Utah Newspapers Try To Educate Utah Politicians On Why Their ‘Protect The Children’ Anti-Internet Bills Are Actually Dangerous For Kids
A few days ago we wrote about some bills in the Utah legislature that were promoted as protecting kids" by demanding age verification for all internet services, and then barring some kids from using them, while also giving parents access to kids' accounts. These bills are almost certainly going to pass. They seem to have tremendous momentum, because protect the children" nonsense grandstanding moral panic bills tend to get that kind of momentum.
Thankfully, though, Utah's newspapers are injecting a dose of sanity into all of this. The Salt Lake Tribune Editorial Board has a fantastic piece echoing what I've been saying: rather than trying to shield kids from the internet, it's better to teach them about and prepare them for how to deal with the real world. First, they note that, yes, bad things happen, but you don't deal with that by trying to sweep it under the rug.
But our leaders fail to realize the social media genies are well out of the bottle, that they have good uses as well as bad, that the ability of one state to control the behavior of global businesses is limited at best, and that controlling the flow of thought and information, even bad thought and information, is not something we are - or should be - very good at.
The editorial also notes that moral panics, in which overly scared adults lose their shit and freak out over something new," are kind of standard for every generation:
We've heard it all before. Bathtub gin and saxophones. Movies. Comic books. Rock n' roll. Mad magazine. MTV. Video games. HBO. The Internet. Each of these, in their turn, was destined to rob our children of their virtue, their virginity and even their lives.
But the best way to actually deal with all that is not to pretend it doesn't exist. It's to teach kids how to deal with it should they come across any of it.
Government, religious institutions, social groups and families should be talking about the woes of youth that social media did not invent, but that it amplifies. We need stronger educational services that include mental and social health and media literacy.
Yes, all of that would cost money and would lack the personal and political exhilaration of slaying a big, bad dragon.
But the dragons will always be there. It's our job to give our children the right armor.
Compellingly, the editorial also notes that - currently - one of the best tools the government has for helping to educate kids is by sharing the info on social media.
Utah has rolled out SafeUT, a smartphone app that reaches the younger generation where it lives, online, with information and access to counseling for those who are in emotional pain, contemplating suicide or self-harm or know of someone else who is.
According to its own annual report, SafeUT saw more than 1 million back-and-forth chat messages, 8,537 tips, and 801 potential school threats or acts of violence tips," from July 2021 and June 2022.
Of course, that program will effectively be destroyed by these new laws, that would basically bar many kids from seeing that information, and, at the same time, would give parents the ability to spy on kids' usage, meaning many would likely be less open to using such a service.
Meanwhile, the Deseret News published an incredible op-ed from Shoshana Weissman, highlighting how one of the bills, SB152, would hurt the very kids it's claiming to protect.
The legislation requires any social media company with at least 10 million account holders to keep a record of any submissions provided under the requirements of this section ... as a record of compliance with" this law. That means that TikTok - which Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (along with many other governors) saw fit to ban from state government devices carte blanche - would be mandated by law to maintain a list of users' IDs and addresses.
China's access to data collected by TikTok presents a threat to our cybersecurity," said Cox in the December announcement. The legislation's requirement that the information be stored in a secure manner" and not used for any other purpose is also hardly reassuring when companies and even government agencies are hacked regularly, affecting hundreds of millions of people.
These compelling editorial arguments are unlikely to matter to politicians who just want a headline about how they're protecting the children." But hopefully it makes a few more people realize that this issue isn't as simple as Utah's politicians make it out to be.