Make the internet better by empowering users, not by demanding that platforms implement automated filters

In the wake of the Senate's predictably grandstanding "Protecting Digital Innocence" hearings (on how to keep kids from online harms), my EFF colleagues Elliot Harmon and India McKinney have posted an excellent, thoughtful rebuttal to proposals to segregate a "kid internet" from an "adult internet" in order to ensure that kids don't see "harmful" things.

They start by pointing out that there is no consensus on what constitutes "harmful material": a ban on kids seeing "any pictures of human genitalia" (proposed by Sen. John Kennedy, R-LA) would block Our Bodies, Ourselves and even Where Did I Come From? (as a parent, I've given both to my daughter, who is now 11).

Attempts to determine what is and is not "safe for kids" have resulted in a grotesque string of laughable failures, from Tumblr's hilariously terrible filter to SESTA/FOSTA, an "anti-sex-trafficking" law that has led to a resurgence in street prostitution, violence against sex-workers, and a golden age of pimping, as sex-workers seek out physical protection now that they can't use the internet to screen clients.

Rather than requiring platforms to block material that might be harmful, Harmon and McKinney propose that we should empower users: allowing kids and their parents to use third-party services and tools that filter, block and sort the materials the Big Tech platforms serve to them, so they can make up their own minds about what is and is not appropriate.

Particularly interesting is their critique of a proposal to put "kid material" in separate silos where there is no tracking for behavioral advertising purposes: "Platforms must take measures to put all users in charge of how their data is collected, used, and sharedincluding childrenbut cleanly separating material directed at adults and children isnt easy. Read the rest