Back door to a Digital Id to Use the Internet (Part 2)

Out of all the censorship bills introduced in congress over the past few years this one (KOSA) has the highest probability of becoming a law with 63 senators now supporting the bill split evenly along party and ideological lines. State censorship will probably come to the U.S. under the reframe ‘think of the children’ as it is the most likely to bypass everyone’s rationality and avoid ideological rifts. This one certainly does that while pretending to be content neutral and only applicable to minors. Of course, the text of the bill, which was revised at the end of last year, still allows congress to consider requiring age verification at the ‘device or OS level’ after the FCC, FTC, secretary of commerce and director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology conduct their study and report back to their respective house and senate committees (Section 9). The bill would also create a new bureaucracy called the Kids Online Safety Council that would advise the FCC on ‘safeguards’ and include tech representatives and people with potential financial ties to Tech. Even though the bill claims to not require ‘covered platforms’ to implement age verification the litany of harms ‘covered platforms’ are made liable for under ‘Duty of Care’ (Section 3) would make it infeasible to comply with this proposed law without age verification which would ultimately take the form of a digital ID to use the internet. ‘Duty of care’ requires covered platforms to prevent and mitigate a litany of common mental health problems including anxiety and depression, anything that can be remotely construed as ‘addiction-like behavior’ (not to be confused with actual physiological dependence) and any financial harms that may result from being stupid on social media. ‘Safeguards for Minors’ (Section 4) makes age verification even more unavoidable by requiring covered platforms to ‘limit the ability of other individuals (over the age of majority) to communicate with the minor’ and ‘restrict the sharing of the geolocation of the minor to other users (over the age of majority) on the platform.’ I’m assuming they mean restricting communication between minors and adults in this section because restricting their communication with anyone would entirely defeat the purpose of them using social media and would effectively be a blanket age restriction. Other stipulated safeguards include limiting innocuous ‘features’ such as autoplay, curation points, and even notifications. Even if the studies conducted by the aforementioned alphabet agencies in Section 7 and 9 don't find a need for mandatory age verification (i.e. digital ID) , social media companies would adopt it to avoid liability for all of the social problems they are tasked with ‘preventing and mitigating’ in Section 3 of this bill. The best case scenario if this becomes law is that social media companies will make the restrictions stipulated for minors the default setting for all users and require users to submit age verification through biometric ID to access all of their features. In this way they will claim that digital ID is “voluntary.”