Growing concerns about the mental health of young people have led state legislatures across the country to propose numerous age limits to protect minors online. The lawmaker says the rules should help protect young people from her pornography, predators and harmful social media posts online.
The current push for age restrictions on certain online content mirrors a similar legislative movement 30 years ago, in the early days of the Internet. In 1996, Congress passed a major telecommunications bill making it illegal to knowingly transmit or display “obscene or obscene” material to anyone under the age of 18.
That law had a long precedent: Federal rule date Back in the 1920’s Radio and television programs were prohibited from broadcasting obscene language, preventing children from wandering into the living room from hearing obscene language.
Anti-pornography regulations of the 1990s included: strong bipartisan supportBut civil liberties groups believed the ban on online obscenity violated the First Amendment and stifled free speech. Among other objections, they said it was too difficult and too expensive for websites to verify the ages of their visitors. We could have created a Disneyized Internet.
The American Civil Liberties Union is suing the government to protect Americans’ access to information that may be considered obscene under new laws, such as educational materials about AIDS. law This is called the Communication Decency Act.
The ACLU wanted that name in the lawsuit, said Chris Hansen, the group’s former senior attorney.But to become a plaintiff, the group would have to be directly threatened by the law, and there was nothing on its website that could potentially “harm” a child, so he said the ACLU was uploaded. rice field supreme court judgment It was about a riff on the seven dirtiest words in English by comedian George Carlin, and included a transcript of Mr. Carlin’s monologue in its no-bleep glory.
The ACLU also posted a quiz for readers to guess seven obscenities.
After a federal court in Philadelphia temporarily suspended the law, the government appealed and the Reno v. ACLU case, named after Bill Clinton’s Attorney General Janet Reno, was taken up by the Supreme Court. rice field. There, he argued, the ACLU argued that the law’s restrictions on speech would curb the Internet’s unique potential and could prevent people, including minors, from accessing information of all kinds.
The ACLU argued that the Internet, where users type or click to access web pages, is more like books and newspapers than radio and television. Anne Beesonthe group’s former assistant legal director. Print language, which individuals freely browsed, was less regulated than broadcast media, where viewers had no control over what they were exposed to.
Judges at the time were not particularly internet savvy. So court officials arranged a demonstration to show how easy it was to find porn. Senator Ted Cruz, then Supreme Court Attorney General, said: told later How he, along with Judge Sandra Day O’Connor, viewed the “hardcore and explicit” image results for fruit search results, which are sometimes used as obscene euphemisms for breasts.
The Supreme Court ultimately upheld the ACLU, ruling that federal restrictions could chill free speech.
The judge said parents would soon be able to use content-filtering software to protect their children, and that age verification systems, when it was common to check users’ credit cards, were still widely used. He said that blanket restrictions were unacceptable because they did not.. (This has changed. Many current online age verification systems now use credentials such as a driver’s license to verify a user’s age. According to one vendor, they integrate easily. , costing as little as 10 cents per visitor.)
In its ruling, the Supreme Court upheld a long-standing principle of U.S. law that “speech to adults cannot be censored in the name of protecting minors.” Hansen Said. If the ACLU had lost, “the Internet wouldn’t be what it is today.”
But that was before our current “very online” era, where powerful social media algorithms fueled hateful and divisive comments, critics say. scaled disinformation; endorsement posts about anorexia and self-harm to young girls;
To strengthen online protections for children, California enacted the Age-Appropriate Design Code Act last year. The law mandates that online services likely to be used by young people, such as social media and video game platforms, default to the highest privacy settings available to minors.
We also require these services to turn off by default features that may pose a risk to minors, such as friend finder, which may allow adult strangers to contact your child.
Tech industry group NetChoice has filed a lawsuit to block child protection from taking effect next year. NetChoice said in a legal complaint filed in December that the restriction would stifle a resource critical to users of all ages, echoing claims he made the ACLU in the 1990s. said.
In March, the Congressional Research Service, a public policy agency that serves Congress, also appeal to legislators Considering the unintended consequences of new online age limits, such as companies collecting more user data and restricting content.
Yet lawmakers continue to propose new online age and content rules.
Last week in the Senate, Hawaii Democrat Brian Schatz promised his new children’s online protection bill would “help stop the growing social media health crisis among children by setting a minimum age.” bottom.
