What you need to know about the bill and its status

The Kids Online Safety Act is a potentially groundbreaking bill that aims to protect minors from a variety of online dangers through a variety of regulatory measures.

The bipartisan bill from U.S. Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., has been through several rounds of revisions since its inception. While the bill has the support of some online safety groups and enjoys bipartisan support in both chambers, some activist groups have opposed it, citing concerns about censorship and free speech.

The bill passed the Senate by a vote of 91-3 last month and now awaits a vote in the House of Representatives.

Here you will find everything you need to know about the legislation known as KOSA.

What is in the bill?

In 2021, just over 97% of Americans between the ages of 3 and 18 had access to the internet in some form. There are several ways KOSA would change online platforms.

It establishes a “duty of care” that platforms must adhere to. This means that under KOSA they must prevent certain harms on their platforms. These harms include:

Mental disorders such as anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance abuse and suicidal behavior.
Social media use that encourages addictive behavior.
Physical and online bullying or intimidation.
Sexual abuse and exploitation of minors.
The marketing or promotion of illegal narcotics, tobacco products, alcohol or gambling.

KOSA requires that platforms under its jurisdiction must also have safeguards. These safeguards include guidelines such as:

A restriction on messaging or contacting minors.
Prevent public and private users from accessing the user data of minors.
Limiting potentially addictive app or platform features such as “autoplay of media, rewards for time spent on the platform, notifications, and other features that lead to compulsive use of the covered platform by the minor.”
Options have been created to permanently delete a minor’s account and the data collected through that account. Parents or guardians should also be given the ability to limit the time a minor spends on the app.

KOSA also has a subsection dedicated to parental tools that the law requires platforms to have. These include the ability for parents to manage a minor’s privacy, change and manage their account settings, and restrict their purchases.

Why now?

In 2021, former Facebook Product Manager Frances Haugen revealed that the company knew Instagram was having a destructive impact on the psyches of teenage girls, with an algorithm that often directed them to accounts promoting eating disorders and anorexia.

“What we saw in the documents, once we started looking at them from the whistleblower and other sources, led us to dig even deeper and conclude that legislation was necessary for reform,” Blumenthal said.

Also in 2023, video roulette platform Omegle was shut down after numerous lawsuits were filed accusing the site of being a haven for child sexual abuse and other crimes.

Blumenthal said another reason he continued with KOSA was the “requests we received from parents and children about the devastating impact of toxic content that has destroyed lives and even led to death.”

What concerns were raised about KOSA?

In the original draft, state attorneys general, along with the Federal Trade Commission, had the authority to enforce the duty of care established in the bill.

However, LGBTQ+ rights organizations across the country have raised alarms about the potential for this to lead to censorship of LGBTQ+ content online, saying that attorneys general in several states have attempted to target these organizations and their allies in recent years.

Subsequently, The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, published an editorial calling for the censorship of transgender content online, citing KOSA as a way to “prohibit the sexual exploitation of minors and the promotion of content that poses risks to the physical and mental health of minors” and “protect against the harms of sexual and transgender content.”

Additionally, Blackburn was recorded in an interview with the conservative Christian organization Family Policy Alliance in which he said that the top issue for conservative lawmakers should be “protecting minor children from transgender people in this culture, and that influence. And I would add to that, looking at what’s happening on social media, and I have the Kids Online Safety Act… This would put a duty of care and responsibility on the social media platforms, and this is where children are being indoctrinated.”

More than 90 organizations advocating for causes as diverse as LGBTQ+ rights and freedom of expression signed a letter against KOSA at the time. One of the organizations that helped draft the letter was Fight For the Future, a nonprofit that works to protect “basic rights in the digital age.”

“We fundamentally believe that, as it stands now in the version that passed the Senate, if it were to become law, it would actually make kids less safe online, not safer,” said Evan Greer, the nonprofit’s executive director.

How has the bill changed?

After concerns were raised about the potential bias of attorneys general, KOSA was updated to designate the FTC as the sole authority for enforcing the duty of care.

State attorneys general now only have the authority to bring civil actions related to protections for minors, clarity from platforms about how they will mitigate harm to minors, and disclosure of a platform’s policies.

After U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, questioned whether KOSA or state law had precedence, KOSA was amended to position itself as preemptive unless a state had stronger protections than federal law.

How could this bill change online platforms?

Online platforms may have to create new ways to verify users’ ages and moderate content, said Tracy Mitrano, a current professor and former director of Internet Culture Policy and Law at Cornell University. “They’re going to have to create a lot of administrative processes to verify users’ ages, they’re going to have to create all kinds of content moderation, administrative processes to monitor content, and that’s really hard because the volume on these sites is so high.”

Meanwhile, prominent groups such as NetChoice, a tech lobby group representing online giants such as Meta, Snapchat and X, have raised concerns about compliance with the duty of care.

“The bill sets a dangerous precedent that would give the government more power over free speech online and give partisan bureaucrats authority over what speech is ‘appropriate’ for American families to see and hear,” said Krista Chavez, a spokesperson for NetChoice.

Digital privacy groups are also concerned about censorship. “KOSA has a duty of care that involves content recommendations, which will lead to companies effectively over-censoring vast amounts of information just because they’re afraid of getting in trouble with the Federal Trade Commission,” Greer said.

Blumenthal refuted those concerns, saying, “There is no provision, none in this law, for blocking content by a government agency or, frankly, by anyone else. There is no censorship.”

What are the next steps?

The bill currently awaits a vote in the House of Representatives. Mitrano said she is “not optimistic” it will pass.

“The legislation seems a little vague, and vagueness is one of the sins of legislation that makes it offensive under the First Amendment. It could already cause people in the House who don’t like it for other reasons, like heavy lobbying from social platform companies, to object to it on First Amendment grounds, because that feels and sounds more principled than saying ‘I’m against it because I get a lot of money from Meta to oppose it,'” Mitrano said.

But Blumenthal is confident in KOSA’s ability to pass, citing bipartisan support in Congress. “I feel very, very hopeful, because of the 91-3 vote in the Senate, which gives us a lot of momentum. The bill in the House has a lot of bipartisan support. We have good co-sponsors there.

What you need to know about the bill and its status

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