KOSA Won’t Just Silence LGBTQ Voices; It Will Also Be Used To Hide Abortion Info From The Internet

Free Speech

from the pay-attention dept

We’ve highlighted in great detail how KOSA (the Kids Online Safety Act), sponsored by Senators Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn, which currently has an astounding 46 cosponsors, will be used to stifle LGBTQ voices. We know this because Republicans keep telling us that’s exactly how they plan to use it.

But, that’s not the only things the bill will be used to censor. Susan Rinkunas, at Jezebel, has a great article about how it will also be used to suppress abortion info from the internet.

Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), said letting AGs be the arbiter of what’s considered harmful is dangerous given the right-wing views many of them have on abortion. For example, 19 of 27 Republican AGs said this summer they wanted police to be able to investigate people for abortions. “I can’t think of anything that was more likely to cause anxiety and depression than being forced to carry a fetus to term that you don’t want,” Galperin told Jezebel.

Erasing abortion from the internet is a Republican fever dream. State lawmakers in South Carolina and Texas have introduced bills to censor abortion information online, though they have yet to advance. The Texas proposal seeks to ban internet providers from hosting information about abortion, and the bill text specifically names abortion pill site Aid Access, Plan C, and telehealth sites that don’t serve Texas, as sites that should be censored. The South Carolina bill appeared to use The National Right to Life Committee’s model legislation on censoring abortion, which essentially wants to make it illegal for anyone to provide information on getting an abortion, whether “over the telephone, the internet, or any other medium of communication.”

KOSA could help states achieve all these goals—and with the gleam of Congressional bipartisanship. If it passed, people would try to impede it with lawsuits arguing a First Amendment violation, but platforms would likely still censor content either on their own or in response to threats from AGs, and lawsuits can take years.

Some people — including Democrats who support the law — keep insisting that the bill won’t actually be abused this way, but they’re wrong. You can read the bill and see the problems. It imposes a vague “duty of care” on websites to prevent “harmful” content in six designated areas from reaching minors. Democrats supporting KOSA will argue that LGBTQ content and abortion info do not fall neatly into those six categories, but they’re not the ones who get to decide.

State Attorneys General do. Because they get to enforce the law.

And that’s why Heritage and Blackburn are so willing to say it will target LGBTQ content. Because they know that they can make that work. While abortion info might be slightly further afield, the categories covered by the duty of care are still vague enough and open to interpretation enough, that red state AGs can have a field day. In particular, sites have a duty of care to magically “prevent and mitigate” any information that can lead to anxiety, depression or other mental health disorders. How long will it be until a red state AG produces a study claiming that abortion leads to anxiety and depression?

This is why activists are rightly concerned:

Just a threatening letter to websites or platforms could cause a chilling effect. To wit, a group of Republican AGs wrote to pharmacy chains in February warning them not to dispense the abortion drug, mifepristone, and Walgreens caved. Websites could also move to pre-emptively ban content they believe right-wing AGs would find objectionable because they don’t want to deal with the cost and hassle of lawsuits. Just look at what happened when states including Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana passed laws putting age restrictions on porn: Pornhub responded by blocking traffic coming from multiple states rather than paying the cost to verify users’ ages. Plus, content moderation is an “inexact science,” Venzke said, and platforms and sites will end up taking down posts that don’t actually violate the bill.

“I view [KOSA] as a blank check for Attorneys General to be able to intimidate in any way that they can,” Philips told Jezebel. “They wouldn’t even need to necessarily pass this [state] legislation if you give them this tool,” she said, referring to proposals in Texas and South Carolina.

Galperin agreed that sites are likely to over-censor or “comply in advance” in order to avoid lawsuits. “To people who say, ‘Oh, surely the platforms will not do this,’ I recommend taking a look at the way that platforms have responded to SESTA/FOSTA,” Galperin said. She’s referring to the 2018 bills Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) and Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), which were ostensibly meant to fight trafficking but resulted in the censorship of sex workers.

Philips also made the comparison to SESTA/FOSTA: “Sex workers in this case are calling attention to KOSA for the same reasons—they’re saying that this is going to be a tool for censorship and I believe them. We should believe them. They are proof and have been on the ground trying to call attention to how bipartisan efforts to censor the internet have affected the most marginalized people on the internet.”

KOSA “in some ways is more of a threat,” said Venzke. “Whereas SESTA/FOSTA tied much of its liability to federal criminal law, there is nothing in KOSA that so limits the legislation’s scope.” KOSA is about mitigating harms from anxiety and depression, which is extremely broad and subjective: “The portions of the duty of care are untethered to any particular legal definitions.”

And, again, we’re left wondering why so many Democrats, who claim that protecting abortion (not to mention LGBTQ rights) is important, are still co-sponsoring KOSA?

Filed Under: abortion info, duty of care, kosa, speech, state attorneys general