Market Institute Senior Fellow Norm Singleton is sounding the alarm over “Kids Over Clicks,” the first major policy proposal from Project 2029, a Democratic effort to develop a governing agenda for the next Democratic president.
In a new piece for RealClearMarkets, Singleton argues that while the proposal is being sold as a way to protect children online, its policies would come at a steep cost to privacy, free speech, and parental authority. As Singleton writes, Kids Over Clicks “increase[s] government control of the internet, violate[s] all our rights, and undermine[s] parental authority while doing little or nothing to keep children safe.”
Among the proposals are weakening Section 230 protections and imposing a federal ban on social media use for children under 16. Singleton warns that enforcing such a ban would effectively require platforms to verify the ages of their users, meaning they would have to collect and store identifying information from adults as well as minors. And there is little evidence such bans work: Australia adopted an under-16 social media ban earlier this year, yet subsequent data found that a large majority of Australian teens continued using social media.
More fundamentally, Singleton argues that Washington shouldn’t replace parents with a one-size-fits-all rule. “Parents may choose to allow limited and controlled access to social media at a young age, in order to teach their children how to benefit from the internet without falling prey to its pitfalls.” Rather than empowering politicians to act as “our national nannies,” Singleton says parents should be the ones deciding when and how their children are introduced to social media.
Read Norm Singleton’s full piece at RealClearMarkets.
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