Florida governor’s plan exposes children to more sexual content, extremism on internet | Opinion

For parents in Florida, unfortunately, stopping sexually explicit material, extremist recruitment and verbal abuse on social-media websites could get a lot harder. Riding on the growing anti-tech wave among Republican politicians, Gov. DeSantis announced the Transparency in Technology Act to fight alleged conservative bias.

By limiting social-media companies’ ability to remove content, the legislation scratches an itch for those upset with Big Tech’s current style of content moderation. If passed, failure to comply with the government’s new mandates would mean harsh penalties and costly civil litigation for social media.

But this proposal has several dangerous unintended consequences, many of which would fall heaviest on Florida’s children and their families.

This bill also limits how social-media companies can change their terms of service and restricts their ability to remove offensive content. In fact, how this legislation requires social-media sites to allow users to opt out of “post-promoting and shadow-banning algorithms,” which makes little sense to both everyday users and the computer programmers who create and operate social-media feeds.

The current online ecosystem ensures social-media websites can provide high-quality services to every consumer, such as safe online communities for Florida’s kids on places like Wikipedia, YouTube Kids and Life360. In the modern age, children must feel safe online to thrive, grow and learn in the real world. And as a state, we should seek to work with and empower any business that wants to help us in this endeavor.

Instead, this bill would prevent the kid-friendly content moderation that Floridian families rely on. Sexually explicit material, expletives, conspiracy theories and verbal abuse would be just some of a wide variety of content that would be far more common if this bill were passed. Online recruitment to radical, fringe groups and even terrorist organizations would be significantly more difficult to combat, too. While the average adult may be fine sifting through unseemly content and spam left posted as a result of this act, parents and their children do not have the same luxury.

By attempting to fight Big Tech, this bill, ironically, would further entrench these websites. The rise of new social-media platforms such as Clubhouse and Houseparty would be less likely as this legislation would significantly raise the costs of creating and running such sites. The costs likely would be so high that only the social-media giants could afford the lawyers and staff necessary to comply with the law. That means the little guy would be the most harmed by government regulation.

Many Americans share DeSantis’ concern over unfair moderation of speech on social media. For good reason, it’s important that the sites be more accountable for and transparent about how they treat their customers. However, this bill would do little to further this cause.

America’s First Amendment rightly limits the government’s power to regulate speech and freedom of association, including in the way this proposed legislation tries to.

But the Transparency in Technology Act would prevent social-media sites from doing the right thing. Society rightly expects that when hate, misinformation and other inappropriate and harmful content spreads online, the sites must do their best to curtail it. By removing legal, but otherwise inappropriate images and posts, social-media sites ensure everyone can use the internet comfortably and safely, especially our kids.

But for social media to make tough decisions regarding speech, we can’t let government punish them for doing so, even if they sometimes make the wrong decision. If we do, we can’t be surprised if many sites choose to stop removing content, even if it is inappropriate. After all, that’s what this legislation really wants to happen.

At a time in which children are relying on the internet more than ever, DeSantis should work with social-media sites to ensure they have the tools needed to remove content that could harm our kids, not take away the tools these websites currently have.

Robert Winterton is the director of public affairs for NetChoice.

This story was originally published February 15, 2021 at 3:33 PM.