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dw_advocacy2024-10-04 02:43 pm
denise) wrote in dw_advocacy2024-10-04 02:43 pm
Netchoice v Skrmetti (TN)
Cross off another entry on the "states we have helped to sue" map!
The case: NetChoice v. Skrmetti (3:24-cv-01191) M.D. Tennessee
The law: Tennessee's HB 1891, the "Protecting Children from Social Media Act"
The filings: The documents aren't in RECAP yet, but you can read them on Netchoice's page for the lawsuit.
The issues and how they affect you: In addition to the standard "a website can't treat minors and adults differently unless they know who's a minor and who's an adult, and the only way to do that to the standards required by these laws is to forcibly deanonymize and age-verify everyone who visits the site" issue that all of these laws have, and in addition to the problems of accurately and conclusively establishing who's a minor user's actual parent and which person has legal decisionmaking authority over them, TN HB 1891 includes some fun (and unconstitutional!) wrinkles. Like several other laws that Netchoice is challenging, HB 1891 requires sites to provide parents with "supervisory" authority over the accounts of minors to change settings and control who can contact them -- but also to "set daily time restrictions and implement breaks during which the minor cannot access the account".
As I covered in our declaration: we have absolutely no idea how much time you spend on the site daily. We don't track it, we don't want to track it, and the technology that would be required to track it accurately (as opposed to just estimatating) would be massively and horribly intrusive, especially given that people can post novel-length entries that can take some people hours to read. The provision about letting parents specify hours during which a minor can't access the account also runs into the time problem: ask any programmer about how hard it is to accurately determine a) what time it is right now; b) what time it is where the user is located; and c) how much time has elapsed between two events, and you're likely to get a hollow, despairing laugh. (I tried to get Netchoice's outside counsel to let me embed xkcd 2867, "DateTime" in my declaration, but alas, courts have no sense of humor.) As I said to one of the lawyers we were working with on this, I'd rather take a job doing nothing but verifying reports of the most horrible content you can imagine posted to the internet than a job that involved maintaining datetime systems, even at half the salary.
If this law is allowed to go into effect, not only would TN residents have to upload their government identification in order to access the site, we'd also have to build awful intrusive and privacy-destroying systems that would track how much time you spent active on the site daily. (And since there's a billion ways around all the easy ways of tracking that kind of information, when I say 'intrusive', I mean intrusive, probably down to the level of capturing keystrokes and cursor movements in order to determine whether someone was actively in front of the keyboard, which means the risk of capturing all kinds of other input as well whenever you have a tab open to DW.) And even with all that, there's still a chance a TN minor could work around anything we put into place and a court would hold us liable for it, no matter how much work we put into preventing it. Like all of these other lawsuits we've contributed to, that's a bad law.
You can read the motion for preliminary injunction, which covers a bunch of the things that make this law unconstitutional very neatly. We'll keep you updated on events that happen!
The case: NetChoice v. Skrmetti (3:24-cv-01191) M.D. Tennessee
The law: Tennessee's HB 1891, the "Protecting Children from Social Media Act"
The filings: The documents aren't in RECAP yet, but you can read them on Netchoice's page for the lawsuit.
The issues and how they affect you: In addition to the standard "a website can't treat minors and adults differently unless they know who's a minor and who's an adult, and the only way to do that to the standards required by these laws is to forcibly deanonymize and age-verify everyone who visits the site" issue that all of these laws have, and in addition to the problems of accurately and conclusively establishing who's a minor user's actual parent and which person has legal decisionmaking authority over them, TN HB 1891 includes some fun (and unconstitutional!) wrinkles. Like several other laws that Netchoice is challenging, HB 1891 requires sites to provide parents with "supervisory" authority over the accounts of minors to change settings and control who can contact them -- but also to "set daily time restrictions and implement breaks during which the minor cannot access the account".
As I covered in our declaration: we have absolutely no idea how much time you spend on the site daily. We don't track it, we don't want to track it, and the technology that would be required to track it accurately (as opposed to just estimatating) would be massively and horribly intrusive, especially given that people can post novel-length entries that can take some people hours to read. The provision about letting parents specify hours during which a minor can't access the account also runs into the time problem: ask any programmer about how hard it is to accurately determine a) what time it is right now; b) what time it is where the user is located; and c) how much time has elapsed between two events, and you're likely to get a hollow, despairing laugh. (I tried to get Netchoice's outside counsel to let me embed xkcd 2867, "DateTime" in my declaration, but alas, courts have no sense of humor.) As I said to one of the lawyers we were working with on this, I'd rather take a job doing nothing but verifying reports of the most horrible content you can imagine posted to the internet than a job that involved maintaining datetime systems, even at half the salary.
If this law is allowed to go into effect, not only would TN residents have to upload their government identification in order to access the site, we'd also have to build awful intrusive and privacy-destroying systems that would track how much time you spent active on the site daily. (And since there's a billion ways around all the easy ways of tracking that kind of information, when I say 'intrusive', I mean intrusive, probably down to the level of capturing keystrokes and cursor movements in order to determine whether someone was actively in front of the keyboard, which means the risk of capturing all kinds of other input as well whenever you have a tab open to DW.) And even with all that, there's still a chance a TN minor could work around anything we put into place and a court would hold us liable for it, no matter how much work we put into preventing it. Like all of these other lawsuits we've contributed to, that's a bad law.
You can read the motion for preliminary injunction, which covers a bunch of the things that make this law unconstitutional very neatly. We'll keep you updated on events that happen!
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That's good to hear! And this community indeed works well for this, I'd say.
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Good luck with this suit!
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Thank you for taking time to do this--you are protecting half the world's population with these challenges.
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I presume it's coming from the party of "small government for the rich, intrusive surveillance for those who might dispute the divine right of the oligarch."
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...and that's ignoring all. the other. problems.
Question for anyone who knows
Or when the fuckery is afoot in a state I don't live in and can't vote in, am I just staying aware and informed of This Sort of Thing?
Re: Question for anyone who knows
Re: Question for anyone who knows
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(I also learned something from that comic, because I would have sat down with my fingers and a clock, tried to count the passage of time from T1 to T2, and eventually given up and had Google do it for me. But I did already know I wasn't normal! 😂 )
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