Congress Still Pushing Dangerous ‘Online Safety’ Bill With A Few Flimsy Fixes That Don’t Really Fix Much
We've written a bunch of posts concerning KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act, which is one of those moral panic kinds of bills that politicians and the media love to get behind, without really understanding what they mean, or the damage they'd do. We've covered how it will lead to greater surveillance of children (which doesn't seem likely to make them safer), how the vague language in the bill will put kids at greater risk, how the parental tools" provision will be used to harm children, and a variety of other problems with the bill as well. There's a reason why over 90 different organizations asked Congress not to slip it into a year-end must pass bill.
And while it didn't make it into the NDAA bill, there are still some efforts to put it in the year end omnibus spending bill. Indeed, the sponsors of the bill quietly released a new version a few days ago that actually does fix some of the most egregious problems of the original. But... it's still a mess, as TechFreedom's Ari Cohn explained in a thread on Mastodon.
As his thread notes, there are still concerns about knowing which users are teenagers. The original bill would have effectively mandated age verification, which comes with massive privacy concerns. The new version changes it to cases where a site knows or should know that a user is under 18. But, what constitutes knowledge in that case, and what trips the standard for should know?" The end result will still be a strong incentive for dodgy age verification, just so sites don't need to go through the litigation hassle of proving that they didn't, or shouldn't, have known the age of their users.
But, the much bigger problem is that the bill still has a duty of care" component. This was core to the original bill so it's no surprise that it remains in place. As we've discussed for years, the duty of care" is a friendly sounding" way of violating the 1st Amendment. In this context, the bill requires sites to magically know if a kid is going to come to some harm from accessing some sort of content on their website. And, given the litigious nature of the US, as soon as any harm comes to anyone under the age of 18, websites will get sued (no matter how loosely they were connected to the actual harm), and they will have to litigate over and over again whether or not they met their duty of care."
The end result, most likely, is that websites basically start blocking any kind of controversial content, no matter how legal - and we're right back to the issue of Congress trying to turn the internet into Disneyland, which is not healthy, takes away both parental and child autonomy, and does not prepare people for the real world.
The new KOSA tries to claim this won't happen, because it says that nothing in the bill should be construed to require a covered platform to prevent or preclude any minor from deliberately and independently search for, or specifically requesting, content." But that won't make any difference at all, if under the duty of care, the minors find that content, and then can later tie some future harm back to that content. So the real world effect of the law is absolutely going to be to stifle that legal content.
Even worse, lawyers will always stretch things as far as possible to make it possible to sue big pockets, even if they're very distant from the actual harm. And, as Cohn, notes, the bill is so vaguely worded that the harm" that can be sued over doesn't even have to be connected to a minor accessing that content on the site. Rather... under the law as written, it appears that if there are minors on the site and separately, some harm occurs related to some content... KOSA is triggered. So even as the bill is supposedly about protecting children, as written, it can be used if it's adults who are harmed in some manner, loosely tied to content on the site.
There's a lot more in Ari's thread that shows just how dangerous this bill is, even as its backers pretend they've fixed all the problems. And yet, Senators Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn are pleading with their colleagues to put it into the must pass omnibus spending bill.
This is a bill that will give them headlines, allowing them to pretend they're helping kids, but which actually do tremendous harm to kids, parents, free speech and the internet. Sneaking it into a must pass bill suggests, yet again, that they know the bill is too weak to go through the normal process. The rest of Congress should not allow it to pass in this current state.