Technology

The "Kids Online Safety Act" (KOSA) is one of the Bad Internet Bills EFF is asking for help trying to stop. KOSA sounds like a good bill. Who doesn't want kids to be safe online? But KOSA wouldn't actually make kids safer -- and the way it's written would be especially harmful to LGBTQIA2S+ people.

As over 90 Human Rights and LGBTQ groups said in this letter the sent to Congress last year opposing KOSA:

"KOSA establishes a burdensome, vague “duty of care” to prevent harms to minors for a broad range of online services that are reasonably likely to be used by a person under the age of 17. While KOSA’s aims of preventing harassment, exploitation, and mental health trauma for minors are laudable, the legislation is unfortunately likely to have damaging unintended consequences for young people.

KOSA would require online services to “prevent” a set of harms to minors, which is effectively an instruction to employ broad content filtering to limit minors’ access to certain online content. Content filtering is notoriously imprecise; filtering used by schools and libraries in response to the Children’s Internet Protection Act has curtailed access to critical information such as sex education or resources for LGBTQ+ youth. Online services would face substantial pressure to over-moderate, including from state Attorneys General seeking to make political points about what kind of information is appropriate for young people.

At a time when books with LGBTQ+ themes are being banned from school libraries and people providing healthcare to trans children are being falsely accused of “grooming,” KOSA would cut off another vital avenue of access to information for vulnerable youth."

KOSA has.a markup session in the Senate next week, so now's a critical time to be telling Congress that we don't want this bad internet bill. So please help get the word out -- and if you're in the US, EFF's KOSA action page makes it easy to contact Congress

#BadInternetBills #KOSA #privacy