Censoring the Internet Won’t Protect Kids
If good intentions created good laws, there would be no need for congressional debate.
I have no doubt the authors of this bill genuinely want to protect children, but the bill they’ve written promises to be a Pandora’s box of unintended consequences.
The Kids Online Safety Act, known as KOSA, would impose an unprecedented duty of care on internet platforms to mitigate certain harms associated with mental health, such as anxiety, depression, and eating disorders.
While proponents of the bill claim that the bill is not designed to regulate content, imposing a duty of care on internet platforms associated with mental health can only lead to one outcome: the stifling of First Amendment–protected speech.
Today’s children live in a world far different from the one I grew up in and I’m the first in line to tell kids to go outside and “touch grass.”
With the internet, today’s children have the world at their fingertips. That can be a good thing—just about any question can be answered by finding a scholarly article or how-to video with a simple search.
While doctors’ and therapists’ offices close at night and on weekends, support groups are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for people who share similar concerns or have had the same health problems. People can connect, share information, and help each other more easily than ever before. That is the beauty of technological progress.
But the world can also be an ugly place. Like any other tool, the internet can be misused, and parents must be vigilant in protecting their kids online.
It is perhaps understandable that those in the Senate might seek a government solution to protect children from any harms that may result from spending too much time on the internet. But before we impose a drastic, first-of-its-kind legal duty on online platforms, we should ensure that the positive aspects of the internet are preserved. That means we have to ensure that First Amendment rights are protected and that these platforms are provided with clear rules so that they can comply with the law.
Unfortunately, this bill fails to do that in almost every respect.
As currently written, the bill is far too vague, and many of its key provisions are completely undefined.
The bill effectively empowers the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to regulate content that might affect mental health, yet KOSA does not explicitly define the term “mental health disorder.” Instead, it references the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders…or “the most current successor edition.”
Written that way, not only would someone looking at the law not know what the definition is, but even more concerning, the definition could change without any input from Congress whatsoever.
The scope of one of the most expansive pieces of federal tech legislation could drastically change overnight, and Congress may not even realize it until after it already happened. None of the people’s representatives should be comfortable with a definition that effectively delegates Congress’s legislative authority to an unaccountable third party.
Second, the bill would impose an unprecedented duty of care on internet platforms to mitigate certain harms, such as anxiety, depression, and eating disorders. But the legislation does not define what is considered harmful to minors, and everyone will have a different belief as to what causes harm, much less how online platforms should go about protecting minors from that harm.
The sponsors of this bill will tell you that they have no desire to regulate content. But the requirement that platforms mitigate undefined harms belies the bill’s effect to regulate online content. Imposing a “duty of care” on online platforms to mitigate harms associated with mental health can only lead to one outcome: the stifling of constitutionally protected speech.
For example, if an online service uses infinite scrolling to promote Shakespeare’s works, or algebra problems, or the history of the Roman Empire, would any lawmaker consider that harmful?
I doubt it. And that is because website design does not cause harm. It is content, not design, that this bill will re
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