The California Pirate Party breaks down what’s actually in the Democrats’ big online safety proposal — and why the cure might be worse than the disease.
Democrats’ “Project 2029” dropped its first major policy salvo last week: a framework called “Kids Over Clicks” targeting online child safety. It’s being pitched as this generation’s “tobacco moment” for social media. There are a handful of genuinely good ideas buried in it. There are also some proposals that, if you follow them to their logical end, require building the exact surveillance infrastructure they claim to oppose.
Let’s run it through the Pirate Wheel.
What They’re Actually Proposing
The framework has several distinct buckets:
- Narrow Section 230 protections — specifically for AI-generated content, paid ads, illegal content, and platforms that facilitate stalking
- Ban social media accounts for kids under 16
- “Smartphone-free childhood” until age 14
- Ban cell phones in schools (with exceptions)
- Ban surveillance advertising
- Limit data collection on children
- Require “safer” default platform design
The group is betting that child safety is the one online policy area that isn’t already “coded” to one party — and they’re probably right. It’s also why several proposals are designed to be enacted via executive action, bypassing a Congress that’s spent thirty years failing to pass meaningful tech regulation.
Where They Get It Right
Banning surveillance advertising and limiting data collection on children are straightforwardly good Pirate policy. Under the Privacy spoke of the Pirate Wheel, children’s data — location, browsing behavior, communication patterns — should never be harvested and monetized, full stop. Surveillance advertising is the business model that turns every child’s curiosity into a targeting profile sold to the highest bidder. California’s own CCPA and COPPA have chipped at this. Going further is warranted.
The Section 230 carve-outs are more nuanced. Section 230 is foundational internet law — it’s why platforms can host user content without being liable for every post. Pirates defend it. But the specific proposed carve-outs (paid advertising, AI-generated content, and content that actively promotes stalking) are narrower than a general 230 rollback. Holding platforms liable for their own algorithmic amplification of illegal content, or for paid ads they profit from, is different from holding them liable for user speech. That distinction matters.
Where It Falls Apart
Here’s the problem: you cannot ban children from social media without first identifying who is a child.
Age verification is surveillance. To enforce a social media ban for under-16s, platforms need to verify every user’s age. That means collecting government ID, biometrics, or some third-party verification that links your real identity to your account — permanently. You’ve just handed the platforms, or the government, a comprehensive identity database of every internet user in the country, built in the name of protecting children.
Australia implemented an age ban for under-16s last year. Within weeks, VPN usage among Australian teenagers spiked dramatically. Kids got around the ban. What didn’t get reversed: the identity verification infrastructure that was now in place for everyone else.
The Pirate Wheel’s Privacy spoke is clear: the right to anonymity in daily life is fundamental. ID demands are only justified on specific, individual suspicion of a specific committed crime. A social media age ban requires demanding ID from every user to catch the ones who are minors. That’s mass identity collection justified by a child safety argument.
We’ve seen this logic before. It’s how surveillance expands: find an unimpeachable moral justification, build the infrastructure, and then watch who else uses it.
The “Tobacco Moment” Problem
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is prominently cited as a supporter, calling this “the tobacco moment for social media.” The cigarette analogy is worth interrogating.
Tobacco’s harm was established through replicable, mechanistic science: nicotine is chemically addictive, smoke causes measurable cellular damage, epidemiological data showed clear dose-response causality. The science was resisted by the industry for decades, but the mechanism was real.
The science on social media harm to adolescents is genuinely contested in ways the cigarette science was not. Haidt’s own research has been disputed by multiple peer-reviewed studies, including work from Oxford’s Internet Institute, that find much smaller or nonexistent effects when controlling for other variables. “The science is in” is doing a lot of rhetorical work in the Semafor piece — work that the Quality Legislation spoke of the Pirate Wheel would ask us to scrutinize.
Quality Legislation requires four things: necessity (a real, sourced, identified problem), effectiveness (demonstrated to work), proportionality (doesn’t create worse problems than it solves), and an evidence basis (not dogma). The “tobacco moment” framing gets necessity. It struggles on effectiveness (age bans don’t work), and it fails proportionality if the mechanism is mass age verification.
The Buried Lede
Here’s what Project 2029 got right that isn’t in the headline: banning surveillance advertising is the most structurally important proposal in the entire framework, and it got one line.
Surveillance advertising is the engine that drives everything else. It’s why platforms are designed to maximize engagement over wellbeing — engagement is what generates behavioral data, and behavioral data is what they sell. Remove the surveillance advertising business model and the incentive structure that creates the harms they’re trying to regulate changes fundamentally. You don’t need to ban kids from platforms; you need to make it unprofitable to manipulate them.
The reason “ban surveillance advertising” is a bullet point and “ban kids from social media” is the headline is that one of those fights is actually winnable in the current political environment, and one would take on the entire ad-tech industry that funds modern political campaigns.
What a Pirate Policy Would Actually Look Like
Real digital rights policy for children doesn’t require choosing between “let platforms do whatever they want” and “build national age verification infrastructure.” It looks like:
- Prohibit data collection on minors, period. Not “limit” it. Zero. Make it criminal, not a civil penalty a corporation can expense.
- Ban behavioral advertising for everyone. Not just children. Contextual advertising — showing ads based on what you’re reading, not who you are — was the model before surveillance capitalism. It can be again.
- Mandate algorithmic transparency. If a platform uses an algorithm to select what content a user sees, that algorithm must be auditable by regulators and researchers. No more black boxes.
- Default privacy, not opt-in. Every platform setting should default to maximum privacy. Surveillance requires affirmative consent, not dark patterns and buried checkboxes.
- Protect the open internet. Don’t let child safety become the wedge that centralizes the internet into a handful of verified, identity-linked platforms. That’s a gift to authoritarians everywhere.
The Bottom Line
Project 2029 identified a real problem, proposed some good solutions, and then buried them under a flagship proposal — the social media age ban — that trades one set of harms for another. The Democrats want to run on child safety in 2028. That’s fine. But policy that requires surveilling everyone to protect some is not child safety. It’s a surveillance expansion with a sympathetic face.
The California Pirate Party has been saying for years: the problem isn’t that the internet is too free. The problem is that it’s been colonized by a surveillance advertising business model that converts attention into data and sells your kid’s psychology to the highest bidder. Fix that, and you’ve fixed most of what Project 2029 is worried about — without building a national ID verification system in the process.
We don’t ask for permission. And we don’t accept false choices.
The California Pirate Party is the party of digital rights. Join the crew at capirates.org
The California Pirate Party breaks down what’s actually in the Democrats’ big online safety proposal — and why the cure might be worse than the disease.
Democrats’ “Project 2029” dropped its first major policy salvo last week: a framework called “Kids Over Clicks” targeting online child safety. It’s being pitched as this generation’s “tobacco moment” for social media. There are a handful of genuinely good ideas buried in it. There are also some proposals that, if you follow them to their logical end, require building the exact surveillance infrastructure they claim to oppose.
Let’s run it through the Pirate Wheel.
What They’re Actually Proposing
The framework has several distinct buckets:
The group is betting that child safety is the one online policy area that isn’t already “coded” to one party — and they’re probably right. It’s also why several proposals are designed to be enacted via executive action, bypassing a Congress that’s spent thirty years failing to pass meaningful tech regulation.
Where They Get It Right
Banning surveillance advertising and limiting data collection on children are straightforwardly good Pirate policy. Under the Privacy spoke of the Pirate Wheel, children’s data — location, browsing behavior, communication patterns — should never be harvested and monetized, full stop. Surveillance advertising is the business model that turns every child’s curiosity into a targeting profile sold to the highest bidder. California’s own CCPA and COPPA have chipped at this. Going further is warranted.
The Section 230 carve-outs are more nuanced. Section 230 is foundational internet law — it’s why platforms can host user content without being liable for every post. Pirates defend it. But the specific proposed carve-outs (paid advertising, AI-generated content, and content that actively promotes stalking) are narrower than a general 230 rollback. Holding platforms liable for their own algorithmic amplification of illegal content, or for paid ads they profit from, is different from holding them liable for user speech. That distinction matters.
Where It Falls Apart
Here’s the problem: you cannot ban children from social media without first identifying who is a child.
Age verification is surveillance. To enforce a social media ban for under-16s, platforms need to verify every user’s age. That means collecting government ID, biometrics, or some third-party verification that links your real identity to your account — permanently. You’ve just handed the platforms, or the government, a comprehensive identity database of every internet user in the country, built in the name of protecting children.
Australia implemented an age ban for under-16s last year. Within weeks, VPN usage among Australian teenagers spiked dramatically. Kids got around the ban. What didn’t get reversed: the identity verification infrastructure that was now in place for everyone else.
The Pirate Wheel’s Privacy spoke is clear: the right to anonymity in daily life is fundamental. ID demands are only justified on specific, individual suspicion of a specific committed crime. A social media age ban requires demanding ID from every user to catch the ones who are minors. That’s mass identity collection justified by a child safety argument.
We’ve seen this logic before. It’s how surveillance expands: find an unimpeachable moral justification, build the infrastructure, and then watch who else uses it.
The “Tobacco Moment” Problem
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is prominently cited as a supporter, calling this “the tobacco moment for social media.” The cigarette analogy is worth interrogating.
Tobacco’s harm was established through replicable, mechanistic science: nicotine is chemically addictive, smoke causes measurable cellular damage, epidemiological data showed clear dose-response causality. The science was resisted by the industry for decades, but the mechanism was real.
The science on social media harm to adolescents is genuinely contested in ways the cigarette science was not. Haidt’s own research has been disputed by multiple peer-reviewed studies, including work from Oxford’s Internet Institute, that find much smaller or nonexistent effects when controlling for other variables. “The science is in” is doing a lot of rhetorical work in the Semafor piece — work that the Quality Legislation spoke of the Pirate Wheel would ask us to scrutinize.
Quality Legislation requires four things: necessity (a real, sourced, identified problem), effectiveness (demonstrated to work), proportionality (doesn’t create worse problems than it solves), and an evidence basis (not dogma). The “tobacco moment” framing gets necessity. It struggles on effectiveness (age bans don’t work), and it fails proportionality if the mechanism is mass age verification.
The Buried Lede
Here’s what Project 2029 got right that isn’t in the headline: banning surveillance advertising is the most structurally important proposal in the entire framework, and it got one line.
Surveillance advertising is the engine that drives everything else. It’s why platforms are designed to maximize engagement over wellbeing — engagement is what generates behavioral data, and behavioral data is what they sell. Remove the surveillance advertising business model and the incentive structure that creates the harms they’re trying to regulate changes fundamentally. You don’t need to ban kids from platforms; you need to make it unprofitable to manipulate them.
The reason “ban surveillance advertising” is a bullet point and “ban kids from social media” is the headline is that one of those fights is actually winnable in the current political environment, and one would take on the entire ad-tech industry that funds modern political campaigns.
What a Pirate Policy Would Actually Look Like
Real digital rights policy for children doesn’t require choosing between “let platforms do whatever they want” and “build national age verification infrastructure.” It looks like:
The Bottom Line
Project 2029 identified a real problem, proposed some good solutions, and then buried them under a flagship proposal — the social media age ban — that trades one set of harms for another. The Democrats want to run on child safety in 2028. That’s fine. But policy that requires surveilling everyone to protect some is not child safety. It’s a surveillance expansion with a sympathetic face.
The California Pirate Party has been saying for years: the problem isn’t that the internet is too free. The problem is that it’s been colonized by a surveillance advertising business model that converts attention into data and sells your kid’s psychology to the highest bidder. Fix that, and you’ve fixed most of what Project 2029 is worried about — without building a national ID verification system in the process.
We don’t ask for permission. And we don’t accept false choices.
The California Pirate Party is the party of digital rights. Join the crew at capirates.org