Alabama Just Made TikTok Change the App. Here's the List

Intro — A State Just Made TikTok Change the App

Welcome to The Tech Radar for Parents. I'm your host, Weston, brought to you by Nicholas D. West Tech LLC. This is your briefing for the week of September twenty eighth, twenty twenty six.

Most weeks on this show I tell you what somebody is thinking about doing. A bill that was introduced. A lawsuit that was filed. A company that says it is considering something. And then I tell you the date it might actually matter, which is usually two years out.

Not this week. This week a state attorney general walked into a courtroom in Montgomery, Alabama, and came out with a signed list of things TikTok has to change about the app your kid is holding. Not a recommendation. Not a guideline. A settlement, with a dollar figure attached and a five year clock on it.

I live here. You may not. I'm going to tell you exactly what's on that list anyway, because the list is the most concrete thing I have ever read on this show, and because it is now the template every other state is being paid to copy.

That's the good, and it's the lead.

The bad is Spokane, Washington, and it's a short story with a long silence in the middle. They got the grade book back. Ten days after the lights went out, attendance and grading came back for staff on Monday, and the parent portal came back on Wednesday. What they still have not said, two weeks in, is whose information was taken.

The ugly is a number. Reports to the national tip line involving artificial intelligence went from a few thousand in twenty twenty three to more than one hundred eighty thousand in twenty twenty five. I'm going to tell you where that number comes from, and I'm going to tell you honestly how much I trust it, because I could not get it from the source I wanted.

And there's a verdict. A jury in Santa Fe spent two weeks listening to this, and then decided that Facebook misled people on purpose, almost forty four million times. The two sides are now about a hundred times apart on what that should cost, and a judge is going to pick a number this month.

Then a decoder ring, and this one made me laugh. The single most searched slang word of the year among kids means absolutely nothing. It's two numbers. I'll explain.

One note before we start. This episode talks about sexual images of children. If you or your child are struggling, call or text nine eight eight. Free, confidential, twenty four hours.

Let's go.

The Good — Alabama's Eight Terms

Let's start with the good, and the good this week happened about ninety miles from where I'm sitting.

On Friday, September twenty fifth, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall announced a settlement with TikTok. Here is the money, in the state's own words, quoting. Alabama will receive a minimum of one hundred million dollars, due to the state within forty five days, with the potential to receive up to three hundred million dollars if certain conditions are met.

I want to be careful with that sentence, because I've already seen it reported wrong. Alabama is getting a minimum of one hundred million. The three hundred million is a ceiling, not a check. It only arrives if certain conditions are met, and I'll tell you what those conditions are in a minute, because they're the most interesting part of this whole thing.

But the money is not why this matters to you. Here is why it matters to you. The settlement requires TikTok to change the product. Not to publish a safety report. Not to form a working group. To change the app. And the state published the list, so I'm going to read you the list.

One. A two hour daily time limit, with parental controls that allow parents to further limit the amount of time their children spend on TikTok.

Two. Quoting, productive pauses, that interrupt teen users after fifteen minutes of continuous use, and again at sixty and ninety minutes, to limit endless scrolling.

Three. Nighttime access that restricts children's access from midnight to six a m, plus restrictions on messaging and push notifications overnight and during school hours.

I want to stop on that one. During school hours. That is a settlement with a company, quietly doing the thing that forty states have been trying to legislate for two years. If this works the way it reads, the phone in your kid's pocket gets quieter during fourth period whether or not your district ever passes a policy.

Four. Robust age assurance measures to more effectively verify the age of young users.

Five. Stronger content moderation provisions, including limits on discoverability of teen accounts by adults, and parental notification of suspicious interactions between teen users and adults.

Six. A blanket prohibition on the use of cosmetic filters by teen users. A blanket prohibition. If you have a teenage daughter, that may be the most significant sentence in this entire episode.

Seven. A default non personalized feed for teen users. The algorithm, off, by default.

And eight. Stronger, more user friendly parental controls.

Attorney General Marshall, quoting. This is a great day for Alabama parents. Tonight, they can rest easier knowing real protections are in place to shield their children from the dangers of social media addiction. TikTok has agreed to give parents real control over what their kids see and how much time they spend on the app.

Now the conditions, because this is the clever part. That extra money, the gap between one hundred million and three hundred million, is contingent on other state attorneys general reaching comparable agreements. It pays out in tranches as ten, then twenty, then thirty, then forty other states sign on. Alabama built a settlement that pays Alabama more if the rest of the country copies it.

So this is not really a story about one state getting a check. It's a story about one state writing a template and attaching a bounty to it.

Four honest caveats, because this show does not hand you a press release and call it reporting.

First, these are obligations as described by one side's press office. The release states no effective date, no deadline for any individual feature, and TikTok is not quoted anywhere in it. The only person quoted is the Attorney General.

Second, there's a trade summary of the actual court decree suggesting the two hour cap applies to the short video feed specifically, and not to the entire app. Search, messaging, settings, and longer videos may be exempt. I could not confirm that against the decree itself, so do not take my word for the scope of that one. Check it before you promise your kid a number.

Third, the forty five days. The release says the money is due within forty five days. It does not say forty five days from what. From the announcement, from signing, from the court entering it. I don't know, so I'm not going to give you a date.

And fourth, the thing I keep coming back to. Alabama did not beat TikTok in court. Alabama settled three days before the trial was supposed to start. The state's own release says Alabama would have been the first state to bring its claims against TikTok to trial. Would have been. It didn't happen. No state has taken TikTok in front of a jury, and this settlement is the reason why. That's not a criticism. Settling for a hundred million dollars and a product redesign is a good outcome. But it is a negotiated outcome, not a verdict, and those are different things.

The Bad — Spokane Got the Grade Book Back

Now the bad, and this is the third school district I've talked about in four weeks.

Two weeks ago I told you Spokane Public Schools in Washington State had gone dark. Sunday night, September twentieth, a network security threat. Monday morning, families told. PowerSchool, which holds grades and attendance and parent teacher messaging, taken offline. The payroll system, taken offline. Schools stayed open, teachers took attendance on paper, and four days in there was no restoration timeline at all.

Here's the update. On Monday, September twenty eighth, attendance and grading came back online for staff, and payroll came back. On Wednesday the thirtieth, the parent and student portals came back. Call it ten days, start to finish.

That part is genuinely good news, and I want to give the district credit for it. Ten days to rebuild from a security incident, with schools open the whole time, is not a bad outcome. Springfield, Massachusetts lost an entire week of school.

But I told you two weeks ago that one sentence in that story was the most likely thing in the whole brief to change after I said it. That sentence was the district's statement that, quoting, preliminary findings indicate only staff were affected by the incident.

I checked again this morning. It has not changed. And it has not been confirmed either.

As of today, no Spokane official has used the word ransomware. No group has been named. The preliminary finding that only staff were affected has been neither revised nor reaffirmed. The district brought in an outside technical expert and says it expects to learn more in the coming days. That was the posture two weeks ago. It is still the posture.

I also went back and looked at the leak site tracker, the one that had a masked entry for an education victim the same day Spokane went down, attributed to a group calling itself Nightspire. That entry is unchanged. Still masked. Still says, quoting, data is not available now. Nothing published. No deadline set. It is exactly as unconfirmed as it was.

And here is the one piece of real news in the silence. There is no breach notification from Spokane, or from any Washington school district, in the state Attorney General's breach directory. But I want to be precise about what that means, because it would be easy to make it sound sinister. Nothing has been filed, and nothing is due yet. The deadline is somewhere around October twentieth. So that is not a district hiding something. That is a clock that has not run out.

Which gives you the thing to actually watch. If you have a kid in a district that has had an incident, the date to circle is the state notification deadline, not the day the grade book comes back. The grade book coming back is an I T milestone. The notification deadline is the legal one, and it is the point at which a district has to put in writing what it knows.

Ten days to get the grade book back. Two weeks, and still nobody will say whose information walked out the door.

The Ugly — A Few Thousand to 180,000

Now the ugly, and I need to start with a number I am not fully sure of.

Two weeks ago I told you about Henderson, Kentucky. A middle schooler used artificial intelligence to make nude images of two classmates and showed them around South Middle School. A juvenile was detained. I told you four counts, and that was right, though I can sharpen it now. It is three charges, one of which carries two counts. Three charges, four counts. Both numbers are correct and I want you to hear me say that, because I'd rather explain an arithmetic difference than quietly change a number.

Some new detail, all of it from before our window, so I'm labeling it as background and not as this week's news. The juvenile was taken to the McCracken County juvenile detention center on Monday the twenty first, and a juvenile court hearing was held the next day, Tuesday the twenty second. The outcome of that hearing has not been reported anywhere I can find. That comes from Sergeant Bill Russell, speaking to a television station, so it is a police account, not a court record.

And the district's response is, I think, the part worth sitting with. Henderson County Schools declined an on camera interview. They issued a statement confirming an allegation and declined further comment because it's an active case. The district spokeswoman, Megan Mortis, says the only notice that goes home to families about this kind of thing is an annual notice about sexual extortion, required by a Kentucky law passed last year. Not a letter about this. An annual form letter, sent every fall to everybody.

I don't say that to beat up on one district. I say it because it is probably also true of yours. Mortis's own words about A I were, quoting, it is certainly new territory.

Now the number.

Stacy Garrett, who is a vice president at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, says that reports to their tip line involving artificial intelligence went from, quoting, a few thousand in twenty twenty three, the first year they tracked it, to more than one hundred eighty thousand reports related to A I generated child sexual abuse material in twenty twenty five.

A few thousand to a hundred and eighty thousand. In two years.

Here is my honesty problem with that number. I got it from a television interview, not from a published report. I tried to get the underlying data and I could not. So I am telling it to you the way I got it, attributed to the person who said it, and I am telling you I have not verified it independently. If that number holds, it is the single most important statistic I have read all year. If it turns out to be a misquote, I'd rather you heard the caveat from me first.

Two more things, quickly, that are useful and that are both older background.

Kentucky did not need a new law to charge this kid. The legislature amended the statute in twenty twenty four so that possession and distribution of matter portraying a sexual performance by a minor includes a computer generated image, and prosecutors do not have to prove the child in the picture actually exists. That is worth knowing, because the most common thing I hear from parents is, surely that's not illegal if it's fake. In Kentucky, and in a growing number of states, it is.

And Louisiana went further. Their twenty twenty six law, named the Ivy Daniels Act, requires public schools to teach students in sixth grade and above about the crimes and consequences of A I generated sexual images. That is a curriculum mandate. That's a real thing you can ask your own district about, and I'd ask.

One more, and then I'll let you go.

On Friday, September twenty fifth, a jury in Santa Fe came back after a two week trial and found that Facebook willfully violated New Mexico's consumer protection law almost forty four million times. The jurors weighed twenty nine statements the company had made, about whether you could control your own data, about hate speech, about misinformation. They found twenty six of those twenty nine were false or deceptive.

This is not our child safety case. New Mexico has two cases against Meta and this is the other one, the adult data privacy one. I'm telling you about it because of what happened on Thursday.

At the penalty hearing, the state asked the judge for thirty five to forty billion dollars. Meta's attorney proposed a judgment between three hundred forty five million and three and a half billion, and said the company is likely to appeal whatever number comes out. So the two sides are roughly a hundred times apart, and Judge Francis Mathew said he'll decide by late October.

And in the other case, the child safety one, I finally got my hands on the actual judgment, which I've been promising to read for three weeks. It is worth it. Beyond the money, it orders Meta to build an under thirteen prediction model, to proactively ask for proof of age, to delete unverified suspected under thirteen accounts within thirty days, and to create a reporting portal so that school administrators can flag suspected underage accounts directly. Your principal, with a button. Meta has to report its compliance to the court every June thirtieth and December thirty first for five years.

That's an actual remedy, aimed at actual children, written down by an actual judge. It's the first one I've seen.

The Decoder Ring — The #1 Word Means Nothing

Now the Decoder Ring, and before I give you a single word I have to tell you where this came from, because it is the weakest source I have used on this show in a while and I'd rather lead with that than bury it.

A European news outlet published a ranking on Monday of the most searched slang terms among kids this year. The data underneath it is not a survey. It is not research. It is a commercial dataset from a word game website, with no sample size published, no search volumes published, and no methodology beyond the phrase, Google search trends data. The only person quoted is a spokesperson for that company, with no job title.

So this is not evidence. This is a conversation starter. I'm giving it to you because four of the ten words are genuinely useful to know, and because the number one word on the list tells you something true about how this all works.

Also worth saying plainly, the search data runs from January through the end of August. So this is the year's ranking, not this week's.

Here are the five that matter.

Number one. Six seven. That's it, that's the word. It is two numbers, and it is the most searched slang term of the year among kids, and it means nothing. It comes from a rap song called Doot Doot, which has six seven in the title, and a viral clip of a kid at a basketball game. There is no definition. There is no hidden drug reference. There is no secret. It is pure in group noise, the whole point of which is that it annoys adults who demand to know what it means.

I'm telling you that first on purpose, because if you go looking for a sinister meaning you will find somebody online willing to sell you one. The correct parental response to six seven is to let it go.

Number two is not like that. Bop. B O P. It used to mean a catchy song, and if you're my age that's what it means to you. It has been reversed. It is now a misogynistic insult aimed at girls, about promiscuity. If you hear your son use it about a girl at school, that is not a music review, and it's worth a conversation.

Number three. Chud. A general purpose insult. Stupid, ugly, repulsive. Not targeted at a protected class, just nasty.

Number four. Mog, or mogging. To dominate someone by being better looking than they are. If that sounds familiar, it should. Two weeks ago I gave you looksmaxxing, and this is its sibling. Both come out of the same corner of the internet, the one that teaches boys that their face determines their life. Mogging is the verb form of that worldview. This is the one on the list I would actually pay attention to.

And number five. Crash out. To lose control emotionally, to melt down. I gave you this one two weeks ago from the dictionary, and it is the only word that appears on both lists, which is a decent sign it is real and not an artifact of somebody's search data.

So. The most searched word of the year means nothing, and two of the other nine are insults. If you want one takeaway from this segment, it is that ratio. Most of it is noise designed to exclude you. A small amount of it is contempt, pointed at somebody. Learning to tell those two apart is more useful than memorizing any list, including this one.

Your Weekly Action Plan (1–2)

Here is your action plan for the week. Four things.

Number one. Go look at TikTok with your kid this weekend, and find out which of the Alabama terms have actually landed.

I need to be straight with you about this one. The settlement is an Alabama settlement. The company's obligations run to this state. Nobody has told me whether TikTok will build two versions of the app or just ship the changes everywhere, and honestly, building one app is usually cheaper than building two. So the honest instruction is, go look.

Open the app together and check three things. Is there a two hour daily limit, and is it on. Is there a nighttime block between midnight and six in the morning. And is the feed for your teen's account personalized or not. Those are the three easiest to see from the outside.

And if you are not in Alabama, use the numbers anyway. Two hours a day. Nothing after midnight. A pause every fifteen minutes. Those numbers came out of a legal negotiation where a company's lawyers had to agree they were reasonable. That's a better foundation than anything I could make up, and screen time settings on both iPhone and Android will do all three of them tonight, in any state, without waiting for anybody's attorney general.

Number two. Have the A I images conversation. If you did it two weeks ago, do the second half of it now.

The first half is for the kid who might make one, and I gave you that already. It's a crime, children do get charged, delete it, don't forward it, tell an adult.

The second half is for the kid it happens to, and it's the one most of us skip because it's harder. It is three sentences. If somebody ever makes a picture like that of you, it is not your fault. You are not in trouble. Tell me, and we will handle it.

And then know what handling it actually looks like, before you need it. It's a free service from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children called Take It Down. It helps get these images pulled off participating platforms, and it works on A I generated ones. Look it up tonight so that it's a thing you already know about rather than a thing you google at eleven at night in a panic.

Your Weekly Action Plan (3–4)

Number three. If your district has had an incident, send one email, and send it in writing.

I have told you to freeze your kid's credit two weeks running and I still mean it, so if you haven't, go do that, it's free at all three bureaus and it takes about ten minutes each. But this week I want to give you the next thing, because three districts in four weeks is not a run of bad luck anymore. It's the weather.

Here is the email. Which categories of student information were in the systems that were affected. When is the district's notification deadline under state law. And will students, not just staff, be offered credit monitoring.

Three questions, in writing, to the superintendent's office, copying your school board member. In writing matters, because a district that tells you something in an email has told you something it has to stand behind. And the notification deadline question is the one most parents never ask, which is why I mentioned Spokane's. Every state has one. It is the date the district has to stop saying we are still investigating.

Number four. Ask your school what replaced the phones.

Two new pieces of research landed this week and they both point the same direction. A Ghent University study followed about thirty five hundred students across twenty secondary schools, before and after a full phone ban. Total daily phone use did not go down. The kids shifted it to after school. Sixty two percent admitted using their phones at school anyway, despite the rules. The researchers did not find a concentration improvement, they found more restlessness, and they found more reported cyberbullying afterward, though that last one might mean more reporting rather than more bullying, and I'd be careful with it.

And the journal JAMA Pediatrics published an umbrella review on Monday. That's not a study and it's not a meta analysis, it's a review of twenty three meta analyses covering two point eight million children across sixty four countries. Screen use was associated with slightly lower academic achievement and slightly lower language skills, and with somewhat more emotional and behavioral and peer problems. The word to hold onto there is associated. Not caused. And the effects were small.

Put those two together and here is the honest version. Taking the phones away, by itself, did not fix the things we were told it would fix. That is not an argument against phone bans. It's an argument against expecting a ban to do the work on its own.

So the question for your principal is not, do we have a policy. You already know the answer. The question is, what did you put in the time where the phones used to be. If the answer is nothing, that's your answer.

Closing & Outro

Let's bring it home.

The good. Alabama got TikTok to agree to change the app, in writing, with a minimum of one hundred million dollars attached and a five year clock. Two hour daily limit, pauses every fifteen minutes, nothing between midnight and six, no cosmetic filters for teens, and the algorithm off by default. And a bounty built in that pays this state more if other states copy it.

The bad. Spokane got the grade book back in ten days, and two weeks on still has not said whose information was taken. Nothing is filed with the state yet, and nothing is due yet. The date to watch is around October twentieth.

The ugly. A middle schooler in Kentucky is facing three charges and four counts, his district's only letter home is an annual form letter, and tip line reports involving A I went from a few thousand to more than one hundred eighty thousand in two years, if that figure holds.

And the verdict. A Santa Fe jury found Facebook misled people on purpose almost forty four million times. The state wants thirty five to forty billion. Meta says three hundred forty five million. A judge picks, by late October.

Now the part I don't skip, which is what I did not check.

The Cat in the Hat threat trend got no searches for the third week in a row. Third week. The only thing I found was dated before our window, so it tells you nothing about now. I cannot tell you whether that trend is growing, dying, or has turned into something else, and at this point the honest thing to say is that I have stopped being able to track it, not that it stopped.

Discord, which was my whole good story two weeks ago, got no follow up at all. I don't know whether the age sorting worked, whether people got misclassified, or whether anybody complained. I told you it was coming and then I didn't go back and look.

I checked two of eight platforms. Snap, YouTube, Roblox, Character A I and Steam got nothing. And TikTok's own newsroom still will not load for my tools, so everything I told you about TikTok tonight came from a government source, not from the company.

Springfield, Massachusetts, second week running, I could not finish the sweep. I don't know if those students were ever offered credit monitoring.

British Columbia's lawsuit against OpenAI, no follow up. And nobody pulled a court docket this week either, which means the New Mexico bond and appeal question is open for the third week for exactly the same reason it was open the first week.

That's a long list. Some weeks it is short. This week it is long, and you should know that the four stories I gave you are the four I could stand behind, not the ten I went looking for.

If you or your child are struggling, call or text nine eight eight. Free, confidential, twenty four hours.

If this episode was useful, the best thing you can do is like and subscribe. And if you've got another thirty seconds, please leave a review. Reviews are free. They cost you nothing but the thirty seconds, and they are genuinely what lets us keep making this show and keep it free for parents. Share it with another parent who needs it. Drop a comment with the topic you want covered next. New episodes weekly, so turn on notifications.

Two things before I let you go. Open TikTok with your kid this weekend and see which of those protections actually show up on the phone in your house. And if your district has had an incident, send the three question email, in writing.

I'm your host, Weston, with Nicholas D. West Tech LLC. Stay vigilant, stay informed, and I'll see you next week.