Could these new child safety laws actually make the internet more dangerous?
Issue #76
If you’ve been paying attention to President Biden’s State of the Union addresses, you might have noticed one topic that came up a couple times: children’s safety online. He’s gone out of his way to put this issue in the spotlight, which isn’t really surprising. Not only is it a very real problem for parents everywhere, it’s also an easy cause to get behind. Who doesn’t want to make the internet safer for kids? It’s a classic case of low-hanging fruit, and increasingly, lawmakers from both sides of the aisles are grabbing onto it. Case-in-point: Congress is coming close to passing two bills aimed at kid-proofing the internet. These bills even have bipartisan support.
They’re known as the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and COPPA 2.0, and they’ve already been approved by the Senate. One of the big motivations behind them is to address the growing mental health crisis among youth, which many experts tie to young people’s embrace of social media platforms.
All this sounds pretty good on the surface. Of course, more needs to be done to protect children online. I’m a parent with a pulse, so I already know that the digital world is full of hazards for children. This is why I started Kinzoo in the first place.
There are measures in the bills that sound pretty good, like increasing the minimum age for some platforms from 13 to 16. And KOSA is meant to give the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general more power to reprimand companies that fail to prevent harmful content from reaching children. (Think: content that glamorizes eating disorders, suicidal thoughts, substance abuse and gambling.) And, it would ban kids 13 and under from using social media and make companies get parental consent for children under 17.
All this might feel like a warm, fuzzy win, but here’s the rub: these bills will force platforms to collect even more sensitive, personally identifiable information from users. And, it could make it harder for LGBTQ+ youth to find the resources they need. And, the language in the bills is quite vague, leading some experts to argue that the legislation will be difficult or impossible to enforce.
I do believe that social media platforms can negatively impact kids’ wellbeing. We might not have that “definitive proof,” but where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And kids often see harmful content online, but as First Amendment lawyer Ari Cohn points out, what’s harmful for one kid might not be harmful to another. These bills paint with a very wide brush, and in so doing, they fail to address the root causes of the issue. (Hint: it’s not the content.)
For one, the FTC doesn’t seem to have the ability to enforce the laws we already have on the books (a.k.a. COPPA 1.0). They’re handing out more fines lately, but these fines are so small as to be meaningless. They can’t be a deterrent if fines are less than a rounding error on the company spreadsheet.
I also worry that bills like these will inspire Big Tech companies to develop retrofitted versions of their apps for younger users. Remember Instagram for Kids? Still a terrible idea, but in the face of this legislations, it starts to look like an appealing solution to a company when there are lots of children on their adult platforms already.
In order for us to see meaningful change, I think we need to see a lot of momentum not just from lawmakers, but from parents. We need to help empower families to understand the risks and make informed decisions around tech. We need to make digital parenting easier, and I don’t know if these bills are it.
At Kinzoo, we’re working hard to be the kind of resource parents need. We’re keeping our eye on the landscape and trying to help people make sense of it. We’re building a community where parents can find level-headed advice and non-judgemental support. And we’re building apps from the ground up for kids and their families.
We ultimately need to see more companies that put children first. We need governments to be more severe in their punishments when companies behave badly. And we need parents to understand the nature of the digital landscape. All that might be beyond the scope of these bills, even if they do look good on the surface.
A deeper dive
Here are a few helpful resources in case you want to really dig into today's topic:
According to Aliya Bhatia, a policy analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology, these bills are “essentially meaningless if the very nature of the bill requires online services to treat minors differently from adult users. Doing so would require online services to know the ages of their users, adults and children alike.” That’s exactly the kind of thing that has privacy experts worried, because it opens a big can of worms.
More than 100 human rights and digital privacy advocates penned an open letter stating their concerns about the bill, saying that they don’t believe it could be enforced without requiring everyone on the internet to verify their age using things like government-issued documents. Another chief concern is that the bill could impact queer kids’ access to affirming online resources.
TL;DR
Too long; didn't read. It shouldn't be a full-time job to keep up on industry news, so here is a mercifully quick summary of some other notable developments:
Propaganda is nothing new, but the Russian government appears to be branching out into novel channels. The latest arena? Games like Minecraft and Roblox. According to the New York Times, “These games and adjacent discussion sites like Discord and Steam are becoming online platforms for Russian agitprop, circulating to new, mostly younger audiences a torrent of propaganda that the Kremlin has used to try to justify the war in Ukraine.”
UNESCO is the UN’s education, science and culture agency, and they’re advocating for a full-on ban of smartphones in the classroom. The ban, they said, sent “a clear message that digital technology as a whole, including artificial intelligence, should always be subservient to a “human-centered vision” of education, and never supplant face-to-face interaction with teachers.” While I sympathize with educators who battle distraction in the classroom, I think this argument is totally shortsighted. If anything, we should be teaching our kids all about digital technology, how it works—and how to build a healthy relationship with it.
And lastly
Here are a few more pieces of original writing from me and my team—just in case you're keen for more:
Lots of families have loved ones spaced far and wide, and it’s often difficult to keep everyone in touch. While WhatsApp might seem like a good solution, there are a few reasons you might want to consider a more kid-friendly alternative. Check out this piece from my team to learn more.
We’ve been suspicious of Instagram for Kids since it was first announced. If you’re interested in learning more, here’s a piece we wrote when the plans were initially rolled out. Check it out for more on our perspective.