Well it was bound to happen. With all the media hysteria over MySpace, any student of our opportunistic elected officials should have known what was coming next. Congress has proposed a bill that would ban MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, and potentially all chatrooms, forums, blogs & Instant Messaging from school & library computers. More info here.

No matter that the Internet is safer than church, and the people you meet there less a danger than your own parents, it is the newest boogeyman that we must be saved from. Congress knows there is a tight election coming up, and there is no surer strategy to pander for votes than tell parents their children are in terrible danger from a vague source the parents (or the politicians) don’t fully understand, and propose some ridiculous solution.

This comes on the heels of Massachusetts Attorney General Tom Reilly, calling for MySpace to require all users be 18 or up.

This isn’t a liberal vs. conservative issue, its a youth vs. adult issue. You can be assured that Republicans & Democrats will be falling over themselves to support this bill. They don’t care about youth, and left to themselves they aren’t going to stop these kinds of anti-youth bills from being passed. Therefore youth have to speak out.

If we don’t find our voice now, then soon we never will because all the ways in which we communicate will be stripped away from us.

So if you want to stop this bill and you want to save MySpace and AIM and LiveJournal and every other part of the Internet that we know and love, then you have to DO SOMETHING.

Join NYRA
Write a Letter to the Editor
Start a NYRA chapter to work on this issue locally
Check out NYRA’s MySpace page