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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
The members of Congress who vote for this bill should remember—they do not, and will not, control who will be in charge of punishing bad internet speech. The Federal Trade Commission, majority-controlled by the President’s party, will be able to decide what kind of content “harms” minors, then investigate or file lawsuits against websites that host that content.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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={“search”%3A"kids+online+safety"}&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/
