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Legislation to secure children’s safety online is all the rage right now, not only on Capitol Hill, but in state legislatures across the country. One of the favored approaches is to impose on platforms a duty of care to protect teen users.

For example, Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) have reintroduced the Kid’s Online Safety Act (KOSA), which would require that social-media platforms “prevent or mitigate” a variety of potential harms, including mental-health harms; addiction; online bullying and harassment; sexual exploitation and abuse; promotion of narcotics, tobacco, gambling, or alcohol; and predatory, unfair, or deceptive business practices.

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According to an old English proverb, children are meant to be seen and not heard. But if we aren’t careful with new online-safety legislation, kids will be neither seen nor heard in online spaces.

There has been no shortage of stories in recent months focusing on the real harms associated with teens on social media, which the platforms have already invested in mitigating in response to market demand from parents, advertisers and teens themselves. Far less attention has been paid to the benefits that teens today enjoy in terms of increased connections and access to information that was previously unimaginable in an offline world.

While it bills itself a “Digital Bill of Rights,” the Florida Senate Bill 262 could actually harm consumers and businesses online by substantially raising the costs of targeted advertising.

For consumers, this would mean less “free” stuff online, as publishers switch from advertising-based to subscription-based models. For businesses, it would mean having less ability to target advertisements to consumers who actually want their products, resulting in less revenue.

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While the impact of social media on the mental health of children and teens has rapidly emerged as a hot-button political debate, the federal government has largely stalled in passing any legislation on the issue.

Instead, the states have led the way, with Utah and Arkansas both passing laws intended to protect children’s online safety in recent weeks. Other states – including Florida, Texas and California – are also considering bills that would apply to social-media services used by minors.

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The topic of social media’s impact on childhood mental health has rapidly emerged as a hot-button political debate, becoming the subject of a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee and earning a mention in President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address.

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ICLE President Geoffrey A. Manne’s March 1 contribution to the Hayek Lecture Series at Duke University’s Center for the History of the Political Economy, adapted from a November 2021 ICLE white paper of the same name. The full video is embedded below.

ICLE President Geoffrey Manne was cited by Matt Perault of the Center on Technology Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill during Perault’s recent appearance on The Lawfare Podcast. His comments are quoted here and the full episode is embedded below.

I saw Geoff Manne give the Hayek lecture at Duke last week and he presented a case that was actually very critical of Section 230 along these lines, making the case that there’s meritorious litigation that because of 230 never gets its day in court and that there are a variety of social harms that tech platforms, at least in some cases, don’t bear any of the costs for.

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law will host a hearing this afternoon on Gonzalez v. Google, one of two terrorism-related cases currently before the U.S. Supreme Court that implicate Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

We’ve written before about how the Court might and should rule in Gonzalez (see here and here), but less attention has been devoted to the other Section 230 case on the docket: Twitter v. Taamneh. That’s unfortunate, as a thoughtful reading of the dispute at issue in Taamneh could highlight some of the law’s underlying principles. At first blush, alas, it does not appear that the Court is primed to apply that reading.

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It seems that large language models (LLMs) are all the rage right now, from Bing’s announcement that it plans to integrate the ChatGPT technology into its search engine to Google’s announcement of its own LLM called “Bard” to Meta’s recent introduction of its Large Language Model Meta AI, or “LLaMA.” Each of these LLMs use artificial intelligence (AI) to create text-based answers to questions.

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