Senate Poised to Pass Kids Online Safety Act KOSA
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
https://act.eff.org/action/tell-congress-kosa-will-censor-th...
The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) would censor the internet and would make government officials the arbiters of what young people can see online. It will likely lead to age verification, handing more power, and private data, to third-party identity verification companies like Clear or ID.me.
The government should not have the power to decide what topics are "safe" online for young people, and to force services to remove and block access to anything that might be considered unsafe for children. This isn’t safety—it’s censorship.
> The updated version seeks to head off concerns [about targeting young LGBT users] by stripping key enforcement powers from state attorneys general and giving regulators at the Federal Trade Commission a more central role in overseeing its protections.
> [LGBT advocacy groups] said the adjustments lawmakers made to KOSA “significantly mitigate the risk of it being misused to suppress LGBTQ+ resources or stifle young people’s access to online communities.”
Am I just not understanding the implications of the updates, or is this an incredibly vague "assurance"?
The federal bureaucracy is often marginally more sane than the state ones because the politics are less localized.
Other than that it's as absurd as you make it sound. Why does a group no one knows about have any say in what happens in the senate?
This is a great question. All we know about them is that the LGBTQ Group may or may not be an LLC, they have a physical headquarters in DC, and accept money (maybe cash or crypto?) in exchange for either making or not making laws. This is not a fabrication because on Facebook my uncl
If we didn't have interest groups we couldn't have a democracy (actually a republic)?
Why does this particular interest group get to decide the fate of a bill and not, for instance some group that you and I create?
Because your group didn't provide any feedback on the draft bills?
I don't see any reason to add an extra layer that's even less transparent and less accountable.
Yes! Who else's interests should they serve? I know interest groups are demonized - by powerful people who want to grab power unimpeded, but those powerful people are really tiny (but wealthy!) interests groups themselves.
Basically, interest groups represent the interests of a group of citizens. The senators can't know nearly everything themselves; they must ask people on the ground or even with the best intentions they will clumsily hurt lots of people. Who else in the population should representatives listen to? They should listen to individuals but that only represents one person.
Think of veterans groups. How does the senator understand how a bill would affect veterans? Asking one veteran helps, but not a lot. Asking someone whose career involves speaking to veterans and veterans groups nationwide for years, knows tens of thousands of them, knows their concerns inside and out, and whom they pay to represent their interests in Washington - that seems like a good step. It's not everything, but it seems really valuable.
With any interest group, there is a legitimacy question. I could start the Atlantic Deep-Sea Fishing group and claim to represent such people, but I don't know a thing about them. The legitimacy question is solved by seeing who has influence - whose voice do LGBTQ or veterans or deep-sea Atlantic fisherpeople listen to? Who do they show up for? That's the person they respect and the person with influence.
> Why does this particular interest group get to decide the fate of a bill and not, for instance some group that you and I create?
On a bill with a close support margin, lots of groups have influence and lots had influence here. Our group could too, if we represented enough people. That's a good thing. Our government should carefull craft bills to meet everyone's interests - that's by design.
Interest groups should pick people that the people show up for? That's what elections are for!
You've basically recreated the legislature, except you've removed the voting and the supposed accountability and transparency. You've added a layer of shadowy groups in between the people and their representatives.
The senator can't talk to millions of people individually.
> You've basically recreated the legislature
The legislature is not the be-all and end-all of democracy. It's part of the daily mechanism; so are citizens.
Nobody is talking to millions of people individually. Least of all the lobbying groups that you're defending. But whatever critical role you feel they're playing, there's no reason why a senator and their staff can't do the same. It's literally their job. If you want to say they need more resources to do it, then I'd agree with you, sure.
> The legislature is not the be-all and end-all of democracy. It's part of the daily mechanism; so are citizens.
The lobbying groups we're talking about here are NOT talking to citizens. They aren't made up of citizens. They aren't democratic in any way. Most citizens aren't even aware that they exist.
If I go to my local LGTBTQ hangout and ask around, do you think they're all going to be in support of the bill that this LGBTQ group has now signed off on? Of course not! This group has nothing to do with them other than exploiting their cause to shake down politicians.
Each senator is going to replicate the work of every interest group in the nation? It's just not possible.
> The lobbying groups we're talking about here are NOT talking to citizens. They aren't made up of citizens. They aren't democratic in any way. Most citizens aren't even aware that they exist.
Which groups do you mean? LGBTQ groups, the ones I'm aware of (I have limited knowledge), are certainly made of citizens and talk to them.
> do you think they're all going to be in support of the bill that this LGBTQ group has now signed off on?
All of them? Nothing can be approved of by everyone. You need another standard.
> This group has nothing to do with them other than exploiting their cause to shake down politicians.
That's just an assumption. You have shown us nothing to support it. Show us some evidence.
The feds are much more sane on LGBTQ issues, where some states are now maximize oppression. If Trump wins, however, he has a detailed plan to replace functionaries with political activists loyal to him. In that case, at least some states could be safe using the original idea.
The tech community does not care.
Ok it cares a bit. But not when it has to actually weigh protesting kids against anything else. Everything else is more important.
The worst product ever creates is Google Classroom. Because it forces you to allow Google through your home firewall at the cost of killing your child grade.
Reddit has a weird system that detects when blocking software is employed and tricks the software into recording a dummy website.
So when my children visit Reddit I don’t know if it’s /r/politics, or /r/nsfw.
I guess they’re worried about parents finding out their kids are visiting /r/lgbtq.
But the fact that it’s impossible to known which subreddits my kids are trying to get at is fucking insane.
I doubt this bill will help. They usually don’t.
Using Microsoft’s parent monitoring software forces you to use Bing. Fucking Bing! Because of course it does.
I wish tech companies cared.
I'm curious, have there been any impact reports on how this law has affected sex trafficing? I haven't heard of any numbers. The only thing I know is that Craigslist took down their personal ads.
(For a transcript version, scroll down to "Act One": https://www.thisamericanlife.org/740/transcript)
> Kara: Let me make it very clear, I was still an independent sex worker for a while after SESTA-FOSTA, so it didn't work. SESTA-FOSTA didn't stop me. It hindered me a few times.
> Kara: It got less safer. I wasn't able to be able to screen my calls the way that I should have. It became a headache, but it never stopped me.
> Lina Misitzis: It was always Kara's plan to stop doing sex work. She wanted to finish school, get a different job, try starting a family. But when the law passed, it threw a wrench in her plan. She made a lot less money at sex work, which slowed down her progress and her ability to reach her goals. So the law didn't push her out of sex work, she says. If anything, it kept her in it for longer.
"Tech is not your friend. We are. Sign up for The Tech Friend newsletter."
Wtf is going on. As usual it's not tech bringing on the dystopian, it's the supposed do-gooders on the peripheral of tech and railing against it, including in the government. They're the new temperance movement people and this is another one of their mistargeted, misguided 'moral' crusades.
They want to prosecute people who abuse prostitutes. Progressive DAs where prostitution is illegal do focus more on the customers, if that's what you mean. How is that similar to the religious right - I've never heard them say that.
Also annoying and probably illegal is that now all US legislation is hidden behind a computational paywall. You cannot read the bills unless you first execute code from Cloudflare. re: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/140... . I cannot access it at all since my browser is not new enough to successfully execute the cloudflare javascript program.
May I ask why your browser is so ancient?