‘Kids Online Safety Act’ will deliberately target trans content, senator admits.::undefined
This is actually a fantastic example of typical politics, but not in the way you’re imagining. It’s a classic poison pill. Write a bill with something good (protecting children’s privacy online, which I think we’d all agree is good) and then put something unpalatable into it (transphobia and homophobia).
Someone votes for it, “Why do you hate LGBT people?” Someone votes against it, “Why don’t you want children to have stronger privacy laws on the Internet?”
It’s exhausting and a lose-lose. That said, I prefer if they don’t vote for it and take heat for “being anti privacy”. You don’t negotiate with people’s rights.
Please explain in detail how this bill does a single good thing for children.
Section 3a of the bill is the part that would be used to target LGBTQ content.
Sections 4 talks about adding better parental controls which would give general statistics about what their kids are doing online, without parents being able to see/helicopter in on exaxrlt what their kids were looking at. It also would force sites to give children safe defaults when they create a profile, including the ability to disable personalized recommendations, placing limitations on dark patterns designed to manipulate children to stay on platforms for longer, making their information private by default, and limiting others’ ability to find and message them without the consent of children. Notably, these settings would all be optional, but enabled by default for children/users suspected to be children.
I think the regulations described in section 4 would mostly be good things. They’re the types of settings that I’d prefer to use on my online accounts, at least. However, the bad outweighs the good here, and the content in section 3a is completely unacceptable.
Funnily enough, I had to read through the bill twice, and only caught on to how bad section 3a was on my second time reading it.
Is it protecting children? Claims need evidence and rules need tests. Until we do that its fear-based, exploitable control for the sake of control.
