from the democratic-support-censoring-lgbtq-speech dept
We’ve talked a lot about KOSA, the “Kids Online Safety Act” that has massive bipartisan support in Congress. The latest version was introduced with 26 Senators as sponsors or co-sponsors. We’ve explained over and over again how the bill is unconstitutional and will actually do a lot to harm kids.
Of course, like so many of these “bipartisan” anti-internet bills that have bipartisan support, the support on each side of the aisle is based on a very different view of how the bill will be used in practice. We went through this last year with the AICOA antitrust bill. Democrats supported it (falsely) believing that it would magically increase competition, while Republicans were gleefully talking about how they were going to use it to force websites to host their propaganda.
Now, with KOSA, again you have Democrats naively (and incorrectly) believing that because it’s called the “Kids Online Safety Bill” it will magically protect children, even though tons of experts have made it clear it will actually put them at greater risk.
Meanwhile, Republicans are now freely admitting that they’re going to use KOSA to force websites to censor LGBTQ content. They’re literally proud of it. The Heritage Foundation, which at least used to have some principled stances before being taken over by culture warriors without any principles, is bragging about how it will use KOSA in this manner:
In that tweet, Florence Ashley calls out an article on Heritage’s website laughably entitled “How Big Tech Turns Kids Trans” (which, um, is not how any of this works), and includes this paragraph:
Lawmakers can also help. 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.
Ashley, correctly calls out that they’re openly admitting how they’ll use KOSA to censor content. And Heritage replies in a quote tweet doubling down that this is exactly their plan:
Yes we do. Keeping trans content away from children is protecting kids. No child should be conditioned to think that permanently damaging their healthy bodies to try to become something they can never be is even remotely a good idea.
Leaving aside that this framing is utter nonsense, it’s also none of lawmakers’ business what individuals and their doctors decide is the healthiest way forward for anyone.
So, um, seeing as over a dozen Democratic Senators, including Richard Blumenthal, Ben Ray Lujan, Tammy Baldwin, Amy Klobuchar, Gary Peters, John Hickenlooper, Chris Murphy, Chris Coons, Brian Schatz, Mark Warner, Peter Welch, Maggie Hasan, Dick Durbin, Sheldon Whitehouse, and Bob Casey are supporting, can anyone ask them why they’re supporting a bill that Republicans are saying directly they will use to silence LGBTQ speech?
Again, the enforcement mechanism in the bill is that state Attorneys General get to bring lawsuits against websites for not removing such “harmful” content. And if you don’t believe that there are GOP state AGs itching to bring exactly these lawsuits, you haven’t been paying attention.
I get that Blumenthal and Klobuchar have both made it clear that they don’t care one bit about how Republicans will use their bills to take away rights of the public, but could someone ask the others on that list why they’re supporting such a bill?
Filed Under: 1st amendment, censorship, gop, kosa, lgbtq, state ags
Companies: heritage foundation