SAFETY TIP OF THE WEEK

A rule of thumb about personal rights goes, “one’s personal rights end where another person’s begins,” but in matters of public information, determining what free speech is harmful can get really tricky. Stay alert for local news about efforts to censor materials online and make your voice heard.

TODAY’S TOPIC

Censorship vs Safety: The Challenge of Legislating Online Safety for Kids

If you have been keeping up with the newsletter, you might wonder why online safety is so often in the hands of parents and families, but not the law. Why hasn’t the government come up with a way to legally protect children from harmful posts on social media or the Internet? The short and simple answer: not everyone agrees what online behaviors should be stopped. It boils down to an ongoing conflict between unnecessary censorship and necessary safety measures. 

Maybe you are an advocate for Americans’ second amendment right to own guns, but you don’t think children should be exposed to drag queens, so an image of a person holding or using a firearm online might not feel as threatening as a reel of a drag performance. On the other hand, you might think that queer spaces online are healthy, but you’re concerned about homophobic content online, and you think someone should restrict hateful online posts. In either case, restrictions to content that we feel is safe and fine can be really frustrating, and it is equally frustrating when we see content that we think should be banned posted without restriction. 

This divide can be seen very clearly in the failed attempt to pass the Kids Online Safety Act. You would think that it would be simple to determine what American families value in online safety, but the truth is that we are quite divided as a nation. What’s worse: this fact is often exploited by government parties in order to instigate “culture wars” that make it easier to sway single-issue voters. Instead of passing helpful, bipartisan legislation to keep kids safe online, we end up arguing about what content is harmful with each other.

_{WHAT CAN YOU DO?}

Our ability to connect with each other from anywhere in the world can sometimes have the effect of leaving us isolated from the real issues we comment on in our own posts. News and social media outlets are often not interested in curing this problem, because it makes it easier to target their audience with specifically tailored content. In order to pass real legislation to protect children’s online safety, we need to step out of the silos the news and social media have made for us. 

Connection with our community is the first step toward building usable legislation for online safety. Below are some essential things you can do to stay informed about issues of online safety and to avoid unnecessary censorship in your community:

• Be Wary of Misinformation: In the so-called “Age of Information,” you’d think it would be easy to find the truth of an issue. In reality, there is so much information available that discerning the truth can actually be very challenging. When keeping up with news or social media posts, verify the information being put out there by checking multiple sources. Often misinformation is built to make you feel angry or fearful, but a closer look at other sources will often reveal that elements of the story are represented improperly or even incorrectly. 

• Get Involved with Your Community Offline: It is easy to make mean comments or get into fights online with people that we don’t see in person. Having real, face-to-face interactions with other parents and their children can be a great way of getting perspective on an issue. You and the other parents in your community can certainly agree that you want your children to be safe, even if your politics don’t necessarily align.

• Make Sure that You Are Not Getting All Your Information from One Source: It can be easy for us to look to one trusted source for all of our information, but by doing this, we limit other potentially insightful perspectives that might get us closer to the truth about an issue. It’s important to consider different sides of an issue before we make conclusions. 

• Use News Syndication Feeds to Monitor Issues that Concern You: There are a number of useful news syndication apps, often called RSS feeds. These give you the latest stories on news about issues that interest you the most. EIN Presswire and Google Alerts are excellent tools for getting the latest news from a variety of sources on topics that you can search by keywords, such as “kids and online safety.” They both generate regular newsletters that send links to stories directly to your email. 

• Participate in Your Local Government: Making change in this country starts with making your voice heard. If you stay informed and participate in local and national elections, you can help move the needle to get legislation passed to protect kids online.

▶ Slang Word of the Week: “cap/no cap” – “cap” is a lie or willful deception. To say “no cap” is to say “I’m not lying or over exaggerating.”