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Online safety legislation is opposed by many it claims to protect.
Young people who listened to Wednesday’s hearing on online safety through a Discord server offered an angry critique.
KOSA would require digital platforms to take “reasonable measures” to prevent harms to children, specifically enumerating sexual exploitation, mental health, substance abuse and suicide. Activists pointed to moments in the hearing such as when Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) claimed TikTok is “being used to basically destroy Israel” as examples of how the real issue the senators had with social media is views with which they don’t agree. A 2023 Oxford study that analyzed data from close to a million people across 72 countries over the course of 12 years, found no “smoking gun” linking the internet with psychological harm.
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