Speaking as a Trust and Safety and Security person, I find KOSA (and the Online Safety Act in the UK) to be terrifying instruments: adults (including those whom our children will grow to become) lose privacy, anonymity and agency over their digital footprints, in the name of protecting children – when children can also be protected in other ways, many of which are already in use… like: involved parenting, for starters.
But the KOSA supporters have appealed to PolitiFact to debunk the ostensible claim that:
“Hey (by the way) everyone should be panicking about this,” read a Feb. 16 X post with 1.8 million views as of Feb. 23. “This bill would require everyone to upload your government ID in order to use most sites on the internet. You can forget about your silly lil stan/fandom accounts if this passes.”
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/feb/23/tweets/proposed-online-safety-act-does-not-require-websit/
…which at best is a strawman / caricature of the bigger issues; it’s amusing that they have chosen to debunk some high-impression-count tweets from random twitter users with low follower counts, but the source material which one of those tweets cites is from senator Richard Blumenthal – a KOSA sponsor – and the note for that tweet says:
“This “Kids Online Safety Act” is effectively a Trojan horse for internet censorship.”
https://twitter.com/SenBlumenthal/status/1758139987864793223 (notes)
…with a variety of explanatory links, including one to EFF.
PolitiFact buffer their factcheck by repeatedly noting that:
If the bill becomes law, though, some experts said companies could possibly use age verification methods, which could include government-issued identification.
…which is the whole damned point, but they choose to stick to the more easily nitpicked turf of “yes but there are other forms of age-verification available” — thereby avoiding the complex, technical, subjective-but-correct opinions like “…other forms of age-verification suck, are error-prone, and the default will be Government ID and/or some service which brokers ‘real’ identities which are essentially backed by Government ID or Financial Services KYC, thereby delivering the end of internet anonymity”
PolitiFact overtly note that:
The [KOSA] bill “does not impose age verification requirements or require platforms to collect more data about users (government IDs or otherwise). In fact, the bill states explicitly that it does not require age gating, age verification, or the collection of additional data from users,” according to both Blumenthal’s and Blackburn’s sites.
…and then PolitiFact punts the question of “how are platforms going in practice to deliver upon the obligations which KOSA proposes for them?” by noting (again) merely that:
Experts don’t rule out age verification if left to the companies
…WHICH IS ONE HELL OF A PROVISO; they continue:
[John Perrino] said that if companies must determine who is under a certain age, it raises “legitimate privacy concerns,” but added that platforms can use other methods that do not include verifying government IDs to determine users’ ages. Those include self-reporting and face scanning tools, some of which are already in use.
…completely ignoring that NCMEC and other activists have already declared that (extant) self-declaration is not adequate from their perspectives to protect children on social media:
Where a [PERSON] has submitted a date of birth that indicates they are above the minimum age, their provided age is checked again later in the process, such as when they next log in (“Can you remind us of your date of birth?”). Children who gave a false date of birth on registration may not remember the date of birth they gave when asked at a later stage or on a different day. Any discrepancy can be escalated to a moderator, who may ask for further proof of age.
https://5rightsfoundation.com/uploads/But_How_Do_They_Know_It_is_a_Child.pdf; note that the original begins with “Where a child…” however the proposed subsequent process impacts ALL people, thus it needs correction to highlight the impact to ALL people
The summary is the most tragic part: (my emphasis)
Our ruling
An X user says the Kids Online Safety Act “would require everyone to upload” government identification “in order to use most sites on the internet.”
The Senate bill does not include that requirement or say social media platforms, applications or websites must collect more user information than they already do.
Experts did not rule out that companies could turn to methods such as requiring government identification because of the law, but that is speculation.
We rate this claim False.
All the nuance and the big issues of anonymity, privacy, and liberty, being reduced to one stupendously oversimplified yes-or-no question which they answer truthfully but with so much proviso and bad context that they are fundamentally deceptive.
What a tragedy for fact checking.
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