#1732 It's Never Just About the Kids (Online Censorship, Age Verification, and the Project 2025 Agenda)
Best of the Left - Leftist Perspectives on Progressive Politics, News, Culture, Economics and Democracy
Jay Tomlinson
4.6 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 24 August 2025
⏱️ 184 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Air Date 8/24/2025
The nature of politics and public policy is that there's always a need to balance opposing interests. Almost nowhere is there a more intractable set of opposing interests than in the attempt to protect children from harmful content on the internet while maintaining free access to adults, particularly because people wildly disagree about what qualifies as harmful and what degree of privacy invasion is an acceptable tradeoff.
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KEY POINTS
KP 1: Age Verification Will Kill Free Speech Online - Taylor Lorenz - Air Date 6-6-25
KP 2: Can the UK Child-proof the Internet? - Front Burner - Air Date 7-31-25
(00:46:37) NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
On the need to demand serious arguments about serious issues
DEEPER DIVES
(00:52:04) SECTION A: AGE VERIFICATION
(01:19:18) SECTION B: SAVE THE CHILDREN
(01:45:50) SECTION C: CENSORSHIP
(02:20:34) SECTION D: ANTI-PORN AGENDA
SHOW IMAGE CREDITS
Description: Photo of a stack of protest signs that say “Fight for your digital rights!”
Credit: “Netzpolitik Demonstration for press freedom in Berlin” by Sebaso, Wikimedia Commons | License: CC BY-SA 4.0 | Changes: Cropped
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Transcript
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| 1:10.1 | Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of Left podcast. |
| 1:13.5 | The nature of politics and public policy is that there's always a need to balance opposing |
| 1:18.9 | interests. Almost nowhere is there a more intractable set of opposing interests than in the |
| 1:24.9 | attempt to protect children from harmful content on the internet while |
| 1:28.6 | maintaining free access to adults, particularly because people wildly disagree about what |
| 1:34.8 | qualifies as harmful and what degree of privacy invasion is an acceptable trade-off. |
| 1:41.2 | For those looking for a quick overview, the source is providing our top takes in about 45 |
| 1:45.1 | minutes today includes Taylor Lorenz, Front Burner, the bituation room, What a Day, |
| 1:51.5 | the Humanist Report, and Democracy Now. |
| 1:54.1 | Then in the additional deeper dives half of the show, there will be more in four sections. |
| 1:58.1 | Section A, age verification, followed by Section B, save the children, section C, |
| 2:03.8 | censorship, and section D, the anti-porn agenda. But first, a reminder to check out our new show |
| 2:09.3 | solved on the Best of Left YouTube channel. We are very proud of the show we're making, |
| 2:13.5 | and we think you'll get real value out of it. In our most reasoned episode, we tackled the topic |
... |
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