‘Kids Online Safety Act’ will deliberately target trans content, senator admits.::undefined

  • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    This is actually a fantastic example of typical politics, but not in the way you’re imagining. It’s a classic poison pill. Write a bill with something good (protecting children’s privacy online, which I think we’d all agree is good) and then put something unpalatable into it (transphobia and homophobia).

    Someone votes for it, “Why do you hate LGBT people?” Someone votes against it, “Why don’t you want children to have stronger privacy laws on the Internet?”

    It’s exhausting and a lose-lose. That said, I prefer if they don’t vote for it and take heat for “being anti privacy”. You don’t negotiate with people’s rights.

    • hglman@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Is it protecting children? Claims need evidence and rules need tests. Until we do that its fear-based, exploitable control for the sake of control.

      • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yeah that’s the problem with legislation like this. You’ll have proponents claim it protects children without actually explaining how.

      • fosforus@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        No, sometimes we actually need to act before knowing everything. What we know for a fact currently is that the number of children who think they are trans or non-binary is in a sharp rise in many countries in the west. Only in the west, somehow. If this is caused by something that is reversible, then it probably should be tried out.

    • rambaroo@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Please explain in detail how this bill does a single good thing for children.

      • primbin@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        Section 3a of the bill is the part that would be used to target LGBTQ content.

        Sections 4 talks about adding better parental controls which would give general statistics about what their kids are doing online, without parents being able to see/helicopter in on exaxrlt what their kids were looking at. It also would force sites to give children safe defaults when they create a profile, including the ability to disable personalized recommendations, placing limitations on dark patterns designed to manipulate children to stay on platforms for longer, making their information private by default, and limiting others’ ability to find and message them without the consent of children. Notably, these settings would all be optional, but enabled by default for children/users suspected to be children.

        I think the regulations described in section 4 would mostly be good things. They’re the types of settings that I’d prefer to use on my online accounts, at least. However, the bad outweighs the good here, and the content in section 3a is completely unacceptable.

        Funnily enough, I had to read through the bill twice, and only caught on to how bad section 3a was on my second time reading it.

        • elscallr@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I think the regulations described in section 4 would mostly be good things. They’re the types of settings that I’d prefer to use on my online accounts, at least.

          Then put them on your accounts. Any regulation in this area is unacceptable.

      • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I don’t know that it does. If bills and the discourse around them were actually about the stated topic, it would be revolutionary to politics.