Who made this site, and why?

Bill of Wrongs is a project of Dreamwidth Studios, a small, independent, ad-free, user-supported social media site. We made it because we believe age verification is harmful to a secure and private internet, harmful to marginalized people, and actively detrimental to the issue of minors' online safety. By tracking these bills, we hope to encourage people to get involved in the legislative process and contact their legislators to express their concerns about the wave of internet age verification bills sweeping the country.

What does "Action Alert" on a bill listing mean?

We mark bills as "Action Alert" when we believe there's a high enough chance of them becoming law that people in those states should contact their legislators to express opposition to the bill. If you don't know who your state legislators are, your state Board of Elections should have an online lookup tool, or you can use the PluralPolicy Find Your Legislator lookup.

We recommend calling their office and explaining why you oppose the bill in your own words. Leaving a voice mail after hours is also okay! Phone calls are better than emails, but if email is the only way you can express opposition, it's better than nothing at all.

Isn't online child safety an important goal?

It is! Unfortunately, these bills don't improve child safety -- they endanger it. Age verification requires everyone (not just minors) to submit sensitive personal information to every site they visit or to a third party hired by that site to perform age verification, and that information can be hacked or misused. Many of these laws require sites to treat an account belonging to someone under 18 differently than an account belonging to someone over 18 in ways other people can tell just by looking at the account, which means giving child predators an easy way to determine whether an account belongs to someone under 18. Most of these laws also assume that every site on the internet engages in significant data collection practices about their users, meaning sites that don't collect that data would need to start doing so in order to comply with them. This means more surveillance, more data gathering, and more tracking of everyone's online activity, not just people under 18.

The fundamental issue with any law that requires a website to treat people under 18 differently than people over 18 is that it's impossible to do without identifying and de-anonymizing every single visitor to the site. Anonymity is a crucial protection for everyone, but especially for marginalized people of all types.

Isn't social media harmful to teenagers' mental health?

Contrary to the popular perception, we don't actually know. Some studies have found a correlation between the amount of time teenagers spend on social media and higher rates of anxiety or depression, but nobody knows whether the anxiety and depression is caused by the time spent on social media or not: it's equally plausible that anxious and depressed teenagers spend more time on social media because they're looking for peer support and acceptance they can't find in their offline lives. Other studies have found that social media use is correlated with improved teenage mental health, especially for teenagers from marginalized groups, while yet more studies find that there's no relationship. Very few of the studies have been conducted with scientifically rigorous methodology, and almost all of them have only been done on a very few number of the very largest sites.

The current best consensus from independent experts in child psychology and teenage mental health is that social media use is beneficial for some teenagers, neutral for others, and detrimental to a small group. We don't think the evidence is anywhere near strong enough to justify destroying the privacy and civil liberties of everyone in the US, especially when there are a number of parental control tools available for parents who want to restrict their childrens' social media use already available.

For more information, see Ten Myths About the Effect of Social Media Use on Well-Being by Jeffrey A Hall.

How comprehensive is this list?

We've done our best to make it as comprehensive as possible, but we can't guarantee that we haven't missed a bill. If you know of any bill we've missed, email us at billofwrongs@dreamwidth.org with the state and bill number.

Can you track laws and bills worldwide, instead of just in the US?

No. We absolutely don't have the capacity to keep track of global legislation; we have enough trouble keeping up with US legislation.

How do you categorize the bills you add?

We start with automated categorization and then read each bill several times to make sure the automated categorization is accurate and hasn't missed anything. In some cases, a bill's requirements are unclear enough that we can't precisely determine whether a specific category applies or not: the best example of this when a bill requires sites to treat adults and teenagers differently without specifying what form of age determination sites needs to use. In those cases, we make our best guess as to which categories apply. If you click on a specific law, the detailed description includes citations to the bill itself for each category we've applied. If you think we've gotten the analysis wrong, email us at billofwrongs@dreamwidth.org with the state and bill number and a description of the problem.

Are you lawyers?

No. We're a tiny social media company that's been trying to do social media ethically and responsibly since 2009. We have no lawyers and no budget to hire lawyers. We joined Netchoice, a trade organization for the technology industry, to be able to help fight these laws in court, not only because they're a danger to the privacy and security of everyone who uses the internet, but also because complying with most of them would put us and every other small, independent website on the internet out of business. Netchoice and Netchoice's lawyers aren't our lawyers, though, and they can't advise us on what we would need to do to comply with these laws.

We're not the only site in this position. These laws threaten the existence of every site smaller than the ones owned by massive multinational corporations -- which are, ironically, the ones who gather the most data about their users and use it in the manipulative ways that legislators most often cite as justification for passing these laws in the first place.

Isn't the opposition to these laws just "Big Tech" not wanting to be regulated?

No. Large social media sites run by big tech companies have plenty of budget to hire lawyers to figure out what they need to do about a new law and plenty of staff to implement the necessary changes. The more of these laws that pass, the more small, independent sites shut down out of fear of liability, and the barrier to starting new independent sites grows. These laws hasten the consolidation and monopolization of the web to the point where the only sites that survive are the ones owned and operated by major multinational corporations with a massive incentive to engage in data harvesting and surveillance capitalism.

We think that's a bad thing. We've been stubbornly trying to keep a tiny corner of the old web alive (on a shoestring budget, without advertising and without data brokering) since 2009. We don't want the entire internet to be owned by the same handful of companies, and we don't want people to have to be billionaires or take massive amounts of venture capital to be able to afford to create a site where people can talk to each other. Whatever you think is wrong with the business practices of those companies, passing laws that make it impossible for small sites to exist only protects those companies from ever facing meaningful competition in the future.

I run a small site. Can you help me figure out what I need to do to comply with a law that's been passed?

Unfortunately, no. We're not lawyers and we can't give out legal advice. All we can do is keep a list of the laws that have passed (and which of them have been challenged in court) and what their status is. We'll do our best to keep this list accurate (with help from the LegiScan API), but we can't guarantee that listings are up to date or comprehensive. Don't rely on this site to make your decisions about risk and liability. We're just a few exhausted nerds who are trying our best to document the attempts to enact sweeping restrictions on everyone's civil liberties in response to the latest "think of the children" moral panic.

How often does this site update?

The status of each tracked bill updates nightly from LegiScan. We will do our best to add any newly-introduced bill as soon as we can (and to mark any tracked bills as "dead" when the legislative session they were introduced in ends), but we can't make any guarantees about how frequently we'll be able to: we're doing this in addition to actually running Dreamwidth. If you spot something wrong, email us at billofwrongs@dreamwidth.org and we'll correct it as soon as we can.

What is the license for this project?

The data and text on the website, including the bill descriptions, are licensed under CC BY 4.0 and credit can be provided to "LegiScan and Dreamwidth Studios". The code that generates the site is licensed under the MIT License.