Thread by @AriCohn

1/ As Congress wraps, members are trying to ram through their terrible tech bills, consequences be damned—including the Kids Online Safety Act

Today. @TechFreedom & scholars warned Congressional leaders that #KOSA will *harm* kids—and the First Amendment
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2/ To hear @SenBlumenthal tell it, you'd think the bill has been through a gauntlet of hearings & experts.

But in truth the actual text of #KOSA has been discussed for less than 20 minutes in committee meetings (mostly non-substantively), all at the July 27 markup.

3/ In fact, the text sent to the floor after amendment hasn't even been made publicly available! We had to piece it together ourselves. We've uploaded it for you here: techfreedom.org/wp-content/upl…

#KOSA belongs nowhere near a floor vote, let alone an omnibus package.

4/ Let's start with who, exactly, KOSA applies to: pretty much every online service. Effectively, if it allows you to communicate or share content, it's bound by KOSA. That has enormous consequences for the Internet.

How, you ask?

5/ KOSA feigns simplicity: its primary provisions just require platforms to act "in the best interests of minors" and provide minors certain safeguards. Doesn't *sound* so bad, right?

Reality is not so simple. There are (at least) three giant problems here.

6/ First, KOSA effectively requires platforms to age-verify their users. How are you supposed to provide minors with a tool that allows them to stop adults from contacting them, or act in the best interest of minors, if you don't know which users are minors, and which are adults?

7/ Congress has been down this road before. In the Communications Decency Act and the Child Online Protection Act, it tried to impose age-verification on the Internet. Courts held both unconstitutional.

8/ In doing so, they noted that requiring age verification chilled protected speech because it would discourage people from accessing lawful content, including government-disfavored content, if they could not do so anonymously.

9/ KOSA is even worse than those previous attempts to impose age verification. COPA excluded forums for user-generated content; KOSA purposefully *includes* them, and imposes an age-verification barrier not just for accessing content, but also for *communicating*

10/ KOSA also runs face-first into another reason courts took issue with age verification under the CDA/COPA: the burden on *websites'* First Amendment rights. Remember how KOSA applies to services and websites alike, regardless of size?

11/ What do you think that means for small forums run by hobbyists/volunteers/etc? They don't have huge budgets, and can't afford EITHER the cost of age-verifying users or the crushing liability of a single enforcement action. They'll just have to shut up, I guess.

12/ It's tempting think senators didn't understand they were doing this. But @SenBlumenthal has been on the age-verification warpath for decades: middletownpress.com/news/article/B…

The Ranking Karen knew exactly what he was doing here. He simply doesn't care about the First Amendment.

13/ At least the drafters of COPA acknowledged the First Amendment's existence, and tried (but failed) to limit the law to unprotected speech. #KOSA invents a new duty to protect people from harms caused by *protected* speech. That's a First Amendment problem too.

14/ More fundamentally, absolutely nobody knows what compliance with this "duty of care" looks like. What is the best interest of a minor? Is it each minor? All minors as a group? There are problems either way. I can't believe I need to say it, but kids are not interchangeable.

15/ So what might platforms do to take "reasonable measures" to "prevent and mitigate" these exceptionally broad categories of harm? Well, they could just boot all minors off the platform altogether, but that would be extremely bad for obvious reasons.

16/ Platforms might also try to broadly block minors from accessing any content that conceivably relates to those categories of harm. That's not going to work on a few levels.

First, it certainly won't work on a technical level, but what more *could* they do, really?

17/ It's also just not what we should *want* them to do. Again, kids aren't interchangeable; they have different reasons for seeking out content, and differing reactions.

Sometimes they are looking for *help*. #KOSA would cut them off from it. So much for "think of the kids"

18/ What about "promotion of narcotic drugs?" Should platforms be cutting kids off from political discussion of drug reform? From music that talks about substance use? From *harm reduction* efforts?

This makes NO sense.

19/ The problem with KOSA's scope comes into stark relief here: you know what website primarily provides a forum for sharing user-generated content?

Wikipedia.

KOSA could force an online encyclopedia to age-gate purely informational content.

Madness, I tell you.

20/ It's not even clear that KOSA requires that harm result *from* a minor's use. It seems enough that a harmed minor is a platform user, if the harm is somehow related to *anyone's* use of the platform. Platforms may also have to censor content between adults to avoid liability.

21/ And so we reach the final, and perhaps most unbelievably obvious issue with #KOSA: it allows state AGs to bring enforcement actions under KOSA.

Need we really explain the obvious ways state AGs will try to purge the Internet of speech they don't like to "protect" kids?

22/ @evan_greer has a good piece in VICE today on just this issue: vice.com/en/article/g5v…

23/ #KOSA is a bad, dangerous bill. @SenBlumenthal & @MarshaBlackburn are willing to shamefully throw kids & the First Amendment under the bus to get a "win" against "Big Tech"

@SenSchumer @SpeakerPelosi @LeaderMcConnell, & @GOPLeader shouldn't let them.

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