Congress must pass the bipartisan Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), child safety advocates say, so parents can better protect their children from sexual exploitation, addiction and myriad other online harms.
The bill, which Senators Marsha Blackburn (TN) and Richard Blumenthal (CT) reintroduced in May, would hold social media companies legally responsible for harming minors. Platforms governed by the bill would fulfill their legal obligations by instituting child safeguards, creating parental controls and increasing transparency.
A similar version of KOSA passed the Senate last year in a near-unanimous, 91-3 vote. It stalled in the House amid First Amendment concerns.
“[KOSA] will compel covered social media companies to center online safety and wellbeing rather than profit alone,” a group of more than 400 organizations representing parents, children, researchers, advocates and healthcare professionals wrote in an October letter encouraging legislators to pass the bill.
Though Senate Majority Leader John Thune (SD) and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY) both endorse the bill, the Senate has not voted on KOSA this year.
The Act
KOSA would apply to any interactive website that primarily allows users to post and share content, including social media platforms, video posting sites like YouTube and some interactive video games.
It would require covered platforms to place automatic safeguards on minors’ accounts, like:
- Limiting who can communicate with minors or view their profiles.
- Prohibiting other companies from viewing or collecting minors’ data.
- Limiting addictive features like infinite scrolling, auto-play, algorithmic content recommendations and rewards for spending time on the platform.
- Restricting location sharing and notifying minors when location-tracking turns on.
It would also force covered platforms to offer parents tools to:
- Manage their child’s privacy and account settings.
- Restrict their child’s ability to make purchases or engage in financial transactions.
- View and limit how much time their child spends on a platform.
KOSA further addresses Big Tech’s lack of transparency. Covered platforms would have to:
- Warn parents and minors about a platform’s potential dangers.
- Clearly disclose marketing and advertising content.
- Explain how they create personal content recommendation algorithms — and how users can opt out.
Companies with more than 10 million users a month, on average, would additionally undergo annual, third-party audits investigating whether their platforms harm children. Parents could read auditors’ findings in mandatory safety reports.
State attorneys general and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) could sue covered platforms for failing to uphold their legal responsibilities under KOSA. The FTC could investigate KOSA violations as “unfair or deceptive business practices.”
First Amendment Concerns
Senators Blackburn and Blumenthal adjusted this year’s version of KOSA to alleviate concerns about government censorship, which contributed to the bill’s failure last year.
Senator Mike Lee (UT), one of just three senators who voted against KOSA in 2024, explained on X:
The legislation empowers the FTC to censor any content it deems to cause “harm,” “anxiety,” or “depression,” in a way that could (and most likely would) be used to censor the expression of political, religious and other viewpoints disfavored by the FTC.
The House Committee on Energy and Commerce tried to alleviate concerns like Lee’s in September 2024 by limiting KOSA’s application to companies making more than $2.5 billion in annual revenue or hosting at least 150 million monthly users.
Though the committee’s revisions eventually passed, many legislators argued the changes gutted KOSA. It never received a vote on the House floor.
This year’s version of the bill specifically prohibits the FTC or state attorneys general from using KOSA suits to illegally censor content. A press release announcing KOSA’s reintroduction reads, in part:
The bill text … further makes clear that KOSA would not censor, limit or remove any content from the internet, and it does not give the FTC or state Attorneys General the power to bring lawsuits over content or speech.
Supporters
Several influential advocates for children’s digital safety support KOSA, including many who regularly appear in the Daily Citizen.
“The Kids Online Safety Act is a powerful tool in parents’ defense of their children,” Tim Goeglein, Vice President of External and Government Relations for Focus on the Family, told the Daily Citizen.
Clare Morrell, fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of The Tech Exit, writes:
Parents have been left on their own to try to fend off a massive tech-induced crisis in American childhood from online platforms that are engineered to be maximally addictive. KOSA offers a needed solution by making social media platforms responsible for preventing and mitigating certain objective harms to minors, like sexual exploitation.
Morrell’s The Tech Exit offers parents a blueprint to break their children free of addictive technologies.
Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and author of The Anxious Generation, argues KOSA “would begin to address the [indisputable harm occurring to children at an industrial scale].”
Haidt’s The Anxious Generation raises alarm bells about the effects of ubiquitous internet access on children’ physical, mental and social wellbeing.
Both houses of Congress must pass KOSA by the end of December. If they do not, parents will have to wait yet another year for the bill’s critical protections.
The Daily Citizen will continue covering this important story.
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