6 ms·

Appeals court finds California’s “Age Appropriate Design Code” unconstitutional

139 points by hn_acker 2y ago

InMice 2y ago
Looking at techdirt's website feels so refreshing. It looks like it uses Slash CMS even still?
- mrinfinitiesx 2y ago
  Wordpress, but still. Holy god, no 350,000 modals in my face, 300 inline boxes / weird grids, a decent podcast, all the content I would need / want to see in viewport and .. just there? good stuff. a working rss feed that gives me what I want? nice. ~> rsstail -u https://www.techdirt.com/feed/ https://www.techdirt.com/feed/
  - InMice 2y ago
    agree. and yes a quick look at source shows wp slugs. i guess it originally used slash and must've really stuck to the style. the look feels very 2000s, i love it.
hn_acker 2y ago
The original title was: > Court Sees Through California’s ‘Protect The Children’ Ruse, Strikes Down Kids Code AADC stands for Age Appropriate Design Code.
Alupis 2y ago
FTA: > California Governor Gavin Newsom eagerly signed the bill into law, wanting to get some headlines about how he was “protecting the children.” When NetChoice challenged the law, Newsom sent them a very threatening letter, demanding they drop the lawsuit. Thankfully, they did not, and the court saw through the ruse and found the entire bill unconstitutional for the exact reasons we had warned the California government about. > Specifically, they call out the DPIA requirement. This is a major portion of the law, which requires certain online businesses to create and file a “Data Protection Impact Assessment” with the California Attorney General. Part of that DPIA is that you have to explain how you plan to “mitigate the risk” that “potentially harmful content” will reach children (defined as anyone from age 0 to 18). > And we’d have to do that for every “feature” on the website. Do I think that a high school student might read Techdirt’s comments and come across something the AG finds harmful? I need to first explain our plans to “mitigate” that risk. That sure sounds like a push for censorship. It's some biased reporting here to be sure - but it's amazing how something like this gets so far as to actually be signed into law. It has significant and obvious flaws, the least of which are the constitutionality. How have we gotten to a place where our elected officials - sworn to uphold the constitution - willingly and knowingly pass unconstitutional laws just to see how long they can get away with it?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- georgeburdell 2y ago
  It does seem like a loophole that blatantly unconstitutional laws can be passed, enforced, and judged, until a court strikes it down. Who makes the accused whole? This is the legislative version of “move fast and break things”
  - semiquaver 2y ago
    Some countries use the opposite scheme, where a constitutional court needs to approve laws before they can go into effect. As you can imagine, that approach has a strongly centralizing effect and would not work well in a federal system like the US’.
- jauntywundrkind 2y ago
  Mike Masnick has a well known bias, and generally I think it fairly well matches a true & consistent view. If nothing else it's a view that few of those he has opposed over the decades have elaborated clearly or consistently; that consistency is both impressive, & the lack of consistency from those who would curb speech is a colossal disrecommendation. Certainly officials bare a huge part of the blame for these ongoing travesties against speech & connectivity. But there is a very angry negative current in the world today, a disaffection with technology as a whole, that grows and grows. These rules, alas, reflect the simple public's simple rage, to some degree, I fear.
  - Nasrudith 2y ago
    To be frank, the public rage to me still seems very engineered by a dying media old guard who cannot admit to any of their faults and blames the newcomers for everything especially the consequences of their very own actions. People as a whole seem stupid, specifically in that they are more easily influenced than ChatGPT. Enough that when told "be angry about X" repeatedly they get angry instead of getting annoyed or angry at constant transparent attempts at emotional manipulation.
gweinberg 2y ago
[flagged]
- ballballball 2y ago
  Huh?
gotoeleven 2y ago
>>>"The law was drafted in part by a British Baroness and Hollywood movie director who fell deep for the moral panic that the internet and mobile phones are obviously evil for kids." While I agree the law should be stricken on first amendment grounds, this sentence, inasmuch as it implies anything factual about social media, is false and dumb. The evidence that social media is bad for kids especially girls is overwhelming. https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/jonathan-haidt-on-how-to-solve-the-teen-mental-health-crisis https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/jonathan-haidt-on-how-to-...
- nl 2y ago
  > The evidence that social media is bad for kids especially girls is overwhelming. Not so! It's bad for some kids but incredibly positive for others. > The ability to form and maintain friendships online and develop social connections are among the positive effects of social media use for youth... Seven out of ten adolescent girls of color report encountering positive or identity-affirming content related to race across social media platforms... A majority of adolescents report that social media helps them feel more accepted (58%), like they have people who can support them through tough times (67%), like they have a place to show their creative side (71%), and more connected to what’s going on in their friends’ lives (80%). "Social Media Has Both Positive and Negative Impacts on Children and Adolescents" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK594763/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK594763/ > When asked about the overall impact of social media on them personally, more teens say its effect has been mostly positive (32%) than say it has been mostly negative (9%). The largest share describes its impact in neutral terms: 59% believe social media has had neither a positive nor a negative effect on them. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/11/16/connection-creativity-and-drama-teen-life-on-social-media-in-2022/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/11/16/connection-c...
  - Cupertino95014 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - nl 2y ago
schoen 2y ago
I'm glad this legislation was struck down, but I don't understand "ruse" here. Protecting children wasn't a serious motivation of many people who supported it? Like, consider a prior case of California legislation that was struck down https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Entertainment_Merchants_Association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Entertainment_Merchan... I think Mike Masnick and I both think it was good that that law was struck down, too. But do we think people who promoted it were insincere about believing it was harmful or undesirable for children to see violent depictions?
- hn_acker 2y ago
  > I don't understand "ruse" here. Protecting children wasn't a serious motivation of many people who supported it? Maybe the ruse is using the motivation of protecting the children to downplay the First Amendment issues. At least some of the legislators might be so sincere and serious about protecting children that they don't fathom how broad the First Amendment's prohibitions on content-based regulation are. Or maybe the ruse is that the legislators frame the act as a design-based restriction or a conduct-based restriction rather than the content-based restriction it really is. In First Amendment cases, the strict scrutiny test applies to laws which indirectly cause removal of legal speech, not just laws which directly require removal.
- cjensen 2y ago
  By "Ruse," they mean the law's ruse of claiming to only regulate the conduct of design, when in actual fact the law clearly intends to regulate speech. It's a "ruse" to try to avoid a court noticing that the law obviously violates the First Amendment.
- krapp 2y ago
  >Protecting children wasn't a serious motivation of many people who supported it? Probably. People were seriously concerned about communist infiltrators in the 1950s. People were seriously concerned about Dungeons and Dragons and backwards masking and secret pedophile cults back and the "gay plague" of AIDS in the 1980s. People were seriously concerned about Muslims after 9/11. People are seriously concerned about transgender groomers and "the wokes" and Chinese mind control through TikTok today. People are always sincerely concerned whenever the government gasses them up in a moral panic. The ruse comes from the government's response, because during moral panics Constitutional rights always seem to get in the way of Something Needing To Be Done. Unfortunately one has to assume, by default, that any law passed under the aegis of "protecting children" nowadays has no actual intent behind it other than eroding Constitutional rights for the sake of ratcheting up fascism.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Aeolun 2y ago
So they think that asking someone to to provide them with some measure of administrative information is ‘compelling’ speech? How does that work with the tax form you have to fill out every year. Or a variety of other compulsory activities related to the government.
- semiquaver 2y ago
  This seems like a disingenuous take. The article highlights this part of the opinion which makes clear that a requirement to file a purely factual form (as in the California privacy law) would not violate the first amendment: > That obligation to collect, retain, and disclose purely factual information about the number of privacy-related requests is a far cry from the CAADCA’s vague and onerous requirement that covered businesses opine on whether their services risk “material detriment to children” with a particular focus on whether they may result in children witnessing harmful or potentially harmful content online. The compelled speech here is “for every feature of your website, provide a narrative evaluation of how it might hurt kids and how you are going to mitigate that risk”. That’s quite a bit different than “put a number in a box telling how much money you made this year”.
  - Aeolun 2y ago
    I find this falls in the same category as ‘you agree to the terms and conditions even if nobody actually reads a 200 page document’. It’s not that I disagree the law is nonsense, but the argument doesn’t make any sense in my opinion. There is nothing preventing anyone from filling out that evaluation with exactly the same ‘It will not materially impact children’ every time, any more than it stops people from adding the same zero to all fields on their tax forms.
    - burnerthrow008 2y ago
      Again, you are being disingenuous. Whether it materially impacts children is not a fact but a judgment. The code is designed such that it is nearly impossible to say anything other than “it may impact children”. Websites are effectively forced to write a document that says “be believe that our site may negatively impact children”. Now, what are the odds that a future politically-motivated DA won’t “accidentally” leak that “secret document which admits they knew they were harming children” when they want to go after someone for something unrelated?
loongloong 2y ago
Appreciate recommendations on any neutral analysis about this topic, the links I managed to find are all strongly for or against it, too much spinning in both directions till my head hurts. Why did it successfully pass in UK (and other countries) and what are the differences in the version passed in UK in actual requirements (to businesses) and protections (to children) compared to this one? Actual legislation at https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billCompareClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220AB2273 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billCompareClient.x...
- semiquaver 2y ago
  > Why did it successfully pass in UK Among many other legal differences, the UK has no free speech guarantee.
  - Y_Y 2y ago
    That's hardly the full story. The UK prescribes a limited right to free expression just like other similar countries, although it is weirdly limited in several ways. Notably it's relatively easy to use the courts to prevent the dissemination of information harmful to a person or business, or even more vaguely harmful, like "incitement to hatred". For example, take Article 10 here, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/42/schedule/1 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/42/schedule/1
    - bibinou 2y ago
      Libel laws in the UK are way more problematic / idiosyncratic than law about "incitement to hatred", which are common (at least in Europe) and made to repress dog whistles. edit: SLAPP suits are basically legal there, and often used to suppress speech or journalism which would be legitimate and even encouraged elsewhere. see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_defamation_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_defamation_law
    - patrick451 2y ago
      If you can be put in jail for hurting somebodies feelings, there is no functional right free expression.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
brikym 2y ago
The article just rips into the deep details without even telling me what the design code is. Great.
- moi2388 2y ago
  You can read the design code here: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billCompareClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220AB2273&showamends=false https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billCompareClient.x... From what I gather, the intent seems good. Identify if your product is likely to be used by children, how old these children are, ensure no harmful contacts or content is possible, collect only the minimal amount of data, don’t use this data to profile them, and make it easier for children to remove their data, as well as store it for a minimal time period. The problem might be in the wording, like “likely to be used”, “dark patterns” and “harmful content” without specifying what this entails.
ayakang31415 2y ago
I know this is conspiracy theory, but whenever "someone" tries to pass a regulation law in California, I can't help but feel that they are trying to inject bureaucracy into highly profitable industry to milk some money out. Look at 1600 feet (about 500 meters) rail bridge on the Fresno River Viaduct that cost 11 billion USD and took 9 years to build. The California agency must have distributed all the fund over the course of 9 years to "someone" in the name of regulation.
- nradov 2y ago
  The whole California high-speed rail project is a gigantic white elephant and waste of taxpayer money. But that one viaduct over the Fresno River didn't cost anywhere near $11B. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2024/05/13/california-high-speed-rail-11-billion/73644153007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2024/05/13/cal...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
shortsunblack 2y ago
Children do not belong on the internet. Full stop. And trying to change that with regulation is in itself problematic from safety perspective.
- cedws 2y ago
  True. Seems like many parents want the government to do the parenting for them. I had internet access from a young age and turned out okay anyway.

139 points by hn_acker 2y ago

InMice 2y ago

Looking at techdirt's website feels so refreshing. It looks like it uses Slash CMS even still?

mrinfinitiesx 2y ago
Wordpress, but still. Holy god, no 350,000 modals in my face, 300 inline boxes / weird grids, a decent podcast, all the content I would need / want to see in viewport and .. just there? good stuff. a working rss feed that gives me what I want? nice. ~> rsstail -u https://www.techdirt.com/feed/ https://www.techdirt.com/feed/
- InMice 2y ago
  agree. and yes a quick look at source shows wp slugs. i guess it originally used slash and must've really stuck to the style. the look feels very 2000s, i love it.

hn_acker 2y ago

The original title was: > Court Sees Through California’s ‘Protect The Children’ Ruse, Strikes Down Kids Code AADC stands for Age Appropriate Design Code.

Alupis 2y ago

FTA: > California Governor Gavin Newsom eagerly signed the bill into law, wanting to get some headlines about how he was “protecting the children.” When NetChoice challenged the law, Newsom sent them a very threatening letter, demanding they drop the lawsuit. Thankfully, they did not, and the court saw through the ruse and found the entire bill unconstitutional for the exact reasons we had warned the California government about. > Specifically, they call out the DPIA requirement. This is a major portion of the law, which requires certain online businesses to create and file a “Data Protection Impact Assessment” with the California Attorney General. Part of that DPIA is that you have to explain how you plan to “mitigate the risk” that “potentially harmful content” will reach children (defined as anyone from age 0 to 18). > And we’d have to do that for every “feature” on the website. Do I think that a high school student might read Techdirt’s comments and come across something the AG finds harmful? I need to first explain our plans to “mitigate” that risk. That sure sounds like a push for censorship. It's some biased reporting here to be sure - but it's amazing how something like this gets so far as to actually be signed into law. It has significant and obvious flaws, the least of which are the constitutionality. How have we gotten to a place where our elected officials - sworn to uphold the constitution - willingly and knowingly pass unconstitutional laws just to see how long they can get away with it?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
georgeburdell 2y ago
It does seem like a loophole that blatantly unconstitutional laws can be passed, enforced, and judged, until a court strikes it down. Who makes the accused whole? This is the legislative version of “move fast and break things”
- semiquaver 2y ago
  Some countries use the opposite scheme, where a constitutional court needs to approve laws before they can go into effect. As you can imagine, that approach has a strongly centralizing effect and would not work well in a federal system like the US’.
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
Mike Masnick has a well known bias, and generally I think it fairly well matches a true & consistent view. If nothing else it's a view that few of those he has opposed over the decades have elaborated clearly or consistently; that consistency is both impressive, & the lack of consistency from those who would curb speech is a colossal disrecommendation. Certainly officials bare a huge part of the blame for these ongoing travesties against speech & connectivity. But there is a very angry negative current in the world today, a disaffection with technology as a whole, that grows and grows. These rules, alas, reflect the simple public's simple rage, to some degree, I fear.
- Nasrudith 2y ago
  To be frank, the public rage to me still seems very engineered by a dying media old guard who cannot admit to any of their faults and blames the newcomers for everything especially the consequences of their very own actions. People as a whole seem stupid, specifically in that they are more easily influenced than ChatGPT. Enough that when told "be angry about X" repeatedly they get angry instead of getting annoyed or angry at constant transparent attempts at emotional manipulation.

gweinberg 2y ago

[flagged]

ballballball 2y ago
Huh?

gotoeleven 2y ago

>>>"The law was drafted in part by a British Baroness and Hollywood movie director who fell deep for the moral panic that the internet and mobile phones are obviously evil for kids." While I agree the law should be stricken on first amendment grounds, this sentence, inasmuch as it implies anything factual about social media, is false and dumb. The evidence that social media is bad for kids especially girls is overwhelming. https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/jonathan-haidt-on-how-to-solve-the-teen-mental-health-crisis https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/jonathan-haidt-on-how-to-...

nl 2y ago
> The evidence that social media is bad for kids especially girls is overwhelming. Not so! It's bad for some kids but incredibly positive for others. > The ability to form and maintain friendships online and develop social connections are among the positive effects of social media use for youth... Seven out of ten adolescent girls of color report encountering positive or identity-affirming content related to race across social media platforms... A majority of adolescents report that social media helps them feel more accepted (58%), like they have people who can support them through tough times (67%), like they have a place to show their creative side (71%), and more connected to what’s going on in their friends’ lives (80%). "Social Media Has Both Positive and Negative Impacts on Children and Adolescents" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK594763/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK594763/ > When asked about the overall impact of social media on them personally, more teens say its effect has been mostly positive (32%) than say it has been mostly negative (9%). The largest share describes its impact in neutral terms: 59% believe social media has had neither a positive nor a negative effect on them. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/11/16/connection-creativity-and-drama-teen-life-on-social-media-in-2022/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/11/16/connection-c...
- Cupertino95014 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - nl 2y ago

schoen 2y ago

I'm glad this legislation was struck down, but I don't understand "ruse" here. Protecting children wasn't a serious motivation of many people who supported it? Like, consider a prior case of California legislation that was struck down https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Entertainment_Merchants_Association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Entertainment_Merchan... I think Mike Masnick and I both think it was good that that law was struck down, too. But do we think people who promoted it were insincere about believing it was harmful or undesirable for children to see violent depictions?

hn_acker 2y ago
> I don't understand "ruse" here. Protecting children wasn't a serious motivation of many people who supported it? Maybe the ruse is using the motivation of protecting the children to downplay the First Amendment issues. At least some of the legislators might be so sincere and serious about protecting children that they don't fathom how broad the First Amendment's prohibitions on content-based regulation are. Or maybe the ruse is that the legislators frame the act as a design-based restriction or a conduct-based restriction rather than the content-based restriction it really is. In First Amendment cases, the strict scrutiny test applies to laws which indirectly cause removal of legal speech, not just laws which directly require removal.
cjensen 2y ago
By "Ruse," they mean the law's ruse of claiming to only regulate the conduct of design, when in actual fact the law clearly intends to regulate speech. It's a "ruse" to try to avoid a court noticing that the law obviously violates the First Amendment.
krapp 2y ago
>Protecting children wasn't a serious motivation of many people who supported it? Probably. People were seriously concerned about communist infiltrators in the 1950s. People were seriously concerned about Dungeons and Dragons and backwards masking and secret pedophile cults back and the "gay plague" of AIDS in the 1980s. People were seriously concerned about Muslims after 9/11. People are seriously concerned about transgender groomers and "the wokes" and Chinese mind control through TikTok today. People are always sincerely concerned whenever the government gasses them up in a moral panic. The ruse comes from the government's response, because during moral panics Constitutional rights always seem to get in the way of Something Needing To Be Done. Unfortunately one has to assume, by default, that any law passed under the aegis of "protecting children" nowadays has no actual intent behind it other than eroding Constitutional rights for the sake of ratcheting up fascism.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Aeolun 2y ago

So they think that asking someone to to provide them with some measure of administrative information is ‘compelling’ speech? How does that work with the tax form you have to fill out every year. Or a variety of other compulsory activities related to the government.

semiquaver 2y ago
This seems like a disingenuous take. The article highlights this part of the opinion which makes clear that a requirement to file a purely factual form (as in the California privacy law) would not violate the first amendment: > That obligation to collect, retain, and disclose purely factual information about the number of privacy-related requests is a far cry from the CAADCA’s vague and onerous requirement that covered businesses opine on whether their services risk “material detriment to children” with a particular focus on whether they may result in children witnessing harmful or potentially harmful content online. The compelled speech here is “for every feature of your website, provide a narrative evaluation of how it might hurt kids and how you are going to mitigate that risk”. That’s quite a bit different than “put a number in a box telling how much money you made this year”.
- Aeolun 2y ago
  I find this falls in the same category as ‘you agree to the terms and conditions even if nobody actually reads a 200 page document’. It’s not that I disagree the law is nonsense, but the argument doesn’t make any sense in my opinion. There is nothing preventing anyone from filling out that evaluation with exactly the same ‘It will not materially impact children’ every time, any more than it stops people from adding the same zero to all fields on their tax forms.
  - burnerthrow008 2y ago
    Again, you are being disingenuous. Whether it materially impacts children is not a fact but a judgment. The code is designed such that it is nearly impossible to say anything other than “it may impact children”. Websites are effectively forced to write a document that says “be believe that our site may negatively impact children”. Now, what are the odds that a future politically-motivated DA won’t “accidentally” leak that “secret document which admits they knew they were harming children” when they want to go after someone for something unrelated?

loongloong 2y ago

Appreciate recommendations on any neutral analysis about this topic, the links I managed to find are all strongly for or against it, too much spinning in both directions till my head hurts. Why did it successfully pass in UK (and other countries) and what are the differences in the version passed in UK in actual requirements (to businesses) and protections (to children) compared to this one? Actual legislation at https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billCompareClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220AB2273 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billCompareClient.x...

semiquaver 2y ago
> Why did it successfully pass in UK Among many other legal differences, the UK has no free speech guarantee.
- Y_Y 2y ago
  That's hardly the full story. The UK prescribes a limited right to free expression just like other similar countries, although it is weirdly limited in several ways. Notably it's relatively easy to use the courts to prevent the dissemination of information harmful to a person or business, or even more vaguely harmful, like "incitement to hatred". For example, take Article 10 here, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/42/schedule/1 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/42/schedule/1
  - bibinou 2y ago
    Libel laws in the UK are way more problematic / idiosyncratic than law about "incitement to hatred", which are common (at least in Europe) and made to repress dog whistles. edit: SLAPP suits are basically legal there, and often used to suppress speech or journalism which would be legitimate and even encouraged elsewhere. see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_defamation_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_defamation_law
  - patrick451 2y ago
    If you can be put in jail for hurting somebodies feelings, there is no functional right free expression.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

brikym 2y ago

The article just rips into the deep details without even telling me what the design code is. Great.

moi2388 2y ago
You can read the design code here: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billCompareClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220AB2273&showamends=false https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billCompareClient.x... From what I gather, the intent seems good. Identify if your product is likely to be used by children, how old these children are, ensure no harmful contacts or content is possible, collect only the minimal amount of data, don’t use this data to profile them, and make it easier for children to remove their data, as well as store it for a minimal time period. The problem might be in the wording, like “likely to be used”, “dark patterns” and “harmful content” without specifying what this entails.

ayakang31415 2y ago

I know this is conspiracy theory, but whenever "someone" tries to pass a regulation law in California, I can't help but feel that they are trying to inject bureaucracy into highly profitable industry to milk some money out. Look at 1600 feet (about 500 meters) rail bridge on the Fresno River Viaduct that cost 11 billion USD and took 9 years to build. The California agency must have distributed all the fund over the course of 9 years to "someone" in the name of regulation.

nradov 2y ago
The whole California high-speed rail project is a gigantic white elephant and waste of taxpayer money. But that one viaduct over the Fresno River didn't cost anywhere near $11B. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2024/05/13/california-high-speed-rail-11-billion/73644153007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2024/05/13/cal...

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

shortsunblack 2y ago

Children do not belong on the internet. Full stop. And trying to change that with regulation is in itself problematic from safety perspective.

cedws 2y ago
True. Seems like many parents want the government to do the parenting for them. I had internet access from a young age and turned out okay anyway.