KOSA is dead! (US)
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/20332183
Fight for the Future writes:
"The controversial and unconstitutional Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) is officially dead in the House of Representatives. Reporting indicates that there was significant opposition to the bill within the Republican caucus, and it faced vocal opposition from prominent progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Rep Maxwell Frost (D-FL)."
Evan Greer:
"KOSA was a poorly written bill that would have made kids less safe. I am so proud of the LGBTQ youth and frontlines advocates who have led the opposition to this dangerous and misguided legislation. It’s good that this unconstitutional censorship bill is dead for now, but I am not breathing a sigh of relief. It’s infuriating that Congress wasted so much time and energy on a deeply flawed and controversial bill while failing to advance real measures to address the harms of Big Tech like privacy, antitrust and algorithmic justice legislation. "
Thanks to everybody who took action ove the last year to stop this bill!
https://www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2024-08-01-kosa-is-dead-now-its-time-to-unite-to-take-on-big-tech-for-real/Open linkView original on lemmy.sdf.org
57 replies
Article doesn't say why republicans opposed it, but I guess this is one of those "broken clock" moments where they were accidentally right but for the wrong reasons.
They probably opposed the idea of safe kids, given the rest of the platform. That, or there was lobbying money.
Considering the tech industry would need to use more money to enforce the law, it would be cheaper to just buy out politicians.
Their official line is based in fears of surveillance and government overreach. My state senator Mike Lee was one of them, must have been a cold day in Hell or something.
Please don’t perpetuate “think of the children” nonsense.
I’m not, it’s the name. The joke was that they saw the concept of safe kids in the Kids Online Safety Act and never read further.
And you making fun of that is just perpetuating the problem of bullshit law names like “protect the children” or “patriot act” or “freedom blah blah safety blah blah.”
I don’t think it does in this context. Not a single person reading this thinks that this was a good bill, whereas in a Facebook comment section, that might be different.
Do you know what kosa stands for?
I'm gonna go out on a limb and go with "Can't give Democrats anything that looks like a conservative win" for $500 Alex.
That and good old reactive contrarianism. Dems say yes, we say no.
Then why did they support it in the Senate?
Cause Senators are generally less reactionary than the house. They can usually afford to play a long game that House members can't.
Yeh tbh not sure why users here are opposed to KOSA.
The condensed version is that it creates a lot of avenues for a very loose definition of "keeping kids safe" that could easily include "information about dealing with bigoted family" being called "dangerous" at the discretion of an executive branch appointee who thinks that lgbtq identity is "unsafe".
It also provides more avenues for the government to remove otherwise legal speech from the Internet entirely on the grounds that they have asserted that it's "bad for children".
This is literally the long running joke about how you pass draconian laws, and would only be made more on the nose if it was "keeping patriotic kids online safe for the future tax cuts of American freedom"
In general, the government should not be able to silence speech that isn't immediately and unambiguously harmful.
It also is written vaguely enough to justify attempts to block VPN access and other forms of anonymous media consumption. Basically under the guise that an anonymous user -could- be a child, so they need to be deanonymized and tracked.
Well the text does very specifically state it would trigger investigation of things that have caused harm, but yeah it's not worth the risk if the FTC decides what harm is.
Ripe, ripe, RIPE for abuse.
Because I think the government should fundamentally not be in the business of telling us on the Internet what we can talk about, how we have to design our websites, etc etc.
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
Alright but if an entity, for example, teaches children about self harm for pleasure or gambling then that entity should be punishable, imo.
But another user makes a great argument that the FTC could decide anything they want is the definition of harm, which could include LGBT+ and therefor KOSA isn't worth the risks.
Read the article
You can't go looking for logic in hate
The reason is obvious, the Democrats wanted it to pass.
I mean, good, but how the hell did it get 90% of the senate?
Senators don't give a fuck about their constituents.
Maybe this is different in Rhode Island and Wyoming, but in Cali the Senators don't even have offices to take your calls if you're a pleb. It's like trying to get customer service from Google.
My US rep actually does constituent services and horror meets with non-rich constituents in person sometimes!
I can always find my senator pretty easily. I just fly to Cancun.
Only when the power is out.
Who the fuck wants to look at him in the light?
Our Alberta MLA, who was also the Minister of Transportation, would sit in his agricultural equipment dealership about 2 days a week and take meetings all day with anyone that wanted to come in and talk.
He fixed a lot of people's problems with a few phone calls from there.
I'm curious what riding you're in
That was Yellowhead back in the 90s. Old Pavin' Pete.
You want hard mode?
Try to get customer service from Steam, I'm almost convinced Valve doesn't actually have a head quarters and Gabe Newell might be an ancient secret government AI hiding on various reels of magnetic tape in some dank basement at Area 51 that not even the President is allowed to apply to be the janitor of.
SAVE THE CHILDREN!!!!
That's how.
Thank goodness the GOP in the house cares not about the children. They definitely voted against it based purely on the majority of Democrats that voted on favor.
Republicans will block anything that Democrats propose, purely out of spite.
Occasionally, when Democrats propose something awful, this actually works in the people's favor.
I'm seriously never surprised Obama never caught wise to this and started demanding they lower the minimum wage to 50 cents. Republicans would have raised it to 420.69 an hour in a bill that had the most racist fucking dog whistle you've ever seen as the name.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B46km4V0CMY&pp=ygUlS2V5IGFuZCBwZWVsZSBvYmFtYSBtZWV0cyByZXB1YmxpY2Fucw%3D%3D
I was hoping that's what this was. Hadn't even seen this one, but when I saw a YouTube link, my exact thoughts were "Please tell me it's a K&P sketch where what I suggested happens."
The Republicans definitely care about the children, but only in contexts that are deplorable and disgusting. Just ask Epstein's buddy Trump.
It's a weird day when I'm happy the Republicans teamed up with progressives to stopped a bipartisan bill.
I'm pretty irritated with Sherrod Brown on this one for voting for it in the senate.
This seems like misinformation... The House is in recess until September.
I'm having a hard time finding any other sources that it's dead in the house. And congress.gov is infuriatingly awful to navigate.
I want to know if my house rep voted for it.
This seems like the most relevant search result but the tracker implies it's passed the house? https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/2073?q=%7B%22search%22%3A%22kids+online+safety%22%7D&s=3&r=3
Edit: apparently it's this "amendment": https://www.congress.gov/amendment/118th-congress/senate-amendment/3021/actions?s=a&r=33 but still no house actions
Your house representative didn't vote for it, nor against it, because the decision was not to bring it up for a vote at all.
You can find sources for this if you search for the #kosa hashtag on Mastodon, e.g. https://www.techdirt.com/2024/08/01/ding-dong-kosas-dead-for-now/
Thank you!
Reminder to always keep up the fight. Even when things seem inevitable, fights can be won. That goes both ways: don't get complacent and don't get despaired
Get active, and get involved
Great news!
But honestly, when something is voted down, there should be a cooldown period, where you couldn't vote for it again.
It both stops these people making a new bill every year, and at the same time, actually have the people writing the bill doing a good job.
Kosa means scythe in Polish. What a name...
Wow. Now I know 1 polish word!
Really? I heard the exact opposite, that it passed the Senate and is expected to breeze through the house.
According to Techdirt , the version that passed the Senate cannot be brought up in it's current form by some of the House Republicans needed to pass it. So it's dead for now.
It does mean it'll have to go through both houses again, and yes, they'll try.
Thank God, ya know after SOPA was defeated I thought they'd never try to ban the internet again...
I was wrong
We thought SESTA was dead, and then they ambushed us with FOSTA, the Senate version which has fucked the internet ever since for sex workers, LGBT+ folk and people who like porn. So I expect they're going to pull the same kind of thing, distracting opposition groups while passing it in secret.
Ultimately, both parties want to kill the internet, or turn it into Cable TV, because the public dialoging in forums is dangerous to the ownership class.
Normally one would expect stupid bills to pass the House, but fail in the Senate.
Has this happened before that it was the other way round?
Good job, everyone!
Boy, this didn't age well, given the KIDS Act passed the House and it'll probably pass the Senate, and then it's over for online freedom in the US.
Yeah I should have said "for now" -- we knew at the time it would come back. My bad.
The House and Senate are pretty far apart so if we can mobilize again we've got a good chance to stop KOSA again this year. https://thenexusofprivacy.net/kosa-kids-act-june-update/ is my post from late June.