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Help tell the Senate: KOSA Will Censor the Internet But Won't Help Kids (act.eff.org)

submitted 1 year ago by MiscreantMouse@kbin.social to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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.

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[-] MiscreantMouse@kbin.social 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You are definitely not a lawyer, and the people backing these bills intentionally use language that creates a specious justification for the erosion of privacy and freedom online.

This bill will require everyone to start using their government ID to post just about anything online, while allowing state AGs to censor basically anything they want in bad faith.

The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing hate group, has already made clear that they will use this to censor any/all LGBTQIA+ material.

Here is a lawyer providing a more detailed thread explaining the issues with this bill.

[-] Calcharger@kbin.social -3 points 1 year ago

You are definitely not a lawyer

Correct, but there's no need to be rude.

Let's take a look at what Ari Cohn is arguing:

“Platforms will still have to age-verify users, violating their First Amendment right to speak and access content anonymously,”
“The revisions made to KOSA just trade an explicit mandate for a vague one. Uncertainty about when knowledge of a user’s age will be implied leads to the same result as before: the only way a platform can be confident it is in compliance is by age-verifying every user. At best, language purporting not to require such verification ignores this practical reality. At worst, it is a deliberate obfuscation of the bill’s intended effect.”

Yeah, that was part of what I originally wrote and then had to delete. In retrospect I should have just split it and made replies. Oh well.
The bill mentions:

SEC. 9. AGE VERIFICATION STUDY AND REPORT.
(a) Study.—The Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in coordination with the Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, and the Secretary of Commerce, shall conduct a study evaluating the most technologically feasible methods and options for developing systems to verify age at the device or operating system level.
(b) Contents.—Such study shall consider —
(1) the benefits of creating a device or operating system level age verification system;
(2) what information may need to be collected to create this type of age verification system;
(3) the accuracy of such systems and their impact or steps to improve accessibility, including for individuals with disabilities;
(4) how such a system or systems could verify age while mitigating risks to user privacy and data security and safeguarding minors' personal data, emphasizing minimizing the amount of data collected and processed by covered platforms and age verification providers for such a system; and
(5) the technical feasibility, including the need for potential hardware and software changes, including for devices currently in commerce and owned by consumers.
(c) Report.—Not later than 1 year after the date of enactment of this Act, the agencies described in subsection (a) shall submit a report containing the results of the study conducted under such subsection to the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation of the Senate and the Committee on Energy and Commerce of the House of Representatives.

So there isn't necessarily a plan for Real ID out of the box, the study would have to be conducted to determine feasibility of what age verification method would be best. I understand the concerns about sharing your personal ID online. It could very well come to a conclusion that the algorithms already in place are plenty good enough to determine what age someone is likely, how my FYP on TikTok is filled with Millenial content just based on what content I liked. But sure, the possibility of having to register your personal ID with every social media company doesn't sound too appetizing.

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[-] morrowind@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

I think we'll just have to wait and see how tech companies implement this and how it's enforced. Even the study is, as the letter points out, just guidance and not enforceable and can be ignored. The bill itself contains very little beyond saying that it doesn't explicitly enforce "age gating" and extra data collection to determine age.

Also, as the letter itself points out

To date, COPPA has had negligible effects on adults because services directed to children under 13 are unlikely to be used by anyone other than children due to their limited functionality, effectively mandated by COPPA. But extending COPPA’s framework to sites “directed to” older teens would significantly burden the speech of adults because the social media services and games that older teens use are largely the same ones used by adults.

Would it be impossible to create separation between sites used by older teens and adults? A lot of it happens culturally anyway. I'm not as pessimistic as others are about this.

[-] MiscreantMouse@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

Would it be impossible to create separation between sites used by older teens and adults?

Obviously it's not impossible, it just requires sites to obtain a verifiable proof of age, i.e., a government ID.

A lot of pathological optimism in this thread, and it might not impact you (at first), but the document you're quoting explains why a lot of people are concerned:

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.

[-] morrowind@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Not disagreeing with you but where are you quoting that from? I don't see it in the letter. Am I looking at the wrong thing?

Also there is the provision to not censor anything that minors search for. I'm not saying the law is perfect mind you but

[-] MiscreantMouse@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Oops, you're absolutely right about the attribution, the quote I posted above is from an earlier letter, I had too many open at once.

Unfortunately, the provision you mention is essentially a bad-faith attempt to skirt the first amendment objections, while leveraging the imposed 'duty of care' to allow State AGs to censor with impunity. From p.6 of the more recent letter:

KOSA will enable politically motivated actors to purge the Internet of speech that they dislike under the guise of “protecting minors.” Section 11(b) permits state attorneys general to bring enforcement actions whenever they believe that a resident of their state has been adversely affected by an alleged violation of KOSA. The inevitable abuse is entirely predictable. Consider two possibilities. First, in the aftermath of the May 14, 2022 mass shooting in Buffalo, New York Attorney General Letitia James issued a report blaming social media platforms for hosting the hateful speech that radicalized the shooter and calling for increased civil liability.27 Under KOSA’s duty of care, James could file suit 28 alleging failure to mitigate or prevent “physical violence” that might affect a minor user to pressure platforms into removing any speech deemed “hateful.”

Second, some have already admitted that KOSA will be 29 used to censor LGBTQ content, especially that which relates to gender-affirming care. Armed with cherry-picked and selectively interpreted studies associating trans content with “anxiety, depression . . . and suicidal behavior,” 30 an ambitious attorney general will claim that “evidence-informed medical information” requires that platforms prohibit minors from viewing such content under KOSA’s duty of care. A state attorney general need not win a lawsuit—or even file one at all—to effectuate censorship. They need only initiate a burdensome investigation to pressure platforms to take down or restrict access to disfavored content.(31)

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this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023

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