Next week, Congress plans to move a bill forward that is opposed by dozens of organizations, digital rights protectors, LGBTQ+ activists, and human rights defenders: the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). As we’ve written before, KOSA would lead to censorship and privacy invasions for all social media users. But the most impacted groups will be young people, who the bill purports to help by banishing to a second-class internet.
What’s often been left out of the debate over KOSA is how young people feel about this. In fact, many teenagers already oppose the bill. Young TikTok users have been rallying one another to call and email legislators to push back on the bill, and videos describing what’s wrong with KOSA have received hundreds of thousands of views. The common sentiment on TikTok, which is primarily used by young people, is that the billwould be disastrous, leading to privacy invasions, account deletions, and even suicides. Petitions and calls to action against it on Tumblr, where 48% of the active users and 61% of new ones are from Generation Z, have This article has been indexed from Deeplinks
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