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Because, god knows when it rains it pours, there’s yet another horrible internet bill on the table, and it is a doozy! 

It’s called the Kids Online Safety Act and it’s basically designed to force internet companies to mandate ID for website logins, destroy websites with any hint of a kid looking at things they aren’t supposed to (With an extremely broad definition of “what they aren’t supposed to”), force companies to send data “for study” to the government (IE, spy on kids) force them to use an age-verification system that will likely include mandatory government ID checks, and put on mandatory parental controls cranked up to high by default for parents to spy on their kids!

Now, this is a nightmare for several reasons. The mandated ID checks are horrifying and intrusive violation of privacy for adults and the young alike, in a way that screws over queer sex workers especially, and the increased liability for websites will lead to truly biblical purges of NSFW content, but there’s another big one:

This bill will lead to kids getting abused and killed.

Like, imagine that parental spying being used on queer or mentally ill teens. Imagine the definition of “not okay for minors” being expanded by, like say, the transphobic push in Texas or Florida’s Don’t Say Gay bill. You see where this goes.

Now, this is before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, who’s members are:

• Maria Cantwell, Washington, Chair
• Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota
• Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut
• Brian Schatz, Hawaii
• Ed Markey, Massachusetts
• Gary Peters, Michigan
• Tammy Baldwin, Wisconsin
• Tammy Duckworth, Illinois
• Jon Tester, Montana
• Kyrsten Sinema, Arizona (Unfortunately)
  
• Jacky Rosen, Nevada
• Ben Ray Luján, New Mexico
• John Hickenlooper, Colorado
• Raphael Warnock, Georgia
• Roger Wicker, Mississippi, Ranking Member
• John Thune, South Dakota 
• Roy Blunt, Missouri 
• Ted Cruz, Texas (Ugh)
• Deb Fischer, Nebraska 
• Jerry Moran, Kansas 
• Dan Sullivan, Alaska 
• Marsha Blackburn, Tennessee 
• Mike Lee, Utah 
• Ron Johnson, Wisconsin 
• Shelley Moore Capito, West Virginia 
• Todd Young, Indiana 
• Rick Scott, Florida 
• Cynthia Lummis, Wyoming
  

You can find their contact info here, and if they’re a part of your state, contact them and tell them this bill is a spying bill that will kill children, it needs to die.

But, even in other state, contact your sentators any way you can, and tell them this is a bad bill, and if it gets out of committee, it needs to die.

Tell your friends IRL to do it too either way, because they measure this shit in terms of how many messages they get, and so we need to flood their offices, and this goes for the other bad internet bills I’ve talked about too.

Again, deeply fatigued by all the godawful internet bills, but this is a goddamn war, and nobody ever won a war by giving up…