KOSA, one of many “protect the children” bills floating around, turns out to be less about protecting kids after all.
One of the things I’ve long warned about is the fact that these so-called “protect the kids” bills floating around has little to do with actually protecting children and more to do with imposing so-called “morality” on the general population. I’ve long classified these bills as censorship not just because they meet the technical definition of government censorship, but because it can very easily be used as a thin wedge to make mass government censorship seem like an acceptable thing before they start targeting other kinds of content. As the saying I often use goes, once you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Indeed, one of the tests I have for certain bills is simply ask, “would you be comfortable with a government you happen to not like at all having that kind of power over you?” More often then not, the answer ends up being “no”, but sometimes, the answer I receive is, hilariously, “well, that’s not the point of the legislation and the government would never abuse such a law for anything bad.” It’s quite comical, really. Give the government an inch on cracking down on civil rights and they’ll take a mile.
While supporters of these “protect the children” bills have long insisted that the focus is narrowly tailored to seemingly noble causes, such as preventing the distribution of CSAM material, terrorism, or any other example of the worst possible material on the internet, that narrow purpose seems to have a habit of gradually expanding into whatever other pet project misinformed politicians think they can adjust the laws to crack down on.
For instance, Australian lawmakers were actively looking in to expanding age verification laws to include video games. The Irish Health minister, for his part, pushed to crack down on not only social media, but also Roblox for reasons that probably only makes sense to him. What’s more, supporters of age verification laws have admitted that such laws are little more than a stepping stone for a full porn ban. This especially after Project 2025 called for the arrest and jailing of anyone who produces such material, whether protected by free speech rights or not.
For such a narrow focus that such bills allegedly have, politicians sure seem to be in the habit of expanding these things into other areas. Funny how that works. Although, to their credit, they did a fantastic job in the early parts of the debate of hiding their true intentions. Still, as they say, the truth does come out sooner or later. Thankfully, the truth ultimately did come out.
Speaking of truth coming out, though, apparently, supporters of KOSA are making similar admissions. In the US, the Heritage Foundation has admitted that one of these “protect the children”, AKA KOSA, is part of a much broader plan to crack down on protected speech. Specifically, they see it as a way of cracking down on not just LGBTQ+ content, but also information surrounding the rapidly diminishing reproductive rights as well. From TechDirt:
It’s no secret that Trump-administration-in-waiting at the Heritage Foundation supports KOSA because it thinks it will be useful in achieving some of the most extreme goals of Project 2025, a project Heritage created. Last year they came out and said that they supported KOSA because “keeping trans content away from children is protecting kids.”
Last year we wrote about the potential for KOSA to be used to suppress abortion info, and received some angry emails from Democrats who insisted that the bill was carefully written to avoid that. Heritage, though, makes it clear in this document that they fully expect if President Trump wins, that they can twist KOSA to silence pro-abortion content.
In a section pushing back on a claim that Democrats could use the “Kids Online Safety Council” created in the bill to push for pro-choice messaging, they say that this is “the status quo,” but as long as Trump wins, they’ll get to use this same mechanism to get anti-abortion people to control the council:
A Republican administration could fill the council with representatives who share pro-life values.
In other words, they know that whichever party is in the White House gets to control the council that will determine what content is considered safe for kids and which is not. That should automatically raise concerns for everyone, as it means whichever party they dislike, if in power, will have tremendous sway over what content will be allowed online.
In the end, Heritage here is trying to walk a very fine line. They’re trying to signal to the GOP that this bill is still useful for the kinds of culture war nonsense they want to propagate, silencing LGBTQ+ and pro-abortion content. But they can’t say that part out loud. So instead this document makes it clear that “wink-wink, nudge-nudge, if Trump wins, we get our people in their to define this stuff.”
All this document really shows is why no Democrat should ever be seen to support KOSA. And, any Republican who can read between the lines should see why they should be equally worried about this bill in the hands of a Democratic administration.
No matter who is in power, KOSA is a dangerous, likely unconstitutional attack on free expression.
This is something I keep seeing over and over again. I had long suspected that there were ulterior motives behind things like online harms bills, age verification laws, and other similar “protect the children” laws. As time goes on, I’m continually being proven right on those suspicions. Any time you start talking about suppressing certain kinds of content, it opens up a Pandora’s box of all sorts of nasty things. We’ve now repeatedly seen that those with their own personal sense of morality proclaim that their sense of morality is the “correct” morality. From there, it is up to the rest of society to abide by that set of “morals”. If that person doesn’t like a certain kind of content, protected speech or not, they feel they have the right to suppress that content for everyone else in society.
That is why such bills should be rejected. It ushers in an unprecedented (in modern history) amount of mass government censorship that only risks expanding. Laws can be amended. Definitions can change. With a stroke of a pen, society can very easily lose their protected rights. As a result, you won’t have much of a free society afterwards.
