why a right wing think tank wants to censor the web under the guise of protecting children

Under the banner of protecting kids, the United States may end up censoring vast swaths of the internet and openly spy on your browsing habits.

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. It’s one of my favorite and frequently deployed quotes that comes to us from St. Bernard of Clairvaux, a mystic thought to have co-founded the Knights Templar in the 1100s, and it’s all too often correct. This time it’s about KOSA, or the Kids Online Safety Act, which requires online platforms to prevent kids from looking at potentially harmful content. Sounds great, right? There’s only one problem. It leaves determination and enforcement to state attorney generals, meaning that one state could go after a platform for showing kids content promoting self-harm while another state attacks an unflinching look at the Civil Rights Era.

That’s not a theoretical either. Followers of John Birch Society conspiracies, which never went out of style on the American right, published a report decrying the idea of controlling internet content this way, saying it amounted to censorship and warning it could stifle "conservative ideas" by a cabal "engaged in efforts to tear at the moral fabric of our society at any cost" last year. Now, they’ve reversed course, realizing the scary but obvious fact that if they’re the ones using the tactics they accuse Big Tech of deploying against them, they could set the national conversation through state AGs first, then on the national level when they get a federal GOP trifecta.

Again, this is not an attempt to deploy a slippery slope since the Heritage Foundation, an ultra-right think tank which has taken on the Bircherite mantle, has basically said it would be their plan, in between accusing social media of turning kids trans, teaching them "anti-American" content, and exposing them to predators. They want you to get sued in a dozen different states for a dozen different things daily, unless you build a censorship system into your platform which can be used by an adult to limit what their children see on the web. How do you verify who is an adult and who’s a child? How do you build this system to be foolproof? No one knows and no one cares. Just do it.

Worst case scenarios could require users to submit government IDs like passports or driver’s licenses, and for platforms to check their authenticity before allowing them to actually browse or post. This would enable interested politicians to go after the post history, browsing habits, and other data of anyone they want while knowing exactly to whom the accounts belong. It would also let them take action against the individuals in question for posting "content that could be harmful to minors" to harass, silence, or intimidate any activists or critics they have in their crosshairs. Does the content really harm kids? Who cares? All that matters is that they’ll have a tool to chill free speech.

If we really wanted to give these efforts the benefit of the doubt, despite pretty clear evidence they’re being made in bad faith, we could say that it’s true that quite a few tech platforms are filled with content that’s not exactly kid-friendly and does pose a number of risks to children. It’s also true that their verification of their users’ ages is a date selection box they’ll totally trust you to fill out honestly. We could also admit that yes, there is all sorts of bad stuff on the internet, along with bad people. But given all of the above, is the solution really to mandate the end of all anonymous accounts and censorship engines ripe for abuse by authoritarians from every tech platform?

Whenever governments step in to determine what content kids or adults should and should not see, they’re opening a Pandora’s Box. No matter how genuinely they want to protect kids, the same mechanism that declares things like body-shaming illegal to keep on a timeline can be used by malicious lawmakers to classify all criticism of the government as "treasonous incitement" and mandate its removal, along with the IDs and addresses of all those who engaged in it. This is what modern authoritarian states do to some extent, and the only thing preventing this from happening in a free nation is its politicians simply refusing to do it. That’s all.

Given all that, it’s important to highlight that KOSA is not just a misguided but genuine legal framework being made to protect kids from real harm. It’s being written with the steady input of an organization which openly declares their goal is to rid the internet of content they find objectionable by using the law as a cudgel while using "think of the children!" as a flimsy, transparent excuse. It’s not being put in place because kids are being harmed online and we need better reporting and regulation — which, let’s be honest, they are and we do — but because they don’t want kids reading about the Tulsa Massacre, or that some of their classmates are different, and that’s okay.

Having been born in the Soviet Union and grown up with stories of draconian control over education, entertainment, and media from the adults around me, I have exactly zero confidence that Heritage and other right wing lobbies won’t demand that KOSA is extended to adults to turn the web into nothing more than right wing propaganda if you access it from anywhere in the United States. In fact, knowing what the people currently behind its introduction and writing are obsessed with today, it seems like a certainty, which is why it’s an extremely stupid idea to give them a single inch on this ridiculous, dangerous idea.