CDT Signs Onto Joint Letter Led by LGBTTech, NBJC, and The Trevor Project to Oppose Age-Minimum Social Media Bans
In a letter released this week, CDT joined ACLU, NBJC, The Trevor Project, GLAAD, interACT: Advocates for Intersex Youth, Public Knowledge, Glisten (Formerly GLSEN), TechFreedom, National LGBTQ Task Force Action Fund, Advocates for Youth, HTTP, COLAGE, Lambda Legal, and the Transgender Law Center, in asserting that youth safety demands serious and evidence-informed solutions, not blanket restrictions that sever young people from a demonstrated source of information and community.
The letter opposes efforts to ban young people from social media which have popped up in states across the country, from Hawaii to California to Arizona to Rhode Island. While these efforts are often framed as common-sense protections for children, these bills jeopardize the safety of all users, including children, and cut off young people from critical online communities while missing other arenas that could be the focus instead, such as business practices and data collection.
The letter notes that these laws will also harm the speech of anyone unwilling or unable to verify their age — whether adult or minor. CDT has also long been concerned with the widespread use of age verification technologies that such bans will necessitate. Age verification raises significant privacy and free expression risks by requiring greater data collection and retention on all users, not just children. As a result, all platforms covered by these proposed bans will now be required, or strongly incentivized by fear of liability, to collect sensitive age-related data on all users, posing a severe privacy risk. Even “privacy-preserving” methods of age assurance (methods that don’t require the collection of identity documents like driver’s licenses and instead rely on experimental techniques like face scanning or user activity analysis) put users at risk as recent data breaches on services like Tea, AU10TIX, and Discord’s customer service vendor have shown.
Previously, CDT has developed principles to articulate how risks to users rights should be mitigated at the outset of the development of laws and rules to protect users, including children, including but not exclusively by considering the proportionality of a proposed law or rule to the problem at hand. Banning kids is not a proportionate solution given the reality that online communities are a lifeline and problems intrinsic with the provision and data practices of these systems won’t go away if the systems are banned.