New Social Network Legislation Proposed

Congress targets social network sites | CNET News.com

"When children leave the home and go to school or the public library and have access to social-networking sites, we have reason to be concerned," Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican, told CNET News.com in an interview. Fitzpatrick and fellow Republicans, including House Speaker Dennis Hastert, on Wednesday endorsed new legislation (click here for PDF) that would cordon off access to commercial Web sites that let users create public "Web pages or profiles" and also offer a discussion board, chat room, or e-mail service.

Dear Rep. Fitzpatrick,

I appreciate your valiant efforts in protecting the youth of our society from online predators.  As the media has been hyping the dangers of such sites as MySpace, it makes absolute sense for you to jump on the bandwagon and align with the perceived needs of your constituents.  Our defenseless, unintelligent youth are not exposed to harmful, scary people in real life situations, only online and I appreciate you taking steps to protect our youth.  However, I would like to alert you to some of the hopefully unintentional consquences of your broad language:

• Sites "that allow users to create profiles or webpages about themselves" is quite a broad category!  As your exposure to the internet may be based within your blackberry, I would like to point out some wonderful sites that have user profiles assigned to them: Flickr, Odeo, Blogger, digg, Yahoo, and OurMedia.  I would love to point out that these sites are not MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, Tribe or Orkut -- some of the better known social networking sites.  Your bill would inadvertently (or so I hope!) restrict anyone in a federally funded location that is accessing the web from viewing photos, posting photos, listing to NPR podcasts, reading a tremendous number of blogs, finding sites/information that are new and interesting, using a leading website/e-mail service or consuming media that is shared among our society.
• Thankfully, Wikipedia is not a commercial service or else our kids couldn't access a great source of education!  Whew!  But I guess that leaves any other wiki stuck in the web filters, eh?  What a shame.  There are many, many educational uses for them.
  
• The intention is to protect our youth -- all youth, all the time -- however, because of the pesky constitution, you can only institute this at locations that receive federal funds.  Therefore, middle and upper class kids can still access at home where their parents pay for internet access.  Hmmm...what kids are we protecting then?  Don't worry, you don't really represent that class anyways!
• Does the media hype associated with predators outweigh the education and connected value that sites with the ability to create, share and connect provide our youth?

I urge you to take a look around at most of the websites that are launching and being used these days.  I believe that your staff may be able to demonstrate for you that most allow users to create and share content!  Thankfully you have only defined content as webpages, because there are a multitude of sites that allow users to record audio and video and share them -- all on that crazy thing called the information super highway.  Crazy, huh?  Perhaps you should change your wording to 'content' to save our youth from audio and video as well.

Cheers,
A Voter