Never Give Up, Never Surrender

The EARN IT Act is the latest threat to open expression and privacy online. It is yet another anti-LGBT, anti-sex-worker, anti-privacy bill that supposedly aims to protect children, while actually making the situation worse. In this case, it would remove ability to send end-to-end encrypted messages: the end to privacy online.

Despite purporting to protect children from sexual exploitation, the EARN IT Act in fact will make online platforms less able to report and remove child pornography. Making platforms liable for content hosted on them actually makes companies less willing to do anything that involves trying to seek out, take down, and report CSAM, because of the greatly increased liability that comes with admitting that there is CSAM on the platform to search for and deal with. In the meantime, it will destroy Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the part that the ACLU regards as “foundational to modern online communications.” In destroying end-to-end encryption, EARN IT will also destroy the Internet as we know it, and continue chipping away at the right to privacy. It will also encourage platforms and far-right interest groups to label anything having to do with sexual health and sexual expression as dangerous pornography, ushering in an era of censorship and repression under the name of keeping children safe, all the while actually making the Internet less able to cope with the very real problem of CSEM. The EARN IT Act has been roundly condemned by nearly every major LGBTQ+ advocacy and human rights organization in the country, and for good reason. It is based on fundamental misunderstandings of the law and reality.

Tumblr user fullhalalalchemist has a much longer and more comprehensive description of the bill's aims and failings, as well as a bibliography of news analysis of the bill; I encourage you to go read it.

In order to contact your senators to prevent this bill's passing, you can:

- Call the Congressional hotline at: 202-224-3121
- Email your representatives in the House and Senate
- Send a Resistbot text-letter already written for you. Text SIGN PVLKLV to 50409.