Lawmakers who support KOSA today are choosing to trust the current administration, and future administrations, to define what youth—and to some degree, all of us—should be allowed to read online.
KOSA will not make kids safer. It will make the internet more dangerous for anyone who relies on it to learn, connect, or speak freely. Lawmakers should reject it, and fast.
Because that’s not what this is. It’s just like the porn site laws
How does a site comply? Maybe they use AI to look at your face, maybe they have you send in your license. The law isn’t clear what’s enough to prove it.
How long until third parties step up? Nice convenient orgs that can sell the collected data that can guarantee compliance, because they sell the data to the government directly. Or even first parties… Facebook and Google are happy to sell this kind of info on their users
This isn’t about protecting kids, it’s about identifying users. What they say this is for is good, what the laws actually do is far removed from that
And I said elsewhere that I’m not okay with IDing users that way (though I’d absolutely love if we banned porn entirely). However, a lot of social media sites have specialized kids’ accounts. In cases like that, those accounts should be legally exempt from algorithm manipulation and given special privacy defaults.
As far as I can tell, THAT is what this bill is doing.