 Well, I unfortunately have some alarming news. COSA, the Kids Online Safety Act, is bipartisan legislation sponsored by Republican Marsha Blackburn and Democrat Richard Blumenthal that now has 62 co-sponsors in the Senate. Yeah, now if you're unfamiliar with COSA, its goal is to minimize the negative effects of social media on minors after researchers found that platforms like TikTok and Instagram were purposefully promoting dangerous content to teens. For example, the Eating Disorders Coalition who endorsed COSA explained in a press release quote, social media companies knowingly promote harmful mental health content to youth in return for boosted engagement and profits. According to research platforms place extreme pro-eating disorder, suicide and depression content next to youth targeting advertising and serve this content to maximize engagement and spending. And they go on to explain the stunning number of pro-eating disorder and pro-self-harm content that is being served to minors on a daily basis, so it is a genuine problem. And regulating social media companies who publish this sort of content does sound worthwhile on paper but in practice the way that COSA is designed would end up hurting more young people in the end. As Fight for the Future and Internet rights group explains, COSA uses two methods to quote protect kids and both of them are awful. First, COSA would pressure platforms to install filters that would wipe the net of anything deemed inappropriate for minors. This equals instructing platforms to censor plain and simple. Places that already use content filters have restricted important information about suicide prevention and LGBTQ plus support groups and COSA would spread this kind of censorship to every corner of the internet. It's no surprise that anti-right zealots are excited about COSA. It would let them shut down websites that cover topics like race, gender and sexuality. Second, COSA would ramp up the online surveillance of all internet users by expanding the use of age verification and parental monitoring tools. Not only are these tools needlessly invasive, there are massive safety risks for young people who could be trying to escape domestic violence and abuse. Now the main question is who gets to decide what is and isn't appropriate for minors because that can vary depending on the person. Now as the New Republic explains, well the person who gets to decide is state attorneys general. They would be the arbiters of alleged failures to quote prevent and mitigate such harms with the power to impose penalties on platforms. Such actions could be initiated by the attorneys general themselves if they feel that any resident of their state is threatened or adversely affected by the engagement of any person in a practice that violates this act. So stop for a moment and try to think about the implications of this and how it could be used. A Republican attorney general like Ken Pax in Texas for example could deem any and all websites about teen pregnancy as inappropriate because they provide minors with information about contraception and abortion. Perhaps a suicide prevention website like the Trevor Project which specifically tries to stop queer youth from harming themselves could be inappropriate since it affirms the identities of young LGBTQ plus people and thus encourages homosexuality and grooms them or some bullshit that they might come up with. The possibilities here are endless and I'm not being overly cynical here with these examples because Marsha Blackburn one of the co-sponsors of COSA literally admitted that this law would be used to censor LGBTQ plus content. Protecting minor children from the transgender and this culture and that influence and I would add to that watching what's happening on social media and I've got the kids online safety act that I think we're going to end up getting through probably this summer. This would put a duty of care and responsibility on the social media platforms and this is where children are being indoctrinated. They're hearing things at school and then they're getting onto YouTube to watch a video and all of a sudden this comes to them and they're on Snapchat or they're on Instagram and they click on something and the next thing you know they're being inundated with it. Parents need to be watching this, teachers need to be watching and protecting our children and making certain that they are not exposed to things that they are emotionally not mature enough to handle. So I mean you heard it stray from the horse's mouth. She is explicitly promoting COSA as a weapon against LGBTQ plus indoctrination meaning that any content that affirms the identity of young LGBTQ plus people which is necessary for suicide prevention by the way could be censored because of her law. So if you're a younger queer person and you have no one in your real life to talk to sometimes finding an online community or a content creator that talks about your lived experience can be life-saving and taking that away from them in the name of safety is downright disgusting and Orwellian and dangerous. Now that's not to say that there aren't genuine concerns about social media because there are. I'm personally worried about the proliferation of misogynistic red pill content that teaches young men to resent women. I'm also really concerned about the rise in white nationalism online and people with large platforms promoting white identity politics and white supremacy and these social media companies really do have perverse incentives and as a society I do think that we need to find some way to deal with it. But this isn't it. This is not the way to deal with it. It's an attack on free speech that could ironically end up harming more kids in the long run than it's trying to help if you even want to assume that the architects of this bill want to help kids. I mean maybe but I don't know if their motivations are pure. I think that this is a power grab that they're going to use for really nefarious reasons. Now this is why so many civil rights organizations like the Human Rights Campaign and GLAAD came out against this initially because of all of the negative implications and because of who's promoting this. Now I say that they initially came out against it because they ultimately dropped their opposition to COSA after adjustments to what were made to specifically address the concerns of these types of civil rights groups that were against it. Now it was amended and these changes are the reason why this bill was able to attract so many new co-sponsors like Chuck Schumer and Chris Murphy. And to be clear the changes that they made to this legislation do make it better ostensibly but the existing problems are still there. So let me explain. The Electronic Frontier Foundation writes the latest version removes the authority of state attorneys general to sue or prosecute people for not complying with the duty of care but COSA still permits state officials to enforce other parts of the bill based on their political whims and we expect those officials to use this new law to the same sensorious ends as they would have of previous versions and the legal requirements of COSA are still only possible for sites to safely follow if they restrict access to content based on age effectively mandating age verification the updated duty of care says that a platform shall quote exercise reasonable care in creation and implementation of any design feature to prevent and mitigate those harms the difference is subtle and ultimately unimportant there is no case law defining what is quote reasonable care in this context this language still means increased liability merely for hosting and distributing otherwise legal content that the government in this case the FTC claims is harmful what COSA tries to do here then is to launder restrictions on content that lawmakers do not like through liability for supposedly harmful design features but the First Amendment still prohibits Congress from indirectly trying to censor lawful speech and disfavors allowing the government to ban content designs is a dangerous idea if the FTC decided that direct messages or encrypted messages were leading to harm for minors under this language they could bring in enforcement action against the platform that allowed users to send such messages now if this all sounds super complicated let me simplify it for you the updated version of COSA is fundamentally the same but it is semantically different and it does force attorneys general to go through extra steps and attack the same content they want to attack in a roundabout way but they still have the power to do that if this were to become a law if a Republican attorney general for example wants to ban abortion content well he can still do that under this new version but rather than saying that the content itself is inappropriate because he's personally anti-abortion he just have to challenge it on the basis of its design so you find a new way to challenge the content you already don't like so for example if the content that is talking about abortion and it's targeted towards minors asks for email for newsletters or it enables push notifications or links to an external source or encourages users to download an app those are all grounds that an attorney general can use to challenge the websites if you allow them to challenge a website on the basis of design they can find anything to nitpick and get the website taken down so I mean they could still use this to accomplish the same end and if you think that they wouldn't do that try to remember the way that Republicans in red states effectively regulated abortion clinics that have existence before Roe v. Wade was overturned I mean COSA gives them the power to do just that albeit digitally and they've already been chomping at the bit to do this because as the Washington Post reports state attorneys general meanwhile have launched a flurry of investigations into the ways social media platforms could be hurting kids by deploying addictive design features culminating in a barrage of lawsuits against Facebook and Instagram parent company meta in October so we're playing a dangerous game here and the bipartisan support that this legislation has is genuinely worrying its support is broad and it ranges from fascists like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley to center right senators like Joe Manchin to even center left senators like Elizabeth Warren and Sheldon Whitehouse and if it were to come up for a vote today it would easily pass the Senate and no it couldn't be filibustered because it has 62 co-sponsors meaning it has 62 presumed votes it would pass easily now that is concerning but the silver lining is that if this were to come up for a vote in the House it's hard to say if it would get that much support and they're unprepared to even pass it in the House because they haven't even introduced a companion piece to the Senate version which is good to hear so that means there's still time to stop COSA if we act now but that means you've got to call your senator and let him or her know that COSA is dangerous and censoring the internet is a violation of freedom of speech and you do not want them to support it in fact you demand that they don't support this be polite when you call but let them know that COSA is bad and you want them to vote against it