Appreciate recommendations on any neutral analysis about this topic, the links I managed to find are all strongly for or against it, too much spinning in both directions till my head hurts.
Why did it successfully pass in UK (and other countries) and what are the differences in the version passed in UK in actual requirements (to businesses) and protections (to children) compared to this one?
>Appreciate recommendations on any neutral analysis about this topic
Same here. This article can't pause its criticism of the law for even one sentence to describe what the proponents of the law hope to accomplish or how.
ADDED. Some other site says that the law prohibits collecting certain kinds of personal info on children and "A business may not use dark patterns to lead or encourage children to provide personal information beyond what is reasonably expected to provide its Online Service or to take any action that it knows, or has reason to know, is materially detrimental to the child’s physical health, mental health, or well-being" -- and a few other things.
ADDED. The text of the bill used the phrase "dark patterns", but doesn't try to define it, so I'm tentatively glad the law was struck down because laws should draw sharp lines whereas "no dark patterns" is a very fuzzy and ambiguous line. (I know that is not why the Court struck down the law.)
Perhaps it is worthwhile to read the article to understand their criticism of the law? They extensively cite the court’s decision, which explains the reasoning for declaring the law unconstitutional.
That's hardly the full story. The UK prescribes a limited right to free expression just like other similar countries, although it is weirdly limited in several ways. Notably it's relatively easy to use the courts to prevent the dissemination of information harmful to a person or business, or even more vaguely harmful, like "incitement to hatred".
Libel laws in the UK are way more problematic / idiosyncratic than law about "incitement to hatred", which are common (at least in Europe) and made to repress dog whistles.
edit: SLAPP suits are basically legal there, and often used to suppress speech or journalism which would be legitimate and even encouraged elsewhere.
In general? If you're looking for a jurisdiction where you'll be able to get away with saying things that upset others without limit then maybe a libertarian paradise like Somalia will suffice.
When you can't get a neutral response, the best alternative is reading both arguments and forming a consensus internally. Here's Google's supportive argument:
I won't pretend to be neutral. As long as the US populace rejects binding a proper national ID (a PROPER one, not the beyond fragile, wholly abused Social Security Number) to their internet activity, this policy is simply a landmine waiting to be stepped on, dozens of time over in quick succession. This can and does work in Asia, but because many accounts require your government ID.
To speculate on your UK laws, that ID difference may be another piece of the puzzle that made this easier to draft a law for over there.
When it comes to getting a neutral response, the advice risks falling into the middle ground fallacy, where people might mistakenly believe that the truth always lies between two opposing arguments. Most people, myself included, don’t have the expertise to fully grasp complex issues, and there's no shame in that—we can’t expect everyone to be well-versed in every subject. This can make it tough to determine which side is more credible, leading to confusion or a false sense that both sides are equally valid, even when they’re not.
Well, it really falls on the individual. If you read both sides and realize "yeah, it's fine to protect the children by any means necessary", I wouldn't consider that radicalization so much as that person's own pre-existing philosophies.
But yes, I highly doubt you won't at least gain some sympathy for both sides of you read both spins. I'm not an expert on law and don't have the money to consult a writer versed in law to "explain to me in detail that I can understand". The next best is simply consuming a variety of content and understanding yourself at the end of the day. Someone looking for nuance to begin with like the GP probably is less prone to radicalization to begin with.
The UK also massively rejects the idea of a national ID. Makes it harder to implement and interact with government services, but, you know:
> Hacker: How will the other countries feel about identity papers? Won't they resist too?
>
> Sir Humphrey: The Germans will love it, the French will ignore it, and the Italians and the Irish will be too chaotic to enforce it. Only the British will resent it.
The UK has no national ID - it is still a disaster waiting to happen, but it is worth noting that most of the worst effects are still under consultation by the regulator and not being enforced. It is still possible it fails under judicial review at some point (given how atrociously drafted it is).
I'm glad this legislation was struck down, but I don't understand "ruse" here. Protecting children wasn't a serious motivation of many people who supported it?
Like, consider a prior case of California legislation that was struck down
I think Mike Masnick and I both think it was good that that law was struck down, too. But do we think people who promoted it were insincere about believing it was harmful or undesirable for children to see violent depictions?
> I don't understand "ruse" here. Protecting children wasn't a serious motivation of many people who supported it?
Maybe the ruse is using the motivation of protecting the children to downplay the First Amendment issues. At least some of the legislators might be so sincere and serious about protecting children that they don't fathom how broad the First Amendment's prohibitions on content-based regulation are. Or maybe the ruse is that the legislators frame the act as a design-based restriction or a conduct-based restriction rather than the content-based restriction it really is. In First Amendment cases, the strict scrutiny test applies to laws which indirectly cause removal of legal speech, not just laws which directly require removal.
By "Ruse," they mean the law's ruse of claiming to only regulate the conduct of design, when in actual fact the law clearly intends to regulate speech. It's a "ruse" to try to avoid a court noticing that the law obviously violates the First Amendment.
There are a few side tangents that maybe confused you. Here is just the main argument with tangents elided:
>... The California legislators ... tried to get around the obvious First Amendment issues by insisting that the bill was about conduct and design and not about speech. But as we pointed out, that was obviously a smokescreen. The only way to truly comply with the law was to suppress speech that politicians might later deem harmful to children.
... the court saw through the ruse and found the entire bill unconstitutional for the exact reasons we had warned the California government about.
> Protecting children wasn't a serious motivation of many people who supported it?
It may be helpful to understand the context.
Ambitious politicians have one goal above all others: Getting elected. This type of law impacts that in two ways. One, they'd really like private corporations to censor the opposition for them, but forcing them to is clearly unconstitutional and also offends voters who don't like that level of cynical authoritarian opportunism to be so transparent. Two, if you can drum up a moral panic and then purport to solve the problem you hyped up, some people will vote for you.
Politicians combine these two into laws like this. "Think of the children" laws too often pass because anyone opposed to them is painted as a monster regardless of the details of what is actually in the law or how ill-conceived it is. Their hope is that it will both disguise their underlying goal from the voters and invoke "hard cases make bad law" to create a precedent that laws in that style aren't unconstitutional, so the next one can do what the really want. Or, because the law is ambiguous and it's hard to even know if you're following it, have something that allows them to threaten arbitrary social media companies with prosecution if they don't do what the administration really wants in a backroom deal.
> But do we think people who promoted it were insincere about believing it was harmful or undesirable for children to see violent depictions?
It's not that they might not believe those things about a particular situation, it's that they're insincere about that situation being their true motivation for passing the law, and disingenuous about the ability of their law to address it. The politicians who propose "think of the children" laws are usually acting in bad faith, and when the law is overbroad with no regard for collateral damage or constitutionality, there is no doubt of it.
>Protecting children wasn't a serious motivation of many people who supported it?
Probably. People were seriously concerned about communist infiltrators in the 1950s. People were seriously concerned about Dungeons and Dragons and backwards masking and secret pedophile cults back and the "gay plague" of AIDS in the 1980s. People were seriously concerned about Muslims after 9/11. People are seriously concerned about transgender groomers and "the wokes" and Chinese mind control through TikTok today.
People are always sincerely concerned whenever the government gasses them up in a moral panic. The ruse comes from the government's response, because during moral panics Constitutional rights always seem to get in the way of Something Needing To Be Done.
Unfortunately one has to assume, by default, that any law passed under the aegis of "protecting children" nowadays has no actual intent behind it other than eroding Constitutional rights for the sake of ratcheting up fascism.
The other half of the problem is that the direction of these moral panics tends to embrace and expand the existing fundamental problem. Here, the tech industry desperately needs some competition in client software, which is currently being prevented by the anticompetitive bundling of client access software together with communication/hosting services. If there were competition, a parent could let their kid communicate on facebook/tiktok/etc with a client that worked in the interest of the kid themselves rather than being forced to take-or-leave the deliberately-designed-as-dopamine-traps singleton proprietary apps/webapps. But trying to fix that fundamental problem would likely step on too many moneyed toes and thus end up dead in the water. So instead this bill was aimed at creating even more of an anti-competitive moat in the hopes the tech giants would get on board.
From what I gather, the intent seems good. Identify if your product is likely to be used by children, how old these children are, ensure no harmful contacts or content is possible, collect only the minimal amount of data, don’t use this data to profile them, and make it easier for children to remove their data, as well as store it for a minimal time period.
The problem might be in the wording, like “likely to be used”, “dark patterns” and “harmful content” without specifying what this entails.
Wordpress, but still.
Holy god, no 350,000 modals in my face, 300 inline boxes / weird grids, a decent podcast, all the content I would need / want to see in viewport and .. just there? good stuff.
agree. and yes a quick look at source shows wp slugs. i guess it originally used slash and must've really stuck to the style. the look feels very 2000s, i love it.
This seems like a disingenuous take. The article highlights this part of the opinion which makes clear that a requirement to file a purely factual form (as in the California privacy law) would not violate the first amendment:
> That obligation to collect, retain, and disclose purely factual information about the number of privacy-related requests is a far cry from the CAADCA’s vague and onerous requirement that covered businesses opine on whether their services risk “material detriment to children” with a particular focus on whether they may result in children witnessing harmful or potentially harmful content online.
The compelled speech here is “for every feature of your website, provide a narrative evaluation of how it might hurt kids and how you are going to mitigate that risk”. That’s quite a bit different than “put a number in a box telling how much money you made this year”.
I find this falls in the same category as ‘you agree to the terms and conditions even if nobody actually reads a 200 page document’.
It’s not that I disagree the law is nonsense, but the argument doesn’t make any sense in my opinion.
There is nothing preventing anyone from filling out that evaluation with exactly the same ‘It will not materially impact children’ every time, any more than it stops people from adding the same zero to all fields on their tax forms.
Again, you are being disingenuous. Whether it materially impacts children is not a fact but a judgment.
The code is designed such that it is nearly impossible to say anything other than “it may impact children”. Websites are effectively forced to write a document that says “be believe that our site may negatively impact children”.
Now, what are the odds that a future politically-motivated DA won’t “accidentally” leak that “secret document which admits they knew they were harming children” when they want to go after someone for something unrelated?
I know this is conspiracy theory, but whenever "someone" tries to pass a regulation law in California, I can't help but feel that they are trying to inject bureaucracy into highly profitable industry to milk some money out. Look at 1600 feet (about 500 meters) rail bridge on the Fresno River Viaduct that cost 11 billion USD and took 9 years to build. The California agency must have distributed all the fund over the course of 9 years to "someone" in the name of regulation.
The whole California high-speed rail project is a gigantic white elephant and waste of taxpayer money. But that one viaduct over the Fresno River didn't cost anywhere near $11B.
>>>"The law was drafted in part by a British Baroness and Hollywood movie director who fell deep for the moral panic that the internet and mobile phones are obviously evil for kids."
While I agree the law should be stricken on first amendment grounds, this sentence, inasmuch as it implies anything factual about social media, is false and dumb. The evidence that social media is bad for kids especially girls is overwhelming.
> The evidence that social media is bad for kids especially girls is overwhelming.
Not so! It's bad for some kids but incredibly positive for others.
> The ability to form and maintain friendships online and develop social connections are among the positive effects of social media use for youth... Seven out of ten adolescent girls of color report encountering positive or identity-affirming content related to race across social media platforms... A majority of adolescents report that social media helps them feel more accepted (58%), like they have people who can support them through tough times (67%), like they have a place to show their creative side (71%), and more connected to what’s going on in their friends’ lives (80%).
> When asked about the overall impact of social media on them personally, more teens say its effect has been mostly positive (32%) than say it has been mostly negative (9%). The largest share describes its impact in neutral terms: 59% believe social media has had neither a positive nor a negative effect on them.
Sorry, pfdietz, but I'm not responsible for proving to you that the Holocaust happened, Sirhan Sirhan killed RFK, tobacco is harmful, or diabetes is related to the pancreas. Or that social media is harmful to children.
Goodness, now you're trying to equate me with holocaust deniers. The Holocaust, in case you didn't realize, has ample documentary evidence online that one can point to. Where is the equivalent for your position?
Anyway, great invocation of Godwin's Law there. You have lost. I remind you of the First Rule of Holes: when you find yourself in one, stop digging.
You are not THE judge of that, nor in fact are you ANY judge.
And I did not compare you to Hitler; I simply said that some facts do not merit the whiny question, "oh, do you have a link for that?" The debate about social media has already happened, and you're the one who lost.
If you want some links, as it appears you do, just go to scholar.google.com and search "social media harms." It says "About 1,390,000 results." (that doesn't mean you would get that many if you kept scrolling, of course)
Edit: we're done here. Have the last word if that's important to you.
Got any "overwhelming" evidence that isn't a podcast? I'm sure social media ain't great for anyone. It's mostly an incomprehensibly large amount of malignant noise...but pretending that justifies some kind of heavy handed government censorship is...well, I guess I'm on social media so when in Rome...overwhelmingly stupid
The "Coddling of the American Mind" guy? Pass. I was in college during the period he wrote about, and my impression is that he agglomerates mountains of misrepresented evidence to work the older generations into another panic about kids these days.
Do you have any support that he misrepresents mountains of evidence? Did you dig into the mountain and find a bunch of places where he misrepresented data? Or did you just go with your gut?
When I hear statements like this, I usually take it to mean "I don't like the conclusions he is drawing with the evidence"
In addition to what 'EMIRELADERO linked - like I said, I lived through the exact period in the American university system that Haidt reported on, and his descriptions don't match my first-hand experiences nor do they match the experiences of my peers. As a result, I do not consider him a trustworthy source. I'm not going with my gut, I'm going with my eyes and ears.
Nah, this isn’t something you can fight as an individual parent. Not unless you want to be seen as a tyrant anyway.
You might be able to pull it off in specific environment, but I’m not convinced the benefits of such an individual mandate outweigh the negatives (or rather, there are better alternatives).
Exactly, everyone in those generations was a tyrant. Therefore nobody was. It’s not about the thing itself, it’s about how it compares.
My point is that kids need to be able to play together, regardless of what ‘play’ means in this generation. If I make mine unable to play/communicate with his peers abot any topic relevant to them, I’m essentially deliberately isolating him.
> California Governor Gavin Newsom eagerly signed the bill into law, wanting to get some headlines about how he was “protecting the children.” When NetChoice challenged the law, Newsom sent them a very threatening letter, demanding they drop the lawsuit. Thankfully, they did not, and the court saw through the ruse and found the entire bill unconstitutional for the exact reasons we had warned the California government about.
> Specifically, they call out the DPIA requirement. This is a major portion of the law, which requires certain online businesses to create and file a “Data Protection Impact Assessment” with the California Attorney General. Part of that DPIA is that you have to explain how you plan to “mitigate the risk” that “potentially harmful content” will reach children (defined as anyone from age 0 to 18).
> And we’d have to do that for every “feature” on the website. Do I think that a high school student might read Techdirt’s comments and come across something the AG finds harmful? I need to first explain our plans to “mitigate” that risk. That sure sounds like a push for censorship.
It's some biased reporting here to be sure - but it's amazing how something like this gets so far as to actually be signed into law. It has significant and obvious flaws, the least of which are the constitutionality.
How have we gotten to a place where our elected officials - sworn to uphold the constitution - willingly and knowingly pass unconstitutional laws just to see how long they can get away with it?
Mike Masnick has a well known bias, and generally I think it fairly well matches a true & consistent view. If nothing else it's a view that few of those he has opposed over the decades have elaborated clearly or consistently; that consistency is both impressive, & the lack of consistency from those who would curb speech is a colossal disrecommendation.
Certainly officials bare a huge part of the blame for these ongoing travesties against speech & connectivity. But there is a very angry negative current in the world today, a disaffection with technology as a whole, that grows and grows. These rules, alas, reflect the simple public's simple rage, to some degree, I fear.
To be frank, the public rage to me still seems very engineered by a dying media old guard who cannot admit to any of their faults and blames the newcomers for everything especially the consequences of their very own actions.
People as a whole seem stupid, specifically in that they are more easily influenced than ChatGPT. Enough that when told "be angry about X" repeatedly they get angry instead of getting annoyed or angry at constant transparent attempts at emotional manipulation.
It does seem like a loophole that blatantly unconstitutional laws can be passed, enforced, and judged, until a court strikes it down. Who makes the accused whole? This is the legislative version of “move fast and break things”
Some countries use the opposite scheme, where a constitutional court needs to approve laws before they can go into effect. As you can imagine, that approach has a strongly centralizing effect and would not work well in a federal system like the US’.
It's not the job of the lawmakers to follow the constitution. That job belongs to the judges. Lawmakers ought to know what's constitutional and what's not because there's no point in passing a law that will immediately be struck down, but this whole process of passing laws and then having them be reviewed by judges is the process we've landed on for figuring out the boundaries of what's constitutional and what's not.
> It's not the job of the lawmakers to follow the constitution.
It is exactly their job to both follow and interpret the Constitution in executing their function as legislators and upholding their oath of office. You only go to Court when there is a case or controversy concerning the law, sometimes implicating the Constitution, but willfully passing a law which you know to be unconstitutional is breaking your oath of office, as is signing in such a law if you are the Governor of California or POTUS.
> willfully passing a law which you know to be unconstitutional
This is the sticking point. Do they know for a fact that it's unconstitutional? If they do then I agree they're in the wrong. My argument here is that they don't know it's unconstitutional, that they have some hope that it will manage to pass judicial review, or at least that judicial review will define the exact boundaries of how the constitution applies to the framing of this law and so they can come away with a modified law that goes right up to those boundaries.
All that said, it's a shitty law, and I'd rather get pissed at the lawmakers for attempting to pass this law because of what it's trying to do rather than arguments about constitutionality.
A good litmus test is if you are questioning whether a law is constitutional, you shouldn’t vote in favor of it. That’s upholding your oath. Getting it wrong isn’t breaking your oath, not caring whether it breaks your oath and putting pedal to the metal anyway is. The Constitution really only works when all parties involved are doing that much, which is why it’s egregious when a POTUS is like “yeah this is probably unconstitutional but I’m gonna sign it anyway and see what the courts say”. That’s the mark of a bad President that doesn’t care about his oath.
So yeah, when all else fails, it does end up coming down the courts, and under our own existing laws it shouldn’t be that way because the courts can get it wrong too and sometimes have.
So I’m with you that it’s a shitty law regardless of constitutionality, but it’s extra shitty when it comes with willful oathbreaking. They get away with it largely because our fellow Californians don’t give a shit.
Your original post said "It's not the job of the lawmakers to follow the constitution". To my ear, "follow" is a lot closer to "support and defend" than it is to "interpret".
> How have we gotten to a place where our elected officials - sworn to uphold the constitution - willingly and knowingly pass unconstitutional laws just to see how long they can get away with it?
The constitution is not a immutable document and "upholding" it has never meant anything. It is whatever the courts interpet it as and in this case the judge disagreed but you pull a different judge and you might get a different outcome.
That simply requires a prior amendment to make it constitutional.
Then again, there’s absolutely nothing saying you need to follow it at all. That’s just a social construct. You could strike it out entirely tomorrow, and as long as your monopoly on violence remains intact there’s little anyone could do against it.
If the Constitution were truly immutable, different iterations of the Supreme Court wouldn't be able to interpret the same words in different ways. In fact, we wouldn't even need a Supreme Court to interpret it. It would always mean exactly what it says in no uncertain terms, with the absolute certainty of mathematical proof.
But it is edited through the interpretation of the Supreme Court. And that's by design - the Constitution was written to be intentionally vague, which makes it unavoidably mutable.
This reads like the transcript of a discussion comprising a bunch of computer science students.
Words are not mathematical symbols. I know you'd like them to be unambiguous, but they're not. First-year law students would probably just smile tolerantly and pat you on the head.
Actually, everything is immutable. All things exist as they are. You are just moving to a different time coordinate (or rather a spacetime point). You can create a changed thing, but the original thing remains there unchanged.
The Constitution is mutable. By your definition, nothing is immutable because technically the data on the disk is overwritten in a manner technically recoverable by theoretical means.
immutable had a different meaning in common parlance than it does in datatypes. And even in datatypes usually you end up creating a new "copy" of the thing but with more info appended. The original remains as it was, unchanged (until garbage collection of course)
I don't see what this contributes. Written laws are immutable in the common sense of the word. That's what "legal certainty" means as an ideal: citizens can know what they'll be punished for. If it's unclear talk to your lawyer.
Why did it successfully pass in UK (and other countries) and what are the differences in the version passed in UK in actual requirements (to businesses) and protections (to children) compared to this one?
Actual legislation at https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billCompareClient.x...