#stop beard

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?

The reason civil rights worked is because it was peaceful and through that peacefulness combined with wide spread knowledge of the act, the violence of the actual bad side was shown. Violence was brought in to finish the job.

Does this mean I think we need to be violent? No. I think that for the things we’re trying to target right now, boycotting is the best option. Because the truth is companies run our government. It’s all about how much money they can make no matter the lives harmed and they get away with it because people want to believe that the powers at play are on their side and will blame the victim instead. Because the leopard eating face party would never eat my face!

So long term boycotts work best, because companies and our governments don’t care about the lives they’re harming and making worse. What they care about is money. So when they stop making money for a decent amount of time, they’ll have to make changes. Not cause they care about you. But because they care about money.

Violence may seem right, because you can get your frustrations out and you can’t really with boycotts. But what will make change in this case, with YouTube and Mastercard and visa, is boycotting and calling. Because once they start getting bad numbers, they’ll start getting desperate.