for people experiencing homelessness by waiving the $25 fee for standard Mass IDs and easing residency verification requirements for youth and adults experiencing homelessness
The MA Senate Is Voting on a Bill to Regulate Teen Social Media Use. Here’s How It Can Be Better.
A couple months ago, the MA House advanced a harmful bill that would ban minors from social media, force social media platforms to enable parental surveillance of teenagers’ online activity, and subject everyone to privacy-invading online ID checks in order to access information or speak out online. We joined groups from across the state in opposing this language.
The Senate’s bill (S.3164), which will be voted on this Thursday, takes a smarter approach, targeting addictive design.
Our friends at Fight for the Future are urging senators to support several amendments that would protect privacy, protect youth, and help the bill better accomplish its stated goals (read more about them here).
- Amendment #2, which closes a loophole in the definition of “user” that would have allowed platforms to continue providing addictive features to minors so long as the minor does not use an account to access the platform
- Amendment #3, which updates the definition of social media so that it would cover Snapchat and exclude sites like GitHub and Wikipedia that have valuable educational purposes
- Amendment #4, which clarifies that the attorney general will be regulating interoperability of age signals and not mandating that all operating systems implement age signals
- Amendment #19, which prevents companies from manipulating users into using addictive features
- Amendment #24, which voids the privacy and security issues that come with obtaining parental consent, while increasing the protections for minors
- Amendment #25, which clarifies that platforms can use interaction data to generate feeds when that data functions to allow users to control the amount and types of content they receive from users they subscribe to
- Amendment #27, which expands the ban on tech companies’ ability to use design tactics, such as repeated nudges and grouping of settings controls, to manipulate users into choosing less protective settings
- Amendment #29, which adds important protections to minors’ data by requiring the attorney general to address issues of re-identification that could expose minors’ personal information to the public
