'The Kids Online Safety Act isn’t all right, critics say'
The fact that the right wing zealot hair farmer Marsha Blackburn is a co-sponsor of the bill should be enough to make its main sponsor Richard Blumenthal have second thoughts, but then he's just another wealthy stooge.Evan Greer, deputy director of the nonprofit digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future, told Ars that the organization "strongly supports strict regulation of Big Tech companies," but as far as Fight for the Future can tell, KOSA is not the privacy bill that supporters claim that it is.
"If KOSA were actually a privacy bill as its supporters claim, we would be all about it," Greer told Ars. "We support cracking down on tech companies harvesting of data, we support an end to manipulative business practices like autoplay, infinite scroll, intrusive notifications, and algorithmic recommendations powered by commercial surveillance. What we don't support is a bill that gives state attorneys general the power to dictate what content younger people can see on social media. That's where KOSA goes off the rails and becomes a censorship bill, rather than a privacy bill."
Because KOSA enforcement falls to state attorneys general—many of whom are elected officials— the ACLU's senior policy counsel Cody Venzke told Ars that it's easier for the government to target and censor specific viewpoints that clash with their party politics.
Mullin agreed, saying that part of the reason why KOSA has so much bipartisan support is because both Democrats and Republicans are in favor of censoring opposing viewpoints and are "assuming the censorship will go their way."
"It's just totally crazy," Mullin told Ars. "People have very different views on how you can mitigate" harms like "eating disorders, addiction, bullying, sexual exploitation, drug use, alcohol use, gambling, tobacco use, and all predatory or deceptive marketing practices" by "controlling online speech."
"People don't agree about what's harmful on any of these issues," Mullin said. "These are challenging things to deal with, and families do it differently. And I don't think it's gonna be better when the government starts creating rules about it."
Venzke told Ars that "outside of very narrow exceptions," it's "not Congress's role to decide what is good speech and what is bad speech."
And he thinks that question probably shouldn't be up to platforms to answer, either. Venzke warned that KOSA would take decisions about kids' welfare out of the family's hands.
Instead, Venzke said that platforms would be required to "look at content that causes depression or anxiety"—"which is, of course, anything that's out there in the world"—and make decisions that could result in platforms dictating what speech flies online. Beyond cutting kids off from information, that could lead to wide-ranging censorship of the entire Internet, and TechFreedom's Cohn told Ars that's why he's found the bill's widespread support "baffling."