Publications: Ashley Johnson

The landscape of state legislation addressing children’s online safety and privacy demonstrates not only the difficulty of regulating social media and other online services but also the need for a federal standard.

Facial recognition has increased public safety, convenience for consumers and security for businesses.

Before policymakers jump straight to regulating social media to address alleged bias—and likely running into First Amendment issues—they need answers to several key questions, namely: Is there political bias on social media? What does this bias look like? And how does it affect American politics?

If the Supreme Court upholds Florida and Texas’s laws on social media content moderation, it is likely that more states will pass similar legislation, raising the costs to social media companies and impacting even more users across the country.

Four new research papers in the journals Science and Nature studied the impact of Facebook and Instagram on key political attitudes and behaviors during the 2020 election cycle. They found little evidence that key features of the platforms led to polarization.

The United States could regain its position as a global leader on digital policy by prioritizing a pro-innovation agenda, cooperating with its allies to advance free trade and democratic values, and pushing back against harmful narratives and policies.

In Congress, California, and Canada, lawmakers are relying on faulty logic—the argument that news aggregators take advantage of publishers—in a misguided attempt to save local journalism. History shows that these measures are not likely to succeed at anything more than limiting consumers’ access to quality news content.

The effect of social media on children has been at the center of recent debate, with multiple bills at the federal and state level and recent advisories from the U.S. Surgeon General and the American Psychological Association. Despite a lack of scientific consensus on how social media affects children, lawmakers have been rushing to implement policies that would, in many cases, create more problems than they solve.

Section 230 may not be out of the woods yet, with some members of Congress still pushing for changes to the law that, in most cases, would have negative unintended consequences for businesses, consumers, and online services.

STOP CSAM Act of 2023 is not an effective solution for protecting children and would come at the cost of decreased privacy and security for all users. Instead, Congress should focus on enabling law enforcement to more effectively protect victims and punish the perpetrators who create, solicit, or enable child sexual abuse material.