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This op-ed from Fight for the Future, a group organizing around the internet and political power, criticizes Democrats' backing of age verification laws and attacks on Section 230 as enabling a censorious MAGA agenda.
In his first few months in office, President Donald Trump and his cronies wasted no time targeting LGBTQ+ communities with a slew of discriminatory executive orders, most of them aimed specifically at trans people. Now, with the right’s obsessive rush to blame trans people for Charlie Kirk’s death, it’s never been clearer that their goal is to completely eliminate us from public life—not just by restricting our legal rights, but by sabotaging our ability to speak, connect, organize, and find information online.
Online censorship is one of the many levers of state power right-wingers have been pulling to try and snuff out queer and trans existence, building on years of dangerous bills and state-level laws that claim to be about protecting children from Big Tech companies. But instead of fighting back, some Democrats are helping them at the controls—even as they show up at Pride marches and claim to support LGBTQ+ communities.
Top Democrats are continuing to enable Trump’s anti-LGBTQ+ tech agenda in three key ways. The first is through misguided attacks on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, known as the “First Amendment” of the Internet. Section 230 specifies that online platforms like TikTok and Instagram can’t be held legally responsible for content that their users upload. It’s what prevents tech companies from being sued by billionaires and the government when people share content they don’t like. It’s why you can post on social media about a protest, or link to information on abortion and LGBTQ+ health care, and the company that owns the platform can’t be held liable and pressured to take it down. It also protects platforms from being prosecuted under discriminatory state laws that criminalize LGBTQ+ content and other “forbidden” topics and resources.
Despite overwhelming consensus among human rights groups that this would be a terrible idea, both Trump and former president Joe Biden have supported repealing or significantly curtailing Section 230, and top Democrats like Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) have joined with Republicans in co-sponsoring a previous bill that proposed “sunsetting” the law, effectively removing it from the books. Durbin and the bill’s supporters have described this as necessary to rein in Big Tech companies that use Section 230 as a shield to avoid accountability. More recently, the day before ABC caved to Trump and suspended late-night star Jimmy Kimmel over his comments on Charlie Kirk’s death, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) described Section 230 as “a problem for our democracy” in an interview with Politico.
The irony is that Section 230 is the one thing stopping Trump from doing the same thing to internet platforms that he tried doing to Kimmel and did to Stephen Colbert. In reality, gutting Section 230 would make Big Tech monopolies stronger, while potentially killing off community-driven alternatives like Bluesky and Mastodon. In April, the organizers of dozens of the Tesla Takedown protests sent a letter to Durbin and other top Democrats explaining why altering Section 230 would kneecap their ability to organize against the Trump administration.
If Section 230 is weakened or repealed, companies could be legally threatened for allowing LGBTQ+ content on platforms like Instagram, YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok, and even websites like Wikipedia, just like CBS and Disney were threatened for hosting speech the president doesn’t like. It would make big social media platforms way more likely to suppress content about important but “controversial” topics, like LGBTQ+ health care, sex education, or the genocide in Gaza, or compel them to preemptively purge this content to avoid lawsuits from state governments and right-wing lobbyists.
A full “sunset” of Section 230 would help Trump carry out Project 2025’s anti-LGBTQ+ agenda, which describes all queer and trans content as “pornography” and proposes making it a crime to promote or distribute it. This effectively means criminalizing whatever the government decides is promoting “transgender ideology,” MAGA-speak for anything acknowledging the fact that trans people exist and allowing us to express ourselves freely. In other words, eliminating Section 230 would help Trump and the right-wing legislatures in states like Texas in their attempts to rewrite the internet without queer and trans people. This erasure is already well underway with the administration removing any mention of queer and trans people from government websites, including the page for the Stonewall monument, which removed the “T” from LGBT. And last month, a bill was proposed in Michigan that would explicitly ban any “depiction, description or simulation” of trans people or their lives as being inherently “pornographic.”
Big Tech giants don’t care about keeping kids safe or protecting LGBTQ+ rights to free expression. They care about making money. If given the choice between fighting expensive lawsuits and policing speech the way Trump wants them to, we can anticipate what they’ll do. Companies like Google, Meta, and Amazon have wasted no time bending the knee to Trump, and CBS recently paid out a $16 million settlement rather than fight a winnable defamation case brought by the administration.
Without Section 230, smaller platforms like Bluesky and Wikipedia that can’t afford armies of lawyers to fight back against a flood of bad-faith lawsuits might have to either cave to Trump’s agenda or close down entirely. The end result would be similar to SESTA/FOSTA, the disastrous anti-sex trafficking law that led to the closure of websites used by sex workers to safely vet clients and communicate with each other, all while failing to make a dent in exploitative sex trafficking.
Unfortunately, these attempts to kill Section 230 are only the tip of the iceberg. The second way lawmakers are implementing anti-LGBTQ+ censorship is through age verification laws, which subject people to online ID checks before accessing websites that the state declares harmful to minors. One of these laws was passed in Kansas last year, where state law broadly defines “harmful to minors” to include anything depicting nonsexual “acts of homosexuality.”
Under the banner of protecting children, these laws can be used to prevent queer and trans youth from accessing information about LGBTQ+ health care and connecting with online queer communities. Age verification laws also subject LGBTQ+ people of all ages to invasive surveillance, including online government ID checks and facial recognition scans, giving state governments and the Trump administration more information they could use to attack and discriminate against queer and trans people.
The effects of these laws extend far beyond the LGBTQ+ community. By attaching your legal name to everything you do online, age verification laws make the internet less safe for everyone and prevent vulnerable people—for example, those trying to escape abusive marriages—from accessing lifesaving resources or speaking out without fear of retribution.
The third and final way lawmakers are advancing anti-LGBTQ+ censorship is by reintroducing KOSA, the fake online safety bill, that would establish a “duty of care” for apps and websites used by young people, requiring them to use censorship to “prevent and mitigate” harms like anxiety and depression. KOSA takes the same logic of the bans on drag shows and LGBTQ+ books and applies it to the internet, allowing censorship of a broad range of information in the name of protecting kids from real online harm.
Instead of stopping Big Tech from harming kids with surveillance and manipulative algorithms, KOSA would focus on stopping platforms from showing young people speech that the government deems harmful. And it’s being supported by Democrats, including self-styled LGBTQ+ ally Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), who recently resumed publicly pushing the bill. Blumenthal co-wrote the bill with Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and has reintroduced it in Congress every year since 2022. The most recent version of the bill was co-sponsored by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and most Democrats outside the party’s progressive wing have been consistently on board since its earlier iterations.
KOSA’s right-wing supporters have not been subtle about their goals. Blackburn has openly said she wants to use KOSA to target online content that promotes “the transgender,” adopting the MAGA conspiracy theory that trans people are a social contagion that must be suppressed. Organizations like the Heritage Foundation have said this even more explicitly: In an op-ed published in the American Conservative and promoted by the foundation, two Heritage operatives promote the conservative hoax that social media is “turning kids trans” and describe KOSA as an opportunity to purge trans content from online platforms. Blumenthal has falsely claimed that KOSA wouldn’t harm LGBTQ+ communities, and has actively smeared our organization, Fight For the Future, a queer- and trans-led group, as a “pawn” of Big Tech for opposing KOSA.
But here’s the truth: According to the bill’s own language, KOSA would allow the Trump administration to go after platforms if they show any content to minors that the government claims makes kids anxious or depressed. The agency tasked with making those claims under KOSA would be the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which, under Trump, has become yet another political weapon against trans rights. In July, the agency hosted an anti-trans “workshop” with the explicit aim of exploring how the Trump administration can use the agency’s authority to go after medical providers offering gender-affirming health care, and released a Request for Public Comment suggesting that “consumers may have been exposed to false or unsupported claims” about gender-affirming care. In response, 17 state attorneys general have blasted the FTC’s unsupported claims, writing that the agency “does not have any authority to regulate the practice of medicine [...] under the guise of consumer protection.”
If KOSA were to pass, it’s fair to assume that the Trump administration and the FTC would claim that resources related to content and sexual health make kids anxious, and that suicide prevention resources for trans youth make kids depressed. Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Twitch would be forced to aggressively filter, age-gate, and suppress content using machine learning tools. Queer voices, stories, and the resources that our community needs to survive would be silenced across the internet.
Queer youth have led a mass online uprising against KOSA and other, what we’d call bad internet bills, flooding Congress with hundreds of thousands of phone calls and emails. This has forced the bill’s supporters to make several rounds of changes to the bill. But none of them have fixed the fundamental flaw with KOSA: It gives the federal government control over online speech and expands online age-gating and intrusive surveillance. Under an openly homophobic and transphobic Trump administration, we already know exactly what would come next.
Dozens of frontline LGBTQ+ groups have joined the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and others in opposing KOSA. While some large LGBTQ+ groups have sat on the sidelines, GLAAD recently told the Washington Post that they have renewed concerns given the Trump administration’s weaponization of the FTC against trans people.
While supporters claim they are trying to protect children, all of these policies are rooted in the logic of domination. Like the failed model of abstinence-only sex education, these censorship bills enforce the idea that the way we can protect children and vulnerable people is by controlling them and preventing them from learning about the world. Politicians constantly talk about protecting children, but rarely about empowering them or respecting their rights and agency—including their right to explore the world and themselves in ways some adults don’t approve of.
While Democrats find common ground with MAGA Republicans on these misguided censorship efforts, the real harm that Big Tech companies are doing to kids and to our basic human rights goes unchecked. Democrats could be pushing for strong privacy, antitrust, and algorithmic justice legislation that would actually hold Big Tech giants accountable and stop their exploitation.
If lawmakers really cared about kids, they’d stop trying to take away their health care and letting giant corporations pollute the air and water they breathe. They’d ensure that every child has a safe place to live and enough food to eat. Instead, many top Democrats in Congress are trying to help Trump censor the internet. And by speaking out, it’s the kids who are protecting us from them.
