来源：《华盛顿邮报》
原文刊登日期：2022年3月11日
A bevy of proposals to constrain Big Tech are moving through the legislative process or have stalled out somewhere along the way. Many are bipartisan, yet none has earned the endorsement of the White House — until the State of the Union.
一大堆限制大型科技公司的提案正在通过立法程序，或已在立法过程中搁置。许多提案获得了两党的支持，但没有一个能赢得白宫的支持——直到今年国情咨文的发表。
In that address, President Biden gave his approval to an agenda to, in his words, “hold social media platforms accountable for the national experiment they’re conducting on our children for profit.” Each of the policy items he outlined has a counterpart bill already introduced on Capitol Hill: boost privacy protections, ban targeted advertising, build safety into products’ design. Taken together, the changes would be transformative. The ideas also have something in common: They’ve been discussed as methods for protecting everyone online, but in the face of congressional gridlock, they’ve gone next to nowhere.
在国情咨文讲话中，拜登总统批准了一项议程，用他的话来说，“让社交媒体平台对他们为了盈利而对孩子进行的全国性实验负责。”他概述的每一项政策都有一项已经在国会提出的相应法案：加强隐私保护、禁止定向广告、将安全性纳入产品设计。总而言之，这些变化将具有变革性。这些想法也有一些共同点：它们被认为是保护每个网民的方法，但面对国会的僵局，它们几乎毫无进展。
If even the most modest tweaks to the status quo for all Americans have proved impossible to achieve, the thinking goes, why not make them more modest still — by focusing only on the most vulnerable victims of Silicon Valley’s overreaches? We can’t fix things for the whole country, so let’s fix things for kids.
这种想法认为，如果对所有美国人来说，即使是对现状最温和的调整都被证明是不可能实现的，那为什么不让他们更加温和——只关注硅谷过度扩张中最脆弱的受害者？我们不能为整个国家解决问题，所以让我们为孩子们解决问题。
The concept is attractive. In a fact sheet released ahead of the address, the administration put its efforts in the context of what it calls a mental health crisis for the country’s youths. The science on the precise effect increased screen time has on children’s well-being remains uncertain — but Facebook’s own research has shown, for instance, how Instagram can exacerbate body image issues by directing teens who consume harmful content to more of the same. More generally, the mass collection of hyper-specific information about who is looking at what content where on the Internet allows platforms to push users further toward addiction. It also allows advertisers to exploit this addiction to market products.
这个概念很吸引人。在拜登发表讲话之前发布的一份简报中，拜登政府将其努力放在了美国年轻人所面临的心理健康危机的背景下。关于屏幕使用时间增加对儿童健康的确切影响，科学尚不确定，但Facebook自己的研究表明，例如，Instagram如何通过引导青少年接收更多有害内容，从而加剧了外貌焦虑问题。更普遍地说，关于谁在互联网上什么地方查看什么内容的海量特定信息，使得平台能够进一步推动用户上瘾。它也允许广告商利用这种上瘾来推销产品。
Senators Richard Blumenthal and Edward J. Markey have reintroduced the Kids Act to ban features such as autoplay, push alerts and like counts for consumers under 16; Mr. Markey and Senator Bill Cassidy have a proposal to update and bolster the Children’s and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act limiting how companies can collect, process and share data; Mr. Blumenthal and Senator Marsha Blackburn recently unveiled the sweeping Kids Online Safety Act.
参议员理查德·布鲁门塔尔和爱德华·J·马基重新推出《儿童法案》，禁止为16岁以下消费者提供自动播放、推送提醒和赞数等功能；马基和参议员比尔·卡西迪提议更新和加强《儿童和青少年在线隐私保护法》，限制公司收集、处理和共享数据的方式；布鲁门塔尔和参议员玛莎·布莱克本最近公布了影响广泛的《儿童网络安全法案》。
All these proposals deserve consideration, and require some refinement. Certainly, lawmakers should be able to manage at least this much: chipping away at the worst excesses of the surveillance economy when it comes to the country’s youths. But they should also be able to manage more. The White House, too, should view any efforts to protect kids on the Internet as merely the start of something bigger.
所有这些建议都值得考虑，需要加以改进。当然，议员们至少应该能够做到这一点：在美国年轻人身上消除监控经济中最严重的过度行为。但他们也应该能够做到更多。白宫也应该把保护互联网上的孩子的任何努力仅仅看作是更大目标的开始。