Charlie Jane Anders discusses KOSA (the Kids Online Safety Act).

If you’re in the US, https://www.stopkosa.com/ makes it easy to contact your Senators and ask them to oppose KOSA.

"A new bill called the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, is sailing towards passage in the Senate with bipartisa>n support. Among other things, this bill would give the attorney general of every state, including red states, the right to sue Internet platforms if they allow any content that is deemed harmful to minors. This clause is so vaguely defined that attorneys general can absolutely claim that queer content violates it — and they don’t even need to win these lawsuits in order to prevail. They might not even need to file a lawsuit, in fact. The mere threat of an expensive, grueling legal battle will be enough to make almost every Internet platform begin to scrub anything related to queer people.

The right wing Heritage Foundation has already stated publicly that the GOP will use this provision to remove any discussions of trans or queer lives from the Internet. They’re salivating over the prospect.

And yep, I did say this bill has bipartisan support. Many Democrats have already signed on as co-sponsors. And President Joe Biden has urged lawmakers to pass this bill in the strongest possible terms."

  •  Dubious_Fart   ( @Dubious_Fart@lemmy.ml ) 
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    1 year ago

    Ah yes… forever and again, the siren song of children being used as an excuse for draconian, rights eroding legislation… its amazing how much responsibility parents have shirked to the state as they replace babysitters with cellphones and tablets.

    • It isn’t so much parents shirking responsibility as folks in power doing what they want and just saying parents demanded it. When actual parents want something there’s a lot more hue and cry, hearings, and suchlike. When there isn’t, dig a bit and you find convenient lies and excuses.

    • Not really surprising to me. Gay (and now trans) people have long been accused of grooming and/or queerifying children

      The first openly gay senator is probably hyper-aware of this, and I’d guess is probably very hawkish on anything protecting children

      The other aspect is congressmen don’t understand shit outside (sometimes) politics or the law. On its surface, this has a very compelling description - hold websites responsible if they let children access NSFW content.

      It’s not until you ask how (interpreted by the community as providing identifiable information to “prove” your age) that the first flaw comes up - this provides a way to collect data on online use, as social media is considered potentially NSFW by the nature of user submission

      Then you get to the things most people without a technical background wouldn’t see

      The second flaw - companies are terrible at securing data. Get ready for every scammer under the sun to be able to find your ID numbers.

      The third, this won’t work. As a young teen, I blazed past parental controls, because there’s a ton of porn out there and there’s no way to hold back someone determined to find it. If you want this to work, we need to make a child Internet of known safe content and parental controls to keep you there… But just like finding or stealing a Playboy, the fact it exists means kids are going to be stealing passwords or IDs and probably sharing them. If we instead had sites declare content ratings and locked down at the device level, they need to go through a lot of work or get a secret device - it would give parents powerful tools to actually enforce this through Apple, Google, or Microsoft accounts

      And finally, this won’t work because it’s inconvenient. Make password requirements too strict, and users write them down. Make content moderation too strict, and people will find shortcuts. People will find ways around this that will likely both end up in the hands of children, but also probably make everyone less safe

    • The problem is where? The EU is trying to apply similar censorship via the DSA, Russia we all know is LGBTphobic and not truly for free speech, Canada is a joke, and China is lol. Not even sure if Japan is viable.

      • In what way is Canada a joke? Like, I’m not saying it isn’t, but our online freedom is pretty good. We don’t actually have a state sponsored censorship campaign, VPNs are legal, TOR is legal, all we legislate is that you aren’t inciting violence or calling for the extermination of a protected group of people or doing shady dark web shit. Pretty much everything else is good to go.

      • There’s some wisdom in the old soviet anecdote

        There’s freedom of speech in the USSR: In the USA, you can stand in front of the White House in Washington, DC, and yell, “Down with Ronald Reagan,” and you will not be punished. Equally, you can also stand in Red Square in Moscow and yell, “Down with Ronald Reagan,” and you will not be punished.

        The Internet is still mostly connected, the law enforcement is not as much. Many businesses exist only because of this. You are free to host (produce, store, distribute) your content where it is legal and access it from where it is not. Access to foreign resources may eventually be outlawed or the access itself restricted. This is already the case in EU, Russia, China, etc. - but for now Internet is mostly connected.

  • I don’t know if I’m in the right here but I’m practically at the point where I’m just like fuck it, let them ruin the internet.

    I want to hear them scream when because of their own actions they have tanked the companies that their retirements are depending on.

    Let’s see how fast they can fix shit when they have 35 million angry retirees that hold 78% of the wealth in the country mad at them and telling them to fix it.

  • Unfortunately I live in a backwards, ignorant red state represented by complete idiots. The last time I wrote to my representatives asking them to oppose something like this they wrote back saying “the agree fully” and then went on to explain that they would definitely support it and thanked me for backing them… Then went on to show a complete lack of understanding of the bill in question.

    And I’ve been on his email list ever since despite clicking unsubscribe probably 30 times. The crusty sock puppet probably thinks that means “show me more” based on how he responded to my initial email.

    • If your unsubscribe isn’t working, report them to the FTC: https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/#/ If you take want to go the extra mile, report them to their email provider as well. You might be able to get their email shut down, and if their email provider is also their web host provider, maybe their website as well. Providers take CAN-SOAM violations seriously.

  • American here, and I am totally OK with a tiny bit of extra latency if people & companies want to move their servers to some place in Europe that actually respects freedom and people.

    Though I suspect that if you’re a US company with servers located abroad, they will still make the law apply to you since you control it.

  • “would give the attorney general of every state, including red states, the right to sue”

    What a weird distinction to make. I know they’re getting squirrelly, but they still technically count in the “every state” column.