It’s scary on the internet right now. All the censorship bills that congress and other countries are trying to/have passed. But I have an idea to combat them.
Minors Against Online “Safety”. I feel like messages against censorship “for the children” will be more effective coming from the children it’s claiming to protect.
Here’s the plan: Find your state’s senators and house representatives. Call them, email them, tell them every little way these bills are detrimental, to BOTH children and adults. Most importantly, do it CONSTANTLY. At least once every few days, IF NOT MORE. AND, tell your friends and classmates to do it too. Regardless of political orientation, I can’t imagine any teen taking kindly to the idea of their internet access being limited or completely revoked.
The bills we’re targeting are: KOSA (requires age verification to access many websites), KOSMA (bans people under 13 from using social media) , the SCREEN act (blocks content seen as harmful to minors for ALL audiences), Block BEARD (supposedly protects against foreign piracy), and the Take It Down act(blocks content seen as sexually obscene to ALL audiences), which has already passed but is ridiculously unconstitutional, so maybe we can get the Supreme Court on that.
Some good points that you may want to bring up (if you can think of any others, put them in comments, please!)
- The SCREEN act could limit a teen’s access to Sex Ed, especially for the lgbtq+ community, who don’t always get taught how to stay safe in schools.
- While this might cut down on kids access to negative content, it could also very easily cut down on access to positive content as well. (e.g. , a child becomes suicidal. While they might no longer have access to material encouraging them to commit, they will likely also lose access to material discouraging them as well)
- A lot of the big companies that would have to enforce these policies are subject to data breaches. What would happen if a predator got access to a list of users containing their ages?
- Block BEARD could lead to many non-profit sites being banned in the U.S. (such as AO3, a fanfiction website that has content tagging and filtering systems put in place, that would likely make it difficult for a child to encounter obscene content, if supervised properly by their guardians.)
- The president has specifically stated that he intends to to use the Take It Down Act to censor those who disagree with him. Not only is this a pretty direct violation of the First Amendment, the government has also put policies like this in place before, to undesirable effects (Alien and Sedition Act).
- Neurodivergent kids. Socializing in person can be quite hard for many ND children, but sites like Discord can be an outlet to help them find connection. KOSMA will ban kids under 13 from social media, which is not only somewhat useless in itself, seeing that most big social media sites either require this already or are specifically for children, but also doesn’t account for the possibility of a child using their parent’s account.
- China. China is infamous in the western world for the unbelievable amount of censorship it puts on its citizens online activity, but not even China requires this kind of age verification.
- A child’s parents should be the one in charge of what they deem too inappropriate for their child, not the government. What if abrahamic religion was considered obscene? How would Christian and Jewish and Muslim parents educate their children on their beliefs?
The most important part of making this effective is to NEVER LET UP. Harass your representatives constantly if you have to. Do it until not only do they vote against these bills, but they become vocal opponents of them, and tell everyone you know to do the same. Share this on every social media you have. Do the same with YouTube’s age verification, or Visa and Mastercard’s sudden control over game stores. And if you live in Canada or Australia or the UK? Do the same. We can stop this kind of oppression, but only if we fight tooth and nail against it. Please reblog to signal boost.
