Technology

Kids have been online for 30 years. AOL and BBSs were available - I think I got my first modem around 1987. That’s a generation-plus. Which is to say - we have plenty of data on the effect of being “on the internet” on kids. Most people under the age of 30 have been online for virtually all of their lives.

You can tell these laws are bullshit because they always have some vague platitude like “protecting kids,” but they never define their measurements. An actual intervention - like a government policy to solve a problem - defines what it is trying to address, how and why they expect the program to work using peer-reviewed evidence, and what they expect the result to be after some time.

Let’s say the problem you’re trying to address is teenage suicide, and you think that being exposed to talk about suicide online contributes to it. First, you’d look for studies that evaluated the problem. They’d have to show causality, because just finding a correlation might mean that kids likely to commit suicide reach out to communities online, rather than vice versa. I’m skeptical, but for the sake of argument let’s say you find there is a causal relationship.

So you develop a model that allows you to estimate that keeping kids from accessing anyone talking about suicide would cut the teen suicide rate by 30%. Removing some middle steps, the government now bans the discussion of suicide on any platform that doesn’t have a strict age verification. So, now what happens? Is there ongoing monitoring to make sure that your hypothesis is correct? If suicide rates go up because kids can’t talk it out anymore and are more isolated, does the law get removed from the books? Are there classes of kids it hurts versus helps, and what are you going to do about them?

You can say the same thing about other metrics, like sexual abuse. The point is that, like they tell you in b-school, you have to measure it if you want to improve it. They never do that, though.

At best, these kinds of things are empty platitudes that allow politicians to pretend they’re doing something to get votes. At worst - and with this bill the more likely outcome - will be that this permits states like Texas to arbitrarily define what they think “kids” should see. They’ll remove the decision from kids and their parents, and instead make the global decision of censorship according to a conservative religious agenda. That’s what we’re seeing in libraries and schools today.

The other reason you can tell it’s just culture war bullshit is that none of this is coming in response to a sudden surge in child abuse statistics. When there’s a spike in something bad, like gun violence, opioid use, or a pandemic, politicians respond with policy. This push, like the bathroom bills, legal restrictions on trans athletes, and anti-drag laws, is not responding to any current crisis. It’s just someone jingling the keys to make people look in the other direction so that they can get away with what they’re actually trying to do.