1. United States
2. Vt.
3. Letter

I am writing today to urge you against voting for any version of KOSA or similar bills about the Internet. I do not disagree that the state of Social Media today is a problem, but making them the arbiters of what is safe for minors and slapping age verification on various websites is not going to solve these problems. The root causes of these problems are in the platforms themselves, with algorithms trained to induce anger for engagement. Most social media these days are made of eternal feeds built around dark patterns that lead to doom-scrolling. There is no incentive to address these issues, no legal or monetary punishment for the harms that these intentional designs cause. The issues are inherent to most social media platforms. Over the last several months, X's Grok AI has continued to generate sexual images of teenagers. Within the last few weeks, Mark Zuckerberg was talking about creating a prediction market aimed at 16-year-old boys. X and Facebook were both instrumental in planning the Belfast race riots earlier this month. On Tumblr, where I spend most of my social media time, the owner publicly harassed and then banned a trans woman, and the staff there continue to ban trans people for no apparent cause. I'm sure it's also no coincidence that Meta stopped moderating anti-trans hate speech around the same time that President Trump was sworn into office, and did away with most of their content moderation teams. Making me show my government ID to Discord before I can see the latest memes isn't going to solve the rotten cores of these companies. No more than putting a bouncer at the front door keeps people with fake IDs from getting into bars. These bills will, however, build tools that conservatives can use to ban queer and adult content from the Internet, while handing millions of peoples' personal data to third-party data companies that similarly have no financial or legal incentive to protect them. We will make ourselves less safe, make tons of legal content significantly harder to find, and still have the issues that KOSA cannot address, because it fundamentally misunderstands the issues. I beg you to send it back to the drawing board, and come back with real regulations for social media platforms around hate speech and dark pattern design practices.