It is an unconstitutional law; it is following the path of similar unconstitutional laws¹²³. Where is the experiment?
¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Entertainment_Merchan...
²https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reno_v._American_Civil_Liberti... (sections about minor access to indecent material struck down)
³https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/ohio/oh...
Only the nerds did that and it was in a computer lab. And they knew enough about keeping up appearances to hit Alt-Tab when an adult was getting close.
It’s not like we don’t have other laws that restrict what we can do or where we can do it.
In order to deny minors access to potentially harmful speech, the CDA effectively suppresses a large amount of speech that adults have a constitutional right to receive and to address to one another. That burden on adult speech is unacceptable if less restrictive alternatives would be at least as effective in achieving the legitimate purpose that the statute was enacted to serve.
That's just me grabbing a snippet from Wikipedia, but it seems like a different issue than the impact of social media and whether it should be allowed by minors w/o parental consent.
But of course the elephant in the room is that the makeup of the Court has changed in a markedly more conservative direction and has proven itself not averse to revisiting previously settled law.
- social media being optimized for addiction
- social media potentially compromising minors’ physical safety
- social media use having documented adverse mental health outcomes for minors
- the fact that social media use requires an ongoing contractual relationship between the company and the minor
I could see these factors tipping the balance on the “compelling government interest” question, though I see less of an argument for “narrow tailoring”.
I think that the rest of the points you brought up are cultural problems and therefore not in the purview of legality
The features I listed all relate to “protecting the children” in some way, which is why I thought they could be the basis for courts to distinguish previous case law regarding the first part of the test.
Almost right. Strict scrutiny has a third factor [1]: Does the law use the available method which is least restrictive of speech?
An alternative method to banning young children on social media could be to apply the caretaker-consent-or-ban condition on social media only for students on the physical premises of public schools while having the public schools teach students the pros and cons of social media (hopefully noting that social media is more helpful than harmful for most teenagers [2]). Enforcement would fall on parents and public school teachers. That's less restrictive of minors' speech rights because the ban doesn't apply everywhere, and also less chilling of social media sites' speech rights because having to collect more of users' personal information for age verification is burdensome. Not saying that my example method is a good one, just more likely to pass strict scrutiny.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_scrutiny#Applicability
[2] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/18/yet-another-massive-stud...
I can't think of a single argument that fits with trusting a parent's choice for a 14 year old that doesn't trust it for a 13 year old, that also ignore's that parent's choice for a 16 year old.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK594763/#:~:text=Social...
Given it's Florida and the political leanings of it's governor, I would argue the law is more in line with CCP/Communist values: attempt to disrupt the communication networks of a demographic that is highly against you.
The reason this matters is that the precedential effect of a prior opinion such as Brown depends on how similar the underlying facts are to the present dispute. If a court wants to go in a different direction, it will usually prefer not to overturn the previous opinion, but rather to say that it doesn't apply here because the facts are different.
I think the experiment is more about the judiciary and about tribal politics. There's ample case law against something like this, so to me this seems unconstitutional, and I doubt it will stand. But DeSantis will win some more heart and minds of the folks who secretly do want big government protecting them from the boogieman.
Regardless of anyone's views about social media, the fact that the government wants 'papers please' for you to access a website should really scare everyone.
The alternative could be to have every piece of legislation go to popular vote rather than elected officials. I feel this could be wrought with problems though as the public could get vote fatigue and weird laws would slip through simply through low turnout or "social media fueled" outliers for extreme turnout on specific bills.
No, it only indicates that a potentially very small group who has gained power agrees that something is bad.
This is especially true in a system that does not require runoff elections (or an Instant Runoff voting system) so that the winner must gain a majority of votes, or where various forms of voter suppression, skewing, or not playing by the rules happen (e.g., sham elections as happened in Russia).
Those supporters aren't very secret about it. In fact, they are quite open about it.
We've been doing that for R and X movies forever.
Those aren't enforced by the government. Movie ratings and the enforcement of them are entirely voluntary on the part of producers and theaters. Some films are released that are non-rated, and enforcement at the ticket booth/theater level has never been consistent or particularly effective. Enforcement by retail is basically non-existent (Nobody is stopping a 13 year old from buying an R rated movie at walmart), and it's the same with streaming services. Quite rightly, it's up to parents to police what media their kids watch.
I recall Howard Stern being fined $millions for indecency on radio.
Overturned by the SCOTUS because of all of that free speech. And CBS was fined, not Janet Jackson. And the Howard Stern content is a well-known free speech issue. And OP was responding to your comment about movies. None of these are movies, so I don't understand why you would bring up something like this. Public radio and TV broadcast are a different beast. Is your argument that private social media services are akin to public broadcasters? Let's see what the courts think.
I think it’s excellent the government is taking a stand to protect kids when it’s obvious most parents are unable to. Kids have no business in the discourse.
Perhaps... but my guess is that repeatability wouldn't depend on the children but on the wants and needs of the governing politicians.
That is, the data would, in my view, likely be worthless for its purported goal, but can give some insight into some political shenanigans.
If it can’t, that’s a strong signal.
Monumentally naïve. Zero understanding of the way things work in reality.
To me, this is the same thing we all lived through in the 90s in America when particular political parties were blaming video games for violence:
https://ncac.org/resource/a-timeline-of-video-game-controver...
This is an old way of thinking and with some recent developments more of the wild west internet will die.
If your idea only succeeds when the smartest people are running it, and they can’t make any mistakes, then it’s not actually a good idea.
Do you stop the car, take a look at everything, make changes, and then put the car back on the road? Do you pull into pit row, change the tires in <10s with top off of the tank, and then get back in the race? Do you take advantage of the run flat tires you chose in advance anticipating the this would be the likely outcome while hoping the other 3 tires stay inflated?
If the current situation isn't work, the worst thing to do is nothing. Paralysis by analysis can be deadly
Alas, language is not so flexible.
I disagree to an extent. Oregons drug decriminalization failed because of a few reasons that are plain to see:
- The people who wrote the measure did not prescribe how it should be done, just what it should achieve.
- The measure demanded changes be immediate, which didn't jive with a very slow running, heavy bureaucracy like Oregons government. More importantly, time was not given for the social services pipelines to fill with cash and plans.
- The law did not also ban public drug use, it depended on the legislature doing this - which they never did. This was the big tipping point. You don't forget the smell of meth or fent, especially outside your grocery store or kids school.
This was a master class in when head in the clouds thinking meets legislative elites who are outright insulted when the people flex their voice.
I do think we'll revisit this again in the future, but hopefully next time we at least ban public drug use.
This is a thing we can do and make work, plenty of other places have had success with it, we just keep doing things in the most Kafka-esque way possible.
Which places, and what do you call success?
The only place in the world that seems to have drugs handled properly is Singapore.
Legalization + proper harm reduction + strict enforcement on public (ab)use is ultimately the way. You get a triple win of tax income, freed up police resources and less pressure on the healthcare system.
"The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor from sleeping under bridges" - Anatole France
Ideally before we ban public drug use with punitive measures we solve free housing for the homeless. It is a known problem, specifically in Portland, that people come here to be homeless. That is a problem in itself because our tiny city can't shoulder the nations burdens. I was mainly speaking directly to what backfired with our approach to substances. Public drug use, whether it be alcohol or otherwise, should not be on the general public to deal with.
Imagine that Biden campaigned in 2000 extensively off a hoax that Trump called nazis fine people. This was well supported by professional media.
That he was defending people at all associated with the unite the right protest that went all neo Nazi is crazy. Why bother trying to point out that there were “good” and “fine” people protesting the statue when we all know what was going on at that event? It minimizes what happened, and reduces the blame on the literal Nazis marching and driving into crowds.
It wasn’t a “hoax”, but it was choice editing. But if you look at the spirit and context, it’s effectively what happened.
If they do something egregious, then people revolt.
Do you mean something egregious like the mass surveillance of the population, or the mass incarceration of citizens, or widespread theft via civil asset forfeiture, or executions by police, or human experimentation on Americans, or dropping bombs on citizens in US cities, or the military shooting protesting college kids, or lying about weapons of mass destruction to justify wars, or prisoners being tortured, or being subjected to virtual strip searches and groping at airports, or two thirds of the population living in "constitution free zones", or the authorization of the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens, or any of the other many many egregious actions that have already been and/or are still being carried out by our government?
My point is that the threat of revolt is extremely remote. For all of the abuses and the erosion of our rights and freedoms we've had just one attempt at violent insurrection in recent history. It involved about 2,000 rioters motivated by a conspiracy theory and it fell apart very quickly. The threat of a successful revolt is basically zero, and that's actually a good thing. A revolt is highly unlikely to solve the problems that we have. Unfortunately that also means that the threat of revolt is highly unlikely to act as any sort of deterrent that might prevent abuses of power by our government. We're far better off making use of whatever is left of our democracy than trying to re-enact the revolutionary war.
If we look at the quality of life for american citizens compared to other the quality of life of other nations right before revolution (famously french, russian, chinese), we are not close.
So maybe it's not a good idea to burn it down and start over just yet.
> The threat of a successful revolt is basically zero
That's what they all say. But the US lost the war in vietnam and afghanistan to natives with extremely low tech weapons.
> I think the argument is that states are not laboratories for behaviors that violate the constitutional rights of others, or in the case of this law, go beyond the legislative branch's constitutional powers, so that just suggesting there isn't an experiment is in itself not sufficient to defend this law.
This comment implies that your objection to the law was not that it infringed upon constitutional rights, but rather that it exceeded the powers of Florida legislature. This was the point I was replying to. If that’s not the point you intended to make, then never mind.
We don't test if parachutes work by throwing people not wearing them out of planes, for one.
States can experiment with variability in their legislature, but there is a unified federal law that guarantees certain fundamental rights. Much of the south is currently trampling all over them.
In fact, none of the other rights matter when the state can control what you can, and can't do with your own body. It is the most fundamental of rights.
They are also doing a great job of trampling on the fourteenth amendment, with the occasional jabs at the first.
It wasn’t the southern states that imposed vaccine mandates for dining in restaurants, either.
I know what you’re alluding to; suffice to say that I don’t find this legal theory particularly compelling, and more importantly, neither does the Supreme Court.
We’re seriously comparing not having TikTok and Instagram for a few years to death?
"Experience is a dear teacher, but fools will have no other" -- Benjamin Franklin
To save someone else a click
Really ?
I mean the entire point of the nanny state argument is to not act as a nanny toward ADULT citizen. Minor should still be protected, especially under 16