Senate panel advances bills to childproof the internet

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?

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.

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 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-...