American censorship bill, KOSA, might be in trouble due to inaccurate beliefs on what the bill actually does.
The American censorship bill known as the Kids Online Safety Act (or KOSA), could be in trouble because, oddly, of mistaken beliefs on what the legislation could do.
Last week, we noted that KOSA was seemingly resurrected from the grave after a version entered markup. Anti-speech lawmakers and free speech critics were excited by the development because they viewed the moment that KOSA might slip through before the next general election. This after it got shelved months earlier.
For clarity, KOSA would require web services to censor content that is deemed “harmful” to children. What that could be is anything, but for some far right people, it is little more than a tool to suppress LGBTQ+ content. Overall, it’s a really bad bill.
It is for that reason that it is kind of ironic that it’s actually right wingers that might sink the bill entirely. For them, it’s a bad bill for reasons that… aren’t even issues in the bill themselves. This was noted by TechDirt:
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise made it clear that House leadership has some problems with the bill, in an interview with the Washington Times:
Mr. Scalise said there would not be action on the legislation before the Nov. 5 election and declined to predict whether it could advance later this year before the current Congress ends. He said he’s provided feedback to Energy and Commerce members leading the bills, and “everybody’s going to keep working,” but the concerns raised by various ideological GOP caucuses are “important to note.”
Among the outstanding concerns is that the bills, particularly KOSA, give too much power to the executive branch to regulate online content.
“You want to protect kids, but you don’t want to give more ability to the Biden administration to censor conservatives. And unfortunately, they’ve abused these powers in the past,” Mr. Scalise said. “And so you got to narrow it. You got to focus it just on kids.”
This is somewhat hilarious and stupid. Yes, KOSA could be used for censorship, which is why we’ve spent years calling out its many flaws. But the claim that the “Biden administration” has “abused these powers in the past” to “censor conservatives” is a myth. It’s a myth made up by the MAGA world.
We’ve gone over this before. Multiple studies have found no evidence to support the claims that social media companies engaged in politically biased content removals. Indeed, many of the studies have found that sites actually adjusted the rules to give Trump supporters more leeway in breaking the rules to avoid even the false appearance of bias.
Then there are the false claims that the Biden administration, in particular, engaged in censorship of conservatives. But that’s made-up fantasyland nonsense based on a misunderstanding of reality. It is true that the administration requested that social media companies do a better job dealing with COVID and election misinformation. However, the companies basically all either pushed back on those requests or ignored them entirely.
Indeed, talk about a stopped clock being right twice a day. Through a number of levels of misinformation and disinformation, it seems that certain parts of the right wing will end up sinking their own internet censorship bill for nonsensical reasons. As a result, they ended up somehow ending up in a spot that could wind up benefiting the internet. OK, then. Um, you know, whatever works, I guess.
Indeed, it is true that the general consensus is that social media actually engages in pro-conservative bias where the platforms bend over backwards to not enforce the rules on right wingers otherwise breaking the rules. That was especially the case when convicted felon, Donald Trump, was spreading malicious lies about, well, pretty much everything on Twitter years ago and Twitter did everything humanly possible to avoid enforcing their own rules on the twice impeached former president. It wasn’t until he launched a terrorist attack on January 6th that Twitter finally took action – because straight up terrorism was apparently the final straw for the platform at the time. Despite that, far right wingers will continue to insist that social media is somehow out to get them and that they are having their voices oppressed because being delusional is a much more comfortable place for them.
So while the reasoning for right wingers to go against the bill is completely insane in some aspects, I can’t help but give a small amount of credit to them for one reason. When it comes to laws that grant sweeping new powers to the government, my own test for people is to imagine those new powers in the hands of a political party you absolutely don’t like. Are you happy with that party getting their hands on those new powers? Keep in mind, those powers and laws can be tweaked. If the answer is “no”, then it is clearly time to rethink those new laws. Even though they utilized misinformation, it appears some right wingers actually technically ran that test on themselves. In response, they freaked out at the possibilities and are now actively working on torpedoing KOSA.
It would have been nice to see KOSA go down in flames through actual logic, reason, and careful debate focused on facts. That doesn’t appear to really be happening. Still, it’s hard to complain about a potential win coming out of this. After all, a win is a win even if it is for really dumb reasons. So, if it nets a positive result, by all means, fly at it, I say.
