Abstract
Convinced that social media is directly harming children, policymakers have started to introduce legislation that requires technology companies to be safe by design through “duty of care” provisions. Unlike regulations that focus on product safety, these bills incorporate technosolutionist logics into regulation by presuming that technology companies can remedy complex harms like mental health duress and bullying if their products were only designed better. In this paper, we unpack the theory of change at the center of the “duty of care” included in the “Kids Online Safety Act” (KOSA). We argue that techno-legal solutionism is both ineffective as a framework and, in the case of KOSA, potentially harmful to the young people it purports to help.
Repository Citation
Maria P. Angel and danah boyd,
Techno-legal Solutionism: Regulating Children's Online Safety in the United States
Proc. 3d Ann. ACM Comp. Sci. & L. Symp. 86
(2024),
Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/fac_artchop/1780
Included in
Child Psychology Commons, Computer Law Commons, Privacy Law Commons, Science and Technology Law Commons
Also available open access at the Association for Computing Machinery Digital Library.