ID age-gating bills and AI age estimation are especially harmful to autistic people.
For those unaware, Congress is trying to push 18 "kids online safety" bills and also trying to repeal Section 230. If they pass these bills and repeal Section 230, the internet will be massively censored, ID age-gated, and ultimately destroyed.
I want to go into detail how this will affect autistic people in particular, coming from an autistic person myself.
You may already be familiar with Youtube's AI-based age estimation, which more often than not, falsely flags adults who have more "childish" interests. It's not a surprise when autistic adults using Youtube are often getting flagged by these systems in place, which may or may not be a coincidence... FFTF has made a report by various users about this before.
Similarly, back when Roblox rolled out the Age Verification Update, many adult players were being falsely flagged as under 18. This is especially harmful for autistic people who also happen to be "baby faced".
As we can tell, even through AI face scanning or age estimation, that AI almost always seems to falsely flag autistic adults as under 18, and the only way to properly verify their age is to provide sensitive information like a credit card or ID, which mind you, not all autistic adults have.
It feels like it's not a coincidence that this could be used as a way to discriminate autistic people from having access to the open internet by locking them out through age gates. Not to mention that even if they do verify themselves, it puts themselves AND their data at risk, like with mass surveillance and data breaches.
If you are an autistic person reading this, I know this seems really scary, and this scares me too, but we CAN fight back against these bills if we ALL work together.
Autistic or not, EVERYONE needs to sign petitions and CALL THEIR REPS!!!
All of the bad internet bills. One website.
Text SIGN PPBSXB to 50409 to send this to your officials.
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