Ms. Magazine – Restricting Access to Information Online Won’t Keep Teens Safe. It Will Only Erode Democratic Rights
This op-ed – authored by CDT’s Michal Luria and Aliya Bhatia – first appeared in Ms. Magazine on January 23, 2024.A portion of the text has been pasted below.
Keeping young people safe online has long been an important goal of policy conversations, and that focus has only increased since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. More young people are online now than ever before, and screen time amongst youth has skyrocketed. They rely on online spaces as lifelines for community, identity, formation, education, and secure access to information about reproductive care and LGBTQ+ identity that parents and teachers may not make available or have the resources to discuss.
Yet, the absence of federal privacy protections leaves individuals, including children, vulnerable to sensitive data falling into the wrong hands. And the use of sensitive data to micro-target compelling and personalized advertisements all around the web irks young people and adults alike.
In response, young people have called for more tools to navigate the web safely. Some teens want more short-term or ephemeral content online, more control over their algorithmic feeds, and the ability to delete data collected or inferred about them. When one of the authors of this piece interviewed over 30 young people about their online safety last fall, many teens asked for better reporting, blocking and user filtering tools so they could minimize unwanted encounters online while still using the messaging services they depended on to stay in touch with friends, family, classmates and loved ones. The undercurrent of their ask: Help us help ourselves.
Not All Guardrails Are Created Equal: Comparing Content Safety and Copyright Filtering
As courts and policymakers work through questions about chatbot liability, they should be wary of analogies that flatten meaningful technical differences. Copyright filtering and safety intervention share real challenges around ambiguity and evasion, but they diverge in what each control must assess, how each manifests over the course of a conversation, and how much can be verified from the outside.
Op-Ed: France’s Constitutional Council Ruling Tests the Limits of Social Media Bans
Read our analysis the legal and policy significance of the Constitutional Council’s decision on ongoing social media age restriction and age assurance debates ahead of the most-anticipated EU-wide approach on child online safety due by December 2026.
The brief explains that Section 230’s liability protections are essential to enable free expression online and they extend to the use of automated systems to engage to rank and order content as part of traditional publishing activities.
