They’ve got your driver’s license on record, remember? Can you prove it wasn’t you who made that post? Where were your thumbs on April 14th at 2:04am?
CREEPS
I believe you can both hate the game and the player, but in this case, I almost can’t hate the players because they played so well. I really do have to commend the craftiness of both the lobbyists and the politicians and intelligence state actors who put this together. Let me explain.
The KIDS act does not require apps and platforms to scan your driver’s license or your face, but they’re going to have to do this if they don’t want to get their pants sued off. The new standard is that the platforms “knew or should have known” that someone who used their platform was a child or a teenager. That is an insanely low bar, so platforms are going to have to get IDs and face scans uploaded to prove someone is an adult, and then assume anyone who isn’t a “verified adult” is a kid and gate them out of their website.
Before we get any further, shout-out to Senators Ron Wyden (D), Rand Paul (R), and Mike Lee (R) for voting against the Senate version of this, and shout-out to most of the Democrats for not voting for this in the House. Also, come on Massie (R, on his way out after extensive lobbying). Be brave and don’t abstain … I can’t figure out yet why 93/100 Senators (bipartisanship, yay!) voted for this in the Senate, but the Democrats in the House opposed this (so this was passed in the house almost exclusively by Republicans, or Democrats in tough races coming up). There were differences between the two versions, but broadly speaking they still required an internet where platforms and apps need to scan government IDs (the bills do not say this, but it’s the only way to comply with the law).
By the way, for the rest of this post, I’m going to refer to the KIDS act as the CREEPS act: Congress Really Enjoys Enabling Pervs and Spies.
It’s all money either way
Many big tech companies, such as Facebook, Google, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter, Roblox, Epic, OpenAI, or Anthropic (all either social media sites, or entrypoints to information, or games), have come under fire in one way or another for enabling shitty behavior towards kids (e.g. bullying eachother) and/or directly harming kids (e.g. loot box gambling addiction, encouraging suicide, general dopamine addiction, etc.). As any good big company does, the first thing you want to do is get the liability off of you. No one wants to pay a big law suit. This is very different from not wanting to do the underlying activity because it is immoral, by the way. Morals got nothin’ to do with it. For-profit companies are legally obligated to act in the best interest of the shareholders. Let’s go through their options.
When deciding whether or not to do something immoral, the company (which is controlled by people who make money when the company makes money) must consider the following outcomes:
| The Company Needs to Pay a Fine | Someone Else Needs to Pay a Fine | |
|---|---|---|
| The Company Increases Revenue | Could go well, could go really poorly, depending on the ratio of revenues to fines. | Literally perfection. Do this all day long. |
| The Company Does Not Increase Revenue | Absolutely not. You’re fired. Horrible idea. | Probably a bad idea, unless you can do damage to a competitor with the fines. |
The CREEPS act is interesting because either outcome lands squarely in the “The Company Increases Revenue” row of the above table. If the act does not pass, Big Tech can continue getting kids addicted to gambling, shitty dopamine-draining content, extreme porn, eating disorders, and all of the other things they do in the pursuit of more engagement, consumption, and the forming of minds of future adults (read: future consumers and voters). If the act does pass, the companies can now perfectly track every adult, who you are, your interests, your worries, your political leanings, your friends, family, location, and more because your government ID is tied to your accounts.
Pervs and spies: the danger
Pervs and spies. What? Yes, that is who benefits the most from this. Well, the Big Tech companies will continue to make insane profits regardless - my proof for that statement is: they’ve BEEN making insane profits for years, and Meta (Facebook, Instagram) wouldn’t have lobbied so hard for this sort of law if they thought it would cause them to lose money. Thus it’s good either way. But for pervs (people who want to flirt with kids, perhaps traffic them, share or request sexual material, etc.), this is literally shooting fish in a barrel. Because the internet will be bifurcated into “kids spaces” and “adults spaces”, guess what your local perv will do? Not verify their identity! Thus, the platforms assume they’re a kid, and they’re put into a lobby / forum / comments section with kids “like them” … I mean, come on, did no one see that coming?
Spies? Yeah, spies. The “intelligence community” (it’s hard to not look intelligent when you hoover up every piece of information you can get your hands on) is absolutely enamored with this bill, and if you’ll allow me some speculation, I think the primary sponsor of it. While we’ve all known that the NSA and friends have been spying on U.S. citizens for well over a decade, the one thing they can’t do is use that data for legal proceedings. Parallel construction (where an illegal search which put you on someone’s tracks is covered up by “happening” to find an incriminating piece of evidence via a legal route) is the way that illegal surveillance is laundered into legality. But with this act, there’s no more need to do this song and dance! Finally, the Big Tech companies (and the FBI, NSA, etc. with whom they share data, often willingly, but also unwillingly) will be able to just say “Yeah, John P. Doe, driver’s license number 8675309 has been posting an awful lot on line lately about how President _____ sucks”. That could come in handy in the future, if we ever got a dictator. If I were a dictator, I’d want to know who’s watching what videos, saying what things, or engaging with what posts. It would be very helpful. What do they think about abortion? Gun control? Vaccines? LGTBQ rights? Immigrants? Do you have the right opinion?
Advertisers (e.g. Facebook, Google) and the intelligence community used to have to do (this is how they do it right now) device fingerprinting (IP address, screen size, cookies, logins, etc.) to track someone, which was annoying not only for advertisers, but also for the intelligence community. Now, with the CREEPS act we know who was using a device. Right?
…
Right?
Identity theft: the danger, and the lack of actual benefits
Right now, if your identity gets stolen, you probably won’t be accused of terrorism, pedophilia, or drug dealing. You’ll probably be bogged down with annoying and stressful forms to various banks and lenders telling them that they got tricked (aside: remember, the term identity theft is a misnomer to make it sound like it’s your fault because it’s your identity that got stolen - but it should really be called “a bank got tricked theft” - I digress - patio11 has some great posts on this). But in this coming future, guess what someone who steals (or fakes) your identity will be able to: threaten people, buy and sell drugs, watch wild and illegal porn, post shitty things, propagandize unwitting people into voting for their candidate, and much more! Except, it’s not them posting it - it’s YOU! Even if you get hacked, it’s YOU! They’ve got your driver’s license on record, remember?
And the other type of identity theft, the one that will mean this act does literally nothing to keep kids safe? Kids using their parents’ identities! The parents who currently are too tuned-out of parenting to set proper parental controls are the exact same ones who will just scan their ID and be done with it. Same parents who give their two-year old an iPad to keep them quiet. Anything except parenting. We’re not going to put parents in prison for allowing underage social media usage (can you imagine that?), so there’s no reason why parents who don’t want to parent won’t just give in and let their kids use their ID.
Conclusion
So what’s my suggestion? Parenting! Seriously, the solution is not more government! The government knows that, as AOC put it recently, this is a “smokescreen” for a national surveillance state. Do you know that? They know this won’t actually help you raise your kids, and if anything it will make it worse (fish in a barrel, remember).
We cannot keep giving the government more control over our kids because we’re too busy or tired or lazy to parent properly. Did you know that your kid cannot get on the internet if you enable parental controls on their phone behind a password? Even if your kid is a technological savant, they’re not going to be able to get on TikTok or PornHub if you whitelist only a subset of websites that are actually good for them. They’re not going to be able to develop a toxic worldview towards women if they can’t watch Andrew Tate on YouTube. They can still text and FaceTime their friends. They can still use peer-to-peer apps with trusted contacts. They can still play video games.
Or just let your kids use the internet and teach them how to consume content critically. I turned out fine.
P.S. I find it really funny (in a sad way) that Sen. Blumenthal (D), the guy to kick this thing off in the Senate, is upset that the House’s version is too weak . I wonder if aides are being replaced by LLMs now. “ICYMI: Blumenthal on Weak House KIDS Act: It’s Not Just Insulting; It is Absolutely Dangerous”