Kids Online Safety Act

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) (S.1409) is a bill first introduced in Congress in 2022. The bill establishes guidelines to protect minors from harmful material on social media platforms through a "duty of care" system and requiring covered platforms to disable "addicting" design features to minors.

The bill originates from the 2021 Facebook leak, which led to a congressional investigation of Big Tech's lack of protection for minors. Senators Richard Blumenthal (D‑CT) and Marsha Blackburn (R‑TN) co-sponsored the bill and introduced it to the Senate in 2022. It was revived for the 2023-2024 congressional term and passed the Senate in July 2024; however, the bill has not been put forward in the House of Representatives. Though KOSA has bipartisan support, it has been criticized by civil rights organizations for potentially enabling censorship, including material important to marginalized groups, as well as block material related to racism and abortion.^[1]

In 1998, Congress passed the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which came after concerns about data collection practices towards minors. ^[2][3] The legislation set guides on child online safety, notably banning companies from knowingly collecting the data for anyone under 13 without parental consent. ^[4]

In the years following COPPA, as the popularity of the internet would rise drastically, concerns from parents about the safety of social media would arise out of concerns that it was contributing to a mental health crisis among teens, eventually leading to a push for new child online safety legislations. ^[5][6]

Richard Blumenthal (Pictured in 2011)

Marsha Blackburn (Pictured in 2016)

Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), along with Co-Sponsor Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), first introduced the bill in 2022.

KOSA was introduced to the Senate by senators Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn on February 16, 2022. The bill was a direct result after Frances Haugen, a data scientist for Facebook, leaked internal files through The Wall Street Journal in 2021 that showed negative effects of Instagram on minors' mental health, among other topics. The leak led to a Congressional investigation of Big Tech's lack of protection for young users with Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri testifying to Congress in December 2021.^[7] Blumenthal, citing the leaked Facebook data, stated that the bill's intention was "not to burn the internet to the ground, not to destroy tech platforms or the internet or these sites; it is simply to enlist the social media platforms in this joint effort to achieve what should be a common goal—protecting children."^[8]

The bill was advanced by the Senate Commerce Committee in July 2022, alongside an updated version of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act (also known as COPPA 2.0).^[9] Both were poised to be passed in the Senate as part of larger legislation near the end of the term for the 117th Congress, but failed to pass.^[10]

President Joe Biden pushed Congress to pass legislation to protect children online during his 2023 State of the Union Address, leading Blackburn and Blumenthal to reintroduce KOSA in the Senate on May 2, 2023.^[12] KOSA along with COPPA 2.0 were approved by the Senate Commerce Committee on July 27, 2023. ^[13]

In November of 2023, whistleblower and former Meta engineering director Arturo Beja testified in congress before a Senate subcommittee hearing about social media and the teen mental health crisis, leading to a renewed push for the bill.^[14][15][16]

In January of 2024, the Senate held a meeting with the CEOs of Meta, TikTok, Snap Inc., Discord, and Twitter regarding child safety. This hearing would lead eventually lead to another renewed push for the bill,^{[17][18][19][20]} which by February 2024, had gained over enough backers in the Senate to assure its passage, though there had yet to be a companion bill introduced in the House of Representatives by this point.^[21] An attempt was made to append it into the FAA reauthorization act in May 2024.^[22] The Senate passed their bill, along with COPPA 2.0, on July 30, 2024, by a vote of 91–3.^[23][24]

The House of Representatives introhad yet to pass their version of the bill by July 2024. A planned markup session for KOSA and other bills by the House Energy and Commerce commission in late June 2024 was abruptly canceled, with speculation that there were disagreements with Republican leaders on a separate privacy bill.^[25] In August 2024, Punchbowl News reported that the Republican leadership of the House would not advance KOSA, citing a staffer who referred to "concerns across our Conference".^[26]

The Kids Online Safety Act, as amended in February 2024, would require Internet service platforms that reasonably likely to be used by minors under the age of 13 to take measures to reduce online dangers for these users by creating a "duty of care", requiring that they change their design to reduce harmful and addictive design features targeting minors like infinite scrolling, notifications, and personalized recommendation systems, and making it easier for parents, guardians, minors, and schools to report certain harms. Enforcement would be mostly handled by individual state attorneys generals with the Federal Trade Commission enforcing some provisions like the duty of care.^[27][28]

KOSA has been supported by numerous organizations, companies, and individuals, including the National Education Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention the American Psychological Association, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation^[29], Common Sense Media^[30], Unilever ^[a][31], The Heritage Foundation^[32], and Lizzo. ^[33][28] The bill has been heavily criticized by members of the "Don't Delete Art" (DDA) movement, anti-censorship groups, and libertarian groups including, American Civil Liberties Union, the National Coalition Against Censorship, Fight for the Future, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, Reason magazine, and Students for Life.^[34] The DDA has encouraged people to signal their opposition through an online petition that labels KOSA as one of several "Bad Internet Bills".^[35] In July 2024, the ACLU brought 300 high-school students to Washington, D.C., in order to lobby against the bill.^[36]

A letter sent to the United States Congress by Evan Greer—director of Fight for the Future—and signed by multiple civil society groups warns that KOSA could backfire and cause more harm to minors by overly censoring content due to a lack of specificity as to what constitutes "harm".^[37][38][27] Fight for the Future has set up a Stop KOSA website for people to sign a petition and contact lawmakers against the bill.^[39]

Critics, including the EFF, note that the bill's definition of harm toward minors leaves room for broad interpretation by the state attorneys general who are charged with enforcing the bill,^[40][41] with EFF likening it to the FOSTA-SESTA bills. ^[42] The bill was revised in February 2024 as to shift the enforcement of the "duty of care" aspects of the bill from state attorneys to the Federal Trade Commission, though states would still be able to enforce other parts of the bill.^[43]

Republican Senator Rand Paul, who has compared it to a Trojan Horse^[44], argues that the bill "promises to be pandora’s box of unintended consequences" ^[45] due to vague and broad provisions that "opens the door to nearly limitless content regulation because platforms will censor users rather than risk liability".^[46]

The conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation wrote that the initial 2022 iteration of KOSA did not go far enough, as the bill did not explicitly list transgender health care as a harm.^[47][48] The inclusion of the phrase "consistent with evidence-informed medical information"^[49] could be used by attorneys general to cherry-pick anti-trans sources as justification since there is no definition of what "evidence-based medical information" can include.^[50] However, the Heritage Foundation would later express support for the bill, arguing that it could be used to censor trans-gender information, Senator Blackburn, co-author of the bill, also made comments in March 2024 that the bill was needed for "protecting minor children from the transgender in this culture", which has led some to argue that the bill would be part of Project 2025,^[51][52][53] though co-sponsor Blumenthal stated that the bill "does not target or censor anyone, including members of the LGBTQ community".^[54] EFF columnist Jason Kelly states that in the framework provided by the bill, that KOSA could be used to censor education about racism in schools since it could be claimed that it impacts mental health.^[55]

In September 2023, a video from the Family Policy Alliance showed Blackburn saying that there should be a priority to "protecting minor children from the transgender [sic] in this culture", alongside her promotion for KOSA, stating "This would put a duty of care and responsibility on the social media platforms, and this is where children are being indoctrinated."^[56] This drew criticism from LGBT advocacy groups, fearing that the bill would allow LGBT information for minors to be censored. A group of 100 parents of trans kid signed an open letter shortly after the comments telling members of congress to oppose KOSA.^[57][58][59] A spokesperson for Blackburn stated that KOSA was not intended to censor LGBT information.^[56] To address these concerns, the bill's language was altered so that the "duty of care" only focused on the product design features that influenced minors' behavior with the platforms, and not the content. As a result, several LGBTQ groups, including GLAAD and GLSEN, dropped their opposition to the bill.^[60] However, the EFF, Fight for the Future, and the American Civil Liberties Union found the revisions far from adequate, arguing that LGBTQ content could still be suppressed by targeting any design feature that makes that content available.^{[43][61][62][63]}

Some, like The Verge and the EFF, have argued that the bill could potentially face challenges on the SCOTUS if passed, arguing 1st Amendment violations, similar state bills in Indiana ^[64], Mississippi ^[65], and Texas ^[66][67] getting quickly struck down by their respective state courts as unconstitutional, and the NetChoice court case as indications.^[68][69][70]

• S.1409 Kids Online Safety Act on Congress.gov