Colorado Amended SB051 (Age Verification Bill) to Exclude Open Source Projects

They didn't survive, they died:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041714/united-kingdom-a...

Except that this is case law, not something I'm pulling out of my ass. See Moody v. NetChoice, LLC, 603 U.S. ___ (2024), in which the court ruled that compiling and curating user-generated content into "a distinctive expressive offering" is protected editorial discretion, and that "the First Amendment offers protection when an entity engaging in expressive activity, including compiling and curating others' speech, is directed to accommodate messages it would prefer to exclude." The court did not rule on whether the same First Amendment protection extends to personalized curation decisions made algorithmically solely based on user behavior online without any reference to a site's own standards or guidelines. However, we cannot definitively say that the algorithms Facebook and co. use are not making decisions based on standards or guidelines of some kind, whether those be the community guidelines FB publishes or something else, because we don't know how they work internally, and they very well could be AI-driven with community guidelines in the prompt or something. Or they could be generic off-the-shelf recommender algorithms. Or something totally different. This bit TikTok in Anderson v. TikTok, where the third circuit court ruled that TikTok's "for you" feed was first-party expression and therefore not shielded by section 230, which is itself a massively misunderstood law of it's own.

Literally the only thing I am trying to illustrate is that "ban all the algorithmic feeds" is not as easy as you suggest, and the definitive research proving that they are harmful has yet to actually be found when meta-analysis is conducted[0][1]. The (far more) harmful thing is these platforms extremely lax moderation. Granted, moderation is impossible to truly do competently at scale, but still.

[0]: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/18/yet-another-massive-stud... (this one links to 6 other studies)

[1]: https://www.techdirt.com/2026/01/21/two-major-studies-125000...

* The homepage of Reddit * The YouTube homepage * The federated timeline of my Mastodon instance * The algorithmic feed that Bluesky uses (which is more customizable than Facebooks)

I could sit here and go on and on. All of these, in one way or another, are algorithmic, in the strict definition of an algorithm. So, are you also saying that the federated timeline of my Mastodon instance shouldn't exist? I mean, in a sense, that's an "algorithmic feed". How am I supposed to find interesting users who I should follow then? By word of Mouth? Because that's not going to work. By forums or awesome lists? Now you've just created yet another kind of echo chamber because what I find depends on what forums or awesome lists I frequent, and that leads to me only seeing what I want to see. Which... Doesn't really solve the root problem that "banning the algorithm" would try to solve. If anything, it makes it worse. Instead of everyone being able to look at alternate viewpoints/ideas, they are suddenly restricted to only those viewpoints/ideas which they want to see/read/hear/whatever. In something like Email that's fine: I only want to see emails for mailing lists and such I've subscribed to for example. On something that is supposed to be a social network, federated or no, that... Kind of destroys the "social network" part.

Like maybe I'm just misunderstanding what everybody means when they talk about "banning the algorithm" and "getting rid of the toxic sludge" but the law (the first amendment) prohibits viewpoint discrimination. Being "content neutral" isn't possible (everything is biased in some manner). So I guess what trips me up is: how exactly would you word the law and thread the needle fine enough that you would only ban the kind of feeds Facebook uses for example, without also causing a ton of second, third, fourth, and maybe even fifth-order effects far beyond what anybody intended to do? And how do you do that without violating the first amendment in the process? Maybe I'm missing something critical here or something, but from all the studies I've looked at that indicate that screen time and such is not actually as harmful as the narrative would like you to think, this looks to me like a solution in search of a problem, and a solution that would have consequences that people haven't thought about.

If the app tells the OS the age range it is appropriate for the filtering will only be able to either block or allow the app to run.

If the systems tells the app the age range of the user the app can operate in a mode appropriate for that age range. For example a multiplayer game app can put kids in games that only have other kids playing.

I think it being limited is a feature. This was modeled after the California law, and I think the intent is the same although the changes made after the initial draft make it less clear. The California law is clearly aimed at being a parental control on the child's device, with minimal privacy implications. Hence relying entirely on the age information provided by the parent.

My personal burden of evidence for prohibition versus age gating is higher. I don’t know if that’s how others think. But the truth is we are getting age gating one way or another, that battle has already been debated and won, and everyone who called in or responded to polls was almost universally in favor of age gates (in Wyoming, New York and Virginia, the states I’m more familiar with).