Members of Congress considered 19 online safety bills Tuesday that may soon have a major impact on the future of the internet as age-verification laws have spread to half of the US and around the world.
In response, digital and human rights organization Fight for the Future is hosting a week of events—across Reddit, LinkedIn, and various livestreams—to raise awareness on how it believes these bills are setting a dangerous precedent by making the internet more exploitative rather than safer. Many of the proposed bills include a clause for ID or age verification, which forces people to upload an ID, allow a face scan, or otherwise authenticate that they are not a minor before viewing adult content. Fight for the Future says the policies will lead to increased censorship and surveillance.
Among the 19 bills considered at the hearing conducted by the House Energy and Commerce Committee was the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which passed with sweeping bipartisan approval in the Senate last year, and the Reducing Exploitative Social Media Exposure for Teens Act (RESET), which would ban tech companies from allowing minors under the age of 16 on their platforms. In addition to age-verification, the bills raised concerns over issues of parental controls, consumer research of minors, AI, and data privacy.
“We’re seeing this huge wave towards ID checks being the norm in tech policy, and it felt like we needed to capture the already activated communities who are not feeling heard in Congress,” says Sarah Philips, a campaigner with Fight for the Future. “If you look on YouTube, if you see people making content about KOSA, or responding to a lot of this legislation, it’s very unpopular with people. But it’s viewed on the Hill as very common sense.”
Missouri’s age gate law took effect earlier this week, meaning 25 US states have passed a form of age verification. The process usually involves third-party services, which can be especially prone to data breaches. This year, the UK also passed a mandate for age verification—the Online Safety Act—and Australia’s teen social media ban, which requires social media companies to deactivate the accounts of users under the age of 16, goes into effect on December 10. Instagram, YouTube, Snap, and TikTok are complying with the historic ban.
Philips believes the laws are a direct threat to democratic freedom. “These are censorship laws,” she says. “In the south, where I live, these same proposals mimic a lot of the arguments that you see behind book bans and behind laws that criminalize gender affirming health care or abortion information.”
In March, over 90 human rights advocacy groups signed a coalition letter opposing online ID check mandates. “The internet is not improved by treating its users like criminal suspects and our lives as opportunities for corporate profit,” David Swanson, campaign coordinator at RootsAction.org, wrote in the letter. “Legislators defunding education to invest in wars, police, prisons, borders, and constant surveillance should think hard before claiming to be acting on behalf of children.”
Though Tuesday’s hearing did not advance any legislation, it included testimonies from Joel Thayer, president of the Digital Progress Institute, and Kate Ruane, director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “The government and social media platforms should not be—indeed, with respect to the government, cannot be—the sole arbiters of the content children can see and services that they can access online,” Ruane said during her testimony.
The package of bills is indicative of how Congress has failed to deliver real solutions, Philips says. “We have repeatedly asked them to focus on comprehensive privacy legislation, on antitrust issues, and on things that actually protect us from the surveillance capitalist business model of big tech companies. Congress says they’re holding big tech accountable but most of the options on the table just mandate verification.” According to the Verge, a revamped version of KOSA removes tech companies’ liability in mitigating potential harms caused by their platforms.
In an op-ed for Teen Vogue published in October, Fight for the Future director Evan Greer and campaigner Janus Rose criticized Democratic lawmakers who support KOSA, including the bill’s cowriter Connecticut senator Richard Blumenthal. “KOSA takes the same logic of the bans on drag shows and LGBTQ+ books and applies it to the internet, allowing censorship of a broad range of information in the name of protecting kids from real online harm,” Greer noted.
But since KOSA and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) failed to gain approval last year, “it’ll be interesting to see what actually floats to the top right now,” Philips says, concerned that some of the bills could be attached to the National Defense Authorization Act or have the Trump administration’s 10-year moratorium on state AI regulations attached to them, “which is a disaster tornado of tech policies.”
Philips tells me she isn’t disheartened by the work because she wants people to understand what’s really at stake in the fight ahead.
“The thing that people misunderstand most about age verification is that it actually applies to all of us,” she says. “A lot of the people pushing for age verification solely focus on kids because that’s the discussion happening in Congress or on the Hill. But in actuality, if we age-gate the internet and implement mandates, that means that you have to prove that you’re not a child—whether you’re 18 or 50. Everyone will have to interact with this.”
The post The Age-Gated Internet Is Sweeping the US. Activists Are Fighting Back appeared first on Wired.
