Hello everyone,

First off I would like to thank you all for supporting this, over 70 people signed in 3 days. When I decided to start this petition part of me thought that I would be viewed as the guy wearing the tin foil hat, but to know others Illinoisans feel the same is heartening. I do believe that if we do not sand up for what we believe is an invasion of our privacy and autonomy, we have no right to complain when we eventually lose it. 

I feel that I owe you all an explanation of where I stand on the core issue that is social media for minors. I do believe that social media is causing an issue in our country. We have all seen the change over the years. When I first signed up for facebook in high-school almost the entirety of my feed was things posted by the people I had friended, or pages I had followed. This is a thing of the past now, almost everything you see is not something you selected to see, but what an algorithm tailors to each of us, individualized to keep us engaged for as long as possible. I do believe it is time for government to step in and help reign this in, especially where children are concerned. Governor J.B. Pritzker has recently proposed several changes to Illinois law to combat this, much of which sounds reasonable to me. I support the idea of taxing social media companies who profit off of users in the state, but since they are not based here are not required to give back to the community that they are profiting off of. I also support banning the use of cell phones in school during class (depending how it is implemented), this was done for many years when they were first becoming common for children to have and I agree the expectation should be that education is the priority in school. These changes seem to benefit everyone involved, and feel like they are not unfairly targeting anyone.

The point I start to have an issue is the bills that we are currently opposing. Some of you may have already fount this if you went to do some of your own research, but there is a chance that a major financial backer of these bills spreading across the country is Meta (formally facebook). It may seem counter to their interests, but it would allow them to pass all responsibility and liability for ensuring they are complying with all laws that reference minors on their platform from them, onto the operating systems. Even if meta analytics say that a user is a child based on account activity, if the operating system they are accessing from says that they are an adult then Meta uses that data. Please keep in mind that this not a confirmed fact but more of a theory based on available information. It was originally posted by a reddit user on r/linux several days ago, and has gone to great lengths to stay anonymous. Since then, individuals have been working to confirm all the sources used and so far all of the collected data is valid. I want you to take this all with a grain of salt, and remember it is a running theory based on publicly available documents. Even if this turns out to be nothing, the primary goal is to protect children from social media, so why are we trying to pass a bill that financially and legally insulates major social media platforms and instead passes that responsibility onto the operating system.

I believe that there are compromises here, there should be comprehensive social media legislation passed in regards to protecting minors, but it should be done in a way that does not cast a massive dragnet by making this mandatory in operating systems. Not only does this end up passing the responsibility onto another party, but in the case of smaller operating systems, many created and maintained by small self funded teams, will force them to shoulder the burden of developing tools because of another, much larger companies inability ad unwillingness to protect their own users. Even if this law does end up being the best solution, I think that there should be exemptions for operating systems below a certain user base count, or possibly exclude linux all together.

In a speech, Governor J.B. Pritzker stated that this law would help parents manage how their children use social media. I would like to hear from Illinois lawmakers how this law would do this when it seems to take any of the management away from the parents. Would they be allowed to set what their children are allowed to do based on their age? I am sure some parents would be among the group of people who would rather use existing parental controls rather than have these settings set without their input. There has also been some concern that a person with bad intentions could use this system to specifically target children if they are able to successfully harvest the age data from the operating systems. I want to be clear about the fact that I am not trying to fear monger with these statements, but I feel that before this law is passed, our lawmakers should be able to answer our questions beyond saying that we should pick the lesser evil. I believe we should be given details on how all of these systems will be implemented and protected, using plain english instead of legal jargain written by lawyers for lawyers. For any proposed law that could infringe on privacy, government transparency should be demanded and freely given.

On Thursday morning 3/19, the house will be having a session to discuss the house bill HB5511. Before then I strongly urge everyone contact your representatives if you have not already. Furthermore, everyone should also submit a witness slip (link posted below) before the hearing to allow our opinions to be known. If you do decide to provide testimony, then I would ask that you remain civil, and please use your own words to share your thoughts. My goal here is not to create a group who has the exact same opinions, but provide information and resources for people who want to know about this issue.  Your opinions and priorities on these issues may differ from mine, but we should all be aware of laws that may effect us and have a chance to influence them, let your thoughts be heard.

Before we wrap this up I want to once again thank everyone for their interest and support, and encourage you to share this info with others.

Witness Slip: https://www.ilga.gov/house/hearings/details/3062/22570/CreateWitnessSlip/?legislationId=167486