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URGENT: Congress trying to pass anti-LGBT bill under the guise of “child safety”! [1]
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Date: 2022-11-26
In a particularly scummy move, the Kids Online Safety Act is going to be put into the must pass end of year spending bill: www.axios.com/…
The two laws best positioned to get rolled into big year-end legislative packages, according to advocates and lawmakers, are: The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which would require platforms to guard kids from harmful content using new features and safeguards and to make privacy settings "on" by default for children. The law also mandates privacy audits and more transparency about privacy policies.
Now at first glance, that doesn’t sound so bad, since it’s supposedly about helping protect children online. Except the problem is that it has MANY similarities to the dangerously flawed and pro-censorship EARN IT Act (I covered this in a previous post here and here), which was not only pushed by the same people (Senator Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn), but also has many of the same flaws, such as pro-censorship, anti LGBT resources and content, and pro-mass surveillance. Like every “protect the children” type law, this would censor the internet of anything “harmful” to children aka any LGBT, NSFW, or whatever the Right doesn’t like, force everyone to upload their govt ID’s to even access anything online, and surveil everyone else. Gutting everyone’s privacy in an era where we see massive state violence and encroaching fascism globally.
But the biggest problem, as Mike Stabile has pointed out, is HOW the mechanism to which this works: The State Attorney General.
This addition would allow states like Texas and Florida to sue companies for having LGBTQ+ content, along with sex education resources, incentivizing these platforms to ban that content. To be more specific, the bill allows the state attorney general to sue if they believe that platforms do not protect minors from a list of harms that includes politicized terms like "grooming" which, as we've seen can include any sort of LGBTQ information, entertainment or literature. RuPaul on TikTok? A clip on transgender youth on Facebook? A gay character in a Disney movie? A story some teenager uploaded on Wattpad? Suicide hotlines for gay youth? Cue a suit from Texas or Florida targeting the entire web.
And the problem is that given the current political climate and the insanity of a number of GOP aligned political groups in positions of power, this only ends up making things RIPE for abuse and mass censorship (since companies will probably end up choosing to acquiesce to their demands rather than risk being subject to liability) not to mention the damage this would cause to children who might need resources regarding LGBT or sex education.
This article by Mike Masnick on Techdirt also goes further into KOSA and its adjacent bills.
To make matters even worse, on top of the usual suspects of NCOSE (a far right group disguised as an anti sex trafficking org, who are infamous for being religious nutjobs who HATE anything to do with sex or LGBT. They used to be called Morality in Media) supporting this travesty of a bill, it’s been revealed that the Senate leader is claiming there’s no opposition.
So we voted to save democracy, and Blumenthal and Blackburn have chosen to stab us in the back by literally giving the fascists a dangerous tool to abuse and use, all for the sake of political brownie points against Big Tech. A tool that far right groups like the Heritage Foundation have OPENLY stated attorneys aligned with them and other far right types will abuse to silence LGBTQ+ or sex ed content for youth if it passes.
The ONLY way this works is by making sure who is and isn’t a minor is to have some form of age-verification scheme. And the only way to do that is through a third party like ID.me which has recently come under scrutiny for, you guessed it, data leaks. So everyone who accesses anything online will be forced to upload their govt IDs. How is this protecting anyone’s privacy?
The excerpt below comes from a collaborative letter me and several others worked on that further expands on the above:
With all that said, what can we do?
Well, the same thing we did for the EARN IT Act; we make a LOT of noise, and get the word out.
Right now, the only major publications pushing this bill are mostly neutral to pro, with very few highlighting the flaws of this bill. Getting the word out on how bad this bill is for children might be enough to sway them against putting this bill into the spending package, thus ensuring that it won’t be pushed into law by the end of the year.
And PLEASE call your Senators at (202-224-3121). There is a call script with phone numbers here. Fax them, email them. Tell them they MUST oppose this bill. CONTACT any major human rights, LGBT, and cybersecurity related organizations aligned and let them know about this bill, and the harm it can cause to LGBT rights and children!
EMPHASIS ON THE HARM TO CHILDREN, SINCE THEY’RE TRYING TO CLAIM THAT THIS WILL HELP PROTECT CHILDREN’S PRIVACY, WHEN IT DOES THE EXACT OPPOSITE.
There’s also a Petition by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and from Fight For the Future.
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/11/26/2136755/-URGENT-Congress-trying-to-pass-anti-LGBT-bill-under-the-guise-of-child-safety
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