Senate to Vote on Web Censorship Bill Disguised as Kids Safety

Why are kids using social media to begin with?

I am on like 2 "social media" platforms at most. I use hacker news to find cool new stuff in tech and to look at what other people think on a topic, and find that the site is a great tool for finding cool niche topic discussions. And I use Snapchat because my friend moved across the country and his texting is spotty due to his provider. I check Snapchat less than once a week, and while I do frequent hacker news more often....I don't spend a lot of time on here.

YouTube I get. Its a great place to learn math or watch makers build things or experiment. But are people so into mindless consumption and digital interaction?

The actual bill: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/140...

> The term “covered platform” means an online platform, online video game, messaging application, or video streaming service that connects to the internet and that is used, or is reasonably likely to be used, by a minor.

This covers quite a bit more than just social media. Sites like Wikipedia and health information seemingly fall under this, though there is an exception for "news" outlets

I remember back in the early 2000's here on Airstirp One when our government of the time used the child protection strategy to introduce the old Criminal records bureau checks on all those people working with children and vulnerable adults.

Being a psychotherapist I had to have those checks done.

There was the "basic check" which gave the employer access to your criminal convictions and an "Enhanced check" which also included under 18 minor offences and police cautions from which no charge was brought and information the chief of police deemed important, like if you had spent time in Psychiatric care.

I assumed correctly at the time that the CRB check would infiltrate all areas of our working life.

Even if you are a road sweeper for the local council you now have to have a CRB check just in case you come into contact with a child while collecting rubbish. Or a company who has a contract with the local medical centre to sweep the car park and mow the grass. you guessed it, you need a CR check to get the job.

The question is?

Has this protected children?

No!

Can you imagine what would happen if any politician refused to vote for a policy that protected children.

> This means they're legally required to protect minors from exposure to anything that could contribute to a host of "harms," including anxiety, depression, eating disorders, suicidal behaviors ...

Looks like harms includes everything associated with living, is the article even correct ?

To me this looks like it will eliminate all advertising and everything else people could buy.

Who decides "harm", just about all food in the US causes "harm" in some form or another.

I think the fundamental issue is identification. The government cannot effectively regulate your interaction with the internet if you cannot be identified.

There seem to be different viewpoints: one is that the government should not try to regulate your interaction with the internet at all. Another that comes up is that it should regulate you, but only in certain special circumstances, which have different definitions of what those things are.

For example, more people want the government to regulate your interaction with the internet in regards to CSAM.

Some people want you to always be identified so that you can't enter sites that might be deemed too adult for you.

Then the other aspect of this is, for people who want you to be identified on the internet, how exactly does that work. The worst aspect of this seems to me to be that that is kind of an afterthought, or poorly designed. Leaking social security numbers is not acceptable.

I feel like generally people want the government to stay out of it. Except for some people, there are specific things they DO want regulated. As more and more of our lives go online, we may come to the conclusion that we do want robust identification online.

We have state and federal identification systems based on physical cards and numbers. I wonder if there has been any attempt to modernize these systems to make them cryptographically secure, biometrically verifiable, or anything like that.

I guess practically speaking, due to the extreme abuse and incompetence we have seen from government so far, I am currently in the "please just stay out of it" camp.

But as virtual and augmented reality picks up over the coming years, we may get to a point where so much happens online that we decide we need a robust "online government". Or maybe the online world will prove that something more like anarchy or self regulation works?

I don’t know how well or bad this bill will be but it’s a good idea to try to stop the mental health assault being inflicted on users of social media. Humans haven’t evolved to be able to handle the targeted messaging that is common on Facebook.

I wonder how a law seemingly so broadly written would behave with chevron gone. Theoretically it might be totally unenforceable. In practice though I imagine it would turn into the courts getting the final say for most enforcement actions.

Here we go again. Another "protect the children!" which only curbs the rights and freedoms of everyone - while leaving children with no greater outcome.

This needs to stop. Who keeps pushing these anti-democracy bills to try and control speech and thought online?

And for sure, this will hurt small businesses much more than corporations.

Amazing!

This article is fast to make a conclusion of its own and make sure that the reader is swayed with a negative opinion. But not everyone will (hopefully) fall for that.

Kids should be kept far from any kind of sexual or predatory content, if not what will lead to life long trauma. What I see today is that small kids being heavily addicted to social media, reels, tiktoks and what not. Many (90% today) I see become so restless if smartphone is snatched away for a moment. Atleast this will (or rather can) protect them from worst but of course more can be done.

> a measure certain to seriously restrict free speech and privacy online for _everyone_ .

I'm not saying I like KOSA, but my reading is it explicitly does not apply to adult-only services (who make reasonable steps to enforce this). If, for example, WhatsApp split into an "open network" and a "verified 18+ network" then the latter would be ok for KOSA even if the latter is used for general chat and not just porn and sexting. It would even be a start if they enforced the, mostly theoretical, 13 lower age limit for meta products.

(Lest anyone think this is unrealistic, in Israel there are already separate phones and services only for the ultra-orthodox, so they don't encounter anything "unholy" there.)

(And fetlife will probably carry on as usual.)

Personally, I wish more of the reaction to unreasonable "think of the children" plans would be to reply with reasonable plans. If the choice is between doing too much and doing nothing at all, we'll end up with too much somewhere down the line.

> There's a lot more to KOSA than just the "duty of care" requirement. But basically, all of it comes down to the same fundamental flaw. At the heart of KOSA—and so many online child "protection" bills—is the pretense that it's possible to eradicate problems associated with young people if only big tech companies would do better. > > Online bullying is bad, of course. But bullying in general is bad, and bullying existed long before the internet. So did teens with eating disorders, problematic media habits, mental health issues, and risky or dumb decisions regarding sex and intoxicating substances.

Ok, I call "logical fallacy" on this argument.

However bad KOSA is, the quoted text feels a bit like saying "we'll never prevent all crime, so we will abolish the police and stop prosecuting _any_ crime". If there's a political amount-of-crime lever, you might never be able to pull it all the way over, but you very much can nudge it a little bit in either direction.

A properly written and thought out bill would not eradicate, but reduce, the cited problems, and it would make big tech, social media and advertising companies do a lot better than the worst excesses we see nowadays. There's a good argument that KOSA is not that bill, but to the extent that the quoted argument would also apply to a better thought out bill, I find the argument overly generalizing and invalid.

Or, for another example, gun crime exists all over the world (organised crime will always find a way - the Yakuza manage it even in Japan). But it's certainly the case that some countries have a lot more gun crimes than others. This argument is essentially saying that even if we had Japan's gun laws, there'd still be some gun crime, which is true but misses the point that there wouldn't be the same amount of gun crime.

Bullying existed before the internet, but the internet has certainly enabled new kinds of bullying, and it's possible the internet has drastically increased the amount of bullying. Eating disorders existed before the internet, forums where you upload a photo and others tell you you're definitely fat and should kill yourself, not so much.

It annoys me when someone tries to shoot down a low-quality bill with an equally low-quality argument. We can do better than this.