Tag: think of the children

Big Brother in Training? How Proposed Legislation Might Pave the Way for Online Age Verification and Digital ID

Bipartisan legislative efforts are underway in the US House of Representatives to adopt new versions of two laws originally drawn up to deal with the safety of youth online.

But the fear is that the bills introduced now – H.R.7891, the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), and H.R. 7890, the Children and Teens Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) 2.0 – will facilitate implementation of a future sweeping age verification and digital ID push.

These concerns are raised because KOSA is directing the secretary of commerce, together with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to conduct a study “evaluating the most technologically feasible methods and options for developing systems to verify age at the device or operating system level.”

At this stage of the proceedings, the study will not be used to mandate that platforms implement “an age gating or age verification functionality” – however, once the authorities have at their disposal the technical solutions to do it, some observers expect it could be used for a more aggressive legislative push at the federal level later on.

The key difference between the existing Senate version of KOSA and the proposed House bill is found under the “care of duty” component, with the House text now defining that to apply to “high impact online companies” with $2.5 billion or more annual revenue, and 150+ million global monthly active users over at least three months of the preceding year.

The Senate version refers to platforms “reasonably likely to be used by a minor” (employing 500 or more people, with gross annual revenue of $50 million or more).

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Legalizing Marijuana For Adults Does Not Drive Increases In Youth Use, New Federally Funded Study Finds

New federally funded research into the impacts of marijuana legalization on youth use found no association between legal adult-use cannabis sales and the prevalence of consumption among middle-school students.

To test whether legal sales led to an uptick in youth use, authors compared middle-school use rates in Nevada and New Mexico, looking at 2017 and 2019 data from two state-run surveys. At the time, adult-use marijuana sales were legal in Nevada, while New Mexico allowed only medical marijuana.

In both states, researchers found increases in the proportions of students that had ever consumed cannabis as well as those who had consumed within the past 30 days.

In Nevada, the share of middle-school students who said they’d ever consumed cannabis rose during the study period, from 9.7 percent in 2017 to 13.3 percent in 2019. Past 30 day (P30D) use also rose, from 6.3 percent to 8.9 percent.

New Mexico, where recreational marijuana remained illegal, saw lifetime use rise from 14.1 percent to 17.4 percent over the same period. Past 30 day use rose from 8.9 percent to 10.5 percent.

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Pennsylvania Officials Won’t Give Medical Marijuana Patients Access To Edibles—For Now

Officials tasked with monitoring the state’s medical marijuana program said this week edibles don’t belong in Pennsylvania’s marketplace.

Concerns about safety, efficacy and legal enforcement gave members of the Medical Marijuana Advisory Board pause. Six abstained from voting on the recommendation at all during its Wednesday meeting. Only two members supported the proposal, while two more rejected it.

The vote came after a discussion about the growing popularity of “troches,” an ingestible form of THC that resembles a cough drop. Dispensaries market the product alongside tinctures, which users absorb sublingually.

Supporters say some patients dislike the respiratory and digestive side effects that come from other forms of medical marijuana, including vaping cartridges, flowers, pills, and concentrates. Edibles offer a viable alternative.

Critics argue, however, that traditional edibles offered in other states come with a higher risk of poisoning, particularly in children, because of deceptive packaging and underestimated potency.

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A Ham-Handed Bill Attacks the First Amendment in the Name of Protecting Minors From Online Harm

Late last month, a Senate committee considered a 50-page bill with a name that includes the word kids and approved it unanimously. Those two facts alone are enough to raise the suspicion that legislators are heading down a winding road toward a destination they only dimly perceive.

That suspicion is amply supported by the text of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which ham-handedly aims to shield children and teenagers from vaguely defined dangers lurking on the internet. The unintended but foreseeable results are apt to include invasions of privacy that compromise First Amendment rights and a chilling impact on constitutionally protected speech, both of which will harm adults as well as the “kids” whom the bill is supposed to protect.

KOSA imposes an amorphous “duty of care” on platforms, online games, messaging applications, and streaming services, demanding “reasonable measures” to “protect” against and “mitigate” various “harms” to users younger than 17. The targeted dangers include anxiety, depression, suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, “addiction-like behaviors,” physical violence, online bullying, harassment, sexual exploitation and abuse, “financial harms,” and promotion of “narcotic drugs,” tobacco products, alcohol, or gambling.

That’s a tall order, and it is not at all clear what meeting this obligation would entail. Nor is it clear when the duty of care applies.

As amended by the Senate Commerce Committee, KOSA applies to any “covered platform” that “knows” its users include minors. But no one knows what “knows” means.

In addition to “actual knowledge,” that condition can be satisfied by “knowledge fairly implied on the basis of objective circumstances.” KOSA directs the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), within 18 months of the bill’s passage, to issue “guidance” about how to understand the latter phrase.

That guidance, however, would not bind the FTC, which is charged with investigating and penalizing platforms that it thinks have violated KOSA. Nor would it constrain state attorneys general, who would be authorized to independently enforce KOSA through “civil actions.”

An earlier version of KOSA provoked criticism from civil libertarians who warned that it would effectively require platforms to verify users’ ages, which would entail collecting personal information. That was a clear threat to internet users of all ages who want to engage in speech without revealing their identities, a well-established First Amendment right.

In response to that concern, the latest version of KOSA revises the duty-of-care test and explicitly says it does not require “age gating or age verification.” But given the burdens the bill imposes and the uncertainty about what counts as “knowledge fairly implied,” platforms still would have a strong incentive to exclude minors or minimize the number of users who are younger than 17.

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Why Does Alabama Only Let You Consume Peach-Flavored Edibles?

Alabama, which legalized medical weed back in 2021, is just now getting around to licensing cultivators, testing labs, processors, transporters, and dispensaries so qualifying patients can begin to have access. The catch? You can’t smoke it, and all the edibles you consume must be peach-flavored.

You see, if the edibles are cube-shaped (also stipulated by law) and peach-flavored, they’re somehow less likely to interest kids—at least that’s the state Senate’s logic after a heated floor debate, according to Alabama Reflector‘s Brian Lyman (and the new regulations).

“At one point the bill said it would have no taste, but (state Sen. Tim) Melson said that would cause people to gag. So the compromise was a single flavor,” Lyman told AL.com. “Maybe peach isn’t as attractive to people?”

This isn’t the first time lawmakers have used “for the children” justifications to attempt to regulate which products adults may legally buy. For over two decades, Reason‘s Jacob Sullum has documented the assaults on malt liquor, clove cigarettes, and any other vice that might possibly excite the taste buds of minors. In 2020, the Food and Drug Administration banned flavored e-cigarette cartridges to “combat the troubling epidemic of youth e-cigarette use,” ignoring the many surveys in which ex-smokers report that flavored vape cartridges actually helped them quit smoking tobacco cigarettes. And the Alabama case isn’t the first time the kid safety justification has been used to justify the regulation of edibles.

Maryland regulators, who took forever to get their medical cannabis scheme off the ground, were further delayed back in 2019 because they needed to develop rules governing the appearance of edibles “to ensure the safety of minors.” (“I don’t want to deprive anyone of their medication, but let’s treat this like medicine, not make little gummy bears out of it,” said Republican state Sen. Robert Cassilly at the time.) New York has banned the marketing and advertising of cannabis products “designed in any way to appeal to children or other minors.”

In 2014, Colorado regulators deliberated over whether to ban practically all edibles before ultimately allowing a broader variety, but disallowing those shaped like animals, people, or fruit (which are also banned in California). In 2018, Washington state regulators mulled rules that would have banned certain shapes of edibles—along with the use of icing and sprinkles—before ultimately just banning the use of bright colors; per the authorities, product colors must fall within a “standard pantone color book that sets the list of colors and specified ranges within those colors.”

“If you go through a [New York] cannabis dispensary right now,” Columbia University epidemiologist Katherine Keyes told the Associated Press, “it’s almost absurd how youth-oriented a lot of the packaging and the products are.”

Lawmakers, regulators, and public health worrywarts are aided and abetted by a willing media. “Consumption of Marijuana Edibles Surges Among Children, Study Finds,” reads a New York Times headline from earlier this year. “3,000+ young children accidentally ate weed edibles in 2021, study finds,” adds NPR. (Though any accidental ingestion that results in hospitalization is worrying, no children died in any of the thousands of cases analyzed in the study—a not-insignificant point that few journalists pointed out.)

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WHO’s Absurd Claim That Tobacco Farming Is Causing Children To Starve

With the COVID-19 pandemic fading away, the World Health Organization (WHO) is returning to its core mission: making bogus, paternalistic attacks on tobacco users and producers.

To promote its World No Tobacco Day this year, WHO has been running a “grow food, not tobacco” campaign that mendaciously pins food insecurity on the global tobacco trade. “Tobacco is grown in over 124 countries, taking up 3.2 million hectares of fertile land that could be used to grow food,” reads a recent WHO report, which it says “compounds the food security issues” faced by low- and middle-income countries.

In addition to starving their countrymen, tobacco farmers are also keeping themselves trapped in poverty by growing a crop that offers little economic return, says the WHO report. Tobacco companies’ subsidization of seeds, fertilizers, financing, and more keeps farmers growing this toxic substance. A lack of government subsidies for alternative grows leaves them stuck in this grim business.

To drive home the point about tobacco’s ruinous impact, the WHO report and associated campaign material feature pictures of dead-eyed, malnourished children holding up food bowls filled with smoldering cigarette butts.

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Childproofing the Internet

For the past several years, lawmakers and bureaucrats around the country have been trying to solve a problem. They wanted to regulate the internet, and in particular, they wanted to censor content and undermine a variety of systems that allow for privacy and anonymity online—the systems, in other words, that allow for online individuals to conduct themselves freely and outside of the purview of politicians.

There was something like a bipartisan agreement on the necessity of these rules and regulations. Lawmakers and regulators test-drove a number of potential arguments for online speech rules, including political bias, political extremism, drug crime, or the fact some tech companies are just really big. But it turned out to be quite difficult to drum up support for wonky causes like antitrust reform or amending the internet liability law Section 230, and even harder to make the case that the sheer size of companies like Amazon was really the problem.

Their efforts tended to falter because they lacked a consensus justification. Those in power knew what they wanted to do. They just didn’t know why, or how.

But in statehouses and in Congress today, that problem appears to have been solved. Politicians looking to censor online content and more tightly regulate digital life have found their reason: child safety.

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The EU wants to scan all chat messages, using the guise of combating child abuse

The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, has proposed a scanning obligation for messaging providers to combat the spreading of child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

The proposal states that, at the request of a government agency, “Providers of hosting services and providers of interpersonal communication services that have received a detection order shall execute it by installing and operating technologies to detect” CSAM.

We obtained a copy of the proposal for you here.

The document further says that companies should use CSAM detection technology that is reliable, effective and state of the art. The technology should also be “the least intrusive” as it is not supposed to “be able to extract any other information from the relevant communications than the information strictly necessary to detect.”

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