It’s accepted that parents, not the government, have the primary right and duty to raise and protect their children. While most Americans would not dispute this notion regarding parenting in the physical world, it has become surprisingly controversial in the digital one.
In Congress and legislatures nationwide, proposals have proliferated to wrest control of children’s digital lives from their parents. These are proposals that would “not enforce parental authority over children’s” behavior but “impose governmental authority, subject only to a parental veto,” to borrow the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s words in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (2011).
They include bills to require online age verification, micromanage social media’s algorithmic interactions with minors and bar children from social media altogether.
Such a bill is the Kids Off Social Media Act (KOSMA), introduced recently by a bipartisan coalition of senators. KOSMA would erect two main pillars: to disallow children under the age of 13 from social media and to disallow platforms from offering “personalized recommendation systems” to teens. Parents should look suspiciously at both.
Barring children from the category of online platforms that KOSMA labels “social media” will probably harm the children it intends to protect.
“The act would inadvertently make children less safe,” TechFreedom writes, pointing out that it “makes no exception for parent-managed kid-safe accounts. … It would ban platforms that allow supervised child access — like YouTube Kids.”
Similarly, the provision to remove personalized recommendations would prevent algorithms from keeping objectionable material from minors.
TechFreedom explains: “By mandating chronological-only feeds for teens, KOSMA inhibits the ability of a platform to cultivate a safer online space — e.g., by downranking controversial or distasteful content that a teen has requested.”
The law of unintended consequences and the limitations of lawmakers’ foresight remain the unconquerable foes of the would-be central planner.
In addition, despite the supporters’ paper-thin protestations to the contrary, KOSMA’s age-specific requirements would act as an age-verification requirement — an unconstitutional burden on speech. KOSMA’s promise that it does not intend mandatory age verification would do little for tech firms that see a deluge of litigation on the horizon. How else might a platform adequately assess a user’s age? The bill’s gapingly broad “knowledge fairly implied” standard serves as an invitation to attorneys.
Knowing the costs of a deluge of lawsuits better than the precise meaning of the law’s text, litigation-averse tech companies will treat KOSMA as what it is: a de facto — if cleverly obscured — age-verification mandate. In practice, only with age verification could platforms be sure to avoid liability under KOSMA; ergo, age verification will ensue.
Judges have long considered mandated age verification — implicit and explicit — unconstitutional. Age verification usually requires users of all ages to proffer sensitive personal data or biometrics, and enforcing it, courts have ruled, imposes unconstitutionally heavy burdens on online speech. KOSMA’s denial of its obvious effects will not save it in court.
Far from possessing rock-solid, unassailable answers, KOSMA’s supporters seem lost at sea, searching desperately for land. They have convinced themselves that something, anything, must be done to keep children from the internet.
Despite the certainty of child safety advocates, just how social media affects children’s psychology remains unclear. Many claim that “the science is settled.” It is not.
When the government trespasses into a sphere “better left to a private individual or institution” — in this case, the family — the attendant harms usually dwarf whatever good might be accomplished. The government does not know much about American children, it has little just authority over most aspects of American children’s lives, and it certainly does not love American children.
Pretending otherwise, as if nobody exists who might do better by them, leads directly to unconstitutional, interventionist nanny statism — and likely to many judicial injunctions.
David B. McGarry is the research director at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.
