Tell your Representative: Protect free speech online—Stop KOSA
This is the updated version of our script from last year. On Tuesday, July 30, 2024, KOSA passed the Senate. Its next stop will be the House. After the House comes back from recess, it may take up KOSA for final passage. We need to stop it before then.
Update, August 1: House Republican leadership have announced they’re not taking up the bill in its current form. While we should remain vigilant, we won. KOSA is dead—for now.
Call ONE of the Representatives. Note: only one of these Congressmembers represents you. Find out which one here.
Hate the phone? Resistbot is your friend. Resisbot now allows you to send text directly to the White House the same as with Members of Congress. If you use Resistbot or write an email to your elected officials, make sure to use your own words. Copy-pasted emails are discounted by Congressional staff. In-depth, personal stories are most effective.
Call Script
My name is __________. I am a constituent, and my zip code is _______. I am a member of Indivisible SF.
To your Representative:
I’m asking you to please vote no on Senate Bill 1409, the so-called “Kids Online Safety Act.” This bill is censorship and surveillance that would harm children and teenagers under the pretense of saving them. I’m asking you not to fall for this lie. Thank you.
Background
We all benefit when we can all access the public square and speak our minds freely, even—maybe especially—about sensitive topics and traumatic experiences. We need to be able to discuss these things, not just as cold abstractions but as personal experiences, to do the work of reducing the amount of harm in the world.
From time to time, lawmakers—well-intentioned or otherwise—try to take away our access to the public square, our right to speak freely in it, or both, often in the name of “protecting our children” from some of those harms. But we cannot repair or prevent those harms if we cannot discuss them.
The latest attempt is S.1409, deceptively named the “Kids Online Safety Act”. This one leverages anger at Big Tech over social media moderation decisions as an excuse to force harmful blanket policies on all Americans.
KOSA is one of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s “Bad Internet Bills” for two main reasons:
KOSA would require you to show papers to use the internet
KOSA would require messaging services (think iMessage, Signal, or WhatsApp) and social media websites to try to shield the eyes of minors against certain topics. It’s likely that these services would comply with these requirements by forcing users to provide proof of age.
Realistically, this means forcing people to prove their identity to every service they sign up for.
The age requirements affect everyone. If this bill passes, you will have to submit to some sort of identity verification to prove your identity and thus your age every time you sign up on a new service. You will always have to do this, over and over again, for the rest of your life.
How that verification works is not specified. It might be one of the sketchy automatic-verification services like the one the IRS almost used, or they might simply ask you to upload some form of identity documentation. Tough luck if you’re undocumented, a victim of identity theft, transgender, or actually underage. Even if you’re none of those things, you will still have lost your anonymity—your identity is only one successful subpoena or data breach away from being in the wrong hands.
There are very real hazards that come from pairing identity verification with private or anonymous communications. At a time when healthcare decisions like abortion or gender-affirming care are being criminalized in some states, and workers are forming unions and facing unfair labor practices, and activists like us are holding government accountable, we must recognize the importance of protecting the right to speak privately or anonymously whenever we want or need to.
You have the right to speak anonymously, and the right to choose what you disclose and what you keep private. We must protect these rights.
KOSA would require messaging services and social media companies to censor you
Currently, you are legally responsible for what you say online—not the companies who own the services you say it on.
This is thanks to a law from the 1990s known as “Section 230” (specifically, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996). Law professor and author Jeff Kosseff called Section 230 “The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet” in his book by that title, recounting the history of conflicts between the First Amendment (and its broad protections of speech) and the harms that can be done with speech, and the development of the Act in that context. Kosseff argues that the internet as we know it today, as a public square where anyone can participate, was created because Section 230’s protections enabled freedom to flourish.
KOSA threatens to undermine those protections by obligating companies to intervene when people talk about certain topics on their platforms. This would create, in effect, a censorship regime—if you’ve ever seen the lengths TikTok users go to in order to try to exercise their free-speech rights without saying things that will get them suspended, you’ve seen what this looks like in action. KOSA would make it legally mandatory on all messaging services and all social media.
No good would come out of forcing these companies to insert themselves into our conversations.
The minute a system exists that tries to decide what people can and can’t say—on the internet or otherwise—that system begins chilling speech. If this bill passes, you will have to think about what you are and are not willing to discuss with others, even in private via instant-messengers, much less in the public square via social media.
You will choose to refrain from talking about some things—your speech will have been chilled. When you do choose to talk about some things, you will have to contort your speech to evade censorship.
And there will always be false positives and false negatives. People who didn’t fall afoul of the law will get censored anyway because the system made a mistake. People who did say something on the proscribed list may get lucky—until they don’t.
This affects all communications, public and private
It’s bad enough to censor people’s public discussions on social media and limit who can contribute to such discussions. It’s even worse to censor people’s private communications via iMessage, WhatsApp, and other messaging services.
You have the right to have private conversations without anybody sticking their nose in, no matter who you are or what you’re talking about.
Beware of simple “solutions”
People are complicated and that makes the rights and responsibilities of speech complicated. There are no simple answers.
Speech can cause harm. The classical example of speech not protected by the First Amendment is shouting “fire!” in a crowded theater—that is, causing a panic, a stampede, injuries, possibly deaths. The fact that the cause of the panic was an act of speech does not shield the speaker from responsibility for the harms that act caused. For a more recent example, consider Trump’s lies about the 2020 election before, during, and after it, by which he fomented an insurrection on January 6, 2021, for which he has been criminally indicted. The First Amendment protects his right to lie, but does not give him a right to start an insurrection.
Speech can also do great good. People have the right to cry out for help, or to speak about injustice. We can work together to solve problems—if we can talk about those problems in the first place.
KOSA is promoted as a simple solution to complex harms. As such, we can recognize that it is a false solution that would do more harm than good. We must protect our right to participate fully and frankly, in both public discourse and private conversation, against this sort of attack.
The EFF is right: This is a bad internet bill
This bill would, in effect, force instant-messaging services and social-media services to begin dossiers on their users and impose a censorship regime. This will not solve any problems; it will only take away our right to use the internet to speak freely.
In spite of these dangers, the bill has the bipartisan support of 43 senators. It wouldn’t take many more for it to have a real chance at passing the Senate. The time to stop it is now.
References
“The Kids Online Safety Act is Still A Huge Danger to Our Rights Online”, Electronic Frontier Foundation, 5/2/2023
“How the Kids Online Safety Act Was Dragged Into a Political War”, The New York Times, 7/30/2024