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Corrupting the Youth: KOSA and Greek Philosophy
-- By MichaelMacKay - 11 Jan 2025 | |
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< | One Poet, Two Greeks | >
> | One Poet, Two Greeks | | |
In Aristotle’s Poetics, why is Homer a poet but not Empedocles? Both Greeks’ works are composed entirely of hexameter verse, but for Aristotle, poetry does not turn on prosody alone.[1] Rather, Empedocles is a philosopher,[2] and today, that distinction—despite apparent similarities—is increasingly relevant facing a new regime of online censorship, as the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) threatens to ratchet up minors' surveillance and mistake measurement for meaning. | |
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< | Put differently, rooting out all the “harms” under KOSA by reasonable care is like rounding up all the poets in Poetics by dactyl. Meter is easy to measure, but what can be counted most easily does not necessarily count the most. What survives of Poetics is approximately 8,933 Attic Greek words, resulting in a paperback English edition of 144 pages (7.92 x 5.04″),[3] but such quantification confounds real inquiry when words themselves contain multitudes.[4] Thus, “[w]e should therefore solve the question [of what something means] by reference to what the poet says himself, or to what is tacitly assumed by a person of intelligence.”[5] Applying statistical models in a top-down manner tends to affix meaning rather than infer meaning from the text in context, and by that measure, KOSA’s requirement that platforms monitor patterns of children’s usage and publicly disclose such information appears to treat online expression as univocal—forgetting that “when a word seems to involve some inconsistency of meaning, we should consider how many senses it may bear in the particular passage.”[6] | >
> | Put differently, rooting out all the “harms” under KOSA by its duty of care is like rounding up all the poets in Poetics by dactyl. Meter is easy to measure, but what can be counted most easily does not necessarily count the most. What survives of Poetics is approximately 8,933 Attic Greek words, resulting in a paperback English edition of 144 pages (7.92 x 5.04″),[3] but quantification confounds real inquiry when words contain multitudes.[4] Aristotle cautions that “[w]e should therefore solve the question [of what something means] by reference to what the poet says himself, or to what is tacitly assumed by a person of intelligence.”[5] Applying statistical models in a top-down manner tends to affix meaning rather than infer meaning from text in context, and by that measure, KOSA’s requirement that platforms monitor patterns of children’s usage and publicly disclose such information appears to treat online expression as univocal—forgetting that “when a word seems to involve some inconsistency of meaning, we should consider how many senses it may bear in the particular passage.”[6] | | |
One Flaw, Two Bills | | |
In December 2024, the Senate amended KOSA to soften some “harms” for platforms (e.g. striking “predatory… marketing practices” from Sec. 103) but at the expense of hardening kids’ virtual cages. Previously, in Sec. 101, the bipartisan bill had defined “compulsive usage” as “any response stimulated by external factors that causes an individual to engage in repetitive behavior reasonably likely to cause psychological distress, loss of control, anxiety, or depression.” But now, it is “a persistent and repetitive use of a covered platform that significantly impacts [emphasis] one or more major life activities of an individual, including socializing, sleeping, eating, learning, reading, concentrating, communicating, or working.” How exactly is a “covered platform” to know what genuinely impacts the lives of children under 13?—apparently, through commercial surveillance, because Sec. 102(a) (“Duty of Care”) now says that “covered platforms” must know: “(III) Patterns of use that indicate compulsive usage.” | |
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< | Again, ascertaining such “patterns” implies averaging across millions of minors’ uploaded content and online footprints, so there is no real knowledge as to any one minor’s particular use of "covered platforms" like Discord or Reddit. Blindly, though, firms are required to be intrusive to establish what is “compulsive,” so while Sec. 102(a)(II) (“clinically diagnosable symptoms”) suggests that some doctors may play a role in guiding FTC enforcement, the need for “covered platforms” to ensure compliance under vague parameters of "compulsive" means data collection will likely be exhaustive, as firms err on the side of caution,[9] meaning that minors’ privacy breach is the only real foreseeable harm within the risk.[10] Notably, Meta cannot even automatically flag disturbing content for removal,[11] so increasing platforms’ vigilance against kids’ “compulsive usage” through proprietary algorithms that prove too much will probably lead to more foreign adults watching American kids. Surely, developers can build bigger nets for smaller fish, but some brain development will inevitably be confused for “brainrot” when adults are not in on the joke. Before the amendment, “compulsive usage” under Sec. 101(3) was predicated on external factors “reasonably likely to cause” such compulsion, but they have been replaced by a set of factors that “significantly impacts” kids, where the change from probable to actual knowledge underscores that “covered platforms” will ultimately incur KYC obligations like mandatory age verification to know who is using their apps and how, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation has predicted.[12] | >
> | Again, ascertaining such “patterns” implies averaging across millions of minors’ uploaded content and online footprints, so there is no real knowledge as to any one minor’s particular use of "covered platforms" like Discord or Reddit. Blindly, though, firms are required to be intrusive to establish what is “compulsive,” so while Sec. 102(a)(II) (“clinically diagnosable symptoms”) suggests that some doctors may play a role in guiding FTC enforcement, the need for “covered platforms” to ensure compliance under vague parameters of "compulsive" means data collection will likely be exhaustive, as firms err on the side of caution,[9] meaning that minors’ privacy breach is the only real foreseeable harm within the risk.[10] Notably, Meta cannot even automatically flag disturbing content for removal,[11] so increasing platforms’ vigilance against kids’ “compulsive usage” through proprietary algorithms that prove too much will probably lead to more foreign adults watching American kids. Surely, developers can build bigger nets for smaller fish, but some brain development will inevitably be confused for “brainrot” when adults are not in on the joke. Before the amendment, “compulsive usage” under Sec. 101(3) was predicated on external factors “reasonably likely to cause” such compulsion, but they have been replaced by a set of factors that “significantly impacts” kids, where the change from probable to actual knowledge underscores that “covered platforms” will ultimately incur KYC obligations like mandatory age verification to determine who is using their apps and how, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation has predicted.[12] | | | First Amendment, Second Act | |
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In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Zuboff recounts the FTC’s $2.2M settlement with Vizio in 2017 after it was discovered that its TVs were essentially watching the family at home.[13] Despite its devices’ “smart interactivity,”[14] it is unclear whether such a company would be liable as a “covered platform” under KOSA, and the ever-expanding IOT complicates KOSA’s paternalistic goals (e.g. should Mattel sell at least 10 million “smart” Barbie dream homes that children play with, why would that not be an “online video game” under Sec. 101(11)?).[15] Assuming arguendo that KOSA is even constitutional under the First Amendment,[16] the next step that the 119th Congress should take would be reconsidering KOSA’s policy goals. Recently, social media companies have publicly displayed AI technology interacting with in-app users,[17] so restricting such platforms' use of large language models may be a worthier goal in promoting kids’ well-being and online expression. After all, statistical models are poor proxies for communicative genius,[18] and where G2 estimated that some 550 million posts were made on Reddit last year alone, there was probably at least one philosophical haiku written by a kid.[19] | >
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In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Zuboff recounts the FTC’s $2.2M settlement with Vizio in 2017 after it was discovered that its TVs were essentially watching the family at home.[13] Despite its devices’ “smart interactivity,”[14], it is unclear whether such a company would be liable as a “covered platform” under KOSA, and the ever-expanding IOT complicates KOSA’s paternalistic goals (e.g. should Mattel sell at least 10 million “smart” Barbie dream homes that children play with, why would that not be an “online video game” under Sec. 101(11)?).[15] Assuming arguendo that KOSA is even constitutional under the First Amendment,[16] the next step that the 119th Congress should take is to reconsider KOSA’s policy goals. Recently, social media companies have publicly displayed AI technology communicating with in-app users,[17] so restricting such platforms' use of large language models may be a worthier goal in promoting kids’ well-being without harming their self-expression. After all, statistical models are poor proxies for communicative genius,[18] and where G2 estimated that users made some 550 million posts on Reddit last year alone, there was probably at least one philosophical haiku written by a kid.[19] | | |
Endnotes:
- Aristotle, Poet. 1447b.
- Ibid. Technically, a “physiologist,” as Aristotle says “φυσιόλογος,” which often differentiates the pre-Socratic from the kind of philosopher of Aristotle’s day (“φῐλόσοφος”).
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- Word count was determined programmatically from Perseus; page count is Penguin’s reprint (1997).
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- Word count was parsed programmatically from Perseus; page count comes from Penguin’s reprint (1997).
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- Aristotle, Poetics, tr. S. H. Butcher, Pennsylvania Press (2000), p. 28: “there is at times no word in existence; still the metaphor may be used.”
- Ibid, p. 38.
- Ibid.
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