Summary
Teen Vogue op-ed (July 2023) by Sarah Philips, Fight for the Future digital rights organizer and longtime Archive of Our Own reader. Personal-essay framing of the KOSA argument: written immediately after AO3’s mid-July 2023 24+ hour DDoS outage by religiously/politically motivated attackers, draws the parallel to KOSA as a state-sanctioned version of the same harm. Anchored in Texas-specific examples (Ken Paxton calling gender-affirming care child abuse; Texas bill to ban abortion fund websites; ACLU investigation of Keller/Frisco school district). Notable for surfacing the Surgeon General’s own report finding that LGBTQ+ youth have better outcomes with social media access — the under-cited section that contradicts the political deployment of the report.
Key Points
- AO3 mid-July 2023 outage: 24+ hour DDoS by attackers with religious/political motivations against queer fandom.
- KOSA “duty of care” would force platforms to remove content state AGs claim causes child anxiety/depression.
- Texas-specific abuse vectors: Ken Paxton has called gender-affirming care “child abuse”; lawmakers want to ban abortion-fund websites; ACLU investigating Keller/Frisco for trans-student discrimination.
- Surgeon General’s own report: Contains a section explicitly noting LGBTQ+ youth have better mental-health outcomes with online community access — under-cited by KOSA proponents.
- SESTA/FOSTA precedent: Decimated sex-ed, sex-worker, LGBTQ+ communities; failed to reduce trafficking (Hacking//Hustling, Columbia HRLR).
- Heritage Foundation explicitly calls KOSA a tool to suppress LGBTQ+ content.
- Personal narrative: Two married couples Philips knows met through fan fiction comment sections; AO3 communities sustained queer kids in conservative households.
Newsletter Angles
- The “fandom is a lifeline” angle — the AO3 outage as the metaphor for what KOSA would do permanently. Concrete, narrative, accessible.
- Surgeon General report contradiction is one of the strongest under-deployed counter-arguments — the same document politicians cite to support KOSA contains evidence against the bill’s core premise for queer youth.
- Editorial hook: “When AO3 went down for 24 hours, the people doing it were trying to silence queer kids. KOSA is the same project, with a federal seal.”
- Texas examples make a generic critique concrete — Paxton’s deployment of “child abuse” framing for gender-affirming care is exactly the deployment KOSA would empower nationally.
Entities Mentioned
- Sarah Philips / Sara Philips — author; Fight for the Future organizer (note: name appears as both Sarah and Sara across the cluster — likely same person)
- Fight for the Future — author’s org
- Archive of Our Own — central narrative
- Ken Paxton — TX AG
- Heritage Foundation — anti-LGBTQ+ KOSA framing
- Vivek Murthy — Surgeon General report
Concepts Mentioned
- KOSA
- Duty of Care (Internet Bills)
- FOSTA
- Fan Communities as Refuge
- Algorithmic Influence and Media Legitimacy (related)
Quotes
“When I meet KOSA supporters who claim to be ‘protecting the children,’ I have to ask: Which children are we talking about? Because the children I know, the teenagers who email me every day with worries about KOSA, they live in fear of the future KOSA would create.”
“Last year, I attended the wedding of a friend I met in a comments section while gushing about our shared favorite fan fiction.”
Notes
Teen Vogue op-ed; clearly opinion piece by a campaign organizer. The Surgeon General report counter-citation is verifiable and important. The personal-narrative structure is unusually effective at making the abstract civil-liberties case concrete — strong candidate for direct quoting in any longer piece.
Author byline name discrepancy: This piece bylines “Sarah Philips” while Age Verification Is Locking Trans People Out of the Internet (Kayyali/Mithani) quotes “Sara Philips, campaigner at Fight for the Future.” Likely same person; flag for the FtF entity page when created.