A lobby group that represents major tech companies like TikTok, Snapchat, Meta etc is suing Ohio's Republican Attorney General Dave Yost for introducing a bill that mandates children to obtain parental consent before using social media apps
A new law, signed by Republican Governor Mike DeWine in July, is considered as a way to safeguard children’s mental health, citing concerns about the intentionally addictive nature of social media.
If you take it at face value, which you should really never do when conservatives are involved.
By my estimation, this (and bills like it) are intended to do two things:
Reduce younger people's access to points of view outside of the US political mainstream. In particular, Republican politicians seem very convinced that TikTok is turning kids gay/trans/atheist/communist/etc.
Allow for aggrieved conservatives to extract money via lawsuit from corporations Republican politicians view as hostile to them. Because laws like this will obviously be circumvented, and these laws are written such that the platform is liable in these cases, these laws open them up to potentially millions of lawsuits every time a teenager gets an Instagram account.
Doesn't COPPA already require this for children under 13? This state bill raises it to under 16.
I guess it comes down to the particulars. Is there something more onerous in the Ohio bill than in COPPA? Because I don't think I've heard of any company seriously getting mad that COPPA is a thing.
How is it fascist to require trans treatment to be signed off on by a psychiatrist, an endocrinologist, and a bioethicist?
Is it just a matter of trying to control people’s bodies?
As a libertarian I oppose any law that requires any adult to get permission from any other adult before modifying their own body. But I don’t consider the normal method — using doctors to approve treatment plans — to be fascist. It’s just authoritarian.
The only way this if fascist is if it’s also fascist to require doctor’s approval before obtaining adderall or antibiotics.
Except you don’t require an psychiatrist, endocrinologist, and a bioethicist before obtaining adderall, do you? Any single doctor in any hospital can prescribe it for you in a single visit and not six months after moving between states. It’s also between you, your doctor, and your pharmacist, no government mandated central registry necessary, dispite adderall being far more commonly abused.
In a quote from the referenced article.-
“Imagine you have diabetes. There are five top diabetes specialists in your state, but you like most patients get your care from your primary care physician. The specialists provide better care, and their patients do better.
Now, imagine the impact of a regulation requiring all patients in your state to get diabetes treatment from one of those five. If you can't see one of them your diabetes goes untreated.
If you're an ordinary patient, the most likely outcome is that you lose treatment for your diabetes entirely. You don't get improved care- there are still just five specialists, and they have no where near the capacity to see everyone with diabetes in the state.”
There’s a reason that these sorts of laws get overturned on anti-discrimination grounds, becuse they apply requirements to trans care that don’t apply to anyone else, including cis people taking the exact same medication.
Protecting children would mean knowing which users are children, which would mean knowing the actual legal identity of every user of the platform. It's never going to happen.
You don’t think that the data the companies collect and analyse from their users don’t already give them a decent idea? How do you think targeted advertising works?