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EFF Call to Action: Tell Congress to Stop 'Kids Online Safety Act'
- n_ary 3y agoOff-topic thought: It feels a bit bizarre to call for a stop to “Kids Online Safety Act”, almost like we don’t care about kid’s safety. Whoever is designing the names for these acts is either very clever or it is an excellent coincidence.
- fwungy 3y ago"For the children..." is a huge red flag.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y agoIt’s a naturally built-in motte and bailey defense.
- genocidicbunny 3y agoIt makes perfect sense to me. The point is to lessen pushback against it. Opponents of the act can be labeled as being against kids' safety. It's entirely purposeful and wholly in line with how many bills have been named in American politics over the last several decades. Controversial bills tend to be labeled as 'protecting the children' or 'counter-terrorism' or 'patriotic' when they are usually the complete opposite.
- faeriechangling 3y agoI mean it’s brilliant in one sense, but when you’re too on-the-nose about it people are likely to see your scheme for what it is. Invoking children, money launderers, terrorists, or drug dealers is a red flag. I feel the Bush era made people cynical and suspicious of such bills in particular. What with the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act. Also the “Coalition of the willing” and “You Are Either With Us, Or With the Terrorists”. After seeing such sophistry result in over a million people dying, I am fairly hostile towards politicians that engage in such demagoguery. But hey, I guess it does work, especially as people forget the last demagogue.
- Obscurity4340 3y agoThey seriously went to all that trouble to turn that phrase into an "intelligent" abbreviation that actually works?
- whynotmaybe 3y agoIt's quite nice to spend 30 minutes of stupid fun to come up with something "useful" and new to represent a concept. Source : I worked on our Standard Hybrid Relationship Engagement frameworK.
- Obscurity4340 3y agoNice. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the intellect and time it takes to adequately capture a concept or whatever it wants to communicate, but there's like a supervillainy aspect to the Bush legislation. It feels weirdly manipulative and autocratic, like they put a gun to the words/lettets' "heads" and demanded they assemble themselves correctly and extra-judicially ;) and then waterboarded them once they were in place as an extra... yeah
- hellojesus 3y agoIt's not just the Bush admin. It's all of them. For example, the Biden admin passed the Inflation Act a year or so ago, which was made to sound helpful in the fight against inflation, but in reality it exasperates the inflation problem.
- Obscurity4340 3y agoI hate the double-speaky ones like those especially. At the end of the day, wolves are going to create the "Love Sheep Act". Sure, they LOVE the sheep. Just not in any way that bodes well for the sheep. "What do you want? You had a problem with inflation, so we created the Inflation Act because it worked so well, WE wanted more of it, despite the unfortunate collateral damage of YOU. We gotta look at the bigger picture/upper classes". Between the Bigger Picture^TM and the Overton Window^TM, there's just never any space for the regular and affected Edit: btw, nice on the S.H.R.E.-K, don't think I didn't see that aha ;) As always, I'm eventually get around to it aha
- dragonwriter 3y ago> It feels a bit bizarre to call for a stop to “Kids Online Safety Act”, almost like we don’t care about kid’s safety That's the point of the name. I do like, though, that the repressive morality policing bill was also named in a way that it shares the acronym used for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, known for its repressive morality police, but I think that, unlike the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act, the acronym was unplanned.
- Obscurity4340 3y agoGood eye re:Saudi Arabia lol
- LispSporks22 3y agoI am sure it’s deliberate. Think for example, the classic Patriot Act.
- rlpb 3y agoPeople always have the option of calling things other than how their proponents want them known. This has been used to great effect by the media in the UK (eg. "bedroom tax"). Perhaps there's space for an organisation that "renames" these accurately, maintains a mapping, and then opponents should just start using the "corrected" names instead?
- AniseAbyss 3y ago[dead]
- PM_me_your_math 3y ago[dead]
- networkchad 3y agoIt is exactly titled like that for the reason you are feeling. Look at the “PATRIOT ACT”. You want to be against the PATRIOT ACT? Well, you must be a terrorist!
- bananabiscuit 3y agoThis bill is very specifically targeting an age range. I think in this case it would be dishonest to omit that from the title.
- soulofmischief 3y agoOr they just read 1984 and thought it was a good manual. Doublespeak is an age-old tradition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublespeak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublespeak
- zlg_codes 3y agoIt's typical for US politicians to be slimy cowards unable to defend the value of their bills, so they instead tie it to evocative topics to try and turn bills into social levers to get results. These lawmakers don't actually care about children. One look at family law will tell you that.
- andrei_says_ 3y agoGeorge Lakoff has done extensive research on metaphors and framing. Basically whoever first frames the issue, wins. U.S. politicians are masterful at that. The bill which installed domestic surveillance and paved the road to a (more) police state wasn't called "The Police State Act". It was called "The Patriot" act. Who'd vote against "Patriot"ism? The Bush bill which cut taxes for the richest people in the country at the expense of everybody else wasn't called "The Billionaire Enrichment Act". It was called "The Tax Relief" bill. Who'd vote against "relief"? It is incredibly important to refuse to repeat malicious framing without at least reframing. Noone would want to be remembered voting against "Kids safety". This is a very powerful frame and repeating it activates the brain in powerful ways. A better way to refer to the bill would be "The Spying on Young People Act maliciously named as Kids online safety act" As George Lakoff says, never use their title, because it embeds the frame in the readers' brains and that's the battle lost right there. Always reframe.
- Two4 3y agoThe Kiddy-Peeper Act
- Nasrudith 3y agoProbably unpopular opinion: "Online Safety" has long been a pernicious euphemism to justify censorship.
- pyuser583 3y agoThe amount of crap kids are exposed to is insane. I doubt this bill will fix it, and will probably make things worse. But serious thought and political will needs to be given to how to protect kids. The best way to do that is empower, parents, not government. But nobody really wants to do that. Look at how crappy parental controls are. I’ve personally battled with my kids over online content. It’s absolutely nuts how difficult moderating your child’s content is. It’s like we are stuck in the 80s where parents are expected to just “watch tv with their kids and talk about it.” Tech could solve this problem, but there simply isn’t money in it. Politically, there’s no will to help parents either. So when you’re writing your Senators about this bill, make it clear they should be deferring to parents on this matter.
- Larrikin 3y agoEmpower parents to do what exactly? Routers have the ability to pinpoint and target devices, shut them off at certain times, and have global filters. AdGuard gives even more fine grained website specific features, letting you shut off YouTube for all devices. Specific devices like the Switch and MacOS also let you setup times, block apps, block websites, and allow apps to only work for a certain time. Kids will try and get around the blocks to keep playing games, but punishing them for getting around the blocks and talking to them about it instead of trying to automate everything still works
- rlpb 3y agoI'd like parental controls at sub-app granularity. For example, to monitor a child's chats, with full knowledge of the child. To see all social media activity and add to the blocklist remotely. That kind of thing.
- Larrikin 3y agoIf you want to read your child's private messages then you need to demand access to their passwords. I expect that to go over just as well as it would with adults
- blzaugg 3y ago
- snowpid 3y agoLaws like this show that the idea of US is not good. We should disamble the US to avoid these laws in general.
- kuchenbecker 3y agoThat's a very radical statement; there have been far worse laws passed.
- irq-1 3y agoI think a white listing system could work. Let each country have it's own set of tags (us-7, us-13, ca-violence) which websites can include in headers or meta-tags. Then browsers and (mitm-)proxies could be configured with an accepted list. It would work well for schools, kiosks, kids devices that the parents control, and home routers. Websites would have clear guidelines per country and incentives to comply and include the tags. Encryption and privacy would ensure that the rest of the web operates as it does today; current software wouldn't need to change.
- zamadatix 3y agoSay your website is hosted in Madeupland, which hasn't implemented such a system in a legal fashion, and falsely advertises us-7 tag compliance. What happens?
- gjsman-1000 3y agoWell, for better or worse, you get your tags with a digital certificate from a third party (kind of like the ESRB rating) verifying compliance. But you get a public key to prove it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- devwastaken 3y agoThe U.S. refuses to regulate Amazon for knowingly going along with the world's largest fraud market. They make bills like this to detract from the much larger and insidious evil of mega tech corps. After all, they pay for the bills.
- k310 3y agoMany sites still list Diane Feinstein as senator from California. Contact pages for our two senators are: Alex Padilla: https://www.padilla.senate.gov/contact/contact-form/ https://www.padilla.senate.gov/contact/contact-form/ Laphonza Butler: https://www.butler.senate.gov/share-your-opinion/ https://www.butler.senate.gov/share-your-opinion/ Any site other than https://www.senate.gov/states/CA/intro.htm https://www.senate.gov/states/CA/intro.htm is likely to have old information.