Senate panel advances bills to childproof the internet
theverge.com
theverge.com
HN is now subject to astroturfers? The comments in here are insane
Section 3(a)(1) is most concerning:
> SEC. 3. Duty of care.
>> (a) Prevention of harm to minors.—A covered platform shall act in the best interests of a user that the platform knows or reasonably should know is a minor by taking reasonable measures in its design and operation of products and services to prevent and mitigate the following:
>>> (1) Consistent with evidence-informed medical information, the following mental health disorders: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance use disorders, and suicidal behaviors.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/140...
It is ridiculous to expect a website to censor any content that can induce anxiety or depression, which is what the bill requires. How exactly is that even supposed to be accomplished? Blocking distressing or negative news from reaching people under 18 will only lead to the next generation being less informed and is not going to build a better society.
I will be calling my senator and representatives to reject these overreaching bills. If you are in the United States, it only takes a couple of minutes to let them know why this bill is unacceptable: https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member
(1) https://www.readtpa.com/p/congress-is-about-to-pass-a-very
> I also oppose these bills. The effect of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which I have read, is that anyone under 18 years old would be prevented from viewing any content that a (most likely inaccurate) classification filter deems "harmful".
The law specifically excludes sites that are not predominantly user-generated content. So if you are running a website about trans issues that is not predominantly user-generated content, KOSA does not apply, even if you are running that site for-profit.
The law specifically excludes sites that are not run for-profit. So if you are running a non-profit forum for trans kids to discuss trans issue, KOSA does not apply.
The law specifically excludes websites of educational institutions, so if you are child development professor or academically affiliated doctor at a for-profit university running a for-profit forum for trans kids to discuss trans issues, KOSA does not apply.
I also argue -- vehemently -- that the first two cases (not user-generated, and/or not for-profit) are exactly the type of websites children should be seeking out for information on sensitive issues.
Even if this law resulted in AGs banning trans content -- which I find extraordinarily unlikely because there are far simpler legal theories and state AGs abusing KOSA this badly can many other statutes that require less legal contortion -- it wouldn't apply to by far the most valuable sources of information and community.
> It is ridiculous to expect a website to censor any content that can induce anxiety or depression
Indeed it is.
> which is what the bill requires
No it does not.
Food distributors have to take reasonable measures to ensure that they do not sell spoiled or tainted food. Food poisoning still happens.
Auto manufacturers have to take reasonable measures to ensure cars protect occupants in case of collision. People still die in car crashes.
The bill requires reasonable measures taken in design and operation of social media platforms.
The intent here is that it should be illegal for Meta to juice under-17 engagement by algorithmically boosting content that leads to "doom scrolling", and the wording of the statute is designed to limit scope to that intent.
This really is a bill about for-profit weaponization of human psychology against minors.
To be blunt: the public, including me, are fed up with Meta/YT's for-profit algorithmic manipulation of children.
Free speech existed before Meta started printing billions by getting kids addicted to social media, and will continue to exist after.
You cannot simply assume that "reasonable measures" would exclude censorship when the phrase is attached to a mandate to "prevent and mitigate" anxiety and depression. A plaintiff or prosecutor could easily argue that "reasonable measures" do include censorship because these platforms have moderation teams, and simply saying "No it does not" is not a very good counterargument. Even though it is impractical to censor all discussions that fit some broad criteria (as the Great Firewall demonstrates), that does not make the censorship acceptable.
The Kids Online Safety Act's sponsor, Richard Blumenthal, is one of the two senators who reintroduced the EARN IT Act in 2022* after it died in committee in 2020. Based on this, it's clear that the intent of the Kids Online Safety Act is to allow the government to stifle certain types of speech on certain mainstream websites and platforms under the guise of protecting children, which is also what the EARN IT Act attempted to do. The Kids Online Safety Act is written so ambiguously that any competent attorney would be able to use it to suppress protected speech and limit the ability of people under 18 to obtain information online. This bill needs to be stopped.
* https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/1/22912387/earn-it-act-secti...
KOSA does NOT prevent people under 18 from watching anything they want.
> Richard Blumenthal, is one of the two senators who reintroduced the EARN IT Act in 2022
More specious FUD. KOSA is not EARN IT. There are several KOSA co-sponsors who did not support EARN IT. Why conflate the two? Can we not just have an adult conversation about what KOSA actually does or does not do?
You're assuming that people under 18 do not want to see content that may trigger anxiety or depression. The reality is that not everything in the world is positive, and people under 18 also want to be informed of negative news (such as the introduction of KOSA) so that they can educate themselves and respond appropriately.
> More specious FUD.
The only FUD here is the KOSA bill itself, which is a censorship bill that is being pushed as a way to "think of the children". Hiding content that may trigger anxiety or depression from people under 18 does not "protect children" any more than banning books does. Richard Blumenthal already has a history of introducing and co-sponsoring internet censorship bills including the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) and the EARN IT Act, bills that the public does not support. KOSA is yet another iteration of the same authoritarian lawmaking.
Over 90 human rights organizations oppose KOSA because the bill harms people under 18 by diminishing their privacy, safety, and ability to access information: https://www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2022-11-28-letter-90-.... These organizations include ones dedicated to civil rights, youth advocacy, and LGBTQ representation. No amount of hand-waving can make up for the problems in KOSA, a bill that has a negative impact on people under 18 despite its supporters' claims to the contrary.
There are many VERY simple ways to comply with KOSA that don't involve censorship, most of which boil down to "don't make your money by using weaponized human psychology on children".
Does the bill make it harder for Meta to monetize and juice engagement amount the under-17 population? Absolutely. The job of Meta becomes much more difficult. They'll survive.
> astroturfers
I don't have any particular stake in this matter. I'm just sharing my opinion, as I do on many topics on this site, and sometimes I disagree with the Usent-cum-Slashdot-cum-HN hivemind.
It couldn't possibly be that there exist real humans who think that subjecting children to social media content recommendation algorithms is, in fact, probably a bad idea.
It couldn't possibly be the case that a bill with FORTY TWO co-sponsors -- damn close to half the chamber, and split equally between both parties -- is actually supported by a single real world human.
No. Must be astroturfing.
In the case of online safety for children, I think this corner of tech subculture has some deep-seated brainrot.
Or perhaps it's just that those sweet Meta RSUs have appreciated a lot and not yet vested...
You then have the gall to call the EFF complaints 'specious FUD'. You can't even construct alegitimate counterargument. Just straight up dismissing them and saying they're fearmongering. You deflect this by claiming the bill will 'stick it to the man' that is Meta.
Finally, you pathetically try to appeal to authority with the claim that the bill has forty two co-sponsors. This literally means fucking nothing. Absolutely nothing. Entire DUMBER bills are written and supported by more congressmen. It's honestly embarrassing that you think this is a strong point of why your bill should be passed through.
So please, tell me how this isn't the genuine definition of astroturfing?
There exist people who disagree with you and who aren't paid PR shills. Like me. I feel strongly about a bill that you don't like. It's possible to have an adult conversation about the merits of the bill without accusing literally everyone who disagrees with you of astrofurfing.
The accusation of astroturfing -- which BY DEFINITION involves fake identities -- is particularly ironic in this thread where the ONLY non-anonymous comment is from a supporter.
You're like the person who says that they can't believe that some candidate or another won and election because they have literally never met a person in their life who would vote for that candidate.
I've explained my reasons for supporting this bill at length. Instead of responding to my long and substantive rebuttals about the EFF's claims, you're name calling.
I'm not going to convince you. That's fine. Others can read the EFF post, them read my comments here, then read the bill, and form their own opinion.
(Also: two can play at this ridiculously juvenile game. I would not be surprised if Meta et al. astrofurf comment sections on topcis like this. For every one person like me, there are dozens of low-effort paranoid comments designed to direct the hive mind away from regulating Meta's bullshit.)
The EFF has raised many good points about how KOSA's censorship mandate would harm people under 18. Calling the EFF's well-reasoned arguments "FUD" and labeling people who oppose KOSA a "hive mind" is not a substitute for engaging with the facts at hand. If KOSA is as innocuous as you are claiming it is, then explain in detail how a website covered under this bill could "prevent and mitigate" anxiety or depression to comply with the bill without the use of censorship.
The EFF is not the only organization that opposes KOSA. There are over 90 more who have signed this letter condemning KOSA, including the ACLU, Yale Privacy Lab, GLAAD, and the Human Trafficking Prevention Project:
https://www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2022-11-28-letter-90-...
Social media algorithmic recommendations and "addictive product features" have to be turned off BY DEFAULT. Social media companies are responsible for not showing content to minors that promotes suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, sexual exploitation, tobacco, or alcohol.
I think Internet Age Verification is both doomed to failure and also a terrible idea from a privacy perspective, but KOSA does not introduce age verification requirements.
We need to reign in social media companies that are targeting children.
What happens when an American-operated chat platform that provides E2EE claims they can't stop kids from seeing illegal content because of E2EE?
All this legislation restricting free flow of information being pushed because "Think Of The Children" is concerning.
KOSA requires that social media companies cannot target children with certain types of ads or provide algorithmic recommendations, when they "reasonably know" that the user is a minor.
A company implementing E2EE can simply make the choice to either not serve minors or to not provide certain features (algorithmic content targeting, targeted ads) to users who are minors.
No new age verification is required.
Tech has had a knee-jerk reaction against doing anything to protect children online since the Slashdot days, because proponents of draconian laws often say "think of the children". But that doesn't mean that EVERY law intended to protect children is bad. And Meta et al need to be held to account.
But:
I fundamentally agree with the concept of restricting children from accessing social media up to a certain age. Shit's radioactive.
Making the choice to not serve minors won't stop minors from lying about their age (no new age verification is required?), and it won't stop subpoenas from piling up from individual cases involving children when that company providing E2EE is compelled to provide data it specifically designed its platform not to be able to provide.
It just worries me.
This is true. But I believe anonymous speech is important, and once you require age verification you necessarily sacrifice anonymity.
> and it won't stop subpoenas from piling up from individual cases involving children when that company providing E2EE is compelled to provide data it specifically designed its platform not to be able to provide.
There are certainly easier ways for law enforcement to do dragnet surveillance. Also, KOSA does not introduce criminal penalties.
I agree with you here. It's not a problem that I think can be solved through legislation.
American law enforcement has proven that it'll collect data in a multitude of ways when needed contextually. They shouldn't be handed additional tools to do so. And I'm not talking about dragnet surveillance, I'm talking about the law creating tons of instances of E2EE getting in the way of "justice", which seems to be an increasingly-common problem, and that in turn being used to rationalize making E2EE illegal like it is in some other places already.
That is not a feature. Simple can be VERY dangerous when it comes to laws, since they do not provide nuance.
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
-H. L. Mencken
Which it isn't. If I hadn't had trans people on the Internet I probably would've killed myself.
Also, the set of "mental health disorders" are specifically enumerated in Sec. 3(a)(1) and do not include any trans-specific medical issues, and includes the language "consistent with evidence-informed medical information" providing ample defense opportunities for companies who want to promote or provide trans-specific material.
Finally, there are other statutes on the books that are more useful for political bullying of social media companies. To the extent that KOSA could be weaponized, the battle is lost anyways.
Section 3(a)(1) does not specifically list trans issues, but it does list anxiety and depression as two conditions that websites are required to "prevent and mitigate". This is arguably even worse, since the bill requires websites to censor reasonable content that would be informative to people of any gender identity.
I agree that amending the text to mention "display" would improve the statute, but I doubt it much matters. If the regulators and courts are this unreasonable, they're going to do what they want and do damn with the letter of the law in an case.
Allowing Meta et al to run amok unchecked on America's youth for fear that politically motivated AGs will weaponize this statute is ridiculous for another reason: KOSA isn't a necessary precondition.
If state AGs want to go after sites that host trans content, they will do so with or without KOSA. KOSA will not make their job any easier, because abuse of KOSA in this way is extraordinarily tortured and there are any number of other federal and state statutes which can be used toward the same end with less tortured legal theories. An AG that dogged and a judge that activist won't be stopped by the mere absence of relevant statute.
And hell, in the majority of those states, the general assemblies will almost certainly pass much more explicitly worded statutes about displaying trans content to children.
KOSA will implement government-mandated censorship against any content that is believed to trigger anxiety or depression, which is not an effective way to aid minors. In fact, over 90 human rights organizations have concluded that KOSA's censorship regime would be detrimental to minors:
> KOSA establishes a burdensome, vague “duty of care” to prevent harms to minors for a broad range of online services that are reasonably likely to be used by a person under the age of 17. While KOSA’s aims of preventing harassment, exploitation, and mental health trauma for minors are laudable, the legislation is unfortunately likely to have damaging unintended consequences for young people. KOSA would require online services to “prevent” a set of harms to minors, which is effectively an instruction to employ broad content filtering to limit minors’ access to certain online content. Content filtering is notoriously imprecise; filtering used by schools and libraries in response to the Children’s Internet Protection Act has curtailed access to critical information such as sex education or resources for LGBTQ+ youth. Online services would face substantial pressure to over-moderate, including from state Attorneys General seeking to make political points about what kind of information is appropriate for young people. At a time when books with LGBTQ+ themes are being banned from school libraries and people providing healthcare to trans children are being falsely accused of “grooming,” KOSA would cut off another vital avenue of access to information for vulnerable youth.
https://www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2022-11-28-letter-90-...
I'm also not impressed with how you are suggesting that people who oppose KOSA are pro-Meta. I do not use any Meta services and I have criticized Meta's privacy abuses for many years. KOSA's censorship mandate does not improve anyone's privacy in any way, and may actually benefit Meta by enlarging its moat since smaller competing social network services may not have the necessary budget or staffing needed to implement the censorship.
> And hell, in the majority of those states, the general assemblies will almost certainly pass much more explicitly worded statutes about displaying trans content to children.
The fact that some U.S. states are already limiting LGBT discourse by banning books is not a good reason to pass KOSA, a broadly worded federal bill that would be used to further hinder access to LGBT resources nationwide.
The standard in the statute is "reasonably should know" that a user is a minor.
This likely looks something like the status quo, where the site asks for but does not verify your age. Additionally, if the site does not know the user's age but eg categorizes a person as "12-15 years old" for the purpose of ad targeting and sells ads based upon this targeting feature, then courts will likely agree that they should have "reasonably known" that this person is 12-15 years old (else they were committing fraud in selling those ads).
Not much changes in terms of age request/verification. What does change is what you need to do with that info about age once it's furnished and available. KOSA is about TARGETED ADS and ALGORITHMIC RECOMMENDATIONS. It even contains language that absolves platforms of responsibility for content specifically requested by children:
> IMITATION.—Nothing in subsection (a) shall be10 construed to require a covered platform to prevent or pre-11 clude— any minor from deliberately and independ-13 ently searching for, or specifically requesting, con-14 tent; or15 (2) the covered platform or individuals on the16 platform from providing resources for the prevention17 or mitigation of suicidal behaviors, substance use,18 and other harms, including evidence-informed infor-19 mation and clinical resources
Actually, the bill does not absolve platforms of that responsibility. Let me format the text of the bill's Section 3(b) into something more readable:
> SEC. 3. Duty of care.
>> (b) Limitation.—Nothing in subsection (a) shall be construed to require a covered platform to prevent or preclude—
>>> (1) any minor from deliberately and independently searching for, or specifically requesting, content; or
>>> (2) the covered platform or individuals on the platform from providing resources for the prevention or mitigation of suicidal behaviors, substance use, and other harms, including evidence-informed information and clinical resources.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/140...
Section 3(b)(1) is worded in a deceptive way. It does not prevent websites from allowing minors to search for censored content censored by the bill, but the text of the "Limitation" still does not allow websites to display content censored by the bill, even when specifically requested by the minor. Websites would still have a "duty of care" to "prevent and mitigate" anxiety and depression in users and viewers under 18 years of age, as prescribed in Section 3(a)(1), which is something that requires content any adult would find acceptable to be broadly censored.
No judge except the most cravenly political would accept that the legislature intended that kids should be able to type things into a search bar but not see the results of the search. That makes no sense and clearly isn't what the law intends. Which does in fact matter.
And if a judge is that full of shit, I don't think the absence of KOSA is going to stop them from finding some pretense to accept an inane legal theory with similar results.
Anyways, I agree the word "display" should be added, but this whole line of argumentation seems pretty desperate.
Mandatory or even incentivized age verification would require a separate act of Congress.
One of the things I like about KOSA is that it separates the verification question from the "once you know, then don't do X" question. A more nefarious bill designed to destroy anonymous speech on the internet would certainly conflate the two issues in a single statute.
As someone who doesn't want ANY mandatory age verification on the internet, I very much want to fight that fight on its own merits and not wrapped up with something like KOSA. Passing KOSA separately and without Age Verification requirements has the advantage of giving a stronger position to anonymous speech proponents when and if mandatory age verification statutes are proposed. Both in Congress and also, potentially, in court.
> (1) Consistent with evidence-informed medical information, the following mental health disorders: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance use disorders, and suicidal behaviors.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/140...
Can you please explain how you expect websites to "prevent and mitigate" anxiety and depression without censoring large swaths of content that any adult would find acceptable?
What does this mean? All computer interaction is potentially addictive.
The text is "patterns of use that indicate or encourage addiction-like behaviors".
It's broad but careful wording. The FTC and courts will have to decide the exact meaning. I think "encourage" is clear enough and pretty obviously something we should regulate, since it signals intent. The implication of the word "indicate" is more ambiguous.
This doesn't concern you?
No thanks.