The culture war campaign could be affected by the House GOP messaging bill

Why Kids Online Safety Matter: An Analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court Result in the Case of the Islamic State Algorithm and YouTube

The Ethics and Public Policy Center is in Washington, DC and has a fellow named Patrick T. Brown. He was a former policy adviser to the Joint Economic Committee. Follow him on his preferred social networking site. The views expressed are of his own. There is more opinion on CNN.

This week the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that raised thorny questions over algorithms and free speech on the Internet. Lawyers for the parents of a teenager who was killed in an attack by the Islamic State group want YouTube to be held responsible for promoting the group’s content.

The Republican base is riled up by battles over Big Tech and accusations of bias. But in a divided Congress, both parties should listen to the parents who make up their base – giving families more tools to protect their kids online is not only long overdue, it’s a political winner.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/25/opinions/kids-online-safety-act-congress-brown/index.html

What do parents think about online adversarial minors? The case of Meta, KOSA, pushed by two Republicans and two congressmen

This is a big issue for every parent. A recent report from Common Sense Media found that the average age of first exposure to pornography is now 12, and that three-quarters of teens had seen porn online by age 17.

Parents also have to worry about how their kids are using technology. All manner of online content can impact a child’s life. As this week’s Supreme Court case reminds us, youth can be lured into extremism or self-harm via online content. Parents might want to know if their child is becoming increasingly drawn toward figures who share racist or misogynistic views online.

According to documents, internal data at Meta showed the site made body image issues worse for 1 in 3 teen girls, and led to more severe and self-destructive thoughts. The company was forced to delay an offer for “Instagram for Kids”, while they disputed the claims. Cyberbullying and non-consensual nude photo sharing have plagued high schools.

A bipartisan effort to take modest steps to protect kids online might bear fruit. Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Connecticut Democrat Sen. Richard Blumenthal have been pushing their colleagues to pass their Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which would update the framework for how tech companies serve minors online.

Among other things, it would require social media sites to default minors into the strongest possible privacy protections and give parents new tools to monitor harmful content. It would mandate social media platforms mitigate harms to minors, such as by restricting or eliminating content relating to self-harm, suicide and eating disorders. It would need an annual audit of the risks to minor and provide access to researchers to study the impact of social media.

The bill was opposed by civil rights and LGBTQ groups because they felt it would prevent young people from accessing information about sexual education without their parents knowing. But that concern may ring hollow with parents who believe they should have better tools to know if their 13- or 14-year-old child is searching for information about birth control.

Some tools for helping keep kids safe on the internet can be quite easy to circumvent. It is unfair to ask a parent to be an expert on all the settings and options for keeping inappropriate content out of their kids’ sight. Congress can take an appropriate step and establish age-based controls.

Indeed, some say the Blackburn-Blumenthal framework doesn’t go far enough. The policy solutions found in the recent report are more aggressive than the ones included in KOSA, and still get support from three in four parents.

House Republicans passed legislation Friday aimed at boosting parents’ access to information about their child’s education, fulfilling a midterm pledge that GOP lawmakers hope will be a galvanizing issue for their base next year.

“The Parents Bill of Rights is an important step towards protecting children and dramatically strengthening the rights of parents,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said on the House floor ahead of the bill’s passage.

The “Don’t Say Gay” and “Parental Rights in Education” bills: Implications for the Education System and for the Future of the United States

Five Republicans joined Democrats in voting against the legislation. The legislation passed despite a handful of GOP defections and several Democratic absences.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has already said the bill has no political future in the Democratic-controlled Senate, but the legislation does send a message about GOP priorities and indicates a further leaning in on culture war issues ahead of the 2024 election.

Schools not selling student information would be banned by the bill. It is mandatory for elementary schools or schools with grades 5 to 8 to get parental consent before changing a student’s pronoun or preferred name, or allowing a student to change their sex-based accommodations.

“Rather than actually invest in empowering parents, making sure parents have the opportunity to be engaged and involved in the education of their children, the extreme MAGA Republicans want to jam their rightwing ideology down the throats of students, teachers and parents throughout America,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters Friday.

Democrats argue that the bill could be used as a basis for banning books in schools.

The politics surrounding parents rights and what’s being taught in schools can be seen at the state level. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is widely considered a viable presidential contender in 2024, signed the controversial “Parental Rights in Education” bill last year, which critics refer to as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. The administration is currently moving to prohibit teaching about gender identity and sexual orientation at all grade levels.

Jeffrey Henig, a political science and education professor at the Teachers College, says Democrats are trying to take advantage of the extreme things that are happening in some parts of the country.

“That’s because there still are a lot of Americans, including Americans in purple states or swing areas, who value the notion that education ought to stretch their kids’ minds and understandings, the notion that we have a complicated history in the U.S. and that children as eventual citizens need to understand that complicated history.”

The issue of parental involvement in education has been brewing as a culture war issue for years and was accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic where school shutdowns and mask mandates energized parents.

Critical race theory, an academic approach taught in college and post-grad that examines how race and racism function in American institutions, was brought to the forefront of political discourse as House Republicans argued the theory was being taught to K-12 students.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/24/1165592471/what-a-house-gop-messaging-bill-could-spell-for-2024-culture-war-campaign

Parents Rights and the Electoral Correlationship: A Viewpoint from Wasserman’s Discussion of the Children’s Bill of Rights

“What we’re seeing now in terms of the Parents Bill of Rights is really an outgrowth of Glenn Youngkin’s victory,” said nonpartisan election analyst Dave Wasserman of The Cook Political Report.

Republicans believe that if they try to portray Democrats as being beholden to teachers unions and siding against parents on cultural war topics, they will connect with voters. It will take time to see if voters warm up to Republicans’ message or if this falls flat, because this issue hasn’t taken center stage in a presidential campaign lately.

That strategy is difficult to implement on the presidential level. The nature of the Republican primary means candidates are likely to cast themselves further right than some moderate Republicans or swing voters might be comfortable with come November.

He said most of the strategy depended on the perception of the audience in a small number of purple states. “That’s where Republicans for national office want to be able to reserve the ability to swing back to the less controversial version of parents rights,” he said.