Don’t Be Fooled: Laws like KOSA Are Just Book Banning Democrats Can Get Behind

Free Speech

from the yes-it's-exactly-that dept

It is almost impossible to believe, as the nation stands on the precipice of one of the most important elections in our lifetime, if not the nation’s history, that Democrats would want to stick it to young people, whose enthusiasm and activism they desperately need to prevail in November. But in trying to ram through Congress the so-called “Kids Online Safety Act” (the title is a misnomer, especially given that the law would actually put vulnerable youth in jeopardy by cutting them off from resources and support) this sort of political foot-shooting would seem to be exactly what leading Senate Democrats were determined to make their fellow Democrats do, no matter how much this exhibition of self-defeating political ineptitude would make them all resented in November.

Fortunately, House Republicans inexplicably decided to help Democrats dodge their own bullet by scuttling the bill, at least for now. Hopefully that will afford a chance for clearer minds to prevail and recognize the political insanity of it should it come back to the floor, or any other similar bill percolating through legislatures around the country, many of which inexplicably have Democratic support. As courts are already starting to find, all of them stand to be a First Amendment disaster. But they also stand to be a political one too.

No matter how they are framed, just like book bans, each of these bills ultimately seeks to use government power to unduly infantilize young people, ignore their First Amendment rights, and remove their practical ability to become educated, informed, and socially connected citizens. While some of the worst of these bills may have been dulled a bit in the Senate’s version of KOSA, it still remained a blunt and potent weapon able to cause a lot of harm to young people’s ability to access information online.

Just as book bans are intended to do, laws like these are intentionally designed to cut young people off from a universe of ideas and information. Sure, maybe up until they turn 18 they could still passively watch TV (almost entirely corporately owned, by very few companies), or listen to the radio (do young people even still do that?), or read newspapers and magazines (but only the dead tree versions, if they still exist, because everything digital stands to fall under these laws’ age-restricting requirements, which means young people can forget about reading things like Teen Vogue, or plenty of other digital-only publications). But the richness of the Internet will largely be out of reach.

Furthermore, these bills manage to be even worse than book bans in how they are also inherently designed to harm young people’s ability to communicate online as well, cutting them off from a needed sense of community and opportunities for their own self-expression. None of these outcomes would arrive accidentally; they are indeed the very point of laws like these, to disconnect young people from others’ expression, and others from theirs.

Yet despite this deliberate deprivation somehow Democrats nevertheless seem to expect young people to emerge from the mandatory isolation these laws would impose on their youth as eager supporters of the very same politicians who had sought to keep them in the dark up to then. Such an expectation is beyond naïve. Like with the TikTok ban, laws like KOSA would represent yet another Democrat own-goal taking aim at the very means that political excitement is engendered, including that which has tended to benefit Democrats in particular.

Laws like KOSA seem to reflect the unreasonable belief that at the stroke of midnight on their 18th birthdays young people somehow magically suddenly become qualified to avail themselves of the medium. At least that’s the belief for now, because any law championed to unilaterally ignore First Amendment rights at one age it could similarly be championed to unilaterally ignore them at other ages too. So even if laws like KOSA only dismiss the rights of young people under 18, maybe the next bill proposed by its proponents will strike at the rights of young people up to the age of 21. Or 24. Or 30, etc. Or maybe the next bill after that will work the other way and take First Amendment rights away from people lawmakers now think are too old.

As they stand now laws like these already harm the First Amendment rights of everyone, including all adults, which is yet another reason that bills like KOSA are so toxic to Democrats’ political prospects. They explicitly teach everyone that Democrats don’t care any more about the Constitution than their opponents. For proponents of these bills the First Amendment is a mere triviality that can be ignored whenever politically expedient. Bills like these run roughshod over the First Amendment rights of so many, including everyone who runs a website, who will now be burdened with onerous if not impossible compliance obligations, which is why young people will end up getting cut off from nearly all digital information if they go into force. And also every adult Internet user as well, who would now have to divulge sensitive personal information to be allowed to read or say anything online, irrespective of how the First Amendment is supposed to protect their rights to read and speak anonymously.

And of course it offends the rights of young people themselves, just as they are when books get excised from curricula and removed from libraries, which is why the book bans being pushed by Republican officials are so odious: they are always about cutting people off from ideas and information, Constitution be damned. But there is no reason why it would be bad only when Republicans engage in such censorship and not when Democrats do it too (and with Republican help, of course, as KOSA was only get passed with bipartisan effort).

In fact, if anything laws like KOSA are even worse than book bans, because people are not just getting cut off from the ideas and information that certain government officials don’t like, but potentially ALL ideas and information, including plenty that young minds very much need to grow up into educated adults, well-equipped and ready to vote (including for Democrats!).

The problem, of course, as per usual, is that this rush to “think of the children!” is not thinking about how much what a law is trying to do will instead actually harm them, and what the results of that harm will inevitably be. If the alleged goal of a law like KOSA is to help ensure the minds of the next generation can develop into healthy adults it is indeed an odd policy to pursue, to purposefully starve those minds of informational resources, social connections, and their own expressive outlets. And politically obtuse to think that, once grown, these same young minds won’t remember who left them hungry.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, book burning, free speech, kosa