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President Reagan once quipped that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Perhaps the only way to make that sentence scarier is to add the two words “your children.” Indeed, other than the time-honored pretext of “national security,” perhaps no other phrase has been so viciously exploited to serve aims diametrically contrary to its professed aims than that of “child safety.” The troubling bill titled the “Kids Online Safety Act” (KOSA), sponsored by Marsha Blackburn (R-CN) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), is no exception.
What exactly is the KOSA? Months ago, we published a piece warning of the bill.
So what is KOSA, and why is it dangerous? KOSA is a bill that, according to the Washington Post, would “impose sweeping new obligations on an array of digital platforms” that would include “exercising reasonable care” to prevent their products from endangering kids with “bullying, harassment, and other harms.” According to the New York Times, this “duty of care” imposed on “social media platforms and video games” would prevent harm to minors, including “depression, eating disorders, violence, sexual exploitation and predatory marketing.”
What could be wrong with protecting children online? The problem, as always, is in the fine print:
On a superficial and naive level, there’s not much to disagree with. After all, who wouldn’t want to make children safer online? Unfortunately, it is hard to imagine how the government exercising more control over video games and social media platforms could amount to anything other than more political censorship and more political propaganda pushing left-wing insanity. In the present political and cultural moment, when bureaucrats and government officials talk about “bullying” and “harassment” and issues affecting self-esteem, this inevitably means censoring politically incorrect content that makes liberals uncomfortable. After all, we live in a farcical world in which appellate courts have even ruled that misgendering transsexuals constitutes “harassment.”
Safety, of course, has always been one of the key censorship predicates under the guise of “Trust and Safety.”
It has been an open secret for several years now that regime censors have preferred euphemisms related to safety. There is the notorious scam of “brand safety,” in which censorious shakedown artists threaten companies for advertising with organizations that have fallen politically afoul of the regime. Then, of course, there’s the fact that the censorship teams within Big Tech companies operate under the offices of so-called “Trust and Safety.”
READ: Beware of Trojan Horse Censorship Bill Disguised as Big Tech ‘Child Safety’ Regulation
Our reporting played a significant role in preventing the passage of the KOSA, but now it looks like it very well may be up for a vote again, with some unexpected and unfortunate allies—none other than Elon Musk’s X.
With just weeks left to pass legislation before Congress adjourns, X CEO Linda Yaccarino announced she worked with the authors of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) to update the bill in what seems like a play to win over the Republican House leaders standing in the way of it becoming law.
We suspect that the X CEO here is well-intentioned, as she has attempted to ensure that the KOSA is not abused in order to advance a censorship agenda. The Verge continues:
Led by X, the new changes made to the Kids Online Safety Act strengthen the bill while safeguarding free speech online and ensuring it is not used to stifle expression,” said Senators Blackburn and Blumenthal. “These changes should eliminate once and for all the false narrative that this bill would be weaponized by unelected bureaucrats to censor Americans. We thank Elon and Linda for their bold leadership and commitment to protecting children online and for helping us get this bill across the finish line this Congress. We appreciate that this endorsement and revised text reflects their publicly stated goal of furthering free speech without fear of censorship. We reiterate X’s call to pass KOSA by the end of the year – it is clear that this legislation has overwhelming support from Congress.
The new legislation does attempt to address some of the concerns raised in our original piece on the KOSA bill.
These changes were made to further make clear that KOSA would not censor, limit, or remove any content from the internet, and it does not give the FTC or state AGs the power to bring lawsuits over content or speech, no matter who it is from.
The major problems with the bill remain, however. Specifically, the potential to interpretively abuse terms such as “harassment” and “safety.” Indeed, these two terms have been abused as censorship predicates just as much, if not more than, the more notorious terms such as “disinformation.” The new language in the bill is perhaps trying to alleviate this problem by emphasizing how extreme harassment would have to be to qualify for censorship and removal, but it includes language like, “Physical violence or online harassment activity that is so severe, pervasive, or objectively offensive that it impacts a major life activity of a minor.”
The concern is that even this language is very much open to interpretive abuse. Indeed, just as there is a whole industry that uses the disinformation term as a censorship predicate, there is an entire pseudo-therapeutic industry that has built up the terms “safety” and “harassment” as potential censorship predicates for speech amorphously deemed to be racially offensive or offensive to the transgendered. According to such “experts,” so-called “transphobia” and “racism” could very much cause the harms envisaged even in the revised language for the KOSA.
The effects of gender dysphoria can be so strong that they lead to depression and anxiety.
When the effects of misgendering impact a person’s mental health, they may begin to develop low self-esteem, isolate themselves from their social circles, or show more risky behavior.
One study showed that transgender people ages 15-21 showed 71% fewer symptoms of severe depression if they were able to choose their name, compared to young transgender people who weren’t able to choose.
At the very least, it is critical to further revise the language of the bill to fortify it against Trojan horse censorship under the guise of a therapeutic concern for “harassment.”
As we have stated elsewhere, ever since Elon’s heroic acquisition of Twitter, the censorship industry has been in retreat in the United States. The Twitter files put much of the censorship industry on the defensive, and major censorship think tanks such as Stanford Internet Observatory and, more recently, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center are on the chopping block.
Just because the censorship industry is in retreat, however, does not mean that it is dead. Just as the industry recedes within the United States, censorship is intensifying across the Atlantic, and we can see that the UK and increasingly the EU are more than happy to incubate the next iteration of the censorship industry, at least while Trump is in office. Legislation such as the KOSA, which seems harmless, could be an attempt at a censorship beachhead domestically, with the censorship industry increasingly abandoning the “disinformation” excuse to silence speech and relying more on censorship under the guise of “safety” and “protecting children.”
After all that Elon has done to change the game completely in favor of free speech, it would be a shame to see his company fall victim to a potential Trojan horse censorship trap in the KOSA—at least in its present form. We will continue to monitor and report on the progress of this bill.
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