California Goes After Social Networking [Code Blue on the Net]

Digital Liberty ^ | 2011-06-01 | [Staff]

[92nina]

Last week, the California Senate voted down a measure (SB 242) that would dramatically regulate social networking sites and – moreover – the First Amendment rights of their users. But the bill’s sponsor, Senate Majority Leader Ellen Corbett, is making a last ditch effort to push it through before the legislature’s Friday deadline.

Sen. Corbett’s bill would forbid Californians from joining social networks until accepting or altering strict default privacy settings that display only a user’s name and city. It would also require the sites to pull any information about a user at their request, or at the request of a parent if the netizen is under the age of 18.

For years, public policy sought to enshrine First Amendment principles online and shied away from regulating the Net. Yet, Senate Bill 242 runs afoul of the Internet’s free speech tenets. For one thing, it infringes upon even the limited First Amendment rights of California teenagers, whose parents could delete their account lest the social network pay a $10,000 fine for noncompliance. Enforcing the bill would also require online age verification that is not yet effective and easy for minors to subvert, something courts noted while striking down the federal Child Online Protection Act. In order to separate minors from adults, the law would effectively require adults to verify their age, which is also considered a violation of free speech rights...

[92nina]

The state of California claims to know better than you, and wants to know your every action.

Take this article and others I found to the fight to the Libs on their own turf; put the Left on the defensive at at Digg and in Delicious and Stumbleupon

[ComputerGuy]

Those people aren’t messing around, folks. They spend 110% of their time thinking of control, control, control...

[bvw]

It would also require the sites to pull any information about a user at their request, or at the request of a parent if the netizen is under the age of 18.

That's a good thing.

[DesertRhino]

Where does this representative stand on requiring ID to vote? She seems to think it should be required for you to have a facebook account.

[Pecos]

So, if I write something demonstrably true about someone's child, but which the parent does not want the world to know about (maybe the fact that he kills kittens every afternoon), the parent would have the right to make me pull it?

[bvw]

I understood this to mean that if I post post something about myself, I can later demand that it be pulled. Or if my child had posted something about themselves, or a photo, I could ask to have it pulled.

[Pecos]

The details of the wording are always important.

[bvw]

That’s true. But without common sense and adult moral sanity words mean nothing.