Kentucky’s ‘At least we tried’ bills

By Rob Mattheu | Forward Kentucky

The Kentucky Lantern recent­ly detailed the fail­ure of HB 227, a bill designed to reg­u­late the access of kids to social media with­in the state. In a sto­ry famil­iar to any­one who has fol­lowed laws regard­ing ani­mal cru­el­ty, a “great” bill with bipar­ti­san sup­port some­how man­aged to die with­out ever get­ting a vote in both houses.

What struck me about the sto­ry was this passage.

It passed the House unan­i­mous­ly on March 9 but progress petered out in the Senate, where it died. Lockett doesn’t blame sen­a­tors. He said Meta lob­by­ing against the bill “kicked into high gear” once it passed the House.

“I think it’s unfor­tu­nate that a com­pa­ny like Meta wants to pro­tect their bot­tom dol­lar so much that they’re will­ing to do it on the backs of kids,” he told the Lantern.

I real­ize I’m just a sim­ple cit­i­zen with a degree in broad­cast­ing and film, but I always thought that the Senate was an inde­pen­dent body, and not a sub­sidiary of Meta.

If the Senate fails to advance a good bill, it is REALLY the fault of the lob­by­ists, or the fault of the Senate, Mr. Lockett?

While I hate Meta tremen­dous­ly, I don’t think you can tru­ly put all the blame on them. Consider the list of some of the com­pa­nies and orga­ni­za­tions list­ed as lob­by­ing on the bill.

1. ADF Action
2. Amazon.com Services, LLC
3. American Civil Liberties Union of KY (ACLU)
4. Apple, Inc.
5. AT&T
6. Charter Communications Operating, LLC
7. Cincinnati Bell, Inc & Its Subsidiaries dba Altafiber
8. Citigroup Washington, Inc.
9. Commonwealth Policy Center
10. Delta Air Lines Inc.
11. eBay, Inc.
12. Expedia Group
13. Family Foundation (The)
14. Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
15. Google LLC and Its Affiliates
16. JPMorgan Chase Holdings LLC
17. KY Chamber of Commerce
18. KY School Counselors Assn.
19. Meta Platforms, Inc.
20. Motion Picture Assn., Inc.
21. Paducah Area Chamber of Commerce
22. ROBLOX
23. T Mobile USA, Inc.
24. Turo, Inc.
25. Uber Technologies, Inc.
26. Verizon Wireless, Cellco Partnership
27. X Corp.

The Commonwealth Policy Center and Family Foundation are two very vis­i­ble lob­by­ists in Kentucky who sup­port­ed this bill and who have had no prob­lem get­ting some pret­ty ter­ri­ble bills through the leg­is­la­ture. Not this one though.

The ACLU of Kentucky and the Kentucky School Counselor’s Association were in sup­port of the bill as well.

But much of the rest of that list is made up of social media com­pa­nies like Meta, X, and Roblox, as well as com­pa­nies that pro­vide the inter­net and under­pin­nings that serve social media to kids, like AT&T, Verizon, T‑Mobile, Google, Amazon, and Apple. It stands to rea­son they wor­ry about any reg­u­la­tion that could dis­rupt their oper­a­tions or hold them account­able for what hap­pens on the internet.

Matt Lockett’s response to why the bill died reminds me of the way my for­mer Representative Kevin Bratcher addressed the fail­ure of bipar­ti­san leg­is­la­tion tar­get­ing ani­mal cru­el­ty back in 2022.

Rather than place the blame on feck­less law­mak­ers who failed to push the bill for­ward, Kevin sim­ply blamed “pol­i­tics” for why a bill meant to pro­tect vul­ner­a­ble ani­mals failed. I ful­ly believe Kevin want­ed this bill, and was tru­ly dis­ap­point­ed in tis fail­ure. But not plac­ing blame where it belongs, which in this case was House lead­er­ship, was a choice.

It’s also inter­est­ing to see Lindsey Tichenor’s reac­tion to the fail­ure of the bill in the Senate. Tichenor has made a career of see­ing threats to kids around every cor­ner and once pub­licly stat­ed “We should not be pro­tect­ing peo­ple who prey on chil­dren. Why would we pro­tect them?” Yet when it comes to imple­ment­ing stronger pro­tec­tions on social media for kids, sud­den­ly she’s mak­ing excus­es. From the Kentucky Lantern article:

Meanwhile, the senate’s fail­ure to pass the bill “should not be viewed as oppo­si­tion,” said Sen. Lindsey Tichenor, R‑Smithfield. A bill stalling often rep­re­sents “a mat­ter of the leg­isla­tive process and the need for delib­er­a­tion, espe­cial­ly when a top­ic is com­plex,” she said.

“There’s not a short­age of exam­ples we could iden­ti­fy where a pro­pos­al took a cou­ple of years or more to get over the fin­ish line. I trust the same is true here,” said Tichenor, who serves on sev­er­al health and edu­ca­tion com­mit­tees in the Kentucky Senate.

Lindsey had no prob­lem vot­ing for hasti­ly writ­ten laws in the past. In 2025 she vot­ed for gen­er­ous last minute tax breaks for data cen­ters crammed into HB 8 in the last hours of the ses­sion. Those tax breaks ben­e­fit­ed the very same tech com­pa­nies that Lindsey Tichenor that Lindsey wants to pro­vide a more com­plex delib­er­a­tion. Certainly Meta, X, Google, Amazon and oth­ers deserve the thought­ful­ness in leg­is­la­tion that Tichenor didn’t pro­vide in her bill reg­u­lat­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions among school employ­ees and stu­dents. Of course, to Lindsey and many of her col­leagues, edu­ca­tors are a per­pet­u­al threat. Businesses can do no wrong.

The fact is, year in and year out there are bills like this that seem like they SHOULD at least get a vote. They have broad and bipar­ti­san sup­port in at least one cham­ber. They get though part of the process and then sim­ply die.

When those pop­u­lar bills die, Republicans pull a Matt Lockett. Rather than name names in their own par­ty, they blame pol­i­tics, lob­by­ists, or tell us “it’s just the way things work.”

In this sit­u­a­tion, large tech com­pa­nies are scared. Folks like Meta know that they’ve done absolute­ly noth­ing of sub­stance to pro­tect kids OR adults from the worst aspects of their tech­nol­o­gy. These com­pa­nies do not want ANY reg­u­la­tion because it means they have to change the way they do busi­ness and make mon­ey. Meanwhile peo­ple of all ages remain at great risk to online preda­tors, scam artists, bul­ly­ing, mis­in­for­ma­tion, and algo­rithms that care only that they keep click­ing and scrolling no mat­ter how much dam­age it may be doing to them.

While I real­ize that Kentucky wish­es to main­tain a busi­ness friend­ly envi­ron­ment and reg­u­la­tions can’t be so oner­ous that they do more harm than good, it’s incred­i­bly sad that our leg­is­la­tors are more afraid of anger­ing big busi­ness­es than they are tak­ing care of the needs of Kentucky’s citizens.

This sto­ry was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished by Forward Kentucky.