This Bill Threatens Access to LGBTQ+ Online Communities.::Archive of Our Own (AO3), a fanfic site loved by young LGBTQ+ people, was compromised by hackers. But the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) is the real threat.
It’s teen vogue. They’re trying to make kids interested. Don’t be dismissive, grandparent.
Yeah sure does but it threatens a lot more than just these communities. This will affect almost everyone and is a clear power grab to gain even more goverental control of online activity across the board. Children are often used as pawns for these types of bills. This is similar to the sesta/fosta nonsense.
‘New law threatens trans communities’ should probably be a news article template by now.
Transphobia, so hot right now.
Angry white male Americans with inferiority complexes are so hot right now.
They see transphobic action as campaigning. And it’s all they do.
You expected actual governance? They broke that in the Reagan era and Citizens United killed it. Welcome to the new feudalism.
Torches in the left shed. Pitchforks in the right.
Yeah, I like it when they put out articles like this. Teen Vogue only occasionally gets political, and when they do, that’s when the threat is pretty serious.
Kids shouldn’t even be on the Internet. If they get access and ruin themselves from stumbling apon some fucked up shit. That’s on them and their parents 🤷
US society has demonstrated a) it’s generally too incompetent to be telling kids what to do and what not to do, and b) does not have kids’ best interests at heart anyway, seeking to forge kids into soulless cheap interchangeable laborers and soldiers to be used and worn out in the vanity projects of billionaires. For every kid in the US, their whole job is learning that everyone, including their parents, are in on the ruse, and to find a way to escape this destiny.
For that the internet will be most useful, and any barriers we have to information it will be up to them to break.
Oh, and our society fucked up the climate and ecology enough that there’s going to be a food crisis in their adulthood. And we’re trying to pretend that won’t happen.
I think it’s far more sensible to say kids should not have access to the internet. Give them like Disney net or something.
Kids have been online for 30 years. AOL and BBSs were available - I think I got my first modem around 1987. That’s a generation-plus. Which is to say - we have plenty of data on the effect of being “on the internet” on kids. Most people under the age of 30 have been online for virtually all of their lives.
You can tell these laws are bullshit because they always have some vague platitude like “protecting kids,” but they never define their measurements. An actual intervention - like a government policy to solve a problem - defines what it is trying to address, how and why they expect the program to work using peer-reviewed evidence, and what they expect the result to be after some time.
Let’s say the problem you’re trying to address is teenage suicide, and you think that being exposed to talk about suicide online contributes to it. First, you’d look for studies that evaluated the problem. They’d have to show causality, because just finding a correlation might mean that kids likely to commit suicide reach out to communities online, rather than vice versa. I’m skeptical, but for the sake of argument let’s say you find there is a casual relationship.
So you develop a model that allows you to estimate that keeping kids from accessing anyone talking about suicide would cut the teen suicide rate by 30%. Removing some middle steps, the government now bans the discussion of suicide on any platform that doesn’t have a strict age verification. So, now what happens? Is there ongoing monitoring to make sure that your hypothesis is correct? If suicide rates go up because kids can’t talk it out anymore and are more isolated, does the law get removed from the books? Are there classes of kids it hurts versus helps, and what are you going to do about them?
You can say the same thing about other metrics, like sexual abuse. The point is that, like they tell you in b-school, you have to measure it if you want to improve it. They never do that, though.
At best, these kinds of things are empty platitudes that allow politicians to pretend they’re doing something to get votes. At worst - and with this bill the more likely outcome - will be that this permits states like Texas to arbitrarily define what they think “kids” should see. They’ll remove the decision from kids and their parents, and instead make the global decision of censorship according to a conservative religious agenda. That’s what we’re seeing in libraries and schools today.
The other reason you can tell it’s just culture war bullshit is that none of this is coming in response to a sudden surge in child abuse statistics. When there’s a spike in something bad, like gun violence, opioid use, or a pandemic, politicians respond with policy. This push, like the bathroom bills, legal restrictions on trans athletes, and anti-drag laws, is not responding to any current crisis. It’s just someone jingling the keys to make people look in the other direction so that they can get away with what they’re actually trying to do.
I like this evidence-based method of yours for making laws, we should do that instead of this “it’s true because I say it is, also the children” method Republicans keep using.
