Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Congress Is About to Break the Internet

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

>>> FREE SPEECH FRIDAY <<<SUPPORT ME ON PATREON. Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 On Tuesday, members of the House of Representatives gathered for a big hearing called Legislative Solutions to Protect Children and Teens Online. The hearing was the latest attempt by lawmakers to force through a slate of horrifying surveillance laws that would censor the internet, strip the ability to freely access information, and cause great harm to children, especially marginalized youth. The mainstream media has been covering none of this. Kate Ruane is a director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, and she testified this Tuesday in front of congress about these evil laws. Today, she joins me to break down what's going on in congress, what these proposed laws would do, and why we're at such a crucial moment when it comes to preserving privacy and free expression on the internet. Read up via the links below and call your representatives today and tell them to stop The SCREEN Act, kill The App Store Accountability Act, and kill the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA).KOSA Won’t Just Silence LGBTQ Voices; It Will Also Be Used To Hide Abortion Info From The InternetHeritage Foundation Says That Of Course GOP Will Use KOSA To Censor LGBTQ ContentWhy The Fuck Are Democrats Helping Build MAGA’s Censorship Machine With KOSA?Follow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz            https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0            https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz

Despite knowing that the best way to protect everyone online is through comprehensive data privacy legislation with strong data minimization provisions, that was not on the table yesterday at all. This Tuesday, members of the House of Representatives gathered together in a room for a big hearing called legislative solutions to protect children and teens online. The hearing was the latest attempt by lawmakers to push through a slate of surveillance laws that would censor the internet, strip us all of our ability to freely access. information and actually cause great harm to children, especially marginalized youth. Of course, the mainstream media has been covering almost none of this. Kate Rain is a director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, and she testified on Tuesday in front of Congress about these laws. Today, she joins me to break down what's going on in Congress, what these proposed laws would do, and why we're at such a crucial moment when it

comes to preserving privacy and free expression on the internet. Kate, welcome. Hi, Taylor. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much for chatting with me. I know you've had a very busy week. To start off, can you kind of tell me what's going on in Congress? What was happening on Tuesday during this session?

So yesterday, the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Commerce Manufacturing and Trade held a legislative hearing to examine 19 bills that are intended to address kids safety online. I think Representative Dingell mentioned that it was the fifth hearing. on kids' safety that the House Energy and Commerce Committee had had in the last few years. This makes sense to me. There have also been a series of hearings and markups in the Senate on this issue. We are still doing this because despite the robust legislative debate, Congress has yet to pass anything to protect kids online in the last five years, or at least since Congress last attempted to address this issue, which resulted in the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.

So that was the focus of the hearing that there were 19 bills at issue. The members were ostensibly discussing those bills. And it was me and three other witnesses to talk about how to approach kid safety online from varying perspectives. Well, let's talk about some of these 19 bills because you're saying that they sort of haven't acted on protecting kids online. But how many of these bills do you think actually would protect kids online? And can you give me the rundown of kind of what some of these bills would do? Because it seems like some of them are pretty harmful. Right. Unfortunately, at this point, not many of them, as they're currently drafted, would actually protect kids online,

or even if they would, they contain some concerning preemption provisions which would stop states from acting to protect kids online in various other contexts, or would stop existing state laws from applying to protect children, even though they historically have done so. So, like, you know, some of the bills, we have an updated version of the Kids Online Safety Act, which has raised significant concerns. my organization, the Center for Democracy and Technology, has been strongly opposed to the Kids Online Safety Act since it was first introduced. The new version does narrow the duty of care in ways that might make it less concerning, but don't necessarily make it constitutional from our point of view and does still incentivize problematic age verification.

Bills like Kappa 2.0, again, that bill is really focused on protecting kids, but the House version has the problematic preemption language and add some problematic language about giving parents access to the content of kids' communications online and allowing them to delete it. There are a number of bills that would allow or require the transfer of massive amounts of data to third parties for them to do analysis on whether the kids who own those accounts are in some kind of danger and then to alert their parents if problematic conversations or problematic content from the middleware provider's perspective is sent to the account holder, which has some significant privacy concerns, right? Like, there are a lot of bills

with significant privacy concerns and a lot of access for parents to contents of communication. Yeah. And I think that those, that's really the key focus of this is that like, in my mind, I don't even like to call them the child online safety laws, even though they put that in the name of all of them, because I think they're ultimately like surveillance laws that really dismantle privacy. And I think when people hear things like, well, parents get access to kids, that might sound good, maybe even to people that are parents, but you can see how that would be weaponized in various ways, right? I mean, especially if a kid is LGBTQ. Maybe the parent is not supportive of that. So what are some of the things that you brought up when you were testifying to Congress on Tuesday? Well, I did write it up exactly that, actually. First, I want to acknowledge that ranking member Polone brought that up first. Not all children are growing up in safe, stable, supportive households. Some kids aren't growing up with families at all. And, And this creates some difficulties if what we are doing in order to protect kids is giving parents, if we can even identify them remotely, which we actually cannot do reliably, the ability to

manage and dictate what they can and can't do online and to whom they can talk online. So I brought that up as a concern. I also brought up that CDT has done research where we asked parents and teens what types of things they want and what they think about existing child safety proposals. And one of the things that they told us was parents thought having access to and control over content was overburdensome to them. It was too detailed to them. They want to make high level guidance type decisions that help their kids engage with safe

services online. But they don't want to be deciding, you know, contact by contact who kids get to talk to. And the kids 100% thought that that was way too invasive. should not be able to delete their content or stop them from talking to people that they want to talk to from their perspective. So it's not just, it's not just a policy concern. It is a day-to-day living concern for a lot of parents and kids. Especially when these laws just continually treat all children the same, like a 17-year-old, the same as a four-year-old. It's like these are radically different types of children with different needs. Another thing that scares me, and I think you

spoke about this on Tuesday is just the way that these potential laws would dismantle adults' privacy. A lot of people don't realize, I think, that in order to determine who even is a child, you have to do this, like, mass identity verification, which removes anonymity from the internet for everyone. I don't think this comes through enough that, you know, if you want to do things that are specific to kids, you have to know the age of everybody. Like, you can't just apply age verification to children. It also doesn't make a ton of sense to apply age verification to children only because they don't have IDs. Exactly. And I think it's important that it's not age verification either. It's identity verification, right? Like I think we use this term age verification that makes

people think that only children are getting identified or whatever. That's a really important point. Age assurance, which can be things like looking at currently owned data and guessing the age of the person to whom it applies all the way up to biometric scanning. to try to guess someone's age, those are generally speaking guesses, right? That's exactly what they are. They're estimates. And for the people for whom that does not work, if you get an error regarding your estimated age, age assurance then becomes age verification, which means in order to get yourself out of

the wrong age bucket, you have to hand over private documentation like your government ID, which contains a lot more information than your age in order to be able to access what might be a critical service for you. And this creates some significant problems because a lot of people don't have valid IDs. I think in my testimony, I note that there's 21 million people of voting age in this country right now that don't have valid non-expired government IDs. Or you just don't want to provide it, even if the service is critical for you because you do want to maintain your privacy and that puts it outside of your reach as well. These are ways that age verification creates a barrier to accessing information, but then there is the part where you conduct age verification,

there's these giant pots of data out in the world that apply to everybody, children, adults, everyone who goes through these processes now has this data sitting on a server somewhere, and if it's not deleted immediately, which we know that it's not being deleted immediately, it is a target for bad actors to access and then leak or sell or use to do identity theft. And one other thing about that is that children's data in particular is really valuable for the purposes of identity theft. Every time we are requiring age verification, we are requiring the creation of these giant pots of data that are making fraudsters thrilled across the internet. And we know that this data constantly leaks and gets hacked. Like we have no comprehensive data privacy in this country.

And that seems like something that none of these bills want to address. Like all of these bills seem to want to basically censor content, prevent children. from accessing information, prevent them from communicating with each other. And it feels like just they're so focused on censorship, but they're not really focused on data privacy. No, they're not at all. The only bill yesterday that was focused primarily on data privacy

is Kappa 2.0. Kappa being a law that was passed in the late 90s that does focus on kids' privacy. But no, we did not that despite knowing that the best way to protect everyone online is through comprehensive data privacy legislation with strong data, minimization provisions that was not on the table yesterday at all.

It feels like we're just backsliding so much, so quickly on the internet. I mean, I've been covering like what's happening in Australia where they just banned vast lots of the internet, you know, for those under the age of 16 and also are doing now identity verification in sort of large ways. The EU is proposing a ton of crazy laws. And you hear this from parents. Like, I mean, there's all these just completely inflammatory, like media articles about how bad technology is, how it's causing kids to mass on alive themselves and other things.

Like, I guess what would you say to parents that say, well, we need to do something? Like, we need to do something and all these other countries are doing something. So why shouldn't we, you know, pass these laws and try to crack down on kids' use of the internet? Wouldn't that be a good thing, even if the laws are imperfect? So first, yes, we do need to do something to the extent that it involves kids' interactions with technology, we can definitely talk about that. But first, we have to understand that what is happening. with children's mental health right now is a complicated picture.

And like you said earlier, not all kids are the same, and the ways they experience harm and the ways that they experience the world are contextual. So whatever public policy we want to put into place has to acknowledge that reality and deal with that reality. We need to provide kids support throughout their whole lives. And one of the things that I said yesterday, and then I'm going to say a million more times, is kids are going to be using online services for their own lives. whole lives. It makes absolutely no sense to just ban them from accessing vast swaths of the internet,

to allow them to access it without, without any sort of guardrails or any sort of education magically when they turn some age, be at 16 or 18. They will be wholly unprepared for the world that they encounter once they get there. If the ban actually manages to work, which I strongly doubt because kids are really resilient and really able to find their way around things anyhow. Yeah, and they'll end up actually an even darker and less regulated corners of the web. I mean, I'm scared of the effect that it'll have on all of us, even when the kids do get on the internet. I think the goal with a lot of these laws is to prevent children from accessing information about the world and to keep them in the dark. You know, as they're passing this or attempting to pass this regulation, we also have

like Prager U videos being integrated into public school curriculums in certain states. So it just, it feels very like dystopian. But also it, I think it has serious speech concerns, even for the adult internet. You know, when those kids do get on the internet when they turn 16 or eventually 18, I know they want to eventually raise it and raise it. But like, what kind of internet do they encounter where we've removed the concept of anonymity? Like, who has the ability to speak out and what sort of content does that prevent? Because I just think that like, especially as a journalist, like so many big parts of the internet rely on anonymity for the web. Yeah, absolutely. And let's just name it. Let's talk about the speech of sex workers. Let's talk

about online adult content, which the Supreme Court just said is okay. to apply legal, legally required age gates to. That decision is risky for so many reasons, including that it's the first step towards ensuring that online antitivity is a thing of the past. The other thing that it's seeking to do is continuously make it more difficult to engage in adult speech online,

meaning adult sexually related speech online. In this consistent campaign to essentially ban pornography, which we had this conversation in the 70s and the Supreme Court said, no, but now we're having it again. And my concern is that the goal, that the end goal of this is actually to expand the definition of what is considered to be obscene for minors to include things like the existence of transgender people and to include things like information about LGBTQ lifestyles and to include things like spaces for kids to talk to each other about gender identity, about

sexual exploration, about all of these things that are part and parcel of identity formation for many kids and not having one of the most important places for people to gather, meaning the internet available to them, it worries me for how kids will interact with this. And it worries me for adults who will also see their access to these sorts of spaces diminish over time. Yeah. Well, we saw what happened in the UK when they passed their online safety act that vast amounts of internet were removed for adults.

There's no more addiction forums. There is no more forums for people to go, you know, discuss disabilities to discuss, yeah, like gender identity, reproductive justice, feminism. All of these things were considered adult. Pretty much every social justice issue was sort of deemed adult. And a lot of these smaller forums as well don't have the resources. Like it seems these laws consolidate the power of big tech in the sense that these smaller platforms that I spoke to the owners of for my story for the Guardian were like, we just don't have the ability to institute this like age identity. identity verification. So like we're just going to shut down. And that leaves, you know, in some cases, thousands of people struggling with with addiction with nowhere to go. That is absolutely true.

And it's it's not just that the sites can't afford it, which is true. Like age verification vendors will quote you a really low price for each verification. But those pile up. Once you get into the millions of people, and that's not a lot of users from an internet perspective, but once you get into the millions of people, you were talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars that you might not have because you have a staff of tool. So that's absolutely true. absolutely accurate and hugely concerning. But the other thing is, there are so many things that people want to talk about privately. So they hit the age gate, regardless of whether the site can afford to do the age assurance

or not, they hit the age gate and they turn and run. If you think of someone in a state right now where abortion access is restricted, and they are going through a crisis in their pregnancy, and they know that they are at risk of having to lose that baby. They run into an age gate when they're looking for support, when they're looking for resources, they're going to run away from it. And they may not know how to use a VPN or other ways to protect themselves in order to ensure that they can access that information. So that's definitely another critical point. Yeah, because it's, again, it's asking for your identity. Like, I just want people to make this connection where, like, it is asking for information

about you. Like, if you have to scan your face, you're no longer able to get this information anonymously. Like you said, you're no longer able to use internet anonymously. And there's so many, I think this is like the number one thing that when I interview people, they don't realize. They say, well, yeah, age verification is for children. I don't have to do anything. And it's like, no, you do. You have to give your data over it. They have to determine who you are to know that you're an adult, whether like you said, by collecting biometric data or your actual like ID.

And it's so problematic. I think of also, I mean, just so many sources that reach out to me that want to speak anonymously about wrongdoing. or whistleblowers or people that, like, yeah, want to get information about abuse or wrongdoing to them. Like, and we saw even in the UK as well when this similar law passed, these forms for children to get support from adults to reach out if they were being abused were being shut down because they were deemed unsafe for children and, you know, under these laws. It's really scary to me, like, I feel like the rhetoric we're hearing around this. Like, we continually frame these laws as protecting children and just this premise. And I've interviewed a lot of researchers as well. that children need to be protected from the internet, that the internet is a bad thing, that it is

this drug, it is this thing that's definitely having a bad effect on children. We know from research that it can have an amazing effect on children. It can help kids. We just saw this study come out recently that kids that get cell phones earlier have better mental health, that young girls, sometimes that engage in the internet in certain ways, like have better views of their body and things. So I'm curious her thoughts on all that and just like fighting back against this broader premise that like the internet is destroying the youth in this way. I mean, yeah, that's in my testimony as well. Everybody should have access to technology and should be able to use it. Everybody, including children, especially children, should have access to age-appropriate technology.

And from my perspective, to the extent that we may have concerns, the solution isn't going to be to ban or restrict kids access. The solution is better education, better and more appropriate guidance for how to use these services and how to engage with them, understanding the context in which they exist and the fact that everything that they are doing is being recorded because we don't have comprehensive consumer privacy legislation. Those are all things that are important and were the subject of some of the bills yesterday, but we're not part of the discussion nearly enough. If we are actually going help kids become adults, which is our job, is our job as adults, is my job as a parent. The only way to do it is through guidance and assistance and not just parents engaging in that guidance, but everybody. Schools, non-custodial adults, coaches, everybody has to be involved in this. And that's a more complicated solution than just ban it.

And I think that's part of why you see some of what you see. I think it's important to note, too, like we're not really just talking about technology. We're talking about information and media. And like technology is like just the medium that sort of, like what people use to get information. So when we talk about these bans, the goal is to not like ban specific technology as much as it is to restrict young people's access to information and communication abilities. And when we look at it that way, we've seen these bands time and time and time again with every single new form of media or communication, you know? And I think that's what

scares me the most is that like it's not like this, in a sense, like banning books was even more limited or banning other forms of media, like when they tried to like, I don't know, outlaw rap music or whatever, like that was bad, but it was like more limited. The internet is this mass information tool that we all rely on. And so I think these laws just have the ability to restrict a lot more and enact a lot more censorship than people realize. Oh, that's absolutely the case. I mean, kids use the internet for everything, including accessing news, creating art. Like, I think that I had a statistic where 10% of kids use their devices. to create art more than once a week.

These things are really important to kids, and they are so integrated into their lives. Like, you look at the Australian limitation on access to services for people under 16. One of them is Reddit. There is so much information on Reddit that is useful. You think of a 15-year-old kid that is super interested in cars

and really wants to, like, figure out how to put a carburetor back together. Reddit is really helpful for that sort of thing. And that kid can't access it? It doesn't make sense. YouTube? I know. It makes sense when you understand that it's not about protecting kids. And I would argue that these laws are about controlling information ecosystem and controlling what access kids do have to information. Because, yeah, if YouTube is so harmful, then why are we showing Prager U videos in school? Why are we integrating, you know, certain types of online content more and more into children's education systems or

different sort of, I guess, propaganda type initiatives, maybe political, initiatives to kind of mis-educate people about LGBTQ things. Like, it seems like they're perfectly happy to use the internet when it says the right thing, but they just don't want young people to have free and open access to information. It's definitely a giant risk. And one of the concerns that I have is it used to be pretty reliable for a long time that the Supreme Court would step in and stop this sort of thing. So 10 years ago, 20 years ago, there was a case about banning the sale of violent video games

to kids without parental consent. And the opinion was written by Justice Scalia, the case is called Brown versus Entertainment Merchants Association. And Justice Scalia proceeded to just dismantle this law. Absolutely dismantle it from top to bottom, pointing out one violent speech has never been unprotected and here is all, here is the gigantic list of violent things that we would never think that we could that we couldn't expose a kid to, like the Bible or Grimm's fairy tales, right?

So he starts there and then he goes on to say also parental consent requirements, which were throughout the legislation that we saw yesterday really don't protect anybody's rights, parents or children's. What they do is they tell parents what the government thinks that they should want and then forces parents who don't want that to take a step to ensure that their kids could get access to the information that the parents think it's okay for them to have access to. So it actually does create a disproportionate burden and barrier on certain parents. And then the third thing he pointed out, the other thing he pointed out about parental consent is, if this stuff is so dangerous, why would we allow it just because kids could find one parent to say yes to it?

So, you know, he just went through all of the ways these things don't make sense and all of the ways that, you know, the content that we are talking about is really just stopping kids from accessing ideas that adults are afraid of them seeing and then said, you know, this is unconstitutional. You can't do it. Every single argument applicable in that currently existing precedential decision applies to almost every piece of legislation we saw yesterday. But I don't have the confidence that it will hold up when it goes to this Supreme Court. I agree with you too. And that is what is so, so, so terrifying to be. And I feel like why we need to fight these laws as much as we can. One little civil lining on that

is we do have an opinion from very brief opinion from Justice Kavanaugh in a recent case that came up to the Supreme Court asking for a stay on a reversal of an injunction, which is a really ridiculous way of saying the Supreme Court did not allow an injunction on a social media ban to go in effect. So the law actually is in effect right now in Mississippi. But even while he was allowing this law to go into effect, Justice Kavanaugh was like, by the way, I do think there is a strong likelihood that this law is unconstitutional. So there is hope. It is less hope that I want to have, but there is hope. There's like one justice that might be sympathetic if it ever gets to that point. there might be one.

Well, I don't think, I don't think it's just one justice. I think that Justice Kagan's opinion and FSC versus Paxton was on point and well-reasoned and well-written for why she would have asked Texas to do more to prove that their law survives strict scrutiny. We do have that. And we also have her opinion in Moody versus Netchoice, which is really important and is going to be critical once these social media bans and age-appropriate design codes make it to the Supreme Court. Well, Kate, thank you so much for joining me today to break all this down

and appreciate all the work you do so much. Thank you so much, Taylor, for having me and thank you for all the work you do, too. That's it for this week's Free Speech Friday. Please don't forget to subscribe to my Patreon via the link below to support my work, or you can buy a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter, usermag.co. That's usermag.com on substack. You can also get my newsletter through my Patreon. I rely 100% on support from people like you to do this work and to fight these laws and to cover the these things that, again, the mainstream media refuses to report on. I'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Free Speech Friday. See you then.