Cristiano Lima-Strong reports in the Washington Post:

"After months of negotiations, senators announced Thursday that a sprawling bill to expand protections for children online had secured more than 60 backers, clearing a path to passage for what would be the most significant congressional attempt in decades to regulate tech companies....

Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) unveiled a fresh version of the bill Thursday with more than a dozen new co-sponsors, including Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), updating it in part to assuage long-running concerns by human rights groups that it could be weaponized to target LGBT youths and stifle speech online."

But the improvements in the bill fall short of what's needed. @fight 's statement (not quoted in the Washington Post, of course, which is a mouthpiece for tech):

"Fight for the Future and the coalition of dozens of human rights, LGBTQ, racial justice and civil liberties groups that have been raising concerns about KOSA for months are still assessing the latest version of the bill. Unfortunately, the bill’s sponsors did not include us in discussions about changes and would not share the text with us despite repeated requests.

Based on our initial read, we are glad to see the attorney general enforcement narrowed. We agree that this will somewhat reduce the immediate likelihood of KOSA being weaponized by politically motivated AGs to target content that they don’t like. We also appreciate that it seems an attempt was made to limit the Duty of Care to design features. However, by not clarifying that the Duty of Care only applies in a content neutral manner, as we have asked, it still invites the harms that we’ve warned about.

As we have said for months, the fundamental problem with KOSA is that its duty of care covers content specific aspects of content recommendation systems, and the new changes fail to address that."

#KOSA #lgbtqia #uspol