Break The Internet
Lawmakers want to keep kids offline. Those efforts could curtail LGBTQ+ expression and make the internet worse for everyone.
While trading fringe proposals with other candidates at the second Republican presidential primary debate, Vivek Ramaswamy suggested cutting teens off social media.
“This isn’t a Republican point or a Democrat point,” Ramaswamy said. “But if you’re 16 years old or under, you should not be using an addictive social media product, period.”
It was a characteristically weird suggestion from a candidate who’s taken a dim view of young people’s participation in public life. Ramaswamy (a millennial who makes TikToks) has previously suggested raising the default voting age to 25 and defended the position by claiming that the overwhelmingly liberal Gen Z would rather give up their voting rights than give up their TikTok accounts.
But while Ramaswamy’s voting-age proposal isn’t likely to see legislative daylight, state and federal lawmakers are already working toward his goal of an age-restricted internet. Using sympathetic and often laudable concerns about children’s safety, a bipartisan group of legislators has advanced a series of laws that experts say would crack down on LGBTQ+ content, sever young people from digital communities, require adults to turn over identifying information, and increase surveillance on minors’ online activities.
Some supporters of these proposals attempt to equate queer existence with pornography, private lives with secrecy, and social media with hard drugs like fentanyl (as Ramaswamy did in the debate.) In doing so, they threaten to make the internet a worse place for everyone, while doubling down on surveillance and censoriousness in children’s name.
Foremost among these proposals is the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a federal effort that counts Democratic senators as supporters, despite conservatives outright stating that the bill would restrict children from learning about LGBTQ+ issues.
Reintroduced this year, KOSA purports to protect children from some of the internet’s worst ills by requiring websites to prevent children from encountering material that could lead to mental health issues. But the bill’s critics say it leaves an open-ended definition of “harm” and allows state attorney generals to determine what material is inappropriate for children.
That’s a problem in any state with a government that’s attempted to restrict transgender care for minors on mental health grounds, or attempted to conflate LGBTQ+ material with pornography. (Think Texas, Missouri, Montana, Florida, or Tennessee for a few recent examples.)
If Texas (where a right-wing government has specifically attacked queer literature as pornographic and equated transgender youth care with child abuse) wants to argue that queer content is harmful to children, KOSA appears to restrict that content for minors in the state.
Conservative powerhouses are already cheering the prospective gag order. As writer Erin Reed has previously reported, the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation endorsed KOSA in an article titled “How Big Tech Turns Kids Trans.”
The Heritage Foundation argued that “raising the minimum age for internet use (as the Child Online Privacy and Protection Act would do) may be one way to protect kids from online harms. Another step in the right direction would be to prohibit the sexual exploitation of minors and the promotion of content that poses risks to minors’ physical and mental health (which the Kids Online Safety Act would do). If we seek to protect kids online, we must guard against the harms of sexual and transgender content.”
When a law professor noted that Heritage was arguing to weaponize KOSA against transgender content, the foundation tweeted “Yes we do. Keeping trans content away from children is protecting kids.”
One of the bill’s sponsors, Sen. Marsha Blackburn also appeared to connect it to censorship of transgender content in remarks last month, although her team later said it was not her intent.
In those remarks, Blackburn highlighted her legislative priorities as “protecting minor children from the transgender in this culture and that influence. And I would add to that watching what’s happening on social media. And I’ve got the Kids Online Safety Act that I think we’re going to end up getting through.”
Blackburn, who has previously described education on race issues as “dangerous for our kids,” went on to describe social media as “where children are being indoctrinated.”
Blackburn’s spokesperson later clarified that “these are two separate issues being taken out of context. KOSA will not — nor was it designed to — target or censor any individual or community.”
But the bill’s opponents argue that its loose language, combined with Republicans’ legislative obsession with LGBTQ+ issues, will lead to selective enforcement of “harm.”
In a July letter to lawmakers, the American Civil Liberties Union described KOSA as a First Amendment hazard.
“While the bill’s purported goal of addressing child safety online is laudable, its means — singling out particular topics for censorship by social media companies — will silence important conversations, limit minors’ access to potentially vital resources, and violate the First Amendment by imposing a government-mandated content moderation rule,” the ACLU wrote.
“KOSA’s purported intent to regulate certain harms would disfavor content related to ‘anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance use disorders, and suicidal behaviors’ and could chill any speech tied to youth stress — from discussions about how conversion therapy has harmed LGBTQ+ youth to young people’s worries about climate change to concerns about school shootings.”
KOSA isn’t the only legislation targeting minors’ access to the internet. A new Utah law, set to take effect next spring, bans minors from social media without their parents’ explicit permission.
Beginning on March 1, according to Utah’s government, social media companies must “verify the age of a Utah adult seeking to maintain or open a social media account, get the consent of a parent or guardian for Utah users under age 18, allow parents or guardians full access to their child’s account, [and] create a default curfew setting that blocks overnight access to minor accounts (10:30 pm to 6:30 am) which parents can adjust.”
While the law includes some admirable data privacy measures (social media companies can’t collect a minor’s data; good!) it installs a new level of surveillance for parents who will become the arbiters of their children’s internet access.
“This may make sense for a seven-year-old,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote in a letter to Utah lawmakers, “but requiring the same restrictions for a seventeen year old greatly interferes both with the child’s rights and the parent’s.”
It also opens adults to new forms of digital surveillance. The Utah law will require adults to verify their ages on social media: a pain and a privacy concern, especially in an era of frequent data breaches, and especially for people without government-issued IDs.
Utah lawmakers have pledged to accept other forms of identification, although they haven’t offered any concrete solutions yet. Those forms “could include facial recognition software or using existing consumer data to verify an individual's age,” Utah’s KSL reported. Not exactly ideal for the privacy-minded.
New laws have already demonstrated the effect of age-verification programs on websites. States like Utah and Louisiana have recently passed age-verification laws for pornographic websites, citing understandable concerns about children viewing adult material. This has caused traffic to those websites to crater (understandable, as you could not make me upload my driver’s license to PornHub on pain of death), or sites to cease operations in those states.
Utah visitors to PornHub, for instance, now land on a page explaining that “giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for protecting our users, and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk.”
And while I can’t imagine most conservative lawmakers are too stressed about plummeting traffic to porn sites, the fact remains that many adults will just bail on a website before uploading their government ID or scanning their face.
These are more than technical impracticalities. The stated aim of many lawmakers is to curtail children’s access to the internet.
It’s easy for me to make some glib condemnation of the internet as bad for everyone, and therefore bad for minors. But just as when I pretend to cheer Twitter’s Elon-era demise (“ugh, good riddance, I waste so much time there”), this is more than a little dishonest.
The internet is a door to worlds beyond your own; to existences and information you might never have encountered. Some of it is garbage but some is groundbreaking. It can be a lifeline for queer youth who seek to understand themselves (and in many cases, to make those discoveries in private). It can be a gateway out of religious dogmatism, out of politically rigid upbringings, out of ignorance and intolerance.
It can be a revelation, not just for marginalized youth but also for the curious. I cannot imagine the trajectory of my life without internet access as a kid in a small, rural town. The further I venture into motherhood and adulthood, the more grateful I am for the freedom my parents gave me to learn and question and disagree.
And as organizations like the Heritage Foundation blame the internet for Making The Kids Trans, we should understand this new slate of internet “safety” bills as a vehicle for controlling what minors learn and how they express themselves.
Tellingly, these laws impose new forms of surveillance on minors without addressing how surveillance also affects minors’ mental health and privacy.
They have little to say, for instance, about data-hungry child-tracking apps like Life360, a family social media platform that allows parents to monitor childrens’ whereabouts at all times. The app (which, after criticism, says it’s no longer selling children’s precise location info to data brokers) has drawn complaints from children and even college students who told the Washington Post that their parents used the app “in ways that resemble emotional abuse.”
One now-adult teenager who criticized the app on Reddit said their mother still makes them use it and that “Life360 has ruined my life, and My teen years.”
“I don’t get it,” they wrote. “I never lied to my mom about my whereabouts EVER and she makes me download this shitty tracking app to watch my every move. I thought things would be better when I turned 18 because I will literally be an adult but nope. I still have to use it. I cannot take it anymore. I literally had to waste the best years of my life because my mom wanted to control every aspect of my life as a teenager. Parents, this app is not worth the irreparable damage you will cause your children. Its not worth the crying and panic attacks you will cause your child.”
We live in a digital age. We cannot, as Ramaswamy suggests, keep minors off most of the internet. In the face of that legislative impossibility, all these new laws can do is make the internet more hostile for everyone, but especially for the people who are the most eager to learn.
It’s a long weekend here, full of soccer practices and birthday parties and a lot of time in the car, schlepping from one place to another. I blame that for this week’s free newsletter arriving in the middle of the night. On the bright side, I hope you’re getting a little extra time off. If you’re spending that time reading, here’s what’s been in my browser tabs:
-CNN has a great deep dive on how parents are beginning to fight back against book bans in Florida—and how the pushback is turning school board meetings into spectacle.
-Here’s a really interesting new study showing that Covid-era work-from-home allowances led fathers to take on a more equal share of childcare. “Additionally, we find evidence that mothers whose spouses have remote work possibilities increased their working hours over the course of the pandemic,” the researchers found.
-A New York woman who was denied medication because she was of “childbearing age” is suing the hospital that denied her treatment.
-I appreciated these thoughts from Israeli journalist Haggai Matar, written in Tel Aviv during Hamas’s attack on Saturday:
“As I write these words, I am sitting at home in Tel Aviv, trying to figure out how to protect my family in a house with no shelter or safe room, following with growing panic the reports and rumors of horrible events taking place in the Israeli towns near Gaza which are under attack. I see people, some of them my friends, calling on social media to attack Gaza more fiercely than ever before. Some Israelis are saying that now is the time to eradicate Gaza entirely — essentially calling for genocide. Through all the explosions, the dread and the bloodshed, speaking about peaceful solutions seems like madness to them.
“Yet I remember that everything that I am feeling now, which every Israeli must be sharing, has been the life experience of millions of Palestinians for far too long. The only solution, as it has always been, is to bring an end of apartheid, occupation, and siege, and promote a future based on justice and equality for all of us. It is not in spite of the horror that we have to change course — it is exactly because of it.”