Echoes of History in New National Push to Shield Children Online

Mounting concerns over young people’s mental health have prompted state legislatures across the country to propose a slew of age restrictions to protect minors online. Lawmakers say the rules should help shield young people from online pornography, predators and harmful social media posts. The current push for age restrictions on certain online content echoes a similar legislative drive three decades ago, when the internet was in its infancy. In 1996, Congress passed a major telecommunications bill that made it illegal to knowingly send or display “obscene or indecent” material to people under 18. That law had a longstanding precedent: federal rules dating back to the 1920s that prohibited radio and TV shows from broadcasting obscene language, to prevent a child wandering into a living room from overhearing it. The anti-pornography rules in the 1990s had strong bipartisan support. But civil liberties groups thought the prohibitions on online indecency violated the First Amendment and squelched free speech. Among other objections, they said it was too difficult and expensive for websites to verify a visitor’s age. That could have led sites to simply get rid of anything inappropriate for children, creating a Disneyfied internet. To protect Americans’ access to information that could potentially be deemed indecent under the new law — like educational material about AIDS — the American Civil Liberties Union sued the government, challenging part of the law called the Communications Decency Act.