A new law, signed by Republican Governor Mike DeWine in July, is considered as a way to safeguard children’s mental health, citing concerns about the intentionally addictive nature of social media.
Anytime someone’s claim is the protection of children, you should apply a VERY heavy dose of scepticism and scrutiny.
I absolutely agree, but “you need parental consent to have an account” doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.
If you take it at face value, which you should really never do when conservatives are involved.
By my estimation, this (and bills like it) are intended to do two things:
- Reduce younger people’s access to points of view outside of the US political mainstream. In particular, Republican politicians seem very convinced that TikTok is turning kids gay/trans/atheist/communist/etc.
- Allow for aggrieved conservatives to extract money via lawsuit from corporations Republican politicians view as hostile to them. Because laws like this will obviously be circumvented, and these laws are written such that the platform is liable in these cases, these laws open them up to potentially millions of lawsuits every time a teenager gets an Instagram account.
Doesn’t COPPA already require this for children under 13? This state bill raises it to under 16.
I guess it comes down to the particulars. Is there something more onerous in the Ohio bill than in COPPA? Because I don’t think I’ve heard of any company seriously getting mad that COPPA is a thing.
You’d think if it was they’d be pointing to that.
As far as I’m concerned “you must have parental consent until 18” is perfectly legitimate, because you can’t really sign contracts or fully legally consent until then.
DeWine is a fascist shitbag, there’s zero chance this starts and ends with “protecting kids.”
How is it fascist to require trans treatment to be signed off on by a psychiatrist, an endocrinologist, and a bioethicist?
Is it just a matter of trying to control people’s bodies?
As a libertarian I oppose any law that requires any adult to get permission from any other adult before modifying their own body. But I don’t consider the normal method — using doctors to approve treatment plans — to be fascist. It’s just authoritarian.
The only way this if fascist is if it’s also fascist to require doctor’s approval before obtaining adderall or antibiotics.
Except you don’t require an psychiatrist, endocrinologist, and a bioethicist before obtaining adderall, do you? Any single doctor in any hospital can prescribe it for you in a single visit and not six months after moving between states. It’s also between you, your doctor, and your pharmacist, no government mandated central registry necessary, dispite adderall being far more commonly abused.
In a quote from the referenced article.-
“Imagine you have diabetes. There are five top diabetes specialists in your state, but you like most patients get your care from your primary care physician. The specialists provide better care, and their patients do better.
Now, imagine the impact of a regulation requiring all patients in your state to get diabetes treatment from one of those five. If you can’t see one of them your diabetes goes untreated.
If you’re an ordinary patient, the most likely outcome is that you lose treatment for your diabetes entirely. You don’t get improved care- there are still just five specialists, and they have no where near the capacity to see everyone with diabetes in the state.”
There’s a reason that these sorts of laws get overturned on anti-discrimination grounds, becuse they apply requirements to trans care that don’t apply to anyone else, including cis people taking the exact same medication.
For those interested in this topic, I recommend PhilosophyTube’s videos, particularly this one: I Emailed My Doctor 133 Times: The Crisis In the British Healthcare System
Also… What the heck is a bioethicist? That sounds like maybe someone involved in advising corporations on ethics, not someone I’d ever expect to see involved in private medical care. Regular doctors and nurses and etc are already required to study and practice ethical medicine.
I’d also like the point out that one can go get their tongue cut in half, or their leg bones lengthened, or get hormone treatment for balding or for menopause, or get a nose job, or surgery to make their boobs bigger or smaller, all without anything like what trans people are forced to go through for the most basic of things.
Even for someone who believes that the gender assigned at birth is the “real” one, or who dislikes or feels weirded out by trans people in general, I don’t see how one could justify imposing so many more restrictions on one group of people who want or need to modify their bodies than are imposed on any other group that seeks similar medical care.
Even if we do just talk about children, the disparity doesn’t make sense. Like, hormone blockers like those prescribed to trans children have been routinely and safely prescribed to cis children, in cases such as to delay early onset puberty (which, iirc but correct me if I’m wrong, is mostly only an issue because of the social consequences surrounding it), for decades. And in many of the new wave of anti-trans bills that ban hormone blockers to delay puberty for trans children, they specifically leave a cut out for cis children to still receive hormone blockers without issue. Because they don’t really believe delaying puberty is unsafe, that’s never been the point.
And that’s not even getting into comparisons with other major medical decisions made by parents and doctors, sometimes even without the consent of the children (let alone the vehemently expressed wish for treatment like trans children), like circumcision, or weight loss treatments or surgeries, or other cosmetic treatments, or even the forced surgeries and hormone treatments that have been routinely done on intersex children (largely the same treatments as a trans person would seek, but forced, to make a person look unambiguously like whichever sex the parents choose for them). If the people pushing these anti-trans bills really cared about children and parents and doctors making medical decisions with big consequences and risking regret, they should be talking about a whole lot of other things - things much less stringently regulated - besides trans healthcare. But nope, crickets.
That’s a decent point. Are there any other treatments that require a whole team of medical professional to sign off on?
I know dialectical behavioral therapy requires a team to implement, though I don’t know if it requires multiple sign-offs.
Protecting children would mean knowing which users are children, which would mean knowing the actual legal identity of every user of the platform. It’s never going to happen.
You don’t think that the data the companies collect and analyse from their users don’t already give them a decent idea? How do you think targeted advertising works?
That data is a very good guess, but not appropriate for legal application.
Yeah for that you’d need some kind of datepicker field marked “birthday”.
Which then wouldn’t be a legally full verification of your age, thus the legislation would probably require some other means. We currently have a similar discussion in the EU regarding porn sites. Verification methods could be showing your id card and your face to a webcam, or showing up at a verification office in person (at least in germany we have this with our national postal service). Of course the porn sites don’t want to implement this. And I cannot really blame them. Nobody would give a random porn site their real identity and it would still be very easy to get porn without verification.
Age verification on social media is very similar.
Really? That’s the basis of the lawsuit? That kids were being protected?
