Charlie Jane Anders discusses KOSA (the Kids Online Safety Act).
If you’re in the US, https://www.stopkosa.com/ makes it easy to contact your Senators and ask them to oppose KOSA.
"A new bill called the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, is sailing towards passage in the Senate with bipartisa>n support. Among other things, this bill would give the attorney general of every state, including red states, the right to sue Internet platforms if they allow any content that is deemed harmful to minors. This clause is so vaguely defined that attorneys general can absolutely claim that queer content violates it — and they don’t even need to win these lawsuits in order to prevail. They might not even need to file a lawsuit, in fact. The mere threat of an expensive, grueling legal battle will be enough to make almost every Internet platform begin to scrub anything related to queer people.
The right wing Heritage Foundation has already stated publicly that the GOP will use this provision to remove any discussions of trans or queer lives from the Internet. They’re salivating over the prospect.
And yep, I did say this bill has bipartisan support. Many Democrats have already signed on as co-sponsors. And President Joe Biden has urged lawmakers to pass this bill in the strongest possible terms."
Can you elaborate how this act could affect me in Germany?
Do you visit any websites that are hosted in the United States? It doesn’t matter where you’re located, it matters where the site you’re accessing is hosted.
As an American, GDPR has affected me. Many sites have chosen, rather than deal with Europe and the rest of the world separately, to just make a version of their site that is GDPR-compliant. I’ve sent GDPR erasure requests to services and they don’t bother checking if I’m actually a European citizen, they just remove my data because it’s easier. I’d argue that GDPR was a net good even for America and other countries.
This is the same thing but in reverse. If KOSA makes Pornhub unable to operate in America, they may very well shut down due to the loss of revenue. If KOSA makes companies paranoid about allowing, for example, NSFW pictures, or LGTBQ or abortion information, or similar, then those companies may disallow it on their services altogether even if they have servers in Europe because setting up the infrastructure for, for example DailyMotion, to have totally separate databases of content in different regions is just too much.
This can affect you. Not as much as people in the US, sure. But unless you use sites and applications made only by European companies, it can absolutely affect you.