Re:Meta Sued by States over Harmful Youth Marketing on Faceb...
by jonhohle on Tuesday October 24, 2023 @09:24PM
(#38008025)
There is historical precedent for limiting access for children. Children can't legally buy cigarettes, alcohol, lottery tickets, firearms (of which owning is a constitutional right), or enter certain prohibited places. Unfortunately, I many service providers have abused their access to children and acted as if children can legally enter into some type of one sided quasi-contract. The bar for working with children at any physical location is huge and boundaries are well understood.
I know of exactly zero places I take my children (activities, sports, clubs, etc.) that would speak to them privately to coerce them to use that service more without parental consent. That's what Meta and a million other online services are doing to children.
COPPA was the culmination of a series of progressively more narrow attempts to restrict internet content and practices using “think of the children” as a justification, the previous efforts were, but for some standalone bits (like Section 230, which survived from the mostly-unconstitutional Communications Decency Act) struck down as unconstitutional, which is why there haven't been attempts to update it with more broadly applicable restrictions—its already the outcome of a process of backing off to the maximal constitutional restriction (OTOH, with a socially conservative Supreme Court that is unusually unconcerned with respecting precedent, I suppose now would be the time, if you wanted to do that.)