828
'Kids Online Safety Act' will deliberately target trans content, senator admits.
(www.thepinknews.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
828 points (96.4% liked)
Technology
59259 readers
1299 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
This is actually a fantastic example of typical politics, but not in the way you're imagining. It's a classic poison pill. Write a bill with something good (protecting children's privacy online, which I think we'd all agree is good) and then put something unpalatable into it (transphobia and homophobia).
Someone votes for it, "Why do you hate LGBT people?" Someone votes against it, "Why don't you want children to have stronger privacy laws on the Internet?"
It's exhausting and a lose-lose. That said, I prefer if they don't vote for it and take heat for "being anti privacy". You don't negotiate with people's rights.
Is it protecting children? Claims need evidence and rules need tests. Until we do that its fear-based, exploitable control for the sake of control.
Government doesn't run on the scientific method, sadly.
Yeah that's the problem with legislation like this. You'll have proponents claim it protects children without actually explaining how.
Please explain in detail how this bill does a single good thing for children.
Section 3a of the bill is the part that would be used to target LGBTQ content.
Sections 4 talks about adding better parental controls which would give general statistics about what their kids are doing online, without parents being able to see/helicopter in on exaxrlt what their kids were looking at. It also would force sites to give children safe defaults when they create a profile, including the ability to disable personalized recommendations, placing limitations on dark patterns designed to manipulate children to stay on platforms for longer, making their information private by default, and limiting others' ability to find and message them without the consent of children. Notably, these settings would all be optional, but enabled by default for children/users suspected to be children.
I think the regulations described in section 4 would mostly be good things. They're the types of settings that I'd prefer to use on my online accounts, at least. However, the bad outweighs the good here, and the content in section 3a is completely unacceptable.
Funnily enough, I had to read through the bill twice, and only caught on to how bad section 3a was on my second time reading it.
Then put them on your accounts. Any regulation in this area is unacceptable.
I don't know that it does. If bills and the discourse around them were actually about the stated topic, it would be revolutionary to politics.