There are many bills in the legislative branch at any time, and some get far more media coverage than others. This can unfortunately lead to dangerous bills getting little to no media attention. One of these bills is the Kids Online Safety Act, also known as KOSA.
I had only learned about KOSA from a friend, and at first glance, it does not seem that dangerous. Essentially, this bill will attempt to ban for-profit websites from showing ‘harmful’ material to minors. Immediately I saw an issue.
What constitutes ‘harmful’ material?
This is a problem with many internet-related bills. Usually, the definition is too vague to be rational, and this can and has been abused in the past. Many pieces of media relating to the LGBTQ+ community have been banned on claims of being ‘pornographic’, when these materials are entirely child-appropriate. ‘Harmful’ is an even vaguer definition, allowing politicians to ban almost anything that they don’t want youth to see.
This could be anything from current events, to LGBTQ+ resources, to random information that someone deems ‘unsettling”.
Imagine that you attempt to look up any current events, or try to do some last-minute research for a project, and upon finding a site that seems like it would be a good resource, you aren’t allowed to enter the site.
Or, perhaps the most prevalent effect, an LGBTQ teenager attempting to find a resource to help them after a bad day, or to try and figure themselves out. Maybe they just want to speak with friends online. This bill could give politicians power to keep a child from speaking to their friends.
Another problem with most internet bills, this one especially, is how exactly these bills are going to be enforced. The most non-invasive way for these bills to be put into effect is a simple pop-up, asking if the reader is over 18. However, it is incredibly easy for this to be bypassed, because all it takes is to push a button and the whole thing is bypassed.
The only way to be sure that this bill is working, and therefore the most likely for the bill to use if it is put into place, is for the government ID of the person to be input into the system. This is deeply unsafe, for a multitude of reasons.
A simple data breach could leak IDs to the entire world, and in the worst case scenario, foreign IDs may not be allowed because of there being no way to verify them. This is the most dangerous effect of the bill, but the one I care about most and affects many people personally is the ability to restrict information from minors.
This doesn’t restrict freedom of speech in the traditional way, the way that most people think of, but it still puts a damper on the effectiveness that many young people can have in the world. Most of the activism in the world is done by young people, and this bill has the ability to remove the needed information from many people.
Many people, myself included, do not want this bill to pass. It’s already been pushed back multiple times, but only thanks to the kind of activism and spread of information that KOSA would prevent.
