Kids Online Safety Act a Trojan Horse for Online Censorship

So, a little secret about politics is that we sometimes gasp like to use manipulative language to try to win.

To the North, it was the Civil War, whereas in the South it was the War of Northern Aggression. President George W. Bush's War on Terror gave his military efforts a sense of urgency and crusader's zeal. But President Barack Obama renamed it Overseas Contingency Operations so that we'd stop paying attention.

We say defending women's sports and safe spaces, they say transgender rights.

We use the term illegal immigrants, Democrats say undocumented — though they certainly didn't use to!

Another clear example of this is the Kids Online Safety Act, (S. 1748) sponsored by Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., according to its own description, the KOSA requires covered online platforms — social media, video games, messaging apps, and so on — to implement tools and safeguards to protect users and visitors under the age of 17. The goal is to mitigate online harm to minors, like bullying, eating disorders, self-harm, suicide, and so on.

The bill’s strongly worded name must be working, because it has 40 cosponsors of both parties. And if we’re trying to protect kids' safety online, how could anyone be opposed?

We learned that last year when a similar bill sailed through the Senate, with only three members voting against it: Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky., Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Ron Wyden, D-Ore.

All three said they voted against it because it opened a back door to government censorship. Wyden said KOSA could be used to sue services that offer privacy-enhancing technologies like encryption or anonymity features — features that protect kids from predators.

Sen. Paul said it would stifle both free speech and future technological advancement.

Sen. Lee said the bill did nothing to protect kids from online pornographers, while empowering the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to censor any content it deems “harmful.” The FTC determining what must be censored in the interests of "protecting" kids and what is okay may seem fine to Republicans now that President Trump is in charge.

But . . . what about when a socially liberal Democrat wins the White House?

That provision could get a lot more problematic, fast.

Critics of the bill say that it’s similar to the UK's Online Safety Act, which was rammed through Parliament under the flag of "Won't Somebody Please Think of the Children?!" but has been used as part of the UK's war on free speech.

In a horrifying act of hypocrisy, the act that was ostensibly passed to protect children is currently being used to crush online discussion of the Muslim rape gangs that have been terrorizing girls in Britain for decades now.

This is a hot topic across the pond, and mixed in with salacious details are indicators that today's girls might use to better safeguard themselves against being groomed — if only today's girls could see the information in question.

Pretending you care about girls getting eating disorders is sickening if you're enabling their sexual abuse.

If you hand the government the tools of censorship, it will censor. Oh — and by the way — the UK edition has also taken Spotify offline, threatened easy access to Wikipedia, and resulted in Members of Parliaments’ own tweets not even showing up online.

Members of Congress may tell themselves that the same kind of horrifying censorship we see in the UK could never happen here. One certainly hopes that's true.

But the easiest way to make sure it never does is if we sink the KOSA.

This isn't to say that all bills that propose to govern Big Tech are bad.

In terms of snaring and addicting young customers, Big Tech is more pernicious than Big Tobacco back in its heyday.

And given how the average 14-year-old doubtless understands how to use their phone better than their mom does, parents need all the help they can get.

ChatGPT is still telling suicidal people to kill themselves!

But while the last 20 years of technological advancement have been the digital equivalent of Ian Malcolm's, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should," the KOSA (and its UK edition) are that on steroids— only with "government bureaucrats" and "politicians" substituted in for "scientists."

At the end of the day, Jurassic Park is fiction whereas online censorship is happening right here, in the real world. And it could be coming to American shores very quickly if a kibosh isn't put on the KOSA sooner rather than later.

Jared Whitley is a longtime politico who has worked in the U.S. Senate, White House, and defense industry. He has an MBA from Hult business school in Dubai. In 2024 he won the Top of the Rockies Best Columnist award. Read Jared Whitley's Reports — More Here.