Apparently the only time Congress can get together to agree to something, it’s to give whoever is President the power to censor speech online. That’s the only conclusion I can come to regarding the widespread support for KOSA (the Kids Online Safety Act), which Senator Chuck Schumer has announced will be coming to the floor for a vote.
Our elected officials have been told again and again why KOSA is a dangerous bill that will enable targeted censorship of protected speech. They continue to push it forward and insist that it would never be abused. And, yes, the “updated” version of KOSA from earlier this year is better than earlier versions of KOSA, but it’s still a censorship bill.
The bill still retains its “duty of care” section, which the FTC can enforce. It requires websites to “exercise reasonable care” in the design of features to avoid harm. But harm remains a risk, often through no fault of any particular platform. We constantly see websites blamed for problematic decisions made by users. But users are always going to make problematic decisions, and under KOSA, whoever is in charge of the FTC can rake a company over the coals, claiming a failure to meet that duty of care.
It seems strange that Republicans, who seem to hate Lina Khan, now want to give her the power to go after Elon Musk’s ExTwitter for failing to properly protect users. But that’s what they’ll do.
On the flip side, why are Democrats giving a potential future Trump FTC the power to go after any website that is too “woke” by enabling LGBTQ content and thus failing its “duty of care” to protect the children?
Like so many powerful would-be censors, they only think about how exciting that censorship power will be in their own hands, and not in the hands of their political opponents.
Schumer is also bringing COPPA 2.0 to the floor. As we explained earlier this year, COPPA 2.0 basically takes the already problematic COPPA and makes it much worse. It might not be as inherently harmful as KOSA, but it’s still pretty harmful.
For one, this is just going to lead to more sites trying to ban teenagers from using their apps entierly, since it raises the age of restrictions from 13 to 16… and that will just mean more teens being taught to lie about their age.
Second, it effectively mandates privacy-destroying age verification by banning targeted ads to kids. But how do you know they’re kids unless you verify their ages? This idea is so short-sighted. The only way to ban “targeted” ads based on collected data is to first… collect all the same data. That seems like a real issue.
In addition, it will change the important “actual knowledge” standard for covered platforms (which is kinda necessary to keep it constitutional) to a “reasonably likely to be used” standard, meaning that even if websites make every effort to keep kids off their platform, all an enforcer needs to do is argue that they haven’t done enough because the platform was “reasonably likely to be used by” kids.
Both of these are “do something” bills. “Here’s a problem, we should do something, this is something.” They are something. They won’t help solve the problems, and are quite likely to make them worse.
But, politicians want the headlines about how they’re “protecting the children” which is exactly what the big news orgs will falsely repeat. What they should be noting is that these bills are about politicians cynically using children as props to pretend to do something.
Senators Marsha Blackburn (who said quite clearly that she wrote KOSA to “protect children from the transgender”) and Richard Blumenthal (who has made it clear that he’d just as soon kill the internet if it got him headlines) put out an obnoxious, exploitative statement about how this will save the children, when it will actually do tremendous harm to them.
Some questions remain about what will happen on the House side, as Speaker Mike Johnson has said they’ll look over whatever the Senate sends. But the existing House version of KOSA, while somewhat different than the Senate version, is equally problematic.
If you’d like to reach out to your elected officials in Congress about these bills, Fight for the Future has the StopKOSA website that includes a way to send emails. And EFF also has their own action center to contact your elected officials regarding KOSA.
