Thoughts on DOPA

In this week's lecture we were asked to share our thoughts about the Deleting Online Predators Act (which now seems to be going by an additional name -- "Protecting Children in the 21st century act"). In any case, although it seems that the bill had good intentions... I mean, who doesn't want to protect kids from predators!...it doesn't seem well thought out to me. The way the bill is set up, it would ban any website that allowed networking and chatting. But in our increasingly web 2.0-type of world, LOTS of sites allow networking and chatting... and LOTS of them are educational (or at least have the potential to be). For instance, it would ban access to Flickr -- where currently the LOC has a bunch of its pictures posted -- and if a teacher wanted to have something like a book discussion blog, the access to that would be banned too.

And anyway, if the web is going to become more and more networky and chatty, but kids at school aren't allowed to access those types of sites, how on earth would we instruct them about how to chat safely or how to use social networking for educational reasons? Also, it seems like it would be holding the kids back from the most current technology.

As the article (The Moral Panic over Social-Networking sites by Roush) points out, passing DOPA would also serve to widen the digital divide in that kids whose only computer access was at school/the public library would be effectively banned from a whole (most current and exciting) segment of the web. They would be reduced to second-class web citizens only able to access web 1.0 type of sites.

For all these reasons, I would definitely not be in support of passing DOPA and am therefore glad it is tied up in committee in the Senate.