This is the third time the Senate has been trying to force this through, and I talked about it last year. It is a bill that claims “protects children and victims against CSAM” by creating an unelected and politically appointed national commission of law enforcement specialists to dictate “best practices” that websites all across the nation will be forced to follow. (Keep in mind, most websites in the world are created in the US, so this has global ramifications). These “best practices” would include killing encryption so that any law enforcement can scan and see every single message, dm, photo, cloud storage, data, and any website you have every so much as glanced at. Contrary to popular belief, no they actually can’t already do that. These “best practices” also create new laws for “removing CSAM” online, leading to mass censorship of non-CSAM content like what happened to tumblr. Keep in mind that groups like NCOSE, an anti-LGBT hate group, will be allowed on this commission. If websites don’t follow these best practices, they lose their Section 230 protections, leading to mass censorship either way.
Section 230 is foundational to modern online communications. It’s the entire reason social media exists. It grants legal protection to users and websites, and says that websites aren’t responsible for what users upload online unless it’s criminal. Without Section 230, websites are at the mercy of whatever bullshit regulatory laws any and every US state passes. Imagine if Texas and Florida were allowed to say what you can and can’t publish and access online. That is what will happen if EARN IT passes. (For context, Trump wanted to get rid of Section 230 because he knew it would lead to mass govt surveillance and censorship of minorities online.)
This is really not a drill. Anyone who makes or consume anything “adult” and LGBT online has to be prepared to fight Sen. Blumenthal’s EARN IT Act, brought back from the grave by a bipartisan consensus to destroy Section 230. If this bill passes, we’re going to see most, if not all, adult content and accounts removed from mainstream platforms. This will include anything related to LGBT content, including SFW fanfiction, for example. Youtube, Twitter, Reddit, Tiktok, Tumblr, all of them will be completely gutted of anything related to LGBT content, abortion healthcare, resources for victims of any type of abuse, etc. It is a right-wing fascists wet dream, which is why NCOSE is behind this bill and why another name for this bill is named in reference to NCOSE.
NCOSE used to be named Morality in Media, and has rebranded into an “anti-trafficking” organization. They are a hate group that has made millions off of being “against trafficking” while helping almost no victims and pushing for homophobic laws globally. They have successfully pushing the idea that any form of sexual expression, including talking about HEALTH, leads to sex trafficking. That’s how SESTA passed. Their goal is to eliminate all sex, anything gay, and everything that goes against their idea of ‘God’ from the internet and hyper disney-fy and sanitize it. This is a highly coordinated attack on multiple fronts.
The EARN IT Act will lead to mass online censorship and surveillance. Platforms will be forced to scan their users’ communications and censor all sex-related content, including sex education, literally anything lgbt, transgender or non-binary education and support systems, aything related to abortion, and sex worker communication according to the ACLU. All this in the name of “protecting kids” and “fighting CSAM”, both of which the bill does nothing of the sort. In fact it makes fighting CSEM even harder.
EARN IT will open the way for politicians to define the category of “pornography" as they — or the lobbies that fund them — please. The same way that right-wing groups have successfully banned books about race and LGBT, are banning trans people from existing, all under the guise of protecting children from “grooming and exploitation”, is how they will successfully censor the internet.
As long as state legislatures can tie in “fighting CSAM” to their bullshit laws, they can use EARN IT to censor and surveill whatever they want.
This is already a nightmare enough. But the bill also DESTROYS ENCRYPTION, you know, the thing protecting literally anyone or any govt entity from going into your private messages and emails and anything on your devices and spying on you.
This bill is going to finish what FOSTA/SESTA started. And that should terrify you.
Senator Blumenthal (Same guy who said ‘Facebook should ban finsta’) pushed this bill all of 2020, literally every activist (There were more than half a million signatures on this site opposing this act!) pushed hard to stop this bill. Now he brings it back, doesn’t show the text of the bill until hours later, and it’s WORSE. Instead of fixing literally anything in the bill that might actually protect kids online, Bluemnthal is hoping to fast track this and shove it through, hoping to get little media attention other than propaganda of “protecting kids” to support this shitty legislation that will harm kids. Blumental doesn’t care about protecting anyone, and only wants his name in headlines.
It will make CSAM much much worse.
One of the many reasons this bill is so dangerous: It totally misunderstands how Section 230 works, and in doing so (as with FOSTA) it is likely to make the very real problem of CSAM worse, not better. Section 230 gives companies the flexibility to try different approaches to dealing with various content moderation challenges. It allows for greater and greater experimentation and adjustments as they learn what works – without fear of liability for any “failure.” Removing Section 230 protections does the opposite. It says if you do anything, you may face crippling legal liability. This actually makes companies less willing to do anything that involves trying to seek out, take down, and report CSAM because of the greatly increased liability that comes with admitting that there is CSAM on your platform to search for and deal with. This liability would allow anyone for any reason to sue any platform they want, suing smaller ones out of existence. Look at what is happening right now with book bans across the nation with far right groups. This is going to happen to the internet if this bill passes.
(Remember, the state department released a report in December 2021 recommending that the government crack down on “obscenity” as hard the Reagan Administration did. If this bill passes, it could easily go way beyond shit red states are currently trying. It is a goldmine for the fascist right that is currently in the middle of banning every book that talks about race and sexuality across the US.)
The reason these bills keep showing up is because there is this false lie spread by organizations like NCOSE that platforms do nothing about CSEM online. However, platforms are already liable for child sexual exploitation under federal law. Tech companies sent more than 45 million+ instances of CSAM to the DOJ in 2019 alone, most of which they declined to investigate. This shows that platforms are actually doing everything in their power already to stop CSEM by following already existing laws. The Earn It Act includes zero resources for proven investigation or prevention programs. If Senator Bluementhal actually cared about protecting youth, why wouldn’t he include anything to actually protect them in his shitty horrible bill? EARN IT is actually likely to make prosecuting child molesters more difficult since evidence collected this way likely violates the Fourth Amendment and would be inadmissible in court.
I don’t know why so many Senators are eager to cosponsor the “make child pornography worse” bill, but here we are.
HOW TO FIGHT BACK
EARN IT Act was introduced just two weeks ago and is already being fast-tracked. It will be marked up the week of May 1st and head to the Senate floor immediately after. If there is no loud and consistent opposition, it will be law by JUNE! Most bills never go to markup, so this means they are putting pressure to move this through. There are already 20 co-sponsors, a fifth of the entire Senate. This is an uphill battle and it is very much all hands on deck.
CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES.
This website takes you to your Senator / House members contact info. EMAIL, MESSAGE, SEND LETTERS, CALL CALL CALL CALL CALL. Calling is the BEST way to get a message through. Get your family and friends to send calls too. This is literally the end of free speech online.
(202) 224-3121 connects you to the congressional hotline. Here is a call script if you don’t know what to say. Call them every day. Even on the weekends, leaving voicemails are fine.
If you have any social media, spread this online. One of the best ways we fought back against this last year was MASSIVE spread online. Tiktok, reddit, twitter, discord, whatever means you have at least mention it. We could see most social media die out by this fall if we don’t fight back.
TLDR: The EARN IT Act will lead to online censorship of any and all adult & lgbt content across the entire internet, open the floodgates to mass surveillance the likes which we haven’t seen before, lead to much more CSEM being distributed online, and destroy encryption. Call 202-224-3121 to connect to your house and senate representative and tell them to VOTE NO on this bill that does not protect anyone and harms everyone.
To recap, here’s why the EARN IT Act would harm online speech, privacy, and security without achieving its child-safety goal:
Fear-Driven Censorship of Legal Speech. Contrary to
the outright lies in the EARN IT sponsors’ “myths vs. facts” document,
nobody, literally nobody, is claiming there’s some First Amendment right
to CSAM that EARN IT impairs. The real issue is censorship of legal speech that is constitutionally
protected. By threatening tech companies with significant litigation
exposure for doing an imperfect job of fighting CSAM on their services,
EARN IT will result in companies overzealously censoring lots of
perfectly legal user speech just in case anything that could potentially
be deemed CSAM might be lurking in there, or even shutting down part or
all of their services entirely. They’d throw the First
Amendment-protected baby out with the unprotected CSAM bathwater. (The same thing happened
with online censorship after Congress passed the SESTA/FOSTA law, on
which EARN IT is modeled, which carved out sex trafficking offenses from
Section 230.) [More here.]
Making Law Enforcement Investigations Harder. Meanwhile,
increased vigilance by providers will push CSAM traders off law-abiding
platforms and onto offshore sites (that don’t follow U.S. law) and the
dark web, where they’re harder to track down. (This, too, happened after
SESTA/FOSTA: even as platforms censored legal speech, sex trafficking offenders and victims got harder for investigators to find.) [More here.]
Undermining User Privacy & Security. EARN IT would, assaid,
discourage the use of encryption, which is vital to protecting the
privacy and data security of children and adults alike (yes, children deserve privacy too).
Punishing companies for strong data protection practices is an utterly
mindboggling public policy choice in the midst of an ongoing
cybersecurity crisis, which has only grown worse since mid-2020 (think SolarWinds, Colonial Pipeline, Log4j, the ransomware pandemic…). As I’ve pointed out before, members of Congress (including EARN IT’s main sponsors) have this unfortunate tendency
to bemoan that tech companies aren’t doing enough to protect users’
privacy, then get mad at them for using strong encryption to do just
that. Sen. Blumenthal in particular is a study in contradiction: while
pushing his anti-encryption EARN IT bill the first time around, he was
simultaneously infuriated by Zoom’s lack of true end-to-end encryption. [More here.]
Privacy Intrusions That Will Let Offenders Walk Free. The bill threatens online privacy by railroading tech companies into surveilling their users even more than they do already. As Techdirt points out,
the “myths vs. facts” document lays bare that the bill’s ulterior
motive is to goad providers into scanning all user data on their
services on pain of criminal liability. In so doing, EARN IT risks upsetting the tightrope that federal CSAM law constantly walks to avoid converting private companies into government agents
whose warrantless surveillance of their users would render evidence
against CSAM defendants inadmissible in court, making convictions harder
to obtain. The bill totally backfires if fewer CSAM offenders are brought to justice because of EARN IT’s heavy-handed pressure on providers. [More here.]
Even if you don’t care about the hits to free speech and personal privacy and cybersecurity, the fact that this bill will hurt child
safety efforts – by making CSAM investigations harder and making it
likelier that CSAM defendants would walk free – should be reason enough
to oppose the EARN IT Act. These are the wholly predictable consequences
if EARN IT (like SESTA/FOSTA before it) tinkers with Section 230. And
Section 230 isn’t the problem here anyway.
This article’s from 2022, but I feel like it gives the best and most succinct summary of the reasons why EARN IT is such a terrible bill for nearly everyone.
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