The Very Bad 'Kids Online Safety Act' Is Dead In The House, For All The Wrong Reasons
The Very Bad 'Kids Online Safety Act' Is Dead In The House, For All The Wrong Reasons
House Republicans likely want it to be worse before they introduce it.
Bad News! The bipartisan, No-Good-Very-Bad-But-Mostly-Well-Intentioned Kids Online Safety Act passed the Senate this week.
Good News! According to a report from Punchbowl News, it’s dead in the House!
Bad News! House Republicans declined to introduce it, and that’s likely because the newer Senate version of the bill took out a lot of the stuff that would have allowed Republican AGs to prevent kids from accessing LGBTQ+ content, and they’d like to put all of that crap back in.
All of that being said, it’s still pretty good news, because now we can really work on our House Democrats, as well as some more libertarian-minded Republicans (look, sometimes they’re on the right side on these issues — Rand Paul is a dick, but he is very much on the right side just this once), to get it squashed.
If you’re not super familiar with the legislation, introduced by Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Richard Blumenthal (D-But He’s Always Been Bad About This Stuff), there are some good things about it, on its face. It’s understandable that parents would want more control about what their kids see online and opt them out of targeted advertising and things like that. It’s understandable that they don’t want their kids to see pornography or information about suicide or pro-anorexia content. However, there are worries that it could be used to prevent kids from accessing information about abortion or information about basic sex education or LGBTQ+ content. This could then lead to adults not being able to access that information either.
It would impose a duty of care on internet sites and social media sites to protect children from certain information, but in most cases, because it’s so difficult to really know who is on the other end of the computer, sites will decide to just censor that information altogether, for everyone.
Rather than repeat myself, allow me to direct you all to the explainer I did on KOSA last year!
Something we should always be vigilant about is the fact that when kids are involved, people’s brains fall out of their heads. We often don’t think as carefully about things as we might when they involve protecting kids — both because we care about kids and because we don’t want to be seen as not caring about kids. This is why so many conspiracies revolve around children.
There must be ways to protect children online that do not require state-sponsored censorship and legal penalties that will inevitably result in adults also being barred from publishing and reading things they are legally allowed to publish and read — and that’s what needs to be looked at and considered well before we start in on this road.
KOSA is evil incarnate and a Reichwing homophobe's goddamned wet dream.
IN NO FORM is this shite acceptable. How about parents monitoring their devilspawns' cell phone usage or--GASP--even limiting/barring their access? HMMMMMMMMMM?????
Incredibly frustrating, because the Horseshoe Theory left continues to insist that this (very bad) bill existing means that the Democrats are "normalizing fascism" and aren't any different than the Republicans, and therefore you shouldn't vote for Harris. I genuinely saw this on Twitter already this morning.
This as opposed to the far more simple explanation that Robyn provides above: that people's brains fall out of their head when children are involved in any kind of political calculus, and a well-meaning party of more or less good people is trying in good faith to do good, helpful things, either unaware of or hopeful that they can ameliorate the more grotesque effects of a party who wants nothing more than to weaponize everything.