from Hacker News

Stop KOSA (Kids Online Safety Act)

by surteen on 2/1/24, 12:03 AM with 50 comments

• by ericra on 2/1/24, 12:40 AM

  It's becoming so hard to constantly keep up the fight against a new bill like this year after year. I guess it is part of the point to try and wear people down over time until they eventually run out of the energy to care.

  I had not previously heard about this one, but they all sort of run together. Some vague stuff about protecting children which would undoubtedly result in 1) not doing much at all to protect children and 2) actively making the internet worse for everyone.

  The fact that this is a bipartisan-introduced bill is even worse news.

• by cowboyscott on 2/1/24, 12:38 AM

  Has anyone found a good explainer about the politics of (and money behind) this and similar legislation? This morning, my city's Axios newsletter contained Instagram sponsorship on the matter, which included this language:

  "More than 75% of parents agree: Teens under 16 shouldn’t be able to download apps from app stores without parental permission. Instagram wants to work with Congress to pass federal legislation that gets it done."

  Given who is paying for this, my assumption is that this is protectionism dressed up as child safety, though the language is so vague I have no idea what legislation is being referenced.

• by dontupvoteme on 2/1/24, 12:26 AM

  I suppose they'll be trying to tie in the whole taylor swift deepfake thing (as if it the whole concept hadn't been around for over two decades now).

  Regardless, If both the ACLU and EFF are against a bill, my immediate reaction is that it is probably a bad bill.

• by ryandrake on 2/1/24, 12:38 AM

  Unfortunately, in the long term, special interests are always going to win, because they can just try over and over until it passes. This is always what happens with these bills: Opponents have to fight it and win every time. Proponents only have to win once. So, chances are, the proponents are going to get their way eventually.

• by adellsworth on 2/1/24, 12:39 AM

  The bill in question: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/140...

• by pragmaticpro on 2/1/24, 12:42 AM

  These types of requirements would be make it damn near impossible for any start-up or non mega-co to abide by due to lack of capital/resources.

  I'm actually surprised more big tech firms aren't in favor of these types of bills. Sure, enforcement will cost a lot, but it would also stifle any chance at future competition from smaller orgs.

• by OkayPhysicist on 2/1/24, 1:51 AM

  The shameful thing about this act is that it has a few good ideas, they're just riding along with a bunch of truly abhorrent ones. If they just axed the entire censorship angle and age verification requirement, and kept the requirement of opt-in (via self-declaration of the user as a minor/guardian account pair) tools for parents and extended the tools available to minors to everybody, I wouldn't even be opposed to the bill.

  Summary:

  - Establishes a duty of care for covered platforms (basically any internet connected platform (social media, videogames, etc) that isn't a common carrier, an email service, a private messaging service disconnected from any broader platform, VOIP service, VPN, or education related.

  - Covered platforms must take reasonable measures to mitigate harms to minors, with a list of specific harms being things like mental illness, addiction, physical violence, bullying, narcotics, and predatory or deceptive marketing tactics. Platforms do not need to hide such content if the minor is specifically searching for/requesting such content, or if the content is providing resources for the prevention of said harms.

  -Covered platforms must provide certain safeguards to minors on their platform, to be used at the minor's (or guardian's) discretion. These include blocking, basic privacy settings, opting out of personalized recommendation systems, while still allowing the display of content based on a chronological format or limit types or categories of recommendations from such systems, hiding geolocation, and deleting the account and all associated data.

  -The default settings for minors must be the most protective.

  -Covered Platforms need to provide parental tools, including the ability to change privacy settings, restrict purchases, view metrics of usage, and restrict the amount of time the minor uses on the platform.

  -Covered platforms need a system to receive reports about minor harming on their platform, and must "substantively respond" to such reports withing either 10 or 21 days depending on whether the service has more or less than 10,000,000 monthly active users

  -Covered platforms are liable for advertising illegal stuff to minors (including stuff that's only illegal for minors to purchase, like alcohol and tobacco).

• by damiante on 2/1/24, 12:42 AM

  It seems that the US Government introduces a new bill of this form every few years; SOPA & PIPA, COPPA, CISPA, etc. Will governments (particularly the US government) simply keep attempting this until they get one through?

• by jjackson5324 on 2/1/24, 12:21 AM

  At this point, if there's any bill around children's online safety I'm immediately against it lol.

  I don't even have to read it to know it'll contain some insane laws around encryption/privacy.

• by teeray on 2/1/24, 12:31 AM

  Entire generations have grown up with the unfiltered internet at this point. What good can possibly come from introducing them now?

• by jimbob45 on 2/1/24, 12:34 AM

  Pretty silly to do this during an election year. It’s super easy to track who votes for this and put them on my Do-not-vote document I’ve got running. I might have forgotten if they’d done it in an off-year.

• by rysertio on 2/1/24, 1:12 AM

  Remember that this bill will block anything that goes against the government by labelling them harmful to children.

• by quickthrower2 on 2/1/24, 12:34 AM

  China for minors.

• by mathgradthrow on 2/1/24, 1:48 AM

  The correct way to protect children is to protect everyone. The correct way to protect everyone is to make advertising illegal, with penalties significant enough that it isn't profitable anymore.

  If we, as a society, were to accept the reality that paying people for their endorsement is only ever used to achieve the effect of fraud without committing it, we could just eliminate paid endorsement.

  Extraordinary technological progress has been made in laundering fraud and disinformation, but that technology costs money and therefore requires customers to operate. Eliminate the customers and the sickness they create will go away.

• by phmqk76 on 2/1/24, 1:00 AM

  Here’s an unpopular opinion among the typical Hacker News crowd: Section 230 (inadvertently?) artificially created a market wherein a platform provider has the exclusive right to earn revenue on the content you post, and yet has zero culpability over that content. This allowed companies like Facebook to pop up and literally print billions and billions of dollars, scaling exponentially, with nearly zero overhead, wreaking havoc on society. Legal culpability for what you host is a very potent way of preventing enormous scale, as content moderation is costly to scale, and provided direct incentive to maintain clean platforms. Section 230 created a system in which Facebook et al. get all the upside, including the privilege of building a platform without having to charge their users, with zero downside.

  Maybe this isn’t the internet we deserve?

• by cyc115 on 2/1/24, 12:24 AM

  So man strawman attacks, jumping to conclusions and divisive terms it's hard to take anything on that website serious.

  > It’s no surprise that anti-rights zealots are excited about KOSA: it would let them shut down websites that cover topics like race, gender, and sexuality.

  > Second, KOSA would ramp up the online surveillance of all internet users by expanding the use of age verification and parental monitoring tools. Not only are these tools needlessly invasive, they’re a massive safety risk for young people who could be trying to escape domestic violence and abuse.

• by throwA29B on 2/1/24, 12:32 AM

  Judging by the quality of the content of the page, this KOSA bill is at least not a bad thing.