New York Gov. Kathy Hochul slammed TikTok on Tuesday over the dissemination of a letter from Osama bin Laden justifying the 9/11 terrorist attacks, vowing action against social media companies and announcing new tools to help prevent young people from having their “minds polluted by the venom that is being spewed on these sites.”
At a press conference ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday, Hochul announced that she was ordering the director of Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services to develop “media literacy tools” for K-12 in public schools to teach students and teachers to “understand how to spot conspiracies, theories and misinformation, disinformation and online hate.”
“Give the teachers the tools they need to help these conversations in school,” the governor said. “And by teaching younger New Yorkers about how to discern between digital fact and digital fiction, we can better inoculate them from hatred and the spread of it and help prepare them for a very fast-moving and often confusing world.”
In the wake of the Buffalo, N.Y., mass shooting that left 10 dead at a grocery store in a historically Black neighborhood, Hochul said state authorities activated more surveillance of critical threats for harm online.
