吃瓜大本营

As jazz music, which began in Black communities, spread across the nation in the 1920s, more than 60 cities adopted rules limiting or outright banning it in dancehalls. Clergy and civic reformers its rhythms promoted sexual freedom and interracial dancing among the youth.

Jazz was just the beginning. , the government set up investigations into crime, horror, and excess violence in comic books, calling on the industry to introduce rating systems and encouraging a ban on extreme violence. A few years later, Santa Cruz police shut down a dance for 鈥渉ighly suggestive, stimulating and tantalizing motions.鈥� The kids were dancing to rock 鈥榥鈥� roll, which the city ultimately banned along with 鈥渇renzied forms.鈥�

Many of these decisions to limit freedom of expression for youth have been reversed as First Amendment protections 鈥� and social norms 鈥� expanded. But in the social media age, government efforts to regulate speech in the name of 鈥減rotecting鈥� kids have evolved with the technological moment.

Legislatures around the country are responding to growing concerns about the potential harms of social media for children and teenagers. They鈥檝e introduced bills with a hodgepodge of strategies to target these potential harms, including requiring people to verify their age before using social media, getting verified parental consent for minors, and mandating social media platforms to block material that the government deems harmful for kids. But whether it鈥檚 banning jazz or content on social media, broad attempts to regulate speech fail to protect children and violate the First Amendment in the process.

One such bill that would violate the First Amendment is the . Although the House and Senate versions of this bill differ, at their core, both require apps and websites to prevent harm to minors. And while this goal is noble, the requirements will likely cause apps and websites to verify the ages of their users or remove a wide array of content from their platforms. If either version is enacted, the bill could implement some of the most significant legislative changes that the internet has seen in recent years. Similar state laws, including those in Utah and California, have been blocked by the courts.

"Safety doesn't need to come at the cost of free speech,鈥� said Jenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel at the ACLU. 鈥淭he overbroad language in KOSA and similar legislation risks censoring everything from jokes and hyperbole to useful information about sex ed and suicide prevention. As state legislatures and school boards across the country impose book bans and classroom censorship laws, the last thing students and parents need is another act of government censorship deciding which educational resources are appropriate for their families.鈥�

KOSA was reintroduced months after the Supreme Court issued a blow to First Amendment rights in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton this summer. In that case, the Supreme Court upheld a Texas law that requires invasive age verification requirements for adults to access sexual content online. The ACLU and the ACLU of Texas represented the Free Speech Coalition, arguing that age verification requirements burden the First Amendment rights of adults while doing very little to protect children; the requirements would not apply to social media, for example, where minors could still access pornographic content. Adults, meanwhile, would be subject to biometric scans or other invasive methods to verify their age in order to access protected speech online. The Supreme Court, however, upset decades of precedent about online speech and allowed the law to remain in effect.

The Paxton decision limits the legality of age verification laws strictly to sexual content. But in practice, laws like KOSA would incentivize age verification for a wide variety of content; otherwise, platforms wouldn鈥檛 know who to filter 鈥渉armful鈥� content for. That could result in, for example, adults undergoing invasive age checks just to watch YouTube videos.

KOSA is on untested constitutional ground, but the court鈥檚 recent willingness to regulate content online is troubling. use TikTok and Instagram, and 90 percent use YouTube. The Supreme Court has long held that it is particularly important to protect the First Amendment rights of young people and not stifle their intellectual freedoms. Laws that try to restrict content online fly in the face of that.

All efforts to regulate social media aren鈥檛 inherently harmful or unlawful. For example, consumer privacy legislation that gives users control over what data social media companies gather about users 鈥� especially young users 鈥� could help. But legislation that allows the government to choose what children and teens can see online is not a targeted solution, and it harms all of our First Amendment rights to see, create, and share content online.

Like jazz 鈥� and comic books and rock 鈥榥鈥� roll and movies 鈥� social media is here to stay. Finding ways to protect children that doesn鈥檛 unconstitutionally restrict speech, like parental controls, show promise. Laws like the SCOPE Act and KOSA fall short of this effort. with our partners to prevent Congress from further eroding our rights.