It’s rare these days to see any sort of bipartisan agreement in the United States Congress, but a new proposal from two Republicans and two Democrats in the Senate seems to be the exception to the rule. The four senators have introduced a bill that would ban children under the age of 13 from accessing social media on the internet. It would also require written parental consent for children between the ages of 13 and 17 to create social media accounts. The proposal immediately raises all sorts of questions about free speech and the age of consent for children. It’s also unclear if such an edict would even be enforceable. But given the amount of intellectual poison circulating on the web, it’s still probably a discussion that’s worth having. (Associated Press)

Sen. Katie Britt says she hears about it constantly when she is at home in Alabama — at school track meets, basketball tournaments and on her regular morning walks with friends. And when she was running for the Senate last year, Britt says, “parent after parent” came up to her wanting to discuss the way social media was harming their kids.

Britt also navigates the issue in her own home, as the mother of a 13-year-old and a 14-year-old.

“Enough is enough,” says Britt, a Republican who last week introduced bipartisan legislation with three other senators — all parents of young children and teenagers — to try and better protect children online. “The time to act is now.”

Before getting into the meat of this debate, allow me to point out the absurdity of some people who apparently think that a 13-year-old child should be able to consent to have irreversible genital mutilation surgery without their parent’s consent being worried that they might not be able to handle something they see on Facebook.

With that out of the way, I have repeatedly pointed out all of the ways that the internet has produced terrible consequences for society. (I’ve also acknowledged the irony of a person who makes his living publishing internet content saying this.) This is probably even more true for children than adults since young minds that are not yet fully developed are typically more open to suggestions and temptation.

I think most of us can agree that there is a lot of garbage out there on social media and many other websites that is not suitable for children. A lot of it also probably shouldn’t be seen by adults, for that matter. But what are we supposed to do about it aside from shutting down the internet entirely? Most sites with adult content already force users to declare that they are 18 or older when they sign up for an account. But that’s nearly impossible to verify. If you start forcing everyone to upload a digital copy of their identification as proof, that personal information will quickly be hijacked by hackers and identity theft will spiral into an even bigger problem.

A law such as this one immediately raises questions of who is the responsible party if the law is broken. Is it the content provider or the child or the child’s parent or guardian? Utah recently passed a law banning children from viewing pornography on the web and placed the onus on the content provider. Pornhub responded by blocking all users in Utah. Some people may see that as a victory, but is it? We can’t even agree as a society what qualifies as porn and what passes as art.

Simply stopping children from having social media accounts doesn’t fully meet the stated goals in any event. There are many ways to be exposed to social media content without having an account. We embed tweets and YouTube videos here on a daily basis and you don’t need an account to view them. Should our site be shut down because of this law?

It’s not that I disagree with the premise that there is a massive amount of virtual garbage on the web with the potential to cause real harm to children. (Some of it comes from the mainstream media, if we’re being honest.) But I just don’t see how a law like this could be effectively enforced and what punishments could or should be doled out for violating it.