I’ve been floating around in conservative policy circles for 30 years and I have spent much of that time covering media policy and child safety issues. My time in conservative circles began in 1992 with a 9-year stint at the Heritage Foundation, where I launched the organization’s policy efforts on media regulation, the Internet, and digital technology. Meanwhile, my work on child safety has spanned 4 think tanks, multiple blue ribbon child safety commissions, countless essays, dozens of filings and testimonies, and even a multi-edition book.

During this three-decade run, I’ve tried my hardest to find balanced ways of addressing some of the legitimate concerns that many conservatives have about kids, media content, and online safety issues. Raising kids is the hardest job in the world. My daughter and son are now off at college, but the last twenty years of helping them figure out how to navigate the world and all the challenges it poses was filled with difficulties. This was especially true because my daughter and son faced completely different challenges when it came to media content and online interactions. Simply put, there is no one-size-fits-all playbook when it comes to raising kids or addressing concerns about healthy media interactions.

Something Must Be Done!

My personal approach, as I summarized in my book on these issues, was to first and foremost do everything in my power to (a) keep an open mind about new media content and platforms, and (b) ensure an open line of ongoing communication with my kids about the issues they might be facing. Shutting down conversation or calling for others to come in and save the day were the worst two options, in my opinion. As I summarized in my book, “At the end of the day, there is simply no substitute for talking to our children in an open, loving, and understanding fashion about the realities of-this world, including the more distasteful bits.” This was my Parental Prime Directive, if you will. I just always wanted to make sure that my kids felt like they could talk to me about their issues, no matter how varied, horrible, or heart-breaking those problems might be.

When talking with other parents through the years, I’ve heard about their own unique concerns and struggles. Every family faces different challenges because no two kids or situations are alike. Moreover, the challenges can feel overwhelming in our modern world of information abundance, which is flush with ubiquitous communications and media options. Sometimes these parental frustrations can fester and grow into a sort of rage until you finally hear folks utter that famous phrase: Something must be done! And that “something” is often some sort of government regulation “for the children.”

Again, I get it. When all your best efforts to help or protect your kids don’t seem to work according to plan, it’s only natural to call for help. But there are very serious problems associated with calling on government for that help. When legislators and regulators are asked to play the role of National Nanny, it comes with all the same baggage that accompanies many other efforts by the government to intervene in our lives or control what people or organizations can say or do.

Conservative Contradictions

These are particularly sensitive issues for many conservatives, both because conservatives tend to have more heightened concerns about media content and online safety issues, and also because the steps they often recommend to address these issues can quickly come into conflict with their own first principles.

Let me run through six ways that support for media content controls and child safety regulations can sometimes run afoul of conservative principles.

1) It’s a rejection of personal responsibility

Again, I understand all too well how hard parenting can be. But that does not mean we should abdicate our parental responsibilities to the State. Conservatives have spent decades fighting government when it comes to broken schools and the supposed brainwashing many kids get in them. The rallying cry of conservatives has long been: Let us have a greater say in how we raise and educate our children because the State is failing us or betraying our values.

Thus, when conservatives suggest that the State should be making decisions for us as it pertains to anything the government says is a “child safety” issue, there is some serious cognitive dissonance going on there. In his humorous Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce jokingly defined responsibility as, “A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one’s neighbor. In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it upon a star.” For parental responsibility to actually mean something, it has to be more than a “detachable burden” that we unload upon government.

2) It’s an embrace of the administrative state & arbitrary rule by unelected bureaucrats

Beyond the classroom, conservatives have long been concerned about the specter of massive administrative agencies and armies of unelected bureaucrats controlling our lives from the shadows. I’ve spent decades working with conservative organizations and scholars trying to get the administrative state under some control to scale back its enormous power, arbitrary edicts, and costly burdens. Over-criminalization has become such a problem that, according to the Heritage Foundation, “regulatory offenses… have proliferated to the point that, literally, nobody knows how many federal criminal regulations exist today.” We’re all criminals of some sort in the eyes of the modern regulatory state.

Yet, when conservatives advocate the expansion of the administrative state through new “online safety” regulations, they are just making the over-criminalization problem worse, including by treating our own children as guilty parties for simply trying to access the primary media platforms of their generation and interact with their friends there. For example, calls to ban all teens from social media until they’re 18 would result in the most massive “forbidden fruit” nightmare in American history, with every teen suddenly becoming a criminal actor and working together to tunnel around bans using the same sort of VPNs and evasion technologies people in China and other repressive nations use to get around over-bearing speech policies. [See: “Again, We Should Not Ban All Teens from Social Media”]

Needless to say, all this regulation and bureaucratic empowerment would have massive negative externalities for online freedom more generally as the era of “permissionless innovation” is replaced by a new age of permission-slip regulation.

3) It’s a rejection of the First Amendment & free speech rights

Conservatives have spent many decades pushing for greater First Amendment-based freedoms as it pertains to religious liberty and or organizational/corporate speech issues. Thus, when conservatives seek to undermine free speech principles and jurisprudence in the name of child safety, it could undo everything conservatives have been fighting to accomplish in those other contexts.

Conservatives are understandably upset with some social media platforms for being too over-zealous with certain types of speech takedowns or de-platformings. But two wrongs don’t make a right, and they should not be calling on Big Government to be imposing its own editorial judgments in place of private actors. [See: “The Great Deplatforming of 2021“ and “When It Comes to Fighting Social Media Bias, More Regulation Is Not the Answer.“]

4) It’s a rejection of property rights and freedom more generally

Related to the previous two points, conservatives have long upheld the sanctity of property rights in many different contexts. This includes the property rights that private establishments enjoy under the Constitution to generally decide how to structure their operations, who they will do business with, and how they will do so. Private organizations and religious institutions possess not only free speech rights in this regard, but property and contractual rights, too.

But when it comes to “child safety” mandates, some conservatives would toss all this out the window and undermine those rights, replacing them with burdensome regulatory mandates that tell private parties how to conduct their affairs. Again, there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance going on here and it could have serious blowback for conservatives when the property / contractual rights of other people or organizations are undermined on similar grounds.

5) It’s an embrace of frivolous lawsuits & the trial lawyers that bring them

The last time I checked, trial lawyers were not exactly the most conservative-friendly constituency. For many decades, conservatives have looked to advance tort reform, limit junk science and frivolous lawsuits, and make sure that the courts don’t engage in excessive judicial activism.

Unfortunately, many of the child safety regulations being proposed today would empower the regulatory state and trial lawyers at the same time. Many of the bills being floated open the door to open-ended litigation and potentially punishing liability for private platforms — and not just against deep-pocketed “Big Tech” companies. The fact is, once conservatives open the litigation floodgates based on amorphous accusations of potential online safety harms, they will be empowering the tort bar (one of the biggest supporters of the Democratic Party, no less) to launch a legal jihad against any and every media platform out there. Good luck putting that genie back in the bottle once you unleash it.

6) It’s an embrace of the same moral panic arguments your parents leveled against you

How quickly we forget the accusations our own parents and others leveled against us as children. Remember when video games were going to make us a lost generation of murderous youth? Or when rap and rock-and-roll music were going to send us straight to hell? Today, those kids are all grown up and trying to tell us that they are fine but it’s this latest generation that is doomed. It’s just an endless generational cycle of moral panics. [See: “Why Do We Always Sell the Next Generation Short?” and “Confessions of a ‘Vidiot’: 50 Years of Video Games & Moral Panics”] Today’s conservatives need to remember that they, too, were once kids and somehow muddled through to adulthood.

The “3-E” Approach Is the Better Answer

At this point, some of the people who’ve read this far are screaming at the screen: “So, are you saying we should just do nothing!?”

Absolutely not. But it is important that we consider less onerous and more practical ways to address these challenging issues without falling prey to Big Government gimmicks that would undermine other important principles. We should start by acknowledging that there are no easy fixes or silver-bullet solutions. The plain truth of the matter is that the best solutions here can seem messy and unsatisfying to many because they require enormous ongoing efforts to mentor and assist our kids at a far deeper level than some folks are comfortable with.

For example, it is just insanely uncomfortable to have to speak with your kids about online bullying or harassment, pornography, violence in movies and games, hate speech, and so on. And I haven’t even mentioned the hardest things to talk to kids about: The daily news of the real world: wars, violence, tragic accidents, famines, etc. Honestly, the hardest conversations I’ve had to have with my kids were those about school shootings. By comparison, many other discussions about online content and interactions were much easier. To the extent that we’re attempting to measure and address negative media affects, I firmly believe that there a few things in this world more horrifying to kids — or harder to talk with them about — than the first 10 minutes of what’s on cable news each hour of the day.

Regardless, whether we’re talking about the potential “harms” or mass media or online content, we cannot pretend there exists a simple solution to any of it. Here’s the better approach.

I recently authored a study for the American Enterprise Institute on, “Governing Emerging Technology in an Age of Policy Fragmentation and Disequilibrium.” It was my attempt to sketch out a flexible, pragmatic, bottom-up set of governance principles for modern technology platforms and issues. In that report, I noted how “[t]he First Amendment constitutes a particularly high barrier to the use of hard law in the United States,” and that court challenges were likely to continue to block many of the regulatory efforts being floated today, just as been the case countless times before in recent decades. Thus, we need to have backup approaches to online safety beyond one-size-fits-all regulatory Hail Mary passes.

I have described that backup plan as the “3-E” approach or “layered approach” to online safety:

• Empowerment of parents: Parental controls cannot solve all the world’s problems. It’s better to view them as helpful speed bumps or emergency alerts for when things are going badly for your child. In the old days, we placed a lot of faith in filtering, and that still has a role along with other tools that help place some reasonable limits not only on content but also overall consumption. But the best types of parental empowerment are those that force conversations between parents and kids by allowing reasonable monitoring to happen that is scaled by age (as in more limits for younger kids until they are gradually relaxed over time). And other carrot-and-stick tools and approaches are incredibly useful in helping parents place smart limits on youth activity and overall consumption.
• Education of youth: Education is the strategy with the most lasting impact for online safety. Education and digital literacy provide skills and wisdom that can last a lifetime. Specifically, education can help teach both kids (and adults!) how to behave in — or respond to — a wide variety of situations. Building resiliency and encouraging healthy interactions is the goal.
• Enforcement of existing laws: There are many sensible and straightforward laws already in place that address more concrete types of harm and harassment. And we have lots of laws pertaining to fraud and unfair and deceptive practices. Sometimes these rules can be challenging (and time-consuming) to enforce, but they constitute an existing backstop that can handle most worst-case scenarios when other less-restrictive steps fall short. And we should certainly tap these existing remedies before advancing unworkable new regulatory regimes.

I noted in my AEI study that, between 2000 and 2010, six major online-safety task forces or blue-ribbon commissions were formed to study online-safety issues and consider what should be done to address them. Each of them recommended some variant of the “3-E” approach as they encouraged a variety of best practices, educational approaches, and technological-empowerment solutions to address various safety concerns. Self-regulatory codes, private content-rating systems, and a wide variety of different parental-control technologies all proliferated during this period. Many multi-stakeholder initiatives and other organizations were also formed to address governance issues collaboratively. There are countless groups doing important work on this front today, including my old friends at the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) among many others.

These organizations push for a layered approach to online safety and work closely with educators, child development experts, and other academics and activists to find workable solutions to new online safety challenges as they arise. Their work is never done, and at times it can feel overwhelming. But, again, it’s the nature of the task at hand. We all must work together to continuously devise new and better approaches to addressing these challenges, because they will be endless. But let’s please not expect that we can unload these responsibilities on government and expect regulators to somehow handle it for us.

Do the Ends Justify the Means When it Comes to Media & Content Control?

I could be wasting my breath here because I’ve been attempting to appeal to conservative principles that may be rapidly disappearing from the modern conservative movement. Donald Trump radically disrupted everything in American politics, but especially the Republican Party. Many so-called national conservatives now live by Trump’s central operating principle: The ends justify the means. The ends are “owning the libs” in any way possible. And “the libs” include not only anyone on the Left of the political spectrum, but even those individuals and institutions that Trumpian conservatives believe are “the enemy” and controlled by “liberal interests.” By their definition, this now includes virtually all large media and technology companies and platforms. Thus, when we turn to the means, it’s increasingly the case that just about anything goes — including many traditional conservative principles.

To see how far we’ve come, recall what President Ronald Reagan said 35 years ago when vetoing an effort to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine. “History has shown that the dangers of an overly timid or biased press cannot be averted through bureaucratic regulation, but only through the freedom and compe­tition that the First Amendment sought to guarantee,” he said. At the time, President Reagan was confronted with some of the same arguments we hear today about media being too biased or conservatives not getting a fair shake. But he called upon his fellow conservatives to reject the idea that Big Government was the solution to such problems.

Unfortunately, Mr. Trump and some of his most loyal followers and even some major conservative groups today have largely given up on this logic and instead embraced regulation. While Trumpian conservatives love to decry everyone they oppose as “communists,” ironically it is this same group that is embracing a sort of communications collectivism as it pertains to modern media control. In the Trumpian worldview, media and tech platforms are useful only to the extent they carry out the will of the party — or at least the man on top of it.

These national conservatives have made a horrible miscalculation. Feeling aggrieved by Big Tech “bias,” or just feeling overwhelmed by things they don’t like about online platforms, they’ve decided that two wrongs make a right. In reality, two political wrongs never make a right, but they almost always combine to make government a lot bigger and more powerful.

It’s an incredibly naïve gamble almost certainly destined to fail, but they should ask themselves what it means if it works. This endless ratcheting effect will result in comprehensive state control of most channels of communications and information dissemination. Is this a game that you really think you can play better than the Lefties?

I’ll close by returning to one of Reagan’s favorite jokes. He always used to say that, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” I would suggest that an even scarier version of that line would be, “We’re from the government and we’re here to help you parent your kids.”

Don’t let it be you uttering that line.

______________

Additional Reading

· Adam Thierer, “Again, We Should Not Ban All Teens from Social Media”

· Adam Thierer, “Why Do We Always Sell the Next Generation Short?”

· Adam Thierer, “The Classical Liberal Approach to Digital Media Free Speech Issues”

· Adam Thierer, “Confessions of a ‘Vidiot’: 50 Years of Video Games & Moral Panics”

· Adam Thierer, “Left and right take aim at Big Tech — and the First Amendment“

· Adam Thierer, “When It Comes to Fighting Social Media Bias, More Regulation Is Not the Answer“

· Adam Thierer, “Ongoing Series: Moral Panics / Techno-Panics”

· Adam Thierer, “No Goldilocks Formula for Content Moderation in Social Media or the Metaverse, But Algorithms Still Help”

· Adam Thierer, “FCC’s O’Rielly on First Amendment & Fairness Doctrine Dangers“

· Adam Thierer, “Conservatives & Common Carriage: Contradictions & Challenges“

· Adam Thierer, “The Great Deplatforming of 2021“

· Adam Thierer, “A Good Time to Re-Read Reagan’s Fairness Doctrine Veto“

· Adam Thierer, “Sen. Hawley’s Radical, Paternalistic Plan to Remake the Internet“

· Adam Thierer, “How Conservatives Came to Favor the Fairness Doctrine & Net Neutrality“

· Adam Thierer, “Sen. Hawley’s Moral Panic Over Social Media“

· Adam Thierer, “The White House Social Media Summit and the Return of ‘Regulation by Raised Eyebrow’“

· Adam Thierer, “The Surprising Ideological Origins of Trump’s Communications Collectivism“

· Adam Thierer, Parental Controls & Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools and Methods (2009).

A growing number of conservatives are calling for Big Government censorship of social media speech platforms. Censorship proposals are to conservatives what price controls are to radical leftists: completely outlandish, unworkable, and usually unconstitutional fantasies of controlling things that are ultimately much harder to control than they realize. And the costs of even trying to impose and enforce such extremist controls are always enormous.

Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal ran a response I wrote to a proposal set forth by columnist Peggy Noonan in which she proposed banning everyone under 18 from all social-media sites (“We Can Protect Children and Keep the Internet Free,” Apr. 15). I expanded upon that letter in an essay here entitled, “Should All Kids Under 18 Be Banned from Social Media?” National Review also recently published an article penned by Christine Rosen in which she also proposes to “Ban Kids from Social Media.” And just this week, Zach Whiting of the Texas Public Policy Foundation published an essay on “Why Texas Should Ban Social Media for Minors.”

I’ll offer a few more thoughts here in addition to what I’ve already said elsewhere. First, here is my response to the Rosen essay. National Review gave me 250 words to respond to her proposal:

While admitting that “law is a blunt instrument for solving complicated social problems,” Christine Rosen (“Keep Them Offline,” June 27) nonetheless downplays the radicalness of her proposal to make all teenagers criminals for accessing the primary media platforms of their generation. She wants us to believe that allowing teens to use social media is the equivalent of letting them operate a vehicle, smoke tobacco, or drink alcohol. This is false equivalence. Being on a social-media site is not the same as operating two tons of steel and glass at speed or using mind-altering substances. Teens certainly face challenges and risks in any new media environment, but to believe that complex social pathologies did not exist before the Internet is folly. Echoing the same “lost generation” claims made by past critics who panicked over comic books and video games, Rosen asks, “Can we afford to lose another generation of children?” and suggests that only sweeping nanny-state controls can save the day. This cycle is apparently endless: Those “lost generations” grow up fine, only to claim it’s the  next generation that is doomed! Rosen casually dismisses free-speech concerns associated with mass-media criminalization, saying that her plan “would not require censorship.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Rosen’s prohibitionist proposal would deny teens the many routine and mostly beneficial interactions they have with their peers online every day. While she belittles media literacy and other educational and empowerment-based solutions to online problems, those approaches continue to be a better response than the repressive regulatory regime she would have Big Government impose on society.

I have a few more things to say beyond these brief comments.

First, as I alluded to in my short response to Rosen, we’ve heard similar “lost generation” stories before. Rosen might as well be channeling the ghost of Dr. Fredric Wertham (author of Seduction of the Innocent), who in the 1950s declared comics books a public health menace and lobbied lawmakers to restrict teen access to them, insisting such comics were “the cause of a psychological mutilation of children.” The same sort of “lost generation” predictions were commonplace in countless anti-video game screeds of the 1990s. Critics were writing books with titles like Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill and referring to video games as “murder simulators,” Ironically, just as the video game panic was heating up, juvenile crime rates were plummeting. But that didn’t stop the pundits and policymakers from suggesting that an entire generation of so-called “vidiots” were headed for disaster. (See my 2019 short history: “Confessions of a ‘Vidiot’: 50 Years of Video Games & Moral Panics“).

It is consistently astonishing to me how, as I noted in 2012 essay, “We Always Sell the Next Generation Short.” There seems to be a never-ending cycle of generational mistrust. “There has probably never been a generation since the Paleolithic that did not deplore the fecklessness of the next and worship a golden memory of the past,” notes Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist.

For example, in 1948, the poet T. S. Eliot declared: “We can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline; that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago; and that the evidences of this decline are visible in every department of human activity.” We’ve heard parents (and policymakers) make similar claims about every generation since then.

What’s going on here? Why does this cycle of generational pessimism and mistrust persist? In a 1992 journal article, the late journalism professor Margaret A. Blanchard offered this explanation:

“[P]arents and grandparents who lead the efforts to cleanse today’s society seem to forget that they survived alleged attacks on their morals by different media when they were children. Each generation’s adults either lose faith in the ability of their young people to do the same or they become convinced that the dangers facing the new generation are much more substantial than the ones they faced as children.”

In a 2009 book on culture, my colleague Tyler Cowen also noted how, “Parents, who are entrusted with human lives of their own making, bring their dearest feelings, years of time, and many thousands of dollars to their childrearing efforts.” Unsurprisingly, therefore, “they will react with extreme vigor against forces that counteract such an important part of their life program.” This explains why “the very same individuals tend to adopt cultural optimism when they are young, and cultural pessimism once they have children,” Cowen says.

Building on Blanchard and Cowen’s observation, I have explained how the most simple explanation for this phenomenon is that many parents and cultural critics have passed through their “adventure window.” The willingness of humans to try new things and experiment with new forms of culture—our “adventure window”—fades rapidly after certain key points in life, as we gradually settle in our ways. As the English satirist Douglas Adams once humorously noted: “Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

There is no doubt social media can create or exacerbate certain social pathologies among youth. But pro-censorship conservatives wants to take the easy way out with a Big Government media ban for the ages.

Ultimately, it’s a solution that will not be effective. Raising children and mentoring youth is certainly the hardest task we face as adults because simple solutions rarely exist to complex human challenges–and the issues kids face are often particularly hard for many parents and adults to grapple with because we often fail to fully understand both the unique issues each generation might face, and we definitely fail to fully grasp the nature of each new medium that youth embrace.  Simplistic solution–even proposals for outright bans–will not work or solve serious problems.

An outright government ban on online platforms or digital devices is likely never going to happen due to First Amendment constraints, but even ignoring the jurisprudential barriers, bans won’t work for a reason that these conservatives never bother considering: Many parents will help their kids get access to those technologies and to evade restrictions on their use. Countless parents already do so in violation of COPPA rules, and not just because they worry that their kid won’t have access to what some other kids have. Rather, many parents (like me) both wanted to make sure I could more easily communicate with them, and also ensure that they could enjoy those technologies and use them to explore the world.

These conservatives might think some parents like me are monsters for allowing my (now grown) children to get on social media when they were teens. I wasn’t blind to the challenges, but recognized that sticking one’s head in the ground or hoping for divine intervention from the Nanny State was impractical and unwise. The hardest conversations I ever had with my kids were about the ugliness they sometimes experienced online, but those conversations were also countered by the many joys that I knew online interactions brought them. Shall I tell you about everything my son learned online before 13 about building model rockets or soapbox derby cars? Or the countless sites my daughter visited gathering ideas for her arts and crafts projects when, before the age of 13, she started hand-painting and selling jean jackets (eventually prompting her to pursue an art school degree)? Again, as I noted in my National Review response, Rosen’s prohibitionist proposal would deny teens these experiences and the countless other routine and entirely beneficial interactions that they have with their peers online every day.

There is simply no substitute for talking to your kids in the most open, understanding, and loving fashion possible. My #1 priority with my own children was not foreclosing all the new digital media platforms and devices at their disposal. That was going to be almost impossible. Other approaches are needed.

Yes, of course, the world can be an ugly place. I mean, have you ever watched the nightly news on television? It’s damn ugly. Shouldn’t we block youth access to it when scenes of war and violence are shown? Newspapers are full of ugliness, too. Should a kid be allowed to see the front page of the paper when it discusses or shows the aftermath of school shootings, acts of terrorism, or even just natural disasters? I could go on, but you get the point. And you could try to claim that somehow today’s social media environment is significantly worse for kids than the mass media of old, but you cannot prove it.

Of course you’ll have anecdotes, and many of them will again point to complex social pathologies. But I have entire shelves full of books on my office wall that made similar claims about the effects of books, the telephone, radio and television, comics, cable TV, every musical medium ever, video games, and advertising efforts across all these mediums. Hundreds upon hundreds of studies were done over the past half century about the effects of depictions of violence in movies, television, and video games. And endless court battles ensued.

In the end, nothing came out of it because the literature was inconclusive and frequently contradictory. After many years of panicking about youth and media violence, in 2020, the American Psychological Association issued a new statement slowly reversing course on misguided past statements about video games and acts of real-world violence. The APA’s old statement said that evidence “confirms [the] link between playing violent video games and aggression.”  But the APA has come around and now says that, “there is insufficient scientific evidence to support a causal link between violent video games and violent behavior.” More specifically, the APA now says: “Violence is a complex social problem that likely stems from many factors that warrant attention from researchers, policy makers and the public. Attributing violence to violent video gaming is not scientifically sound and draws attention away from other factors.”

This is exactly what we should expect to find true for youth and social media. Most of the serious scholars in the field already note studies and findings about youth and social media must be carefully evaluated and that many other factors need to be considered whenever evaluating claims about complex social phenomenon.

While Rosen belittles media literacy and other educational and empowerment-based solutions to online problems, those approaches continue to represent the best first-order response when compared to the repressive regulatory regime she would impose on society.

Finally, I want to just reiterate what I said in my brief  National Review response about the enormous challenges associated with mass criminalization or speech platforms. Rosen seems to image that all the costs and controversies will lie on the supply-side of social media. Just call for a ban and then magically all kids disappear from social media and the big evil tech capitalists eat all the costs and hassles. Nonsense. It’s the demand-side of criminalization efforts where the most serious costs lie. What do you really think kids are going to do if Uncle Sam suddenly does ban everyone under 18 from going on a “social media site,” whatever that very broad term entails? This will become another sad chapter in the history of Big Government prohibitionist efforts that fail miserably, but not before declaring mass groups of people criminals–this time including everyone under 18–and then trying to throw the book at them when they seek to avoid those repressive controls. There are better ways to address these problems than with such extremist proposals.

Additional Reading from Adam Thierer on Media & Content Regulation :

• “Should All Kids Under 18 Be Banned from Social Media?”
• “Why Do We Always Sell the Next Generation Short?”
• “The APA’s Welcome New Statement on Video Game Violence“
• “Video Games and Moral Panic“
• Parental Controls & Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools & Methods, 4th Edition.
• “Technopanics and the Great Social Networking Scare“
• “More on Monkey See-Monkey Do Theories about Media Violence & Real-World Crime“
• “Video Games, Media Violence & the Cathartic Effect Hypothesis.”)
• “The Classical Liberal Approach to Digital Media Free Speech Issues“
• “Left and right take aim at Big Tech — and the First Amendment“
• “When It Comes to Fighting Social Media Bias, More Regulation Is Not the Answer“
• “FCC’s O’Rielly on First Amendment & Fairness Doctrine Dangers“
• “Conservatives & Common Carriage: Contradictions & Challenges“
• “The Great Deplatforming of 2021“
• “A Good Time to Re-Read Reagan’s Fairness Doctrine Veto“
• “Sen. Hawley’s Radical, Paternalistic Plan to Remake the Internet“
• “How Conservatives Came to Favor the Fairness Doctrine & Net Neutrality“
• “Sen. Hawley’s Moral Panic Over Social Media“
• “The White House Social Media Summit and the Return of ‘Regulation by Raised Eyebrow’“
• “The Not-So-SMART Act“
• “The Surprising Ideological Origins of Trump’s Communications Collectivism“

• “Why Regulate Broadcasting: Toward a Consistent First Amendment Standard for the Information Age,” Catholic University Law School, 15 CommLaw Conspectus (Summer 2007): 431-482.
• Testimony at FCC’s Hearing on “Serving the Public Interest in the Digital Era”, March 3, 2010.
• “FCC v. Fox and the Future of the First Amendment in the Information Age,”

Facebook announced some changes to its site today that will make it easier for teen users to share content with not just their friends but also the entire world. (More coverage at The Washington Post here.) No doubt, some privacy advocates will cry foul and rush to policymakers with requests for restrictions. Yet, it’s not clear to me what their case would be. There isn’t any COPPA issue here since we are talking about teens, and they aren’t covered by the law. Moreover, it seems entirely sensible to allow teens to make their voices heard more broadly via Facebook’s platform the same way they can via many other online sites and services. Teens have speech rights, too, after all.

On the other hand, this is another “teachable moment” that parents should take advantage of. When sites (especially larger sites like Facebook) change their policies and make it easier for our kids to share more about themselves and their feelings, that is always a great time to have another chat with them about acceptable online behavior. I’ve spent a lot of time here and elsewhere talking about the importance of “Netiquette,” or proper online etiquette in various social settings and situations. We need to talk to our kids and each other about being more savvy, sensible, respectful, and resilient media consumers and digital citizens. And schools and even governments have a role to play in pushing education and media literacy in pursuit of better “digital citizenship.”

The crucial lesson here — and this certainly has relevance to today’s Facebook announcement — is that we need to constantly be encouraging our kids to think about smarter online hygiene (sensible personal data use) and proper behavior toward others. We can, without using excessive fear tactics, do more to explain the potential perils of over-sharing information about ourselves and others while simultaneously encouraging kids to delete unnecessary online information occasionally and cover their digital footprints in other ways. These efforts and lessons should start at a young age and continue on well into adulthood through other means, including awareness campaigns and public service announcements.

For its part, Facebook is taking the sensible step of issuing multiple warnings to teens before they use the new tools now at their disposal to communicate to the world. Before they first post publicly, they’ll apparently see an inline pop-up box warning them they are a posting for a broader audience than just their friends. I can’t see what more Facebook should do to educate kids in this regard. I suppose they could issue endless warnings each and every time that teens go to post publicly, but then the pop-up overload would just become annoying and drive kids away entirely.

Facebook also offers a lot of ways for users to clamp down on their sharing, but it defeats the whole purpose of the site if you are cranking all those settings up to maximum restrictiveness because, by its very nature, Facebook is all about sharing. So, we shouldn’t expect Facebook to switch all those defaults over to a completely locked-down experience.

If you don’t like the fact that your teen shares a lot on Facebook, you probably need to ask yourself if you want them on Facebook at all. Personally, Facebook is just not for me (I stopped using it well over a year ago; just too much of a Digital Nudist Colony for my taste) and my kids haven’t expressed much interest in it yet (which is probably good since they are not yet 13!)  But if and when they do express interest (and are old enough to join), I will be happy to sit down with them, walk through the process of setting up a profile, and use the opportunity to talk to them in a open, understanding, and loving fashion about the ups and downs of digital life in a mass-sharing, hyper-transparent ecosystem like Facebook.

Honestly, as a parent, I don’t think Facebook is all that concerning from the perspective of safety, although it can at times be a bit more concerning when it comes to privacy. But many kids today aren’t even all that into Facebook and other social networking sites, viewing them as the spaces where old farts hang out. Today’s kids are more into visual media, texting, and services that let them instantaneously combine those services to rapidly create and share their lives and their feelings. My daughter and her friends walk around all day and night long filming each other and then creating silly mash-ups of the best moments before sharing them with each other and classmates. The potential for mistakes is always there and I am constantly talking to her about what she films, when she films, and who she shares the clips with. But in the end, she is being remarkably creative and enjoying herself immensely in the process. I want to encourage that since it is rewarding for both her and for me. I am very proud of what my kids can do with modern digital media and jealous that I did not have similar tools and opportunities when I was young! But I also want to make sure she understands the potential downsides and dangers of oversharing or inappropriate uses of modern video and texting technologies.

Patience and personal responsibility is always more sensible than panic. That’s something we should keep in mind when companies like Facebook and others role out new tools and features that our kids will gradually assimilate into their lives. Talk to them about it, help them make smart decisions, and constantly reinforce those positive messages.  But most of all, don’t panic!

Connect Safely, which is great parenting and online child safety resource run by my friends Anne Collier and Larry Magid, has just released some excellent “Virtual World Safety Tips for Parents of Teens.”  Tons of good advice in there worth checking out, especially the thing I always focus on in all my online safety work—talk to your kids!! Here’s Anne and Larry on that point:

Talk with your teens about the virtual worlds they use – ask them to show you around. See what their avatars look like and what screen names they’ve chosen to represent themselves. What do their profiles and the appearance of their avatars say about them? Try to hold back snap judgments (long-term guidance usually works better than control if the goal is learning rather than short-term compliance – see this). Are their virtual-world profiles linked to social-network ones, and how much do those linked-up profiles together reveal about them – too much? Are their in-world friends mostly friends they know in real life? If not, do they know that they can’t really know who people are online unless they know them offline?

It’s about getting a dialogue going with your kids. That is so absolutely essential and it would help head off about 90% of the problems that develop online today with kids. Kids need mentoring, whether its in meatspace or cyberspace. But make sure to read all the Connect Safely tips. They are excellent.

Incidentally, I talked about some of these issues when I did a virtual guest lecture in Second Life last October hosted by Metanomics. The show was called “Live Free and Prosper: Government’s Place in Virtual Worlds and On-line Communities,” and I posted all the video clips here.  I also encourage those of you interested in these issues to check out these recent TLF guest posts by Joshua Fairfield an Associate Professor of Law at Washington & Lee University School of Law.  He recently posted and interesting essay entitled, “Virtual Paternalism” as well as a summary and discussion of the recent “FTC Report on Kids and Virtual Worlds.”  Worth reading.

Playboy’s newly released 2009 College Sex Survey found that 49% of college students admitted to “Sexting” (having sent or received sexually explicit messages and pictures via cell phones). A survey conducted a year ago by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and CosmoGirl.com found that 20% of teens (13-19) and 33% young adults (20-26) have “sent/posted nude or seminude pictures or video of themselves.” Together, these two studies give us a sense of just how prevalent sexting is.

Since nude photos of minors under 18 can be considered “child” pornography even if taken and shared voluntarily by the minor, there’s a very real possibility that minors will be prosecuted for common (if inappropriate) interactions with their peers under laws that were intended to prevent adults from exploiting children sexually. This is serious stuff indeed when one considers the dire consequences of being convicted not just of a felony, but a “sex offense.” Depending on state law, “sexters” put on a sex offender registry may spend the rest of their lives on sex registries as social pariahs with difficulty in finding a job, housing, being banned from using “social networking sites,” etc.

The study conducted last year offered some excellent advice for teens, young adults, and their parents. Perhaps we ought to spend more time focused on education than on criminalization.  The tips are worth repeating here.  First, for teens and kids: “Five Things to Think about Before Pressing Send:”

Don’t assume anything you send or post is going to remain private. Your messages and images will get passed around, even if you think they won’t: 40% of teens and young adults say they have had a sexually suggestive message (originally meant to be private) shown to them and 20% say they have shared such a message with someone other than the person for whom is was originally meant. There is no changing your mind in cyberspace—anything you send or post will never truly go away. Something that seems fun and flirty and is done on a whim will never really die. Potential employers, college recruiters, teachers, coaches, parents, friends, enemies, strangers and others may all be able to find your past posts, even after you delete them. And it is nearly impossible to control what other people are posting about you. Think about it: Even if you have second thoughts and delete a racy photo, there is no telling who has already copied that photo and posted it elsewhere. Don’t give in to the pressure to do something that makes you uncomfortable, even in cyberspace. More than 40% of teens and young adults (42% total, 47% of teens, 38% of young adults) say “pressure from guys” is a reason girls and women send and post sexually suggestive messages and images. More than 20% of teens and young adults (22% total, 24% teens, 20% young adults) say “pressure from friends” is a reason guys send and post sexually suggestive messages and images. Consider the recipient’s reaction. Just because a message is meant to be fun doesn’t mean the person who gets it will see it that way. Four in ten teen girls who have sent sexually suggestive content did so “as a joke” but many teen boys (29%) agree that girls who send such content are “expected to date or hook up in real life.” It’s easier to be more provocative or outgoing online, but whatever you write, post or send does contribute to the reallife impression you’re making. Nothing is truly anonymous. Nearly one in five young people who send sexually suggestive messages and images, do so to people they only know online (18% total, 15% teens, 19% young adults). It is important to remember that even if someone only knows you by screen name, online profile, phone number or email address, that they can probably find you if they try hard enough.

And tips for “parents to talk to their kids about sex and technology:”

Talk to your kids about what they are doing in cyberspace. Just as you need to talk openly and honestly with your kids about real life sex and relationships, you also want to discuss online and cell phone activity. Make sure your kids fully understand that messages or pictures they send over the Internet or their cell phones are not truly private or anonymous. Also make sure they know that others might forward their pictures or messages to people they do not know or want to see them, and that school administrators and employers often look at online profiles to make judgments about potential students/employees. It’s essential that your kids grasp the potential short-term and long-term consequences of their actions. Know who your kids are communicating with. Of course it’s a given that you want to know who your children are spending time with when they leave the house. Also do your best to learn who your kids are spending time with online and on the phone. Supervising and monitoring your kids’ whereabouts in real life and in cyberspace doesn’t make you a nag; it’s just part of your job as a parent. Many young people consider someone a “friend” even if they’ve only met online. What about your kids? Consider limitations on electronic communication. The days of having to talk on the phone in the kitchen in front of the whole family are long gone, but you can still limit the time your kids spend online and on the phone. Consider, for example, telling your teen to leave the phone on the kitchen counter when they’re at home and to take the laptop out of their bedroom before they go to bed, so they won’t be tempted to log on or talk to friends at 2a.m. Be aware of what your teens are posting publicly. Check out your teen’s MySpace, Facebook and other public  online profiles from time to time. This isn’t snooping—this is information your kids are making public. If everyone else can look at it, why can’t you? Talk with them specifically about their own notions of what is public and what is private. Your views may differ but you won’t know until you ask, listen, and discuss. Set expectations. Make sure you are clear with your teen about what you consider appropriate “electronic” behavior. Just as certain clothing is probably off-limits or certain language unacceptable in your house, make sure you let your kids know what is and is not allowed online either. And give reminders of those expectations from time to time. It doesn’t mean you don’t trust your kids, it just reinforces that you care about them enough to be paying attention.

Sometimes the most revealing conversations about policy issues happen with our loved ones at the breakfast table. Although loyal TLF readers may remember my partner Michael as my “Posterboy for Advertising’s Pro-Consumer Quid Pro Quo,” he doesn’t usually get into the policy issues I cover.  But this morning, we fell into a conversation about the bitterly contentious issue of marketing to kids:

Michael: Growing up in South Korea, on a military base, we didn’t have any commercials on television. We had three channels and all they showed was public service announcements.

Sounds like paradise for anti-advertising zealots like Jeff Chester and the media reformistas who want to re-create the old media scarcity in the name of “media democracy“! Anyway:

We moved back to the U.S. when I was nine, and suddenly, during all my favorite cartoons, there were ads for toys. It was exciting—and more than a little bit overwhelming! It wasn’t just that I wanted these toys; it was that felt this incredible sense of urgency: I thought we had to go get the toys right now or they’d be gone! What did Rousseau call his innocent man, the Noble Savage? That’s what we were: The noble savage, coming into this world of sophisticated toy advertisements. But it didn’t take long for me to get over this initial bewilderment. My parents explained to me that we didn’t really have to go to the store  right away. (They also explained to me that I couldn’t haggle with the staff at Toys ‘R Us the same way I’d haggled with street vendors back in Korea—something that utterly mystified the staff.) After one trip to Toys Toys ‘R Us, I got the toys I wanted most and, over the next few months, realized that they weren’t anywhere near as exciting as I had imagined. After that, I enjoyed the toy ads on TV, but I lost interest in many of the toys I already had, preferring to create my own toys or play outside.

I explained that advertising of toys to kids has long been the cause celebre of anti-advertising crusaders:

Michael: But kids are acquisitive, too! How are they supposed to know about the latest toys if you can’t advertise to them? And what’s the big deal, anyway? I got used to toy ads and I think most kids would, too. The thing that’s different is incentive programs at stores.

My sister was really into the Limited Too‘s incentive program from the ages of about 7 to 11. She knew all the saleswomen by name at the Limited Too in our mall. It was like our mothers at Bloomingdale’s! She had a huge wardrobe for an elementary school kid.  I don’t think it was unhealthy, but it’s not exactly a fair game. Me: So why did your parents let her do it? Michael: Because they were indulgent! Her friends didn’t have wardrobes like she did—it was just my mom. My dad just wasn’t around much, so we spent a lot of time shopping. It shouldn’t really have been that way. Me: Do you think it was bad for your sister? Michael: No, but it’s a good thing she’s so sensible and practical now, because otherwise her acquisitiveness about clothes might get out of hand. I think she learned that at the Limited Too.

So maybe shopping incentive programs could really teach some kids bad habits and maybe those habits are hard (but certainly not impossible) to kick later on in life. Those are good reasons for parents not to let their kids sign up for such rewards programs! We certainly don’t need a law to fix this problem: We just need parents to exercise their power of the purse and learn to say “No!”—as the parents of Michael’s sister’s friends apparently did. Relying on parental responsibility instead of banning such programs means that parents would have the opportunity to teach their kids to shop responsibly—and still benefit from the discounts such programs offer on clothes they’d buy anyway.

In the meantime, let’s stop pretending kids are helpless drones just waiting to be programmed by evil marketers who get them “hooked on capitalism” by showing them ads for GI Joe, Barbie, digital penguins, Hannah Montanna or whatever it is kids these days care about. Oh, and lest anyone insist that kids don’t really “need” toys or clothes from Limited Too, let me simply point to this brilliant 1959 magazine ad by the ad firm Young & Rubicam:

There is no chestnut more overworked than the critical whinny: “Advertising sells people things they don’t need.” We, as one agency, plead guilty. Advertising does sell people things they don’t need. Things like television sets, automobiles, catsup, mattresses, cosmetics, ranges, refrigerators, and so on and on. People don’t really need these things. People don’t really need art, music, literature, newspapers, historians. wheels, calendars, philosophy, or, for that matter, critics of advertising, either. All people really need is a cave, a piece of meat and, possibly, a fire. The complex thing we call civilization is made up of luxuries. An eminent philosopher of our time has written that great art is superior to lesser art in the degree that it is “life-enhancing.” Perhaps something of the same thing can be claimed for the products that are sold through advertising. They enhance life, to whatever degree they can.

I’d much rather have parents deciding what their kids “need” than some paternalist bureaucrat!

On July 27th, The Progress & Freedom Foundation hosted a Capitol Hill panel discussion entitled “Online Child Safety, Privacy, and Free Speech: An Overview of Challenges in Congress & the States.” The event featured remarks from:

• Parry Aftab, Executive Director, WiredSafety.org
• Todd Haiken, Senior Manager of Policy, Common Sense Media
• Jim Halpert, Partner, DLA Piper
• Berin Szoka, Senior Fellow, The Progress & Freedom Foundation

We’ve just released the transcript of the event, which I have also pasted down below the fold in a Scribd document reader. Also, the audio for this event can be heard by clicking below:

Download mp3

Here is the full event description:

Online child safety, privacy, and free speech remain hotly debated issues at both the federal and state level. Bills introduced in Congress to address cyberbullying concerns propose either educational initiatives or a criminalization approach. Access to objectionable content also remains a concern and a new, government-mandated task force is looking into those issues. Meanwhile, state officials, including many state attorneys general, continue to explore age verification mandates for social networking sites and some have considered building on the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) to expand “parental notification” mandates. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has recently announced an expedited review of COPPA to see if it is keeping up with new developments. The FTC is also exploring child safety in virtual worlds. New concerns about “sexting,” or the sending of sexual explicit images over mobile devices, has also raised new concerns led some lawmakers to ponder penalties.

How serious are these concerns? Is legislation or regulation needed to address them? What free speech issues are at stake? Should Congress take the lead or leave it to the States to experiment with different models? These and other issues were discussed by a panel of leading experts in the field of online safety and privacy policy.

Transcript PFF Online Child Safety Privacy Hill Event (7-27-2009) http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=18756666&access_key=key-1blb7az1ag406howibuk&page=1&version=1&viewMode=

Adam Thierer & I have just released a detailed examination (PDF) of brewing efforts to expand the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 to cover adolescents and potentially all social networking sites—an approach we call “COPPA 2.0.”

As Adam explained on Larry Magid’s CNET podcast, COPPA mandates certain online privacy protections for children under 13, most importantly that websites obtain the “verifiable consent” of a child’s parent before collecting personal information about that child or giving that child access to interactive functionality that might allow the child to share their personal information with others. The law was intended primarily to “enhance parental involvement in a child’s online activities” as a means of protecting the online privacy and safety of children.

Yet advocates of expanding COPPA—or “COPPA 2.0″—see COPPA’s verifiable parental consent framework as a means for imposing broad regulatory mandates in the name of online child safety and concerns about social networking, cyber-harassment, etc. Two COPPA 2.0 bills are currently pending in New Jersey and Illinois. The accelerated review of COPPA to be conducted by the FTC next year (five years ahead of schedule) is likely to bring to Washington serious talk of expanding COPPA—even though Congress clearly rejected covering adolescents age 13-16 when COPPA was first proposed back in 1998.

We’ll discuss some of the key points of our paper in a series of blog posts, but here are the top nine reasons for rejecting COPPA 2.0, in that such an approach would:

• Burden the free speech rights of adults by imposing age verification mandates on many sites used by adults, thus restricting anonymous speech and essentially converging—in terms of practical consequences—with the unconstitutional Children’s Online Protection Act (COPA), another 1998 law sometimes confused with COPPA;
• Burden the free speech rights of adolescents to speak freely on—or gather information from—legal and socially beneficial websites;
• Hamper routine and socially beneficial communication between adolescents and adults;
• Reduce, rather than enhance, the privacy of adolescents, parents and other adults because of the massive volume of personal information that would have to be collected about users for authentication purposes (likely including credit card data);

• Would likely be the subject of massive fraud or evasion since it is not always possible to definitively verify the parent-child relationship, or because the system could be “gamed” in other ways by determined adolescents;
• Do nothing to prevent offshore sites and services from operating outside these rules;
• Present major practical challenges for law enforcement officials in the face of such evasion by both domestic users and offshore sites;
• Could destroy opportunities for new or smaller website operators to break into the market and offer competing services and innovations, thus contributing to consolidation of online content and services by erecting barriers to entry; and
• Violate the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, since Internet activity clearly represents interstate commerce that states have no authority to regulate.

So I was just finishing up this excellent new Pew report on “Teens, Video Games and Civics,” and was about to post some thoughts about it when I saw in my RSS feed that the brilliant Henry Jenkins had beat me to it in an essay entitled “Video Game Myths Revisited.” Prof. Jenkins summarizes the major findings of the Pew report as follows (note: He elaborates on each finding in his essay):

• At the most basic level, game playing has become more or less universal.
• The Pew research may also force us to rethink once again the assumption that there is a gender gap in terms of who plays games.
• The Pew Data complicates easy generalizations about the place of violent entertainment in the lives of American teens.
• The Pew Data further challenges the idea that game playing is a socially isolating activity.
• The Pew Research does indicate some areas where parents should be concerned about the gaming lives of their sons and daughters.
• The Pew Research also challenges the prevailing myth that most parents are worried or alarmed about their young people’s relations to games.

Anyway, make sure to read Henry’s write-up and the entire Pew report.  Good stuff.  [And here’s the point where I once again shamelessly plug my old paper on video game myths and some of my other essays like “Dear Gov. Patterson… Regarding that Video Game Bill You Are About to Sign,” “Understanding The True Cost of Video Game Censorship Efforts,” “Do video games create cop killers?” and “Why hasn’t violent media turned us into a nation of killers?”]