As a father of five at 55, I can’t afford to ignore the societal scourge of cyberbullying. My kids haven’t yet reached the age where they can use social media, but that didn’t prevent me from encountering the issue way too early.
A few weeks ago, my wife summoned me to intervene when she caught an older kid from the neighborhood chasing my 8-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter down the street with a cellphone in hand, capturing video footage of them for a live platform to amuse his virtual community. When confronted, he couldn’t understand for the life of him what he had done wrong. He’s a good kid, and apparently, this is the way good kids have fun. The nonchalance with which this and similar incidents have been shrugged off by parents — let alone their children — convinces me that legislators could not help but take action as they have done in my home state of Georgia.
It remains to be seen how adult entertainment companies will react to Georgia’s SB 351 and how the law will be enforced by local authorities.
On July 1st, the “Protecting Georgia’s Children on Social Media Act” (SB 351), signed by Governor Brian Kemp in April, will take effect. The law is intended to promote the “safe and appropriate” use of technology, especially for young people. The measure requires local school boards, with the assistance of the State Attorney General and the Department of Education, to “adopt, implement, and enforce” social media policies. It also requires social media platforms to provide information to parents upon request, and for websites with “a substantial portion of material that is harmful to minors” to use age verification systems, such as the submission of a government ID. (RELATED: Conservatives Should Safeguard Kids From Social Media)
You can see where this is going.
The Free Speech Coalition, which defines itself as “the nonprofit non-partisan trade association for the adult industry,” is not happy with the law. They are engaged in several legal battles at the state level to defend their perverted clientele. Their mission “is to protect the rights and freedoms of the adult industry,” and SB 351 certainly threatens to impinge on those rights and freedoms. Among the Coalition’s more recent endeavors is to assist in the defense against a private lawsuit in Kansas that alleges a minor gained access to pornographic material since the websites did not employ “commercially reasonable” age-verification protocols. Georgia will join several states next month in requiring such protocols.
Aside from the viability of lawsuits such as that brought on in Kansas, the effectiveness of these age-verification protocols is highly questionable. In some cases, pornography providers do not want to wait around to find out how well they work, so they simply pull their services from geographical areas where they are liable for verification. PornHub, for example, decided to pull its services completely from France after the nation enacted age verification laws. (RELATED: Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton: Porn Doesn’t Have to Be ‘Inevitable’)
The country’s communications regulator, Arcom, noted in a statement that Aylo, another adult entertainment company, had chosen to “shirk the requirement of protecting minors … by suspending access to its content in France, including for adults.” That action was apparently much easier than constantly monitoring user-uploaded content on Aylo’s site, which did not sufficiently employ age verification requirements.
It remains to be seen how adult entertainment companies will react to Georgia’s SB 351 and how the law will be enforced by local authorities. Nevertheless, come fall, the law’s impact on schools will be immediate and apparent. Given the broadness of “material that is harmful to minors,” local school boards should feel free to be as stringent as they want. The bill defines such material as that “which the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find, taking the material as a whole and with respect to minors, is designed to appeal to, or is designed to pander to, prurient interest (‘prurient” being material that has or encourages ‘an excessive interest in sexual matters’).”
This is the moment for local communities to step up and for local school boards to take control. Be assured, however, that the Free Speech Coalition and similar advocacy groups will be no less active at the local level than they have been on the state and national levels. (RELATED: At the Supreme Court, Porn Should Lose So Free Speech Can Win)
Social Media in the Home
The battle is on, but it cannot be fought on a single front. It’s a battle that, first and foremost, must take place within the walls of homes where parents can monitor, place restrictions, and block material as much as possible. As children grow into adolescents, the harm of cyberbullying and pornography is not the sort of issue you wait for your child to bring to you. As sad as it is, my wife and I were forced to broach the topic with them much earlier than we had wished.
We had to hammer out a way of explaining to our children that they were right to feel so uncomfortable with a neighborhood boy running after them, taking a video of their frightened faces, and sharing it on his social media site. As I say, my kids are still too young to have cellphones and use social media, but their friends are old enough to check their cellphones at the front door whenever they enter our home.
We parents also have to be humble enough to admit that our children can be lured into cyberbullying as easily as the next child. The good kid in our neighborhood saw no reason to hide his pursuit of our two younger kids from the full view of my wife. Any of his friends would have done the same. In a few years, my son could easily be on the other side of the camera, bullying his own little sister and her friends. I know that sounds insane, but recognizing how commonplace the insanity has become is our first step toward sanity.
Measures like Georgia’s SB 351 will certainly help, but they are far from capable of solving the problem alone.
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