#block beard act

Minors Against Online “Safety”. I feel like messages against censorship “for the children” will be more effective coming from the children it’s claiming to protect.

Here’s the plan: Find your state’s senators and house representatives. Call them, email them, tell them every little way these bills are detrimental, to BOTH children and adults. Most importantly, do it CONSTANTLY. At least once every few days, IF NOT MORE. AND, tell your friends and classmates to do it too. Regardless of political orientation, I can’t imagine any teen taking kindly to the idea of their internet access being limited or completely revoked.

The bills we’re targeting are: KOSA (requires age verification to access many websites), KOSMA (bans people under 13 from using social media) , the SCREEN act (blocks content seen as harmful to minors for ALL audiences), Block BEARD (supposedly protects against foreign piracy), and the Take It Down act(blocks content seen as sexually obscene to ALL audiences), which has already passed but is ridiculously unconstitutional, so maybe we can get the Supreme Court on that.

Some good points that you may want to bring up (if you can think of any others, put them in comments, please!)

- The SCREEN act could limit a teen’s access to Sex Ed, especially for the lgbtq+ community, who don’t always get taught how to stay safe in schools.

- While this might cut down on kids access to negative content, it could also very easily cut down on access to positive content as well. (e.g. , a child becomes suicidal. While they might no longer have access to material encouraging them to commit, they will likely also lose access to material discouraging them as well)

- A lot of the big companies that would have to enforce these policies are subject to data breaches. What would happen if a predator got access to a list of users containing their ages?

- Block BEARD could lead to many non-profit sites being banned in the U.S. (such as AO3, a fanfiction website that has content tagging and filtering systems put in place, that would likely make it difficult for a child to encounter obscene content, if supervised properly by their guardians.)

- The president has specifically stated that he intends to to use the Take It Down Act to censor those who disagree with him. Not only is this a pretty direct violation of the First Amendment, the government has also put policies like this in place before, to undesirable effects (Alien and Sedition Act).

- Neurodivergent kids. Socializing in person can be quite hard for many ND children, but sites like Discord can be an outlet to help them find connection. KOSMA will ban kids under 13 from social media, which is not only somewhat useless in itself, seeing that most big social media sites either require this already or are specifically for children, but also doesn’t account for the possibility of a child using their parent’s account.

- China. China is infamous in the western world for the unbelievable amount of censorship it puts on its citizens online activity, but not even China requires this kind of age verification.

- A child’s parents should be the one in charge of what they deem too inappropriate for their child, not the government. What if abrahamic religion was considered obscene? How would Christian and Jewish and Muslim parents educate their children on their beliefs?

Please, please, PLEASE start downloading the things you like. Whether that be videos, games, or written works, please download them.

We're entering a digital age that's uncertain, and there's a high chance we'll need to start saving what we can to protect the history of the internet.

As I stated in my post as an addition to Gentleman Velvet's youtube boycott plan, you need to start downloading your stuff so that you can decrease your site activity to the point of nothing.

Please don't forget what Youtube did with COPPA. I know the worst of it has been cleaved away, with the annoying aspects remaining still, but that could've been the end of YouTube as we know it.

And this new set of rules and ai Youtube wants to use to force you to doxx yourself will either be repealed, or it will destroy the site (and possibly the internet) as we know it.

If you're a creator, start archiving your work and moving it. Don't rely on one site for uploading. I know that it's tempting, but you have to refuse the urge to only use Ao3.

You have to refuse the urge to only use YouTube as a video service too.

___

Another reminder before I sign off.

If you are American, contact your representive and senator about

KOSA

the SCREEN Act

and the Block Beard Act.

These are all censorship propositions that will make the internet more unsafe and sterile. Block Beard is a new proposed bill designed to block piracy sites in America.

Please, if you are a United States citizen, do what you can now to prevent these from passing.

If you are in the UK, sign the petition to repeal the Online Safety Act.

Yes, the government said that it won't repeal it, but that's okay! Get it to 500k signatures and above, it makes more of a case in the debate in Parliament.

Use a VPN! Sites that are being forced by Ofcom to use age verification are going to ban UK users because it's too much work and frankly they can't afford the fines.

Contact your MP!

And protest this!

This is an important fight, not just against censorship but to save lives. These laws are dangerous things that can funnel children into the hunting grounds of child predators and human traffickers. With the 18+ age verification and bans on sites meant to help victims of abuse, this will result in children being unable to articulate what they experienced, or be able to understand that they're being abused at all.

The Block BEARD Bill will crack down on online piracy.

If you have a favorite retro media that you enjoy, piracy is a huge part of what is keeping it from becoming lost media.