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Posted on 06/30/2026 10:24:32 AM PDT by lonewacko_dot_com
This week, the House of Representatives is considering a bill to radically expand the government’s power to regulate online speech platforms. Framed as a child safety measure, the KIDS Act imposes a litany of restrictions on social media apps and other platforms...
The KIDS Act would fundamentally overturn this status quo by allowing the government to decide how platforms can be built and imposing restrictions that will censor the speech of adults and minors alike...
(Excerpt) Read more at fire.org ...
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Click here: to donate by Credit Card Or here: to donate by PayPal Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794 Thank you very much and God bless you. |
Not to worry. A global authority will soon be in place to protect all of us from mal-information.
ANY bill that has large rat support should be vetoed. Same with any nominee.
The KIDS Act Pressures Platforms to Check Everyone’s Age
Supporters of KOSA have said the bill doesn’t require age verification. And technically, the KOSA section of the bill does say that KOSA shouldn’t be read to require age verification.
But if you read the rest of the bill, that disclaimer starts to look hollow.
Throughout the KOSA section of the legislation, special protections, controls, messaging settings, and parental tools are required whenever a website or app “knows or should have known” a user is a child (defined in the bill as anyone under 13) or a teen (defined as anyone between 13 and 16 years old).
The problem is a website operator doesn’t need actual knowledge that a user is a minor to get in legal trouble. It applies when a platform “knows or should have known” a user’s age—a low, negligence-style standard of knowledge. If an online service gets it wrong, it’s going to be up to courts and regulators to decide, after the fact, if an online service “should” have known a user was 16.
To try to avoid liability, services will have to determine which users are teenagers and which are not. Most won’t be able to simply trust their users. They’ll have to collect more information about age, before any lawsuit or government action arises. Some companies may respond by requesting driver’s licenses or passports. Others will rely on age-estimation systems that attempt to guess users’ ages by looking at existing activity or doing facial scans. Existing estimation systems make mistakes when estimating children’s ages correctly, which is a big problem when that is the population KOSA is trying to protect. And the systems fail more frequently for people of color, people with disabilities, and trans and nonbinary people.
The bill’s authors seem to know this is a problem. On the one hand, the new KOSA section says age verification is not required. On the other, it repeatedly imposes obligations that depend on knowing whether a user is under 17. But a disclaimer doesn’t magically eliminate legal risk, especially for smaller services and startups that can’t afford to defend lawsuits or fight regulators.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/kids-act-would-require-age-checks-get-online
They should at least wait until they can see if the various state and foreign laws are effective. Australia has only had its law working for a few months.
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Thanks for that link. I follow them on FB.
Any legislation with a cute acronym is evil.
That’s what the data centers are for.
The constitution makes it very clear that “Congress shall pass no law restricting free speech ….”
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