I'm glad this legislation was struck down, but I don't understand "ruse" here. Protecting children wasn't a serious motivation of many people who supported it?
Like, consider a prior case of California legislation that was struck down
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Entertainment_Merchan...
I think Mike Masnick and I both think it was good that that law was struck down, too. But do we think people who promoted it were insincere about believing it was harmful or undesirable for children to see violent depictions?
> I don't understand "ruse" here. Protecting children wasn't a serious motivation of many people who supported it?
Maybe the ruse is using the motivation of protecting the children to downplay the First Amendment issues. At least some of the legislators might be so sincere and serious about protecting children that they don't fathom how broad the First Amendment's prohibitions on content-based regulation are. Or maybe the ruse is that the legislators frame the act as a design-based restriction or a conduct-based restriction rather than the content-based restriction it really is. In First Amendment cases, the strict scrutiny test applies to laws which indirectly cause removal of legal speech, not just laws which directly require removal.
By "Ruse," they mean the law's ruse of claiming to only regulate the conduct of design, when in actual fact the law clearly intends to regulate speech. It's a "ruse" to try to avoid a court noticing that the law obviously violates the First Amendment.
There are a few side tangents that maybe confused you. Here is just the main argument with tangents elided:
>... The California legislators ... tried to get around the obvious First Amendment issues by insisting that the bill was about conduct and design and not about speech. But as we pointed out, that was obviously a smokescreen. The only way to truly comply with the law was to suppress speech that politicians might later deem harmful to children.
... the court saw through the ruse and found the entire bill unconstitutional for the exact reasons we had warned the California government about.
> Protecting children wasn't a serious motivation of many people who supported it?
It may be helpful to understand the context.
Ambitious politicians have one goal above all others: Getting elected. This type of law impacts that in two ways. One, they'd really like private corporations to censor the opposition for them, but forcing them to is clearly unconstitutional and also offends voters who don't like that level of cynical authoritarian opportunism to be so transparent. Two, if you can drum up a moral panic and then purport to solve the problem you hyped up, some people will vote for you.
Politicians combine these two into laws like this. "Think of the children" laws too often pass because anyone opposed to them is painted as a monster regardless of the details of what is actually in the law or how ill-conceived it is. Their hope is that it will both disguise their underlying goal from the voters and invoke "hard cases make bad law" to create a precedent that laws in that style aren't unconstitutional, so the next one can do what the really want. Or, because the law is ambiguous and it's hard to even know if you're following it, have something that allows them to threaten arbitrary social media companies with prosecution if they don't do what the administration really wants in a backroom deal.
> But do we think people who promoted it were insincere about believing it was harmful or undesirable for children to see violent depictions?
It's not that they might not believe those things about a particular situation, it's that they're insincere about that situation being their true motivation for passing the law, and disingenuous about the ability of their law to address it. The politicians who propose "think of the children" laws are usually acting in bad faith, and when the law is overbroad with no regard for collateral damage or constitutionality, there is no doubt of it.
>Protecting children wasn't a serious motivation of many people who supported it?
Probably. People were seriously concerned about communist infiltrators in the 1950s. People were seriously concerned about Dungeons and Dragons and backwards masking and secret pedophile cults back and the "gay plague" of AIDS in the 1980s. People were seriously concerned about Muslims after 9/11. People are seriously concerned about transgender groomers and "the wokes" and Chinese mind control through TikTok today.
People are always sincerely concerned whenever the government gasses them up in a moral panic. The ruse comes from the government's response, because during moral panics Constitutional rights always seem to get in the way of Something Needing To Be Done.
Unfortunately one has to assume, by default, that any law passed under the aegis of "protecting children" nowadays has no actual intent behind it other than eroding Constitutional rights for the sake of ratcheting up fascism.
The other half of the problem is that the direction of these moral panics tends to embrace and expand the existing fundamental problem. Here, the tech industry desperately needs some competition in client software, which is currently being prevented by the anticompetitive bundling of client access software together with communication/hosting services. If there were competition, a parent could let their kid communicate on facebook/tiktok/etc with a client that worked in the interest of the kid themselves rather than being forced to take-or-leave the deliberately-designed-as-dopamine-traps singleton proprietary apps/webapps. But trying to fix that fundamental problem would likely step on too many moneyed toes and thus end up dead in the water. So instead this bill was aimed at creating even more of an anti-competitive moat in the hopes the tech giants would get on board.