Washington has finally found a monster big enough for bipartisan unity: the attention economy. In a moment of rare cross-aisle cooperation, lawmakers have introduced two censorship-heavy bills and a tax scheme under the banner of the UnAnxious Generation package.
The name, borrowed from Jonathan Haidt’s pop-psychology hit The Anxious Generation, reveals the obvious pitch: Congress will save America’s children from Silicon Valley through online regulation and speech controls.
Representative Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts, who has built a career out of publicly scolding tech companies, says he’s going “directly at their jugular.”
The plan: tie legal immunity to content “moderation,” tax the ad money, and make sure kids can’t get near an app without producing an “Age Signal.” If that sounds like a euphemism for surveillance, that’s because it is.
The first bill, the Deepfake Liability Act, revises Section 230, the sacred shield that lets platforms host your political rants, memes, and conspiracy reels without getting sued for them.
Under the new proposal, that immunity becomes conditional on a vague “duty of care” to prevent deepfake porn, cyberstalking, and “digital forgeries.”
TIME’s report doesn’t define that last term, which could be a problem since it sounds like anything from fake celebrity videos to an unflattering AI meme of your senator. If “digital forgery” turns out to include parody or satire, every political cartoonist might suddenly need a lawyer on speed dial.
Auchincloss insists the goal is accountability, not censorship. “If a company knows it’ll be liable for deepfake porn, cyberstalking, or AI-created content, that becomes a board-level problem,” he says. In other words, a law designed to make executives sweat.
But with AI-generated content specifically excluded from Section 230 protections, the bill effectively redefines the internet’s liability protections.
Next up is the Parents Over Platforms Act, which reads like a spy’s dream version of child safety. The idea is to require mobile app stores and developers to “assure” user ages through “commercially reasonable efforts.”
Developers must “determine whether a user is an Adult or a Minor with a reasonable level of certainty.” How they’re supposed to do that without collecting more personal data is unclear. Privacy advocates might want to sit down for this one.
The bill’s co-sponsor, Republican Erin Houchin of Indiana, says it comes from personal experience. Her daughter, age 13, “hacked around our parental controls” and started chatting with strangers.
“My goal is to put parents back in the driver’s seat,” she says. Fair enough, but that driver’s seat now comes with a dashboard full of federal switches and levers.
If passed, parents would input their children’s ages into the app store, which would then transmit the “Age Signal” to every app. Kids under 13 would be locked out of restricted platforms. The potential for data errors and cross-app confusion seems baked in, but Congress appears unbothered.
Rounding out the trio is the Education Not Endless Scrolling Act, which would slap a 50 percent tax on digital ad revenue over $2.5 billion. The money would fund tutoring programs, local journalism, and technical education. Auchincloss explains, “This is for the major social media corporations, not the recipe blogs.”
He adds, “These social media corporations have made hundreds of billions of dollars making us angrier, lonelier, and sadder, and they have no accountability to the American public.”
The proposal reads like a moral tax: the government will collect penance for every click.
Both Auchincloss and Houchin frame their effort as a bipartisan stand for the children, launching a “Kids Online Safety Caucus” to formalize their alliance. Houchin puts it simply: “Good policy supersedes politics.” It’s a line you usually hear right before an entire generation of digital policy disasters.
The timing is no accident. Congress is now flooded with “child safety” bills.
Auchincloss says he’s tired of waiting. “I don’t like to be passive or wait for the ground to shift,” he says. “I am trying to be an earthquake.”
It’s a fitting metaphor, though he might consider what happens after the shaking stops. Once the dust settles, the UnAnxious Generation may find that the cure for digital anxiety looks a lot like preemptive censorship and surveillance wrapped in a moral crusade.
Forum poosting, Kiwis roosting
