Mississippi’s incipient legal fight with a trade group that claims to represent Google, Facebook and other online platforms is a distracting sideshow.
That’s because, no matter how the court case turns out, it’s unlikely that children will be kept off the websites that are bad for them or that serve them content that is inappropriate for their age.
The law in question, which is supposed to take effect July 1, requires social media services to verify the ages of their users and bans digitally produced or modified images of child pornography.
Most people would think such regulations are a good idea. However, NetChoice, which filed the federal lawsuit, claims the restrictions violate the First Amendment’s right to free speech, usurp the prerogative of parents to regulate their children’s internet usage, and threaten the privacy of the platforms’ users by trying to force them to provide proof of age.
That last argument is especially choice, since nearly every one of these platforms, in its terms of use, requires visitors to surrender a lot more about themselves than just their age.
Mississippi’s law, dubbed the “Walker Montgomery Protecting Children Online Act,” has the best of intentions. It is designed to prevent the type of sexual extortion by online predators that prompted a 16-year-old boy from Starkville to take his life.
But even if it survives court challenges, it’s unlikely to work. Age filters are routinely bypassed by young people to access pornography and other content that they are not supposed to see. Once they’ve gotten there, they’re likely to be served even more of the same, since the algorithms that serve the content and ads are based on users’ online behavior, not their age. A minor who has surreptitiously accessed pornography one time is likely to be served a steady stream of it going forward or be a target for blackmailing scams.
Rather than trying to carve out privacy protections for young people that are unlikely to work, it would be better to safeguard the privacy of everyone who uses the internet. If social media companies, e-commerce sites and other platforms were banned from snooping on the internet activity of their visitors, that would put an end to the lucrative behavior targeting on which these platforms are making a killing and by which people of all ages are being manipulated. Instead of serving content and advertising based on individual users’ internet habits, these companies and their clients would instead have to resort back to marketing based on the content that’s on a site. For example, a male visitor to a hunting website might see ads for sporting goods but not for lingerie just because he has a secret fetish for women’s clothes.
The internet companies claim they can’t operate with such privacy restrictions, but that’s nonsense. They just can’t operate as profitably.
