Caitlin Vogus
speaker
86 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 13 Jul
Caitlin Vogus’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Sure, so the Kids Act is a package of bills that combines actually a lot of different pieces of legislation, and they're all framed around this idea of online safety and protecting kids online.
And that is, of course, a framing that I think anyone can get behind.
kids safe, of course.
But the issue with the bill is that buried within it, it also really strongly either incentivizes or actually requires social media platforms to engage in age verification or age gating, saying that social media platforms could be held liable if they offer certain content or certain features to kids.
And the question comes up of, well, how could they do that unless they could determine which of their users are kids and which are adults?
And the answer is that they can't.
And so the bill would require platforms to use these kind of very invasive measures, invasive of people's privacy, in order to determine their ages.
And that's where our concern is coming from at Freedom of the Press Foundation, where I work.
right that's a great question so one of the methods for age verification is requiring a user to produce a government id as you mentioned and as you say correctly um kids you know below a certain age are not going to have that id but it's not just kids below a certain age it also might be people who are in the country and are undocumented or it might be people who just don't have the money in order to get a government id things like that so it could impact a lot of people
If platforms are not requiring a government ID, another way that they might try to verify age is through biometric data.
So they might take a scan of a user's face and then try to estimate their age based on that scan.
But a problem with that is not only is that extremely privacy invasive, I don't want to have to share a scan.
They had to go onto a social media platform.
It also is not always accurate.
And studies have shown that it's especially not accurate when dealing with people of color, for example.
So there are different methods, but none of them are foolproof.
And I think the biggest problem with all of them is that there's no way to verify someone's age, but allow them to still remain anonymous online.
And that's a huge issue when it comes to free speech and our ability to speak online.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think the impact on LGBTQ youth is really severe and groups like Fight for the Future have been bringing that argument to the forefront because we know that the Internet has been a place for some of those kids where they can connect with communities of other LGBTQ people to help them navigate what can be a really difficult process for them as they are in communities that might not be supportive for them.
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