KOSA and other Bad Internet Bills (US-specific for now)
Red alert! For the last six months, EFF, Fight for the Future, ACLU, Woodhull Foundation, and dozens of other groups have been sounding the alarm about several #BadInternetBills that have been put forward in Congress. We’ve made it clear that these bills are terrible ideas, but Congress is now considering packaging them together—possibly into must-pass legislation. We're organizing to keep them from sneaking these bad internet bills through.
This community is for news stories, opinion pieces, and action links about these bad internet bills. Please help get the word out!
And if you use microblogging software like Mastodon, please also check out the #BadInternetBills hashtag.
Icon originally from Why we need to openly protest KOSA on Five Nights at Freddy's Wiki, used by permission.
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How much of this is population control and how much is actual protection of children? Like don't get me wrong, I genuinely don't know about this and the article does not tell me enough about the proposed bills. All I know from my life in the west (I simply don't know enough to judge the rest of the world), "protecting the children" has been a tool for extending surveillance.
In the meanwhile we have gutted education, social services and health services. More and more children live in poverty. Living in poverty increases the likelihood of abuse but doing something for real costs money, which our governors like to spend otherwise...
You're completely right that these laws won't actually protect children. Instead, they'll give the government tools for targeting LGBTQIA2S+ youth and people seeking reproductive health care, censorship, and surveillance.
For some legislators, that's actually the goal -- one of KOSA's sponsors in the Senate (and the Heritage Foundation, which backs the bill) has explicitly talked about using it against LGBTQ people. For others, the most charitable interpretation is that the people pushing these bills have succeeded in fooling a lot of legislators into thinking that these bills will be effective -- and that the downsides that so many civil rights, LGBTQIA2S+, and reproductive rights organizations are warning about aren't real.. Also, there's a lot of pressure on Congress to do something about the predatory way that big tech companies prey on kids and teens (and everybody else too) ... so in some cases they probably know that the bills won't really make a difference, but hey, at least passing a bill is doing something.