by Kristi Dunn
The last thing we need is more political censorship, and with Trump in the Oval Office, our future on this front looks bright. However, states across the country are introducing bills that aim to censor kids online and take parents out of the equation when it comes to deciding what is best for their children and technology. No matter how well-intentioned these ‘kids’ online safety’ bills may be, they present an unconscionable threat to our most fundamental freedoms, such as freedom of speech and parents’ rights. To protect these freedoms, we must categorically reject these bills and other efforts to empower the government to censor our speech.
To differentiate between adult and child users, many of these bills would require all online platforms to implement age verification. This raises a multitude of issues, from infringing on adult users’ rights to access online speech to creating significant data privacy risks that all users would face. Since age verification systems necessitate users to submit a government ID and/or other personal information, anonymity is eliminated, and user data privacy is jeopardized. Even if this information is stored securely, requiring platforms to collect it generates troves of personal data that are vulnerable to theft by cybercriminals. This is not a matter of if, but when: the largest verification service providers currently in use have already been hacked and their data compromised.
More concerningly, proposals for kids’ online safety frequently place the government in a parenting role regarding our children’s speech and what is best for them and our families. The Constitution expressly forbids the government from making determinations about speech yet bills for kids’ online safety would allow the government to decide what content is suitable for children online. In doing so, these bills seek to establish the exact kind of government-mandated truth regime that others have long attempted to impose on the American people. We must not open the door to state control of the truth, as this is a swift and historically well-trodden path to political censorship and suppression of dissent on ideological grounds.
Regardless of who controls the White House or our state houses, government has no role in deciding how we raise our children. Real solutions must place parents at the forefront of these important decisions, empowering them to make the best choices for their kids regarding appropriate online content, rather than stripping them of their fundamental right to parental autonomy. Likewise, sacrificing our freedoms in the name of child safety has always been, and will continue to be, a slippery slope—one that we should avoid here in Tennessee.
The Constitution’s framers were abundantly clear that the government cannot and must not involve itself in the regulation of speech. Freedom of speech is our most important and essential right as Americans, and the strength of our speech protections—particularly the prohibition on government regulation of speech—is what safeguards us from the type of speech policing happening in Europe and around the world. We must remember what’s at stake as these type of kids and age verification bills are considered.
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Kristi Dunn is a mother, health care worker, and activist based in Wilson County, Tennessee.
