California appears to be waging war on internet freedom, writes Norman Lewis in Spiked, with two new laws that effectively treat all citizens like children by imposing severe censorship requirements to prevent “harm”.
Last week, California governor Gavin Newsom signed off a new social-media transparency law that poses a serious threat to free speech. Known as AB 587, the law will force social-media companies to disclose their content-moderation policies, and submit detailed descriptions of their efforts to police speech in certain categories, including hate speech, extremism and harassment. Failure to demonstrate that they are regulating, editing and no doubt censoring what appears on their platforms could land social media companies with big fines.
As noted by Eric Goldman, a Law Professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, the law will have draconian consequences. It effectively forces social media companies to please the regulatory authorities now empowered to watch over them.
But that was not the only attack on online freedom launched by California lawmakers last week. Newsom also signed the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act into law. This is arguably an even more troubling move than AB 587.
The Age-Appropriate Design Code Act aims to protect children from harmful online content, by insisting that children’s interests are prioritised when businesses are designing and developing their online services. This law effectively insists that all internet users should be treated like children.
After all, the law will apply to any business “likely to be accessed by a child”, or unable to establish the age of its consumers “with a reasonable level of certainty” – which goes for most businesses. Businesses will therefore have to assume that the child, defined by the act as any individual under 18, is the default user.
This does not just mean, for example, that an online business’s privacy settings must be set at the highest level. This act goes well beyond the scope of traditional data-protection laws. It also means that businesses must ensure that they are not exposing their users to content deemed harmful, because those users might be children. This will affect traditional media outlets just as much as social-media platforms. They will all have to design their offerings accordingly, filtering out news and content that might be deemed harmful to children.
Under this law, it is likely that age-verification for all users on almost all websites will become the norm.
What’s more, says Lewis, with California the home of Big Tech, “regulatory bodies in every capital around the world will no doubt be seeking to emulate the regulatory regime now being established in California”.
Worth reading in full.
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The way California is going it soon won’t have any electricity to power all the devices one needs to access the Internet anyway.
I think we can all agree that California’s new laws are not “designed to protect children”.
They’re designed to advance power of some over others.
They’re designed to keep the population under control.
They’re designed to stifle dissent.
They’re designed to advance a particular social and political agenda.
They look designed to accomplish a number of things. But protecting children, no.
I know that because the same people promoting these laws are the ones pushing explicit sex education on young children, encouraging gender dysphoria among adolescents, promoting racial stereotyping of white people from a young age.
It’s the same dangerous, revolting people.
This age appropriateness idea really needs to be extendened to all of reality: Every human interaction, every facility for anything constructed by man and all of nature must be designed such that unattended children of any age cannot possibly end up harming themselves by witnessing or accessing it. In other words, everything public authorities in California haven’t declared to be safe for unattended children of any age is henceforth strictly prohibited.
This cannot possibly conform with the US constitution and hence, very likely isn’t meant to.
“Online Harm”. Doesn’t that sound familiar? Nobody in the main media outlets in the UK is doing anything to stop this tyranny
As every decent budding dictatorship knows, one of the first building blocks is to always invoke the ‘safety of the children’. This ruse not only enables you to censor any criticism and dissent, but also to force through age verification by bank card, therefore identifying any opponents of the regime for flagging and more fun filled harassment.. Normally ending in gulags and incinerators.