As Yet Another ‘Protect The Kids’ Bill Is Declared Unconstitutional, NY Moves Forward With Its Latest Attempt
It never ends. We just wrote about Ohio having its “parental consent/age verification” bill tossed out as unconstitutional, and pointed out that it is the latest in a long series of similar bills being declared unconstitutional. The internet/kid bills are a bipartisan mess, as legislatures dominated by both parties have passed similar bills, and all have been found to be unconstitutional when challenged.
All of that apparently won’t stop New York, where yet another one of these bills is apparently rapidly moving forward. A08148/S07694 — aka the SAFE for Kids Act (SAFE being: “Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation”) — is apparently likely to pass and get signed into law, despite numerous problems. We wrote about this bill when it was introduced last year and highlighted its myriad constitutional problems, but apparently that does not matter to sponsors Andrew Gounardes in the NY Senate and Nily Rozic in the Assembly.
But, because the bill is moving forward, let’s once again discuss its problems. The bill starts out with a falsehood: that algorithmic feeds are inherently bad. Unfortunately, there is no support for that conjecture, and it’s literal disinformation that Gounardes and Rozic are writing into law, while claiming they have to do so to stop the spread of disinformation. How embarrassing.
Last summary, a study at NYU showed that when you take away algorithmic feeds, it leads people to seeing more disinformation, because the companies can no longer use algorithms to get disinformation out of your feed. But apparently Counardes and Rozic are fine with kids seeing more disinformation.
The bill itself uses extremely laughable and biased language. For example:
“Addictive feed” shall mean a website, online service, online application, or mobile application, or portion thereof, in which multiple pieces of media generated or shared by users of a website, online service, online application, or mobile application, either concurrently or sequentially, are recommended, selected, or prioritized for display to a user based, in whole or in part, on information associated with the user or the user’s device.
That’s a lot of language to say “if a website shows you what you’ve indicated you want, it’s addictive.”
Similarly:
“Addictive social media platform” shall mean a website, online service, online application, or mobile application, that offers or provides users an addictive feed that is not incidental to the provision of such website, online service, online application, or mobile application.
So, a website that provides you information you’d likely want, instead of information you don’t, is deemed addictive.
This is so fucking stupid.
Anyway, once they deem any website that offers an algorithmic feed de facto “addictive” they require age verification and parental consent for all kids.
We’ve gone over this multiple times before (as have multiple courts — including the one in Ohio earlier this week), but requiring both age verification and parental consent violates the First Amendment in multiple ways, including violating the First Amendment rights of kids. The parental consent requirement also violates the kids’ rights, and makes a real mess of things for kids who, say, are LGBTQ and trying to access a community with information related to their own identity, when they have parents who are anti-LGBTQ.
Both Goundardes and Rozic are Democrats, which makes it that much more ridiculous that they’re pushing a bill that everyone knows will be used to harm LGBTQ children.
But, really, given how many courts in the last year have made it clear that bills of this nature violate the Constitution, it should be seen as legislative malpractice for them to continue pushing it.
Of course, that isn’t stopping politicians across the country from continuing to push these bills. They do not have the health and safety of kids in mind. They do not have the oath they swore to the Constitution in mind. They simply want headlines pretending that they’re “protecting the children” even as they know they’re passing unconstitutional garbage that will now waste taxpayer money to defend in court, only to lose easily before it ever goes into effect.