[VERGE] Child safety bills are reshaping the internet for everyone
[VERGE] Child safety bills are reshaping the internet for everyone
Texas, Utah and other states are age-gating parts of the internet.
[ sourced from The Verge ]
Censorship bills hidden behind a thin veneer of "child safety"
You'd think that if child safety was such a preoccupation, none of them would struggle getting basic meals and health care on the daily but sadly here we are.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“It does seem like a very clear backlash to not just tech, but to any sort of movement towards allowing young people to make their own decisions based on the information that they can access,” Jason Kelley, activism director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), said in an interview earlier this month.
France has proposed similar age verification restrictions on porn in the past, leading its data protection agency, CNIL, to investigate the security of current services on the market, determining that many were “intrusive” and for new, safer models to be developed.
Over the last few years, more than a dozen states, including many that have implemented age verification bills, have passed resolutions identifying porn as a “public health crisis,” arguing that it encourages violence despite little research backing these claims.
“I think progressives had the idea that they wanted to regulate Big Tech without fully appreciating the degree to which they were playing with fire,” Evan Greer, Fight for the Future director, said in an interview with The Verge earlier this month.
The American Civil Liberties Union sued to unravel the language related to pornography and ultimately won in 1997 after the Supreme Court decided that banning the material would infringe on the First Amendment rights of adults.
Without more pushback, age verification bills, just like the ongoing book bans taking place in schools, will continue to fuel the right’s censorship fire all at the expense of speech protected by the First Amendment.
The original article contains 1,875 words, the summary contains 245 words. Saved 87%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_Online_Safety_Act
Stop KOSA.
Stop your states from passing these. 17 states have tried, looks like 7 have succeeded.
I feel particularly torn by it because I sometimes wish I didn't see porn as a teen and didn't use 4chan as a teen. But I don't know that my life would've been different, and these were coping methods for another far more important problem - lack of mobility and freedom as an American teen. I couldn't access any fun, because I lived in a rural area and my parents had to drive me literally everywhere. That's what is worth fixing. I have to choose not to infantilize the younger version of myself, not treat teens as if they aren't capable of intelligent decisions. Don't lock down the internet.