speech about internet safety

• Speech on Internet for Students and Children

Speech on Internet

Very good morning to all. Today, I am here to present a speech on internet. Someone has rightly said that the world is a small place. With the advent of the internet, this saying seems realistic. The internet has really bought the world together and the distance between two persons is really not a distance today. We all know about the technological advancements happening in the world. One of the major attributes of technological advancement is the internet. Today the internet is available easily to many individuals. Also, it is rapidly changing the way we work, travel, educate and entertain.

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Evolution of Internet

Many of you are aware of what the internet facility is. Still, I would like to highlight the aspects of the internet. The internet is a facility wherein two gadget screens are connected through signals. Thus, through this medium, the information can be exchanged between two gadgets.

The history of the internet dates back to 40 years ago with its first use in the United States of America and the inventor of the internet was Robert E.Kahn and Vint Cerf. Earlier the internet was only used to send emails between two computers. Today it has reached all distant parts of the globe with more than 1.5 million users. They use the internet for exchange of information, entertainment, money exchanges, etc.

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Pros of the Internet

The internet facility has many advantages and it has proved to be a milestone in the technical advancement of humankind. It allows users to exchange and communicate information. Two users who are sitting in distant corners of the world can easily communicate through mails, chats, and video conferencing by using the internet.

It provides information of all kinds to its users. Also, it provides entertainment by offering services of watching movies, listening to music, playing a game. Various day to day activities such as travel ticket bookings, banking facilities, shopping, etc. can be easily done through the internet.

Nowadays the internet also offers various dating websites and matrimonial websites by which one can find their prospective soul mate.

The Internet also offers a facility to its users where they can earn online by means of blogs and video blogs. These are some of the major benefits of the internet has a dark side also.

Cons of the Internet

Many a number of people misuse information for fraud and illegal works. Due to excessive use of the internet in the wrong hands, a number of cybercrimes are happening which is affecting the trust of the people on the internet.

Abuse over social media is also prevailing through the internet wherein people of negative mentality abuse other people on the basis of caste, race, color, appearance, etc. Addiction to online games is one of the major problems of parents today as children get addicted to online games and avoid their studies and outdoor activities.

The internet has nowadays become such an important part of the life of the people that it is hardly possible to spend even a day without using the internet. Thus after seeing the negatives of the internet, it is not practically possible to completely avoid the internet. However, we can put a timeline or restriction on its usage especially to children.

The parents and teachers can monitor the online activities of their children and guide them on the proper use of the internet. We should also educate and aware people of online cybercrime and fraud. Thus through proper precautions and adopting safety measures the internet can prove to be a boon for the development of human society.

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Internet Safety for Kids  - Teaching Kids About Internet Safety

Internet safety for kids  -, teaching kids about internet safety, internet safety for kids teaching kids about internet safety.

Internet Safety for Kids: Teaching Kids About Internet Safety

Lesson 1: teaching kids about internet safety,  teaching kids about internet safety.

The Internet can be a wonderful place to learn, shop, play games, and talk to your friends. Unfortunately, there are also predators, identity thieves, and others online who may try to harm you. In order to be safe online, it's important for you and your kids to be aware of the dangers.

Many kids are confident that they know how to be safe online. However, there are a few reasons kids are often more at risk. They may not always think about the consequences of their actions, which can cause them to share too much information about themselves. Kids also are sometimes specifically targeted by cyberbullies or predators.

If you're a parent or guardian, you can help to keep your kids safe by talking to them about their Internet use , teaching them about online dangers , and learning everything you can about the Internet so you can make informed decisions.

About this tutorial

This tutorial is designed for any parent or guardian who wants to learn how to keep their kids safe online. You may want to review our Internet Safety tutorial first so you'll have a basic understanding of online safety. Throughout this tutorial, we'll link to other resources you can use if you want more information. We'll also link to some activities, videos, and other resources that are geared toward kids and teens. You may want to show these resources to your kids or even work through them together.

If you want to learn the basics of using the Internet, you can also check out our Internet Basics , Email 101 , and Beyond Email tutorials.

Understanding online dangers

In order to keep your kids safe, you'll need to know about the different types of online dangers that exist. For example, kids and teens may find inappropriate content on the Internet, such as pornography or obscene language. There is also a possibility of cyberbullying or cyberharassment from others online. This does not mean your child will encounter all of these threats. However, knowing about the dangers can help you and your kids make smart decisions online.

Review the interactive below to learn about some of the dangers kids can encounter online.

Malware is malicious software that is designed to damage your computer or steal your personal information . It includes viruses, spyware, and other types of software.

Malware is often secretly bundled with other software, and it can also infect email attachments.

Cyber-stalking

Cyber-stalking is any kind of harassment or threatening behavior that occurs online. It can happen through instant messaging, text messaging, email, or social networks. If the perpetrator is a child or teen, it is often called cyberbullying .

In the online world, piracy refers to illegally sharing copyrighted materials . This can include music, movies, TV shows, and software. For many kids, sharing files may seem innocent, but it can result in stiff penalties.

Phishing is a type of scam where the scammer tries to trick you into revealing your personal information . Usually, it involves an email, instant message, or website that is designed to look like it's from a legitimate company.

The Internet contains a lot of content you probably don't want your kids to see, including pornography, violent content, and vulgar language .

Cyberbullying

Cyberbullying is bullying that occurs online , often through instant messaging, text messaging, email, and social networks.

Cyberbullies may be the same age as the victims, or they may be older. If the perpetrator is an adult, it is generally called cyber-stalking or cyberharassment .

Revealing too much

Many kids and teens like to post photos and share information about themselves. In some cases, this information can be used by online predators .

It's also possible for an embarrassing photo to damage a kid's or teen's reputation . This can affect their social life, and it may even come back to haunt them years later when they're applying for a job.

Other types of dangers

Whenever someone uses a computer, there is a risk of eye strain , wrist strain , and other injuries . You can help prevent this by limiting the amount of time your kids spend on computers and mobile devices. For tips on avoiding injury, read Creating a Safe Workspace in our Computer Basics tutorial.

There's also another reason to limit your kids' Internet use: Because people are spending more and more time online, Internet addiction is becoming a more significant problem. Internet use can be a good thing, but if it becomes an addiction it can affect a person's offline life.

Places where dangers can occur

It's important for kids to be careful whenever they're connected to the Internet because online dangers are not just limited to bad websites . Chat rooms, computer games, and even social networking sites can be risky. If your kids have mobile phones, they'll also need to be careful when texting or when accessing the Internet on their phones.

Review the slideshow below to learn about some of the places online where kids can be at risk.

Guidelines for keeping your kids safe

It can be difficult to keep your kids completely safe online. Even if you set up parental controls on your home computer, your kids will use many other computers that don't have parental controls. To keep your kids safe, you'll need to teach them to make good decisions online—even when you're not around.

Below are some general tips you can use when teaching your kids about online safety:

• Learn everything you can about the Internet. Being familiar with the Internet will not only help you understand the risks, but it will also help you talk to your kids.
• Set standards for what your kids can and cannot do online. It's important to make rules for your kids so they know what's expected of them. Don't wait until something bad happens to start creating guidelines.
• Teach your kids to keep personal information private . It's usually a bad idea to post personal information online such as phone numbers, addresses, and credit cards. If criminals gain access to this information, they can use it to harm you or your family.
• Teach your kids to use social networking sites safely. Sites like Facebook allow kids—and adults—to share photos and videos of themselves, as well as have conversations with friends and strangers. If your kids share something with friends, it's still possible for it to get into the wrong hands. Generally, they should only post something online if they're comfortable with everyone in the world seeing it.
• Encourage your kids to come to you if they encounter a problem. If your child gets into trouble online, you'll want him or her to come to you instead of hiding it. Keep in mind that your kids could accidentally encounter a bad site, even if they're doing everything right.
• Talk to your kids about Internet use. Talk to your kids regularly about how they use the Internet. If they're in the habit of talking to you about the Internet, they'll be more willing to come to you if there's a problem.

The Federal Trade Commission has videos and other resources you may find helpful. Watch the following video to learn more about talking to your kids about Internet safety.

Minimizing risks at home

If you have a home computer your kids use, there are some extra precautions you can take to make it safer. Remember that your kids will probably use many other computers, and these precautions won't keep them safe when they're not at home. Also, keep in mind that these are merely suggestions; depending on your parenting style and your kids' ages, you may choose not to use all of them.

• Keep the computer in the living room or in another common area. By putting the computer in a common area of the house, you can reduce the chance that they'll talk to strangers or visit inappropriate websites. For teens, you may choose to give them more freedom about where they use the computer (especially if they have their own computers).
• Install antivirus software. Viruses and other malware are a risk for any computer (although Macs are slightly safer). To protect your computer, you can install antivirus software such as BitDefender or Norton .
• Use a kid-friendly search engine. Regular search engines may return results with inappropriate content you don't want your kids to see. However, there are some search engines that are designed to only return kid-friendly results (although there is still the possibility of inappropriate results getting through). Examples include KidTopia and KidRex.org .
• Use parental controls. Windows and Mac OS X allow you to add parental controls to user accounts. These include time limits , website restrictions , and controlling which applications can be opened . You can also buy parental control software like Net Nanny , which has versions for Windows and Mac.

Creating an Internet safety contract

Once you've established Internet guidelines, you may want to put them in writing. You can create an Internet safety contract your kids can sign, and then you can keep a copy of it near the computer.

There are also premade contracts you can download and print. One example is the Family Online Safety Contract , which you can download from the Family Online Safety Institute . In addition to a contract, it includes a contract for parents, which contains guidelines you may find helpful.

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Internet Safety Is the New Internet Freedom

And it comes with a cost..

On Jan. 25, 2011, protests erupted across Egypt against the regime of Hosni Mubarak. As an estimated 2 million people protested at Tahrir Square in Cairo, the government tried to control the narrative by first blocking Twitter and then Facebook. Within a couple of days, Egypt’s telecom services would go dark. According to reports at the time, “the shutdown caused a 90 percent drop in data traffic to and from Egypt, crippling an important communications tool used by antigovernment protesters and their supporters to organize and to spread their message.”

Egypt’s digital shutdown sent shock waves across the world , leading people to one conclusion: Internet freedom was under threat. In a speech, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that internet freedom “is about whether we live on a planet with one internet, one global community, and a common body of knowledge that benefits and unites us all, or a fragmented planet in which access to information and opportunity is dependent on where we live and the whims of censors.”

A decade later, the picture is quite different—because the world and the internet have both changed dramatically. In 2011, it was Facebook that was celebrated for accelerating Egypt’s awakening ; in 2021, Facebook is vilified for seeming to do little to moderate posts in the world’s most violent countries, or for its struggles to contain insurrectionists’ posts . Today’s internet has become one that calls for safety rather than freedom, and governments are ready to step in, as evidenced by privacy-invading legislation in Canada, Australia, the U.K., and beyond.

Since the Enlightenment, public safety has been seen as the first duty of government. For the government’s guarantee of safety and security, Enlightenment thinkers observed, individuals would abandon the free state of nature. Hobbes wrote about this: “The end for which one man giveth up, and relinquisheth to another, or others, the right of protecting and defending himself by his own power, is the security which he expecteth thereby, of protection and defense from those to whom he doth so relinquish it.” For Enlightenment philosophers, security was central to the concessions people would make for the state.

Fighting misinformation (especially during a pandemic) and extremist content, seeking to expose child abusers who use internet services—all of these issues easily fall under the notion of “public safety,” and they provide the state with justification for intervention. If sovereignty is conditional upon the sovereign’s ability to ensure the safety and security of the people, then the state should have every right to act on any of these issues.

However, in practice, internet safety is opposed to the most fundamental benefits of the internet: empowering citizens, global interconnectedness, and opening new avenues for innovation. Whereas we once sought a more global and open internet, internet safety represents a movement that is inward-looking, fragmented—and often dangerously misguided.

The Online Safety Bill in the United Kingdom is a prime example. Promising to make “ the UK the safest place in the world to be online ,” the broad and unfocused bill contains threats to freedom of expression, privacy, security, and the internet. The bill’s main goal, to fight illegal and harmful content, would be accomplished by imposing a “duty of care” on internet service providers. The duty of care would also extend to users, who could face up to two years in prison for sending messages or posting content that causes “psychological harm” to others . If the bill passes, the U.K. government, in collaboration with the Office of Communication, the bill’s uberregulator, will need to introduce “ codes of practice to specify different levels of the duty of care and liability .” (At the moment, the scope and reach of the duty of care remain unclear.) Furthermore, the bill would ban end-to-end encrypted communication services in the name of safety. Service providers would be criminally liable for the acts of their users if law enforcement agencies do not manage to get access to encrypted communications data. Finally, the Online Safety Bill would justify the criminal prosecution of tech executives who fail to address how their algorithms cause harm. “Remove your harmful algorithms today and you will not be subjected—named individuals—to criminal liability and prosecution,” said U.K. culture secretary Nadine Dorries.

Australia faces a similar situation. Freedom House’s Freedom on the Net 2021 report says that “Internet freedom in Australia [has] regressed” thanks in particular to the passage of its own Online Safety Act. Enacted in June, the legislation introduces a set of “basic online safety expectations” that internet service providers, social media platforms, and other online parties are expected to uphold. These include protecting minors from certain content, responding to user complaints about cyberbullying targeting Australian children and the sharing of nonconsensual content, and removing content that is abusive toward Australians in general.

Finally, in Canada, elections put a temporary pause on a legislative proposal that targets five different categories of harmful content: hate speech, child sexual abuse, terrorism, incitement to violence, and the nonconsensual sharing of intimate images. The main focus is on big platforms (such as Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and Pornhub), which will be required to take reasonable steps to block such content in Canada; once content has been identified as harmful and/or illegal, it will need to be removed within 24 hours. The act also gives law enforcement agencies discretionary powers “ in identifying public safety threats .” On the Mozilla blog, Owen Bannett writes that “in its proposal that platforms take down more content in ever-shorter periods of time, the government’s approach merely responds to symptoms and not structural causes of online harms. Worse still, the government’s proposal includes some suggested policy ideas that would have the opposite effect of making online spaces healthier and more inclusive.” For instance, Bannett says, “The government’s apparent ‘zero-tolerance’ approach to objectionable content … manifests through the proposal that online services must report instances of ‘potentially criminal content’ to national security agencies. This … will incentivize greater and more invasive monitoring of individuals by platforms (e.g. upload filtering; real-name policies) and have a disparate impact on those individuals and communities who already face structural oppression in the criminal justice system.” The legislation is slated to return under the new government, and there is nothing to indicate it will not pass when it gets reintroduced.

In the name of safety, governments are placing conditions that make it increasingly difficult for internet actors to prioritize security. Encryption is a clear example. Encryption tools constitute important security building blocks and are a sign of a healthy network. So, when government interventions in the name of safety compromise encryption’s integrity, they create islands of insecure networks that will find it difficult to interconnect with secure ones, further fragmenting the internet.

Safety and freedom are not irreconcilable, and they should not be treated as such. Benjamin Franklin famously said , “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” It is the responsibility of government to find the balance between safety and freedom. In its current application, however, the focus on safety facilitates the creation of central chokepoints that allow the state to intervene. Given that the global nature of the internet is a feature and not a bug, this intervention leads to fragmentation and conflict.

So why, then, is internet safety such a popular idea?

There is a practical reason, and it concerns the market’s failure to self-regulate and effectively address issues of safety. The very companies that were seen as beacons of internet freedom around the world 10 years ago are currently depicted as the causes of an unsafe internet environment. Data leaks , ransomware attacks , a wave of misinformation and disinformation , and various cybersecurity incidents have made us all feel less safe and, often, less free. For instance, earlier this year news broke that the Israeli surveillance company NSO Group was selling hacking software to authoritarian governments around the world to target human rights activists, journalists, politicians, and lawyers. With no solution coming from the market, governments had no option but to intervene, mainly through regulations that perpetuate the tension between safety and freedom. In fact, the Freedom on the Net 2021 report found that “while some democratic governments have made good faith attempts to regulate the technology industry, state intervention in the digital sphere worldwide has contributed to the 11 th consecutive year of global decline in internet freedom.”

No one wants an internet where illegal or harmful acts occur, where networks are accessed without authorization, where phishing and email frauds are rampant, and where sexual abuse and terrorism proliferate. Equally, we should not want an internet that is less global, is insecure, or where basic human rights are not respected. The problem is not with the term internet safety , per se. It is more about the way the phrase is being abused and, often, used as an excuse for control over global communications.

We must observe the way internet safety is used and call out the instances it is abused. The future of the internet might depend on it.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate , New America , and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

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Regions & Countries

More so than adults, u.s. teens value people feeling safe online over being able to speak freely.

Teens and adults in the United States differ on a key issue tied to online speech and its consequences. A majority of teens ages 13 to 17 say a welcoming, safe online environment is more important than people being able to speak their minds freely online, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. A separate survey of Americans 18 and older shows that adults’ views on the same question are more evenly divided.

Overall, 62% of teens say people being able to feel welcome and safe online is more important than people being able to speak their minds freely online, while 38% hold the opposite view. By comparison, half of adults say a welcoming and safe online environment is more important, while a similar share (47%) put more value on people being able to speak their minds freely online.

Adults ages 18 to 29 differ from their younger teen counterparts on this question. Some 57% of adults in this age group favor the idea that people should be able to speak their minds freely online. Those 65 and older, by contrast, are the only age group whose views are similar to teens’: 58% of these Americans say feeling welcome and safe online is more important.

Pew Research Center conducted these studies to understand teens’ and adults’ views about online speech and the broader online environment. This analysis relies on data from two separate surveys. For the analysis of teens, the Center conducted an online survey of 1,316 U.S. teens from April 14-May 4, 2022, via Ipsos. Ipsos recruited the teens via their parents who were a part of its  KnowledgePanel , a probability-based web panel recruited primarily through national, random sampling of residential addresses. The teen results are weighted to be representative of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 who live with parents by age, gender, race, ethnicity, household income and other categories. The research was reviewed and approved by an external institutional review board, Advarra, which is an independent committee of experts that specializes in helping to protect the rights of research participants.

For the separate analysis of adults, the Center surveyed 3,581 U.S. adults from March 21-27, 2022. All adults who took part in the survey are members of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey of adults is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the  ATP’s methodology .

Here are  the questions used for the survey of teens, along with its methodology ; and here are the questions used for the survey of adults, and its methodology .

But there is also nuance in people’s views of online speech. For example, when asked which of two statements about the way people react to offensive content online comes closer to their view, the majority of teens (59%) think that many people take such content too seriously, as do 54% of adults. Smaller shares in both groups believe offensive content online is too often excused as “not a big deal” (40% of teens and 44% of adults).

Similar to teens, about six-in-ten adults ages 18 to 29 (62%) say offensive content is taken too seriously, as do 56% of those ages 30 to 64. By contrast, just 41% of adults 65 and older say the same.

These new results are from two Center surveys – one of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 conducted April 14-May 4, 2022, and one of U.S. adults conducted March 21-27, 2022. They come in the wake of heightened bipartisan calls for tech companies to address cyberbullying and create a safe environment for teens. They also come amid continued court battles over whether schools can impose consequences on adolescents for what they say online – and broader debates about people being banned by social media platforms or “ canceled ” by their peers.

Politics shapes views about online discourse among both teens and adults

In both surveys, Americans’ views on these topics break sharply along partisan lines. But regardless of what party they identify with or lean toward, teens are more likely than adults with similar partisan leanings to say allowing for safe spaces online is more important than being able to speak freely online.

Some 71% of teens who identify as Democrats or lean toward the Democratic Party say this, compared with 62% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning adults. About half of Republican-identifying or GOP-leaning teens (49%) also back a welcoming and safe environment – 13 percentage points greater than the share of Republican and GOP-leaning adults (36%) who hold the same view.

Among both teens and adults, though, there are substantial differences by party. Republican teens are 23 points more likely than Democratic teens to say being able to speak freely online is more important. Among adults, Republicans are 26 points more likely than Democrats to say the same. Democratic adults instead are more likely to favor welcoming, safe spaces by the same margin.

On the question of offensive content, teens’ and adults’ views within each party are similar. Gaps between parties emerge for both teens and adults: Democratic teens are more likely than Republican teens to say that offensive content online is too often excused as not a big deal (50% vs. 27%), and there is a similar pattern for Democratic versus Republican adults (55% vs. 32%). By comparison, 72% of Republican teens and 67% of Republican adults say many take offensive content they see online too seriously.

Among adults, views on these topics within each political party have continued to evolve over the past several years. In 2017, when Pew Research Center first asked adults these questions, Democrats and Republicans held largely similar views about the balance of online safe spaces versus freedom of expression. That changed in 2020 and the partisan split on this question has widened from 16 to 26 points in the past two years. On the question about offensive content online, the partisan gap among adults has slightly narrowed since 2020 but remains pronounced. Adults’ overall views on this question have remained largely unchanged during this period.

The changes since 2020 are largely driven by those at the ideological poles in their respective parties. The share of conservative Republican adults who say free speech is more important in this context has risen from 57% in 2020 to 68% today, even as the view that offensive content is taken too seriously among that group has dipped somewhat from 74% to 67%. Liberal Democrats are now slightly more likely to think offensive content is taken too seriously than in 2020 (rising from 31% to 39%), but the majority of this group think it’s too often excused as not a big deal (61% say this today, compared with 68% in 2020).

Attitudes among teens, adults also differ by demographic factors

Views of the online environment that teens and adults encounter also vary by race, ethnicity and gender. 

For example, Black and Hispanic teens are more likely than their White peers to say that feeling welcome and safe online is more important than free speech online, and that offensive content is too often excused as not a big deal.

Among adults, those who are Black (60%) are more likely than either White (50%) or Hispanic (46%) adults to prioritize feeling welcome and safe. Black adults are also more likely than Hispanic adults to say offensive content is too often excused as not a big deal (51% vs. 38%). The views of White and Hispanic adults are statistically similar on both questions. (There were not enough Asian teens or adults in the samples to be broken out into a separate analysis. As always, their responses are incorporated into the general population figures throughout this analysis.)

Teen girls are also more likely than teen boys to prioritize feeling welcome and safe and to say offensive content is too often excused. Similarly, adult women (58%) are more likely than adult men (42%) to value a welcoming, safe environment and to feel people too often excuse offensive material as not a big deal (50% vs. 38%).

In many cases, differences are still present when accounting for other relevant characteristics that may be playing a role. Differences in by party and gender remain among teens on both questions when controlling for other factors, as do differences by race and ethnicity for views of offensive content. Among adults, party, age and gender matter after controlling for demographics.

Note: Here are  the questions used for the survey of teens, along with its methodology ; and here are the questions used for the survey of adults, and its methodology .

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Most U.S. teens who use cellphones do it to pass time, connect with others, learn new things

How parents feel about – and manage – their teens’ online behavior and screen time, teens who are constantly online are just as likely to socialize with their friends offline, teens’ social media habits and experiences, how teens and parents navigate screen time and device distractions, most popular.

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

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Protecting children online, every child must be protected from violence, exploitation and abuse on the internet..

• Violence against children
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Children are spending more time online than ever before. And they’re getting there sooner. Around the world, a child goes online for the first time every half second.

Growing up online offers limitless opportunities. Through computers, smartphones, gaming consoles, and televisions, children learn, imagine and develop their social networks. When used in the right way – and accessible to all – the internet has the potential to broaden horizons and ignite creativity the world over.

But with these opportunities come serious risks.

Cyberbullying and other forms of peer-to-peer violence can affect young people each time they log in to social media or instant messaging platforms. When browsing the internet, children may be exposed to hate speech and violent content – including messages that incite self-harm and even suicide.

Children can also be put at risk when tech companies breach their privacy to collect data for marketing purposes. Child-targeted marketing through apps – and the excessive screen time it often results in – can compromise a child’s healthy development.

More than a third of young people in 30 countries report being cyberbullied, with 1 in 5 skipping school because of it.

Most alarming is the threat of online sexual exploitation and abuse . It has never been easier for child sex offenders to contact their potential victims, share imagery and encourage others to commit offences. Children may be victimized through the production, distribution and consumption of sexual abuse material, or they may be groomed for sexual exploitation, with abusers attempting to meet them in person or exhort them for explicit content.

In the digital world, any person from any location can create and store sexually exploitative content. Child sex offenders may even livestream sexual abuse from the confines of their homes, directing on-demand abuse of children far away.

Some 80% of children in 25 countries report feeling in danger of sexual abuse or exploitation online.

As children embrace more digital platforms, they too may self-generate sexually explicit imagery. And though these images might be intended for an age-appropriate relationship, they can end up widely shared without consent. Sometimes, trusted adults solicit children to share imagery. For a child victim, this may result in social isolation, mental health issues, substance abuse, self-harm or suicide, as well as an increased likelihood of exhibiting abusive behaviours themselves in adulthood.

UNICEF’s response

What happens online reflects the realities children face every day – at home, at school and in their wider communities.

Strategies to promote online safety must protect the educational and health benefits of digital technologies, while addressing the risks of exposure to violence, exploitation, and abuse, as well as to privacy breaches.

UNICEF works to make the internet a safe place for children to learn, socialize and express themselves. We partner with governments to advocate for necessary regulation, and with tech companies to promote the use of acceptable safety measures on their platforms. We also support ministries of education to teach children digital-literacy and online-safety skills.

Through our Global Kids Online   and Disrupting Harm projects, we gather evidence on children’s digital rights, opportunities and risks to better understand how use of digital technology contributes to their lives – and when it amplifies their risk of harm.

How does UNICEF address the online sexual exploitation of children?

UNICEF prevents and responds to the online sexual exploitation of children at the country and global level. We support coordinated national responses to online child sexual exploitation in over 20 countries – using the WePROTECT Global Alliance model – and strengthen the capacity of on-the-ground responders to provide services to victims. We work closely with governments to guide investments in evidence-based preventive programmes and awareness-raising. And we collaborate with tech companies to make digital products safer for children, providing industry guidelines and developing cutting-edge tools to stop the circulation of child sexual abuse materials.

More from UNICEF

Growing concern for well-being of children and young people amid soaring screen time

Cyberbullying: What is it and how to stop it

What teens want to know about cyberbullying

DR Congo: Children killed, injured, abducted, and face sexual violence in conflict at record levels for third consecutive year – UNICEF

On World Poetry Day, hundreds of children affected by conflict and war share Poems for Peace

Ending online child sexual exploitation and abuse , addressing technology-facilitated child sexual exploitation and abuse in the face of covid 19  , covid-19 and its implications for protecting children online: a technical note from unicef and partners, the state of the world’s children, 2017: children in a digital world, perils and possibilities: growing up online, guidelines for industry on online child protection  , advocacy brief: child online protection, weprotect global alliance: intelligence brief impact of covid-19 on online child sexual exploitation, weprotect global alliance: global threat assessment, 2019 – working together to end the sexual exploitation of children online, weprotect global alliance: preventing and tackling child sexual exploitation and abuse – a model national response, weprotect global alliance: working examples of model national response capabilities and implementation, global kids online, disrupting harm, online course: action to end child sexual exploitation and abuse, legislating for the digital age: global guide on improving legislative frameworks to protect children from online sexual exploitation and abuse framing the future: how the model national response framework is supporting national efforts to end child sexual exploitation and abuse online.

Last updated 23 June 2022

Safer Internet Day: Prioritize and protect child well-being online

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Although millions of boys and girls worldwide have relied on the internet to play, socialize and learn during the COVID-19 pandemic, time online can also expose them to online sexual exploitation, cyberbullying and other risks, the head of the UN Children’s Fund ( UNICEF ) said on Tuesday.

UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore is among experts expressing growing concern for the well-being of children who were already facing these online risks even before the pandemic. 

When you’re bullied online, it can feel as if you’re being attacked everywhere and there is no escape, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. This #SaferInternetDay, check out our advice on how to protect yourself online and prioritise your mental health. UNICEF UNICEF February 8, 2021

“For children already experiencing harm or hurt – online or offline – the rise in screen time may have exacerbated their anguish”, she said in a statement marking Safer Internet Day. 

“School closures, physical distancing, decreased services, and increased strain on already vulnerable families disrupted and reduced some of the protective measures available to them.” 

Sexual predators lurking online 

Due to the pandemic, children have seen their worlds shrink to just their homes and the screens of their computers, laptops, mobile phones or other devices. 

However, the internet “wasn’t built with children’s safety in mind”, according to a UN-backed initiative working to eliminate online child sexual exploitation and abuse.  

“At any one time, 750,000 individuals are estimated to be looking to connect with children online for sexual purposes, a challenge so large – and so complex – that no one entity can solve it alone”, the Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children said in supporting Safer Internet Day. 

Meanwhile, UNICEF cited evidence which suggests more time online is leading to less outdoor activity for children, and also reduced sleep quality, increased symptoms of anxiety, and unhealthy eating habits.  

A safer world for children 

The UN agency believes Safer Internet Day can be an opportunity to reimagine a safer world for children online through prioritizing and protecting their physical and mental well-being. 

“For children and young people themselves, preparing for a kinder, more connected world post-COVID means helping strike a balance between their online and offline worlds, nurturing safe, positive relationships with those around them, and having access to the support they need”, Ms. Fore said. 

UNICEF has recommended three areas for action, starting with encouraging governments to train health, education and social service workers about the impact of COVID-19 on child well-being, and to ensure core services for child protection and mental health remain open during the pandemic and beyond. 

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Parents should also receive support to help their children understand the risks of going online and using digital technologies. They also need to be alert to any related signs of distress. 

Schools also have a role through granting children access to school-based counselling services, including virtually, and policies that respond to mental health and child protection concerns. 

“For children and young people themselves, preparing for a kinder, more connected world post-COVID means helping strike a balance between their online and offline worlds, nurturing safe, positive relationships with those around them, and having access to the support they need," said Ms. Fore.

Here’s a Script for How to Talk to Your Kids About Being Safe Online

As parents, it’s our job to guide kids toward making good decisions—and that doesn’t stop when they’re behind a phone, tablet, or laptop. So as soon as kids have unsupervised access to the internet, it’s time to start the conversation about being safe online.

Online safety goes beyond digital security measures like parental locks—since we spend so much time online these days, it’s actually about kindness, respect, and how we conduct ourselves in the world. Here are some points to help you get started, along with ways to make the discussion interactive so that you know your kids, tweens, or teens are getting something out of it and feel comfortable participating in the conversation.

Don’t give out personal info

“If someone asks for your address, phone number, or other personal info, just say no. Even if you think it’s a legit request, ask me first and we can decide together.”

Make a list together of types of personal info not to give out, like their phone number, birthday, passwords, or where they go to school—and ask them why each one could be risky. Come up with a few tricky scenarios, like if someone says they want your address to send you a gift.

Images are forever

“If someone you don’t know well asks you for a picture, don’t send one. If someone you DO know asks for a picture, think about whether it’s something you’d want your classmates, principal, and grandparents to see.”

Talk about how images are permanent once they’re online, because other people can screenshot them, share them, and use them however they want. Have your kid come up with a few examples of what types of pictures would not be appropriate to post on social media, and what types of pictures would not be appropriate to text to a friend, even if they’ve requested them.

Online actions have real consequences

“If you’re not saying something kind or thoughtful online, just don’t say anything.”

Ask your kid how they’ve felt when receiving an unkind comment, and discuss how a future employer, mentor, or friend might judge their words or actions online. Just because they’re behind a screen—or maybe even an anonymous username—doesn’t mean their actions don’t have real consequences that affect real people.

Teach consent

“Never use other people’s pictures or info online without their consent.”

Consent is not just about physical interactions—it applies to online interactions too, and you can begin by asking your own kids’ permission to post photos and videos of them. Ask them for examples they’ve heard about where people have misused others’ content, and why they think those actions were unfair or disrespectful. Keep in mind that boys and girls need to be aware of online bullying and rumor-spreading and the damage it can do.

No judgment

“If you see anything disturbing or you realize you’ve made a mistake online, you can tell me and I promise not to judge you or get mad. I’m just here to support you.”

Then make sure you do your best to uphold that promise, because it’ll help kids and teens feel comfortable being open with you when issues do arise. Most kids don’t tell adults about cyberbullying , for example, because they are afraid they’ll lose phone or computer privileges. A more productive and supportive approach as a parent would be to help your teen or tween document any important information about what happened, block the person who is bothering them, or come up with other solutions.

Keep in mind that the conversation about online safety is not a one-time thing—it should be ongoing, and doesn’t have to always be a formal sit-down. And most importantly, be sure to back up your words by acting responsibly when you see something questionable in your own social media feed.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by ParentsTogether (@parentstogether) on Aug 6, 2020 at 2:21pm PDT

Joanna Eng is a staff writer and digital content specialist at ParentsTogether. She lives with her wife and two kids in New York, where she loves to hike, try new foods, and check out way too many books from the library.

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Online safety - it is not about the internet...

How child safety internet laws could affect us all

Critics warn that the laws are subversive tactics aimed at free speech

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In an effort to address the alarming teen mental health crisis , many lawmakers have turned their eyes to regulating what they can access online. While the goal to protect young people is laudable, the laws have been stirring concern among critics who argue the laws are setting dangerous precedents that could affect the future of free speech online for everyone.

On the state level, Louisiana was the first to pass a law requiring age verification with IDs for sites that host adult content. Other states followed suit in approving similar laws. Though the rules are written to protect children, critics argue they also dissuade adults who prefer anonymity from using the sites. The stigma around pornography makes many people unwilling to have their picture and government name attached to viewing such sites. Opponents also argue the laws "threaten digital privacy" because there's no way to "ensure that websites don't retain user identification data," The Associated Press reported. Mindgeek, the operator of Pornhub and other adult content sites, has blocked access to its sites in Utah, Mississippi, Virginia, and, most recently, Arkansas in protest of these laws.

The wave has also hit Congress, with Republicans pushing the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) in Congress. This law would require similar age verification for social media sites, among other things. It also requires sites to adhere to a "duty of care" to prevent access to content deemed harmful to the mental health of users under 16. Given that the bill is supported by "a slew of far-right, anti-LGBTQ organizations," opponents fear it will enable governments to censor LGBTQ+ content.

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The laws are "an end run around the First Amendment"

Even though the age verification law in Utah doesn't say the sites are subject to persecution for not checking IDs, it does empower citizens to sue the sites if they don't comply. These state laws are "attempting to do an end run around the First Amendment by outsourcing censorship to citizens," said Alison Boden, executive director of the Free Speech Coalition. The organization recently lost a suit challenging the law's constitutionality in Utah. The workaround is a "new mechanism," though a "deeply flawed one." Boden noted that any attempts by the government to "chill speech" is unconstitutional "no matter the method."

KOSA's vague "duty of care" clause also poses a threat to free speech by targeting content online, "the overwhelming majority of which is constitutionally protected," wrote Ari Cohn, a First Amendment lawyer at TechFreedom, in a letter to lawmakers supporting the bill. The unconstitutionality of the clause is "highlighted by its vague and unmeetable nature." Platforms cannot be responsible for preventing and mitigating "the complex psychological issues that arise from circumstances across an individual's entire life," which could be reflected online, Cohn added. What might not be helpful for one teen could benefit others because adolescents aren't a monolith. The law would force platforms "to undertake an unworkable one-size-fits-all approach to deeply personal issues," Cohn asserted, "thus ultimately serving the best interests of no minors."

It'll be more harmful to teens in the long run

Although designed to protect young people, enforcing KOSA would have "​​damaging unintended consequences for young people," per a letter from a coalition of 90 advocacy groups opposing the law. The organizations "believe that the privacy, online safety, and digital well-being of children should be protected," but KOSA "would undermine those goals for all people, but especially children." The law would force platforms to use invasive monitoring tools and incentivize increased data collection for minors and adults. It would also undermine "the delivery of critical services to minors by public agencies like schools."

Requiring age verification and parental permission for minors to use social media is "a blow to the autonomy and privacy rights of older teens," Casey Newton wrote for The Verge . LGBTQ+ youth "who were once able to use social networks to connect with other queer youth in the face of disapproval or abuse from their parents," are also put at risk. "They'll now have a much harder time doing so," Newton pointed out. Beyond that, anyone who uploads government identification to the websites will "almost certainly one day find themselves victims of a future data breach in which hackers obtain that data and sell it on the open market."

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Theara Coleman has worked as a staff writer at The Week since September 2022. She frequently writes about technology, education, literature and general news. She was previously a contributing writer and assistant editor at Honeysuckle Magazine, where she covered racial politics and cannabis industry news. 

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It’s not easy to talk with tweens and teens about internet safety. here’s how to easily take the essential first step and simply start the conversation..

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Will the Online Safety Act protect us or infringe our freedoms?

After six years of development, child safety and free speech campaigners react to the long-awaited internet laws.

By Sarah Dawood

Six years after the idea first materialised, the Online Safety Act has finally passed into law. It’s long overdue – since its invention, the internet has had little-to-no regulation. And in the years since, it has grown increasingly all-encompassing, embedding itself in every facet of people’s lives.

Recent global events show the impact of a completely unlegislated online world. Social media has been awash with falsified information of the Israel-Hamas conflict, making it increasingly difficult to decipher which videos and photos are real and which fake. Meanwhile, online grooming and child sexual abuse cases are up a staggering 80 per cent in the past four years, and four in ten UK children aged eight to 17 have experienced bullying, either offline or online.

During its development, the Online Safety Bill came under intense scrutiny from both online safety and free-speech campaigners, with each side arguing that it neither kept people safe nor protected free expression and privacy.

After much flip-flopping, the final act has ended up with same core tenets as the original draft – the independent regulator, Ofcom, can fine social media platforms up to £18m or 10 per cent of their global annual revenue (whichever is higher) if they do not remove illegal content. This includes child sexual abuse, terrorism, assisting suicide and threats to kill. There is a list of “priority offences” in the act, which are the types of illegal content that must be prioritised by tech platforms.

Tech companies can now also face criminal liability – social media bosses could go to jail for up to two years if they consistently fail to protect children from harm. This includes illegal offences but also certain types of legal content, such as that promoting eating disorders, self-harm or cyberbullying. Tech companies will be required to write their own “terms of service” based on “codes of practice” created by Ofcom and enforce these consistently. The bill originally contained provisions to protect both adults from “legal but harmful” content too, but this was scrapped.

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Other laws have been strengthened in line with the act, especially around violence towards women and girls. An update to the “revenge pornography” law means that someone who threatens to share intimate images without consent could face two years in prison, as well as those who do share them. Cyberflashing and upskirting have also been criminalised, and three new communications offences have been created around intentionally sharing harmful, false and threatening communication.

Free-speech campaigners are broadly unhappy with the final Online Safety Act. Barbora Bukovská, senior director for law and policy at the human rights organisation Article 19, says that while the final version has been “slightly improved” by the removal of “legal but harmful”, the act remains an “extremely complex and incoherent piece of legislation that will undermine freedom of expression and information, [and] the right to privacy”. It will be “ineffective” in making the internet safer, she adds.

As the law now requires social media platforms to enforce their own terms of service, she believes this will cause companies to be overzealous, and will give them too much censorship power. “This will incentivise platforms to censor many categories of lawful speech that they – or their advertisers – may consider harmful, inappropriate or controversial,” she says, adding that algorithm-based moderation technology is “not advanced enough” to navigate this complex landscape.

Instead of focusing on content moderation, the Online Safety Act should have addressed the “business model of Big Tech ”, she adds, which is based on “advertising and monetising users’ attention”, and looked to increase competition rather than consolidate the market power of giants.

Concerns around the suppression of marginalised voices online is legitimate – social media companies have been called out for their moderation policies before. According to documents obtained by the investigative news website the Intercept , TikTok moderators were previously told to suppress videos from users who appeared too “ugly, poor or disabled”. Instagram users have also raised concerns about the censoring of posts in support of Palestine.

“In light of the [now former] Home Secretary’s response to pro-Palestine protests, it’s easy to see how tech companies could be pressurised into removing – at scale – content featuring Palestinian flags,” says Jim Killock, executive director of digital rights organisation Open Rights Group. “This carries tremendous risk for freedom of debate within a democracy.” He adds that preventing children from seeing a broad range of legitimate content could mean they are denied access to “large swathes” of the internet, including informative and supportive resources.

Safety campaigners, however, are more positive. Peter Wanless, the chief executive of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, says the new act will make children “fundamentally safer in their everyday lives”. Michael Tunks, head of policy and public affairs at the the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) charity, says he is “delighted” to see the bill finally become law, and that he hopes it will make tech companies think more carefully about how they design their services to prevent child sexual abuse in future.

He also says he is pleased to see stricter regulation around end-to-end encryption, which currently stops third parties from accessing private messages on apps. This has been another point of contention during the bill’s passage. The government has decided not to ban end-to-end encryption but has said Ofcom can force messaging platforms to use “accredited technology” to scan for content like child abuse if the regulator deems it “necessary and proportionate”. An amendment to the Investigatory Powers Act also means messaging apps now have to inform the Home Office about any privacy features they want to add, including encryption, and the government can block these if necessary.

Jessica Ni Mhainin, policy and campaigns manager at the free-speech organisation Index on Censorship says that encryption is “essential” for protecting sensitive information, such as bank details, medical data and journalistic sources that hold power to account, and that the amendment “sets an extremely dangerous precedent”.

Even those broadly in support of the bill say there needs to be more nuance around invading privacy with the aim of keeping people safe. “End-to-end encryption can be vital to protect users’ privacy, particularly in sensitive discussions regarding abortion, sexual orientation or gender identity,” says Olivia DeRamus, founder at Communia, a social media start-up aimed at women and non-binary people.

She believes that the law alone is not enough, and that the tech industry needs to be more proactive in creating digital spaces that are healthy and safe to start with. “We need to divorce ourselves from the notion that harm is a normal part of being online,” she says. “Large social media platforms often use ‘free speech’ as an excuse not to address and even encourage harmful online conduct.” Communia recently conducted a survey of 2,058 UK women and marginalised genders using social media and found that more than a third (36 per cent) had been a victim of online abuse.

Technology is advancing at pace, and many campaigners feel legislation is struggling to keep up. Tunks thinks the Online Safety Act has “simply taken too long” since the bill’s first inception in 2017, and that developments in artificial intelligence have resulted in a surge in deepfakes of child sexual abuse. A recent report from the IWF found that nearly 3,000 AI-generated images depicting child sexual abuse were found in September this year. Ofcom should work with child safety organisations to determine new threats and develop its codes of conduct accordingly, he says.

There are still questions over the government’s approach to disinformation and misinformation – the intentional and unintentional spread of false information, which surged during the pandemic. The act specifies that Ofcom must establish a committee to advise the government, but otherwise does not have any parameters in place to tackle the scourge of fake news online.

The fact-checking organisation Full Fact says there is “no credible plan” to tackle this, after the government scrapped its plans to include health misinformation in a list of “priority” harms, and for Ofcom to have a “media literacy duty”, which Full Fact says could have helped to build the public’s resilience to bad information. The organisation recommends that the government rethinks these decisions, and suggests that promoting good information should be prioritised over restricting content, to protect free expression.

The Online Safety Act is now law and will come into force once Ofcom has published its codes of practice, likely in mid-2024. But it’s clear this is only the start of a long road of amendments that will be needed as technology advances and new platforms emerge. Given the pace of change, these reforms will need to be much quicker and more frequent than the historically sluggish parliamentary process.

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The UK’s Controversial Online Safety Act Is Now Law

Jeremy Wright was the first of five UK ministers charged with pushing through the British government’s landmark legislation on regulating the internet, the Online Safety Bill. The current UK government likes to brand its initiatives as “ world-beating ,” but for a brief period in 2019 that might have been right. Back then, three prime ministers ago, the bill—or at least the white paper that would form its basis—outlined an approach that recognized that social media platforms were already de facto arbiters of what was acceptable speech on large parts of the internet, but that this was a responsibility they didn’t necessarily want and weren’t always capable of discharging. Tech companies were pilloried for things that they missed, but also, by free speech advocates, for those they took down. “There was a sort of emerging realization that self-regulation wasn’t going to be viable for very much longer,” Wright says. “And therefore, governments needed to be involved.”

The bill set out to define a way to handle “legal but harmful” content—material that wasn’t explicitly against the law but which, individually or in aggregate, posed a risk, such as health care disinformation, posts encouraging suicide or eating disorders, or political disinformation with the potential to undermine democracy or create panic. The bill had its critics—notably, those who worried it gave Big Tech too much power. But it was widely praised as a thoughtful attempt to deal with a problem that was growing and evolving faster than politics and society were able to adapt. Of his 17 years in parliament, Wright says, “I’m not sure I’ve seen anything by way of potential legislation that’s had as broadly based a political consensus behind it.”

Having passed, eventually, through the UK’s two houses of Parliament, the bill received royal assent today. It is no longer world-beating—the European Union’s competing Digital Services Act came into force in August. And the Online Safety Act enters into law as a broader, more controversial piece of legislation than the one that Wright championed. The act’s more than 200 clauses cover a wide spectrum of illegal content that platforms will be required to address and give platforms a “duty of care” over what their users—particularly children—see online. Some of the more nuanced principles around the harms caused by legal but harmful content have been watered down, and added in is a highly divisive requirement for messaging platforms to scan users’ messages for illegal material, such as child sexual abuse material, which tech companies and privacy campaigners say is an unwarranted attack on encryption.

Companies, from Big Tech down to smaller platforms and messaging apps, will need to comply with a long list of new requirements, starting with age verification for their users. (Wikipedia, the eighth-most-visited website in the UK, has said it won’t be able to comply with the rule because it violates the Wikimedia Foundation’s principles on collecting data about its users.) Platforms will have to prevent younger users from seeing age-inappropriate content, such as pornography, cyberbullying, and harassment; release risk assessments on potential dangers to children on their services; and give parents easy pathways to report concerns. Sending threats of violence, including rape, online will now be illegal, as will assisting or encouraging self-harm online or transmitting deepfake pornography, and companies will need to quickly act to remove them from their platforms, along with scam adverts.

In a statement, UK Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan said: “The Bill protects free speech, empowers adults and will ensure that platforms remove illegal content. At the heart of this Bill, however, is the protection of children. I would like to thank the campaigners, parliamentarians, survivors of abuse and charities that have worked tirelessly, not only to get this Act over the finishing line, but to ensure that it will make the UK the safest place to be online in the world.”

Enforcement of the act will be left to the UK’s telecommunications regulator, Ofcom, which said in June that it would begin consultations with industry after royal assent was granted. It’s unlikely that enforcement will begin immediately, but the law will apply to any platform with a significant number of users in the UK. Companies that fail to comply with the new rules face fines of up to £18 million ($21.9 million) or 10 percent of their annual revenue, whichever is larger.

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William Turton

Some of the controversy around the act is less about what is in it and more about what isn’t. The long passage of the legislation means that its development straddled the Covid-19 pandemic, giving legislators a live view of the social impact of mis- and disinformation. The spread of anti-vaccination and anti-lockdown messages became an impediment to public health initiatives. After the worst of the pandemic was over, those same falsehoods fed into other conspiracy theories that continue to disrupt society. The original white paper that was the bill’s foundation included proposals for compelling platforms to tackle this kind of content—which individually might not be illegal but which en masse creates dangers. That’s not in the final legislation, although the act does create a new offense of “false communications,” criminalizing deliberately causing harm by communicating something the sender knows to be untrue.

“One of the most important things was tackling harms that happen at scale. And because it’s focused so much on individual pieces of content, it’s missed that,” says Ellen Judson, head of the digital research hub at the think tank Demos. The act includes strict rules forcing platforms to move swiftly to remove any illegal post—such as terrorist content or child sexual abuse material—but not on disinformation campaigns comprised of a drip-drip of misleading content, failing to understand that “when that turns into things going viral and spreading, then the harm can occur cumulatively.”

Wright says that the exclusion of disinformation and misinformation from the bill was partly due to confusion between the remits of different departments. The Department of Culture, Media and Sport “was told that the Cabinet Office would be taking care of all of this. ‘Don’t you worry your pretty little heads about it, it’ll be done elsewhere in something called the Defending Democracy agenda ,’” he says. “And then I think, subsequently, it wasn’t really. So I think … there still is a gap there.”

Under the Act, bigger platforms will be expected to police potentially harmful, but not illegal, content by applying their own standards more consistently than they currently do—something that free-speech campaigners have decried as giving private companies control over what’s acceptable discourse online, but which some experts on dis- and misinformation say is a cop-out that means Big Tech will be less accountable for spreading falsehoods. Legal experts, however, say compliance with the law will require platforms to be more transparent and proactive. “They have to put all of those processes in place as to how their decisions will be made, or they risk actually being seen as a platform that is controlling all kinds of free speech,” says Emma Wright, technology lead at the law firm Harbottle & Lewis. That’s likely to become quite a significant burden. “It’s the new GDPR ,” she says.

By far the most divisive clause out of the more than 300 pages of the Online Safety Act is Section 122, which has been widely interpreted as compelling companies to scan users’ messages to make sure that they aren’t transmitting illegal material. That would be incredibly difficult—perhaps even impossible—to do without breaking the end-to-end encryption on platforms such as WhatsApp and Signal. End-to-end encryption means that the sender and recipient of a message can see its content but the owner of the platform that it’s sent on cannot. The only way to comply with the law, experts say, would be to put so-called client-side scanning software on users’ devices to examine messages before they’re sent, which would make the encryption largely useless. The government said during the bill’s development that companies could find a technical solution to scan messages without undermining encryption; companies and experts countered that that technology doesn’t, and may never, exist.

“That gives Ofcom, as a regulator, the ability to obligate people like us to go and put third-party content monitoring [on our products] that unilaterally scans everything going through the apps,” Matthew Hodgson, CEO of encrypted messaging company Element, told WIRED before the bill passed. “That’s undermining the encryption and providing a mechanism where bad actors of any kind could compromise the scanning system in order to steal the data flying around the place.”

Companies whose products depend on end-to-end encryption threatened to leave the country, including Signal. Meta said it may pull WhatsApp from the UK if the bill were to pass. That cliff edge has come and gone, and both services are still available—albeit after an 11th-hour restatement by the government that it wouldn’t force platforms to adopt nonexistent technology to scan users’ messages—which was seen by some as a climbdown.

However, the clause remains in the act, which worries privacy and free-speech activists, who see it as part of a spectrum of threats against encryption. If the Online Safety Act means companies have to remove encryption or circumvent it using client-side scanning, “it then potentially opens [data] up to being scooped up into the broader surveillance apparatus,” according to Nik Williams, policy and campaigns officer at the campaign group Index on Censorship.

The Online Safety Act has concerning overlaps with another piece of legislation, the Investigatory Powers Act, which allows the government to compel platforms to remove encryption. Williams says the overlap between the two pieces of legislation creates “a surveillance gateway between the OSB and the IPA in that this can give the security services, such as MI5, MI6, and GCHQ, access to data they previously could not access … I would say it’s probably an unprecedented expansion of surveillance powers.”

The morning after the Online Safety Bill passed through the House of Lords, the UK Home Office launched a new campaign against encrypted messaging, specifically targeting Facebook Messenger.

Former minister Jeremy Wright says that the question over encryption “is frankly not resolved. I think the government has sort of dodged around giving a concluded view on what it means for encryption.” However, he says, the answer is unlikely to be as absolute as the act’s opponents are making out. Encryption won’t be banned, he says, but platforms will have to explain how their policies around it balance safety with their users’ right to privacy. “If you can meet those [safety] duties by using encryption or with encryption as part of the service, you’re fine,” he says. If not, “you have a problem … it can’t be true, surely, that a platform is entitled to say, ‘Well, I operate encryption, so that’s a get-out-of-jail-free card for me on the safety duties.’”

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Don’t Fall for the Latest Changes to the Dangerous Kids Online Safety Act 

The authors of the dangerous Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) unveiled an amended version this week , but it’s still an unconstitutional censorship bill that continues to empower state officials to target services and online content they do not like. We are asking everyone reading this to oppose this latest version , and to demand that their representatives oppose it —even if you have already done so.  

TAKE ACTION

TELL CONGRESS: OPPOSE THE KIDS ONLINE SAFETY ACT

KOSA remains a dangerous bill that would allow the government to decide what types of information can be shared and read online by everyone. It would still require an enormous number of websites, apps, and online platforms to filter and block legal, and important, speech. It would almost certainly still result in age verification requirements. Some of its provisions have changed over time, and its latest changes are detailed below. But those improvements do not cure KOSA’s core First Amendment problems. Moreover, a close review shows that state attorneys general still have a great deal of power to target online services and speech they do not like, which we think will harm children seeking access to basic health information and a variety of other content that officials deem harmful to minors.   

We’ll dive into the details of KOSA’s latest changes, but first we want to remind everyone of the stakes. KOSA is still a censorship bill and it will still harm a large number of minors who have First Amendment rights to access lawful speech online. It will endanger young people and impede the rights of everyone who uses the platforms, services, and websites affected by the bill. Based on our previous analyses, statements by its authors and various interest groups, as well as the overall politicization of youth education and online activity, we believe the following groups—to name just a few—will be endangered:   

• LGBTQ+ Youth will be at risk of having content, educational material, and their own online identities erased.   
• Young people searching for sexual health and reproductive rights information will find their search results stymied.  
• Teens and children in historically oppressed and marginalized groups will be unable to locate information about their history and shared experiences.  
• Activist youth on either side of the aisle, such as those fighting for changes to climate laws, gun laws, or religious rights , will be siloed, and unable to advocate and connect on platforms.   
• Young people seeking mental health help and information will be blocked from finding it, because even discussions of suicide, depression, anxiety, and eating disorders will be hidden from them.  
• Teens hoping to combat the problem of addiction—either their own, or that of their friends, families, and neighbors , will not have the resources they need to do so.   
• Any young person seeking truthful news or information that could be considered depressing will find it harder to educate themselves and engage in current events and honest discussion.  
• Adults in any of these groups who are unwilling to share their identities will find themselves shunted onto a second-class internet alongside the young people who have been denied access to this information.  

What’s Changed in the Latest (2024) Version of KOSA  

In its impact, the latest version of KOSA is not meaningfully different from those previous versions. The “duty of care” censorship section remains in the bill, though modified as we will explain below. The latest version removes the authority of state attorneys general to sue or prosecute people for not complying with the “duty of care.” But KOSA still permits these state officials to enforce other part of the bill based on their political whims and we expect those officials to use this new law to the same censorious ends as they would have of previous versions. And the legal requirements of KOSA are still only possible for sites to safely follow if they restrict access to content based on age, effectively mandating age verification.    

KOSA is still a censorship bill and it will still harm a large number of minors

Duty of Care is Still a Duty of Censorship  

Previously, KOSA outlined a wide collection of harms to minors that platforms had a duty to prevent and mitigate through “the design and operation” of their product. This includes self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, and bullying, among others. This seemingly anodyne requirement—that apps and websites must take measures to prevent some truly awful things from happening—would have led to overbroad censorship on otherwise legal, important topics for everyone  as we’ve explained before .  

The updated duty of care says that a platform shall “exercise reasonable care in the creation and implementation of any design feature” to prevent and mitigate those harms. The difference is subtle, and ultimately, unimportant. There is no case law defining what is “reasonable care” in this context. This language still means increased liability merely for hosting and distributing otherwise legal content that the government—in this case the FTC—claims is harmful.   

Design Feature Liability  

The bigger textual change is that the bill now includes a definition of a “design feature,” which the bill requires platforms to limit for minors. The “design feature” of products that could lead to liability is defined as:  

any feature or component of a covered platform that will encourage or increase the frequency, time spent, or activity of minors on the covered platform, or activity of minors on the covered platform.   Design features include but are not limited to   (A) infinite scrolling or auto play;   (B) rewards for time spent on the platform;   (C) notifications;   (D) personalized recommendation systems;   (E) in-game purchases; or   (F) appearance altering filters.  

These design features are a mix of basic elements and those that may be used to keep visitors on a site or platform. There are several problems with this provision. First, it’s not clear when offering basic features that many users rely on, such as notifications, by itself creates a harm. But that points to the fundamental problem of this provision. KOSA is essentially trying to use features of a service as a proxy to create liability for speech online that the bill’s authors do not like. But the list of harmful designs shows that the legislators backing KOSA want to regulate online content , not just design.    

For example, if an online service presented an endless scroll of math problems for children to complete, or rewarded children with virtual stickers and other prizes for reading digital children’s books, would lawmakers consider those design features harmful? Of course not. Infinite scroll and autoplay are generally not a concern for legislators. It’s that these lawmakers do not like some lawful content that is accessible via online service’s features.  

What KOSA tries to do here then is to launder restrictions on content that lawmakers do not like through liability for supposedly harmful “design features.” But the First Amendment still prohibits Congress from indirectly trying to censor lawful speech it disfavors.   

We shouldn’t kid ourselves that the latest version of KOSA will stop state officials from targeting vulnerable communities.

Allowing the government to ban content designs is a dangerous idea. If the FTC decided that direct messages, or encrypted messages, were leading to harm for minors—under this language they could bring an enforcement action against a platform that allowed users to send such messages.  

Regardless of whether we like infinite scroll or auto-play on platforms, these design features are protected by the First Amendment; just like the design features we do like. If the government tried to limit an online newspaper from using an infinite scroll feature or auto-playing videos, that case would be struck down. KOSA’s latest variant is no different.    

Attorneys General Can Still Use KOSA to Enact Political Agendas  

As we mentioned above, the enforcement available to attorneys general has been narrowed to no longer include the duty of care. But due to the rule of construction and the fact that attorneys general can still enforce other portions of KOSA, this is cold comfort.  

For example, it is true enough that the amendments to KOSA prohibit a state from targeting an online service based on claims that in hosting LGBTQ content that it violated KOSA’s duty of care. Yet that same official could use another provision of KOSA—which allows them to file suits based on failures in a platform’s design—to target the same content. The state attorney general could simply claim that they are not targeting the LGBTQ content, but rather the fact that the content was made available to minors via notifications, recommendations, or other features of a service.  

We shouldn’t kid ourselves that the latest version of KOSA will stop state officials from targeting vulnerable communities. And KOSA leaves all of the bill’s censorial powers with the FTC, a five-person commission nominated by the president. This still allows a small group of federal officials appointed by the President to decide what content is dangerous for young people. Placing this enforcement power with the FTC is still a First Amendment problem: no government official, state or federal, has the power to dictate by law what people can read online.   

The Long Fight Against KOSA Continues in 2024  

For two years now , EFF has laid out the clear arguments against this bill. KOSA creates liability if an online service fails to perfectly police a variety of content that the bill deems harmful to minors. Services have little room to make any mistakes if some content is later deemed harmful to minors and, as a result, are likely to restrict access to a broad spectrum of lawful speech, including information about health issues like eating disorders, drug addiction, and anxiety.   

The fight against KOSA has amassed an enormous coalition of people of all ages and all walks of life who know that censorship is not the right approach to protecting people online, and that the promise of the internet is one that must apply equally to everyone, regardless of age. Some of the people who have advocated against KOSA from day one have now graduated high school or college. But every time this bill returns, more people learn why we must stop it from becoming law.    

We cannot afford to allow the government to decide what information is available online. Please contact your representatives today to tell them to stop the Kids Online Safety Act from moving forward.  

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Silicon Valley Battles States Over New Online Safety Laws for Children

Lawsuits filed by NetChoice, which represents companies including TikTok and Meta, have stalled protection efforts in three states.

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By Natasha Singer

Natasha Singer covers children’s privacy and tech regulation.

Last summer, Ohio enacted a social media statute that would require Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube to get a parent’s consent before permitting children under age 16 to use their platforms.

But this month, just before the measure was to take effect, a tech industry group called NetChoice — which represents Google, Meta, Snap, TikTok and others — filed a lawsuit to block it on free speech grounds, persuading a Federal District Court judge to temporarily halt the new rules.

The case is part of a sweeping litigation campaign by NetChoice to block new state laws protecting young people online — an anti-regulation effort likely to come under scrutiny on Wednesday as the Senate Judiciary Committee questions social media executives about child sexual exploitation online. The NetChoice lawsuits have rankled state officials and lawmakers who sought tech company input as they drafted the new measures.

“I think it’s cowardly and disingenuous,” Jon Husted, the lieutenant governor of Ohio, said of the industry lawsuit, noting that either he or his staff had met with Google and Meta about the bill last year and had accommodated the companies’ concerns. “We tried to be as cooperative as we possibly could be — and then at the 11th hour, they filed a lawsuit.”

Social media platforms said that some of the state laws contradicted one another and that they would prefer Congress to enact a federal law setting national standards for children’s online safety.

NetChoice said the new state laws impinged on its members’ First Amendment rights to freely distribute information as well as on minors’ rights to obtain information.

“There’s a reason why this is such a slam dunk win every single time for NetChoice,” said Carl Szabo , the group’s vice president. “And that’s because it’s so obviously unconstitutional.”

Fueled by escalating public concerns over young people’s mental health, lawmakers and regulators across the United States are mounting bipartisan efforts to rein in popular social media platforms by enacting a wave of laws , even as tech industry groups work to overturn them.

A first-of-its-kind law passed last spring in Utah would require social media companies to verify users’ ages and obtain parental consent before allowing minors to set up accounts. Arkansas, Ohio, Louisiana and Texas subsequently passed similar laws requiring parental consent for social media services.

A landmark new California law , the Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, would require many popular social media and multiplayer video game apps to turn on the highest privacy settings — and turn off potentially risky features, like messaging systems allowing adult strangers to contact young people — by default for minors.

“The intent is to ensure that any tech products that are accessed by anyone under the age of 18 are, by design and by default, safe for kids,” said Buffy Wicks, a California Assembly member who cosponsored the bill.

But free speech lawsuits by NetChoice have dealt a major blow to these state efforts.

In California and Arkansas last year, judges in the NetChoice cases temporarily blocked the new state laws from taking effect. (The New York Times and the Student Press Law Center filed a joint friend-of-the-court brief last year in the California case in support of NetChoice, arguing that the law could limit newsworthy content available to students.)

“There has been a lot of pressure put on states to regulate social media, to protect against its harms, and a lot of the anxiety is now being channeled into laws specifically about children,” said Genevieve Lakier, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. “What you are seeing here is that the First Amendment is still a concern, that in many cases these laws have been halted.”

State lawmakers and officials said they viewed the tech industry pushback as a temporary setback, describing their new laws as reasonable measures to ensure basic safety for children online. Rob Bonta, the attorney general of California, said the state’s new law would regulate platform design and company conduct — not content. The California statute, scheduled to take effect in July, does not explicitly require social media companies to verify the age of each user.

Mr. Bonta recently appealed the ruling halting the law.

“NetChoice has a burn-it-all strategy, and they’re going to challenge every law and set of regulations to protect children and their privacy in the name of the First Amendment,” he said in a phone interview on Sunday.

On Monday, California introduced two children’s online privacy and safety bills that Mr. Bonta sponsored.

NetChoice has also filed a lawsuit to try to block the new social media bill in Utah that would require Instagram and TikTok to verify users’ ages and obtain parental permission for minors to have accounts.

Civil rights groups have warned that such legislative efforts could stifle freedom of expression — by requiring adults, as well as minors, to verify their ages using documents like drivers’ licenses just to set up and use social media accounts. Requiring parental consent for social media, they say, could also hinder young people from finding support groups or important resources about reproductive health or gender identity.

The Supreme Court has overturned a number of laws that aimed to protect minors from potentially harmful content, including violent video games and “indecent” online material , on free speech grounds.

Social media companies said they had instituted many protections for young people and would prefer that Congress enact federal legislation, rather than requiring companies to comply with a patchwork of sometimes contradictory state laws.

Snap recently became the first social media company to support a federal bill, called the Kids Online Safety Act, that has some similarities with California’s new law.

In a statement, Snap said many of the provisions in the federal bill reflected the company’s existing safeguards , such as setting teenagers’ accounts to the strictest privacy settings by default. The statement added that the bill would direct government agencies to study technological approaches to age verification.

Google and TikTok declined to comment.

Meta has called for Congress to pass legislation that would make the Apple and Google app stores — not social media companies — responsible for verifying a user’s age and obtaining permission from a parent before allowing someone under 16 to download an app. Meta recently began placing ads on Instagram saying it supported federal legislation.

“We support clear, consistent legislation that makes it simpler for parents to help manage their teens’ online experiences , and that holds all apps teens use to the same standard,” Meta said in a statement. “We want to keep working with policymakers to help find more workable solutions.”

But merely requiring consent from parents would do nothing to mitigate the potentially harmful effects of social media platforms, the federal judge in the NetChoice case in Ohio has noted.

“Foreclosing minors under 16 from accessing all content” on social media websites “is a breathtakingly blunt instrument for reducing social media’s harm to children,” Judge Algenon L. Marbley, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Eastern Division, wrote in his ruling temporarily halting the state’s social media law.

An earlier version of this article misstated the title of Algenon L. Marbley. He is chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Eastern Division, not chief justice.

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Natasha Singer writes about technology, business and society. She is currently reporting on the far-reaching ways that tech companies and their tools are reshaping public schools, higher education and job opportunities. More about Natasha Singer

Online safety legislation is opposed by many it claims to protect

Gen z tiktokers, lgbtq organizations and free speech advocates react angrily to wednesday’s hearing.

Lawmakers who grilled the CEOs of Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, Discord and X on Wednesday all seemed to agree that protecting children’s safety online was a priority. Many of those children were less accepting of the idea, and they let their opinions flow as they listened to the hearing through a Discord server.

“These senators don’t actually care about protecting kids, they just want to control information,” one teenager posted. “If congress wants to protect children, they should pass a ... privacy law,” another teenager said. Others in the server accused the lawmakers of “trying to demonize the CEOs to push their ... bills,” which were often described with profanity.

They’re not alone in their opposition to the Kids Online Safety Act, a bill introduced in Congress by Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D‑Conn.) and Marsha Blackburn (R‑Tenn.), and similar efforts by state legislatures.

KOSA would require digital platforms to take “reasonable measures” to prevent harms to children, specifically enumerating sexual exploitation, mental health, substance abuse and suicide. It would also require companies to enable their strongest privacy and safety settings for kids by default, provide parents with greater control over their children’s account settings and force companies to regularly audit their products for potential risks.

The measure has twice advanced out of committee with broad bipartisan support and is now backed by nearly half the Senate, but has yet to be taken up by the full Senate and lacks a companion bill in the House, clouding its potential path to passage.

More than 100 human rights and LGBTQ groups have condemned the bill, saying it would endanger minors, especially LGBTQ youth . First Amendment lawyers and organizations focused on protecting free speech also have lambasted the proposal and similar state laws, saying they would place dire restrictions on free speech and expression.

“What we’re seeing is a rash of legislation that both doesn’t do what it thinks it’s going to do, will be used to do bad things specifically, and also will impact the First Amendment rights of adults and minors alike,” said Ari Cohn, free speech counsel at TechFreedom, a tech policy think tank. “Nothing should terrify you more than having to identify yourself before speaking online.”

Opponents say KOSA would result in the collection of more sensitive data on both children and adults, violate the First Amendment, impose legal mandates that are inherently unenforceable, and significantly limit the ability for children to access and benefit from the internet, according to a report from R Street , a policy research organization that describes itself as center right .

“The whole hearing was a joke; it was a sham,” said May, the 26-year-old Michigan activist who created the Discord server in hopes of rallying opposition to KOSA. She agreed to speak to The Washington Post on the condition that she be identified by first name only. “The way they were attacking political content that they disagree with, it’s obvious they’re using this bill to censor speech.”

Activists pointed to moments in the hearing such as when Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) claimed TikTok is “being used to basically destroy Israel” as examples of how the real issue the senators had with social media is views with which they don’t agree. LGBTQ groups also cited earlier comments by Blackburn, where she claimed KOSA would help in “protecting minor children from the transgender in this culture,” claiming that social media “is where children are being indoctrinated.”

An open letter written in 2022 by the Electronic Frontier Foundation , a nonprofit digital rights group, has been signed by dozens of LGBTQ and human rights organizations. It outlined an extensive list of issues with the bill, saying it would require social media sites “to employ broad content filtering to limit minors’ access to certain online content” and would “threaten the privacy, safety, and access to information rights of young people and adults alike.”

A Blumenthal’s spokesperson acknowledged in an interview that the bill faces opposition, but said since the 2022 EFF letter, the bill has gone through several updates and revisions and that they are working with advocates to address their concerns, specifically around data collection and LGBTQ issues.

In a statement to The Post, Blumenthal said “urgent harms faced by young people online are one of the most common topics raised with me by constituents."

“Children and teenagers in Connecticut and across the country tell me how devastating they find toxic content like bullying and harassment, eating disorders, suicidal self-injury, and more,” he said. "The internet can be a positive place, but it is also a prevalent source of harms to feelings of self-worth. This bill gives young people choices to disconnect from algorithms with tools to take back control over their online lives. In crafting and improving the bill, we have worked with a broad group of stakeholders to address their concerns and include additional safeguards for privacy and supportive information, as well as more precise definitions of harms.”

Those revisions haven’t silenced critics.

“People have been using the idea of protecting children as the justification for authoritarian policies that actually hurt children for decades,” said Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, another human rights advocacy group. “KOSA is not a privacy bill; it’s a censorship bill.”

Greer listed the concerns: “KOSA, as written, would make kids less safe by cutting them off from access to lifesaving information and resources on controversial but important topics like abortion, gender-affirming care, substance abuse and even current events.” Especially concerning was the bill’s requirement that social media exhibit a “duty of care” that would cover content recommendations by a site.

“It can and will be used as a censorship bill,” Greer said. “It will force platforms to suppress a wide range of content that has nothing to do with harming kids, just to avoid possible litigation. And there’s no meaningful way to comply with it without conducting invasive age verification.”

Cohn, the free speech counsel, blasted the hearing as feeding those who believe, without evidence, that any new cultural development threatens young people.

“What we are seeing is the same exact thing as when people said comic books were causing kids to commit crime and juvenile delinquency, or when they said TV is melting kids’ brains, or that Dungeons and Dragons is causing an unprecedented mental health crisis,” Cohn told The Post. “Every new form of media has at some point been declared to be destroying the mental fabric of American youth.”

166/ It's just the latest example of Congress caring more about soundbites than careful legislation. Repeated claims that the committee is open to hearing criticism of their bills and fixing language is LAUGHABLE. They have brushed off such feedback wholesale. — Ari Cohn (@AriCohn) January 31, 2024

The evidence of social media’s impact on young people’s mental health is not supported by studies of the subject, opponents say. A 2022 Pew Research survey found that the majority of teens credit social media with “ strengthening their friendships and providing support .” LGBTQ youths specifically have more positive outcomes when they have access to social media, according to a 2023 report by the U.S. surgeon general that was mostly a warning on the harm social media may cause for children.

A 2023 Oxford study that analyzed data from close to a million people across 72 countries over the course of 12 years, found no “smoking gun” linking the internet with psychological harm. In fact, it found a potential association between Facebook use and positive well-being. “Our results do not provide evidence supporting the view that the Internet and technologies enabled by it, such as smartphones with Internet access, are actively promoting or harming either well-being or mental health globally,” Oxford researchers said in the study.

In fact, research shows that how social media makes people feel depends largely on how they use it. In a 2023 advisory, the American Psychology Association said that “using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people. Adolescents’ lives online both reflect and impact their offline lives.”

Teenagers and Gen Z activists echoed those sentiments on Wednesday.

“The internet allows people to see different ideas,” said Nathan, a 15-year old in New York who agreed to speak to The Post on the condition that they be identified only by their first name. “They can hear different ideas. They can learn about LGBT people. They can see so many things. These bills are created to censor and hide children. They are created to cut people off from the outside world.”

Nathan, who is nonbinary, said the internet helped them overcome an eating disorder. They worried the information that helped them would no longer be accessible if social media platforms were required to wall off certain topics such as eating disorders.

TechFreedom’s Cohn agreed. “People who are anti eating disorder use the same language as people who are pro eating disorder,” he said. “It’s impossible to determine in any meaningful way at large scale whether content is pro or anti eating disorder and what kind of effect it’s going to have on viewers.”

Onyx, a 15-year-old in Tennessee who agreed to talk only if just his first name was used, said the internet had saved his life by helping to relieve the isolation of his physical environment. “I’m not really allowed to go anywhere,” he said. He worries that bills like KOSA would eliminate his access to online communities he considers essential to his ability to socialize.

@sarahephilips sorry i needed a rant #KOSA #badinternetbills #bib #kidsonlinesafetyact ♬ original sound - sarah 💫

There’s also an enormous disparity in terms of which Gen Z activists get a voice and meetings with representatives and whose voices are silenced, young people said. “We have lives. We have jobs. We have stuff to do. We’re not poli-sci majors backed by billionaires and certain organizations,” May said. “Just because you’ve got a couple kids up there who can afford to go to D.C., does not mean Gen Z agrees with KOSA.”

May and other young people listening to the hearing on the Discord server were particularly incensed that some of KOSA’s biggest supporters have voted against gun-control measures or public funding for parks and other measures they feel would actually help teenagers’ mental health.

“Every person who claims to care about kids online is ignoring the fact that the internet is the only space left for kids,” May said. “In real life, you’re dealing with mass shooters, no public spaces that are free and nearby. Nobody has money to go hang out at a mall or anything.”

Activists and tech policy experts both said they sympathize with parents who believe their children have been harmed by the internet, but that doesn’t mean they support legislation they think would be damaging.

“These are real stories with real tragedy and sadness,” said Taylor Barkley, director of technology and innovation policy at the Center for Growth and Opportunity, a policy research center at Utah State University. “That makes it all the more important to find solutions that work, and a lot of major leading proposals are not going to end up helping kids and teens in the long run. It’s going to end up restricting their access to information, educational content, connection, community.”

In the hours after the hearing, members of May’s Discord group traded screen recordings they said they planned to disseminate online. Some said they’d already called their representatives’ offices to voice their anger, but were ignored. They wondered whether it was because they aren’t yet of voting age.

Adam Kovacevich, founder of the Chamber of Progress, a tech trade group, said he hopes Congress will listen to opponents of the bill. “There used to be a quaint time in American politics where politicians preached a message of personal responsibility and parental decisions,” he said. “Now, it seems the elements of both the right and left have converged on a much more heavy hand from the government.”

He also hopes that the moral panic around technology will subside.

“There is something timeless about moral panics,” Kovacevich said. “You could say they are a reflection of every parent’s worry and desire to do best by their kids. But you can respond in a variety of ways. You could say, ‘Look, I want that for my kids. And I’m going to help them navigate the rough edges of adolescence.’ Or you could say, ‘I want the best for my kids and so I’m going to go ask a politician to pass a new law.’

Speech on Safety

Safety is something you deal with every day. From crossing the road to handling sharp objects, it’s always around you. It’s important to understand what safety means and why it’s so crucial.

Do you know all the ways to keep safe? Let’s explore the concept of safety.

1-minute Speech on Safety

Hello friends! Today, we talk about something important – safety. Safety is like a big umbrella that keeps us dry when it rains. It protects us from harm.

Think about your home. It’s your safe place, right? But are all the doors locked when you go to bed? Are the stove and other appliances turned off? Safety begins at home. It’s as simple as keeping your toys away after playing, so no one trips over them. Let’s make our homes the safest place.

Now, let’s talk about safety at school. Does running in the corridors sound fun? Sure, but it could also lead to a fall. Playing safe, following rules, and listening to our teachers help us stay safe at school. So, let’s promise to be safe and let others be safe too.

What about safety on the road? We must always cross the road carefully. Remember, the zebra crossing is our best friend. We should wear helmets when riding bicycles. These simple steps can save us from big troubles.

And lastly, let’s not forget about safety online. The internet is a big world. We must not share our personal details with strangers. It’s like not opening our home’s door to someone we don’t know.

Remember, safety is not just a word, it’s a habit. It’s something we should think about every day, everywhere. Let’s pledge to make safety our priority, for a happy and secure life. Thank you!

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• Essay on Safety

2-minute Speech on Safety

Good day to all. Today, I want to talk about something we all need – safety. Safety is like a big, strong wall that keeps harm away from us. It is the feeling of being secure and protected. Like when you’re home safe from a thunderstorm, that’s safety.

Let’s talk about safety at home first. Home is a place where we feel most safe, right? But, we can get hurt if we’re not careful. Things like hot stoves, sharp knives, and slippery floors can cause accidents. Always remember, you should never touch anything dangerous unless an adult is with you. Also, keep your toys and stuff where they belong to avoid tripping over them.

Next, let’s think about safety at school. School is where we learn and play. We must be safe there too. Always follow the rules. Don’t run in the hallways, don’t push or shove your friends, and always listen to your teachers. They care about your safety and want you to be safe.

Now, let’s think about safety outside. When we play in the park, ride bikes or cross roads, we need to be extra careful. Always use sidewalks, crosswalks, and obey traffic signals when crossing the road. When you ride your bike, wear a helmet to protect your head. When you play in the park, don’t use broken equipment and always play in safe places.

Another important safety rule is about strangers. We meet lots of people every day. Some are friends, some are strangers. Not all strangers are bad, but we must be careful. Never go anywhere with someone you don’t know, even if they offer you candy or gifts. If a stranger makes you feel scared or uncomfortable, run away and tell an adult right away.

Finally, let’s talk about online safety. The internet is like a big city with lots of fun places to visit. But, just like a big city, it can be dangerous too. Don’t talk to strangers online. Don’t share your name, address, phone number or any personal information with someone you don’t know.

Safety is not just about rules, it’s about being smart and making good choices. Remember, safety is like a superhero’s shield. It protects us from harm. So, let’s promise to always be safe, at home, at school, outside, with strangers, and online.

I hope that you now understand how important safety is. It’s not something to be scared of, but something to be aware of. It’s like a friend, always looking out for us. So, let’s all be friends with safety and live happy, healthy lives. Thank you.

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AZ Governor Vetoes Age Verification Law

This afternoon, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs vetoed HB2586, a bill that would have mandated invasive age verification for visitors to sites with “material harmful to minors.” We completely agree with Governor Hobbs that legislation to protect children’s online safety “should be bipartisan and work within the bounds of the First Amendment, which this bill does not.”

FSC led opposition to the bill, and traveled to Arizona multiple times to speak with legislators, journalists, allies and constituents. HB2586 ultimately passed the legislature on a party-line vote, and opposition to the bill came from the ACLU, FIRE, Chamber of Progress, Woodhull Freedom Foundation, SIECUS, ESPLERP and a host of other organizations dedicated to civil liberties, reproductive rights, sex worker rights and LGBTQ+ rights. They understand, as we do, that these bills endanger not only adult content, but wide swaths of speech online. 

We thank Governor Hobbs for her courage in standing up to calls for censorship, and look forward to working with the legislature on effective methods of keeping minors from accessing age-inappropriate material online.

Read Hobbs’ veto letter here .

FSC and Coalition Partners Call on Arizona Governor to Veto AV Law