The Protecting Kids on Social Media Act would lead to a second-class online experience for young people, mandated privacy-invasive age verification for all users, and in all likelihood, the creation of digital IDs for all U.S. citizens and residents. The bill will make it illegal for anyone under 13...
Let your Congress-critters know this is not the right thing to do.
It was built into Apollo (the Reddit app for IOS).
You could type something highlight it and select “sPonGeTExt” from a menu to set random letters uppercase in a block of text.
Yikes, please click on the link and do submit to your reps. Very easy to do. This kind of save the children labeling almost always gets voted in, so this is an uphill battle, but this is clearly a power grab, don't let them take this, the implications are quite frightening. If policies like fosta / sesta can become reality, this can too. Things are degrading rapidly, fight it!
One of my Senators is Marsha Blackburn, whose photo is used in this cal to action. She will tell me that I'm stupid and should support the bill, and then I'll be on her GD mailing list again (it is very difficult to get removed from that list).
Should be filterable though. It's a very small vocal minority that even uses these automated letters to contact legislators. These don't go unnoticed. May feel like a drop in a bucket but I think it's best to go down fighting.
That's a job for the parents though isn't it? And for early teenagers people seem to forget what positive influence the internet could have on their lives. Eg. many IT workers started fiddling around with stuff when they were quite young.
I'm just glad there was no internet as it is today when I was 13. The internet of the 90s? Good. The internet of the 2020s with algorithms fighting for your attention? Yuck.
Maybe stop for a second and consider how this bill is meant to act in concert with library book bans and cuts to school curriculum. Conservatives are coordinating bills and policies to cut off access to important knowledge about marginalized communities.
The only way the far-right can build a young political base is if they can keep entire generations ignorant and uneducated, and unfortunately kids in red districts can’t rely on getting the education they need to be informed citizens from schools.
Precisely this. Just like there’s solid research showing the bad effects of social media on kids generally, there’s solid research showing the positive effects of social media in the case of LGBTQI+ youth. This is designed to let oppressively religious families cut off their queer children from “the world” and from the idea that “it gets better.” Kids are gonna die.
To clarify, I 100% think this bill is bad for adults, privacy, and the internet.
However...
"The end result of this law would likely be that a huge number of young people—particularly the most vulnerable—would lose access to social media platforms, which can play a critical role for young people in accessing resources and support in a wide variety of circumstances"
Social Media has a documented, well-studied, negative effect on young people's mental health. We really could and should be doing more as a society to prevent young people from using it / pressuring social media platforms to fix the inherently negative issues with social media. This bill isn't the answer, but acting like kids and teens should have free reign of web apps that are known to be bad for them isn't the answer either.
Their parents should fucking parent them then. If my parents didn't want me exposed to something they didn't let me have it. Stop giving your kids mobile devices and letting them loose on the internet and maybe they won't turn out so fucked up.
Absolutely nothing hypocritical about politicians who are willing to sacrifice literally everyone outside of the people in their family wanting to ahem SaVe ThE kIdS. /s
Is this one like KOSA meant to target transgender content and drag queens because that material (and specifically that material) is too spicy for America?
Both the measures suck and are meant to defang the internet since they don't like the public talking to each other so much, but the the US Senator who sponsored KOSA admitted it was specifically meant to censor the existence of LGBT+ folk, specifically trans folk.
Long past time to do it. It's not even congress but the market share of the internet has been centralizing around the handful of FAANG or whatever acronym. Unfortunately too much of the tech nerd population have been seduced by the dark side. A reconstructed world wide web would be very hard to gain enough traction without enough nerds backing it.