What to know about the Kids Online Safety Act

This story has been updated.

The Kids Online Safety Act is a potentially landmark bill that seeks to protect minors from a multitude of dangers online through a variety of different regulatory measures.

The bipartisan bill from U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., has been through a few rounds of revision since its inception. While the bill is supported by a number of online safety groups and enjoys bipartisan support in both chambers, some activist groups have stood against it, citing concerns over censorship and freedom of speech.

The bill passed the Senate in a 91-3 vote last month, and is awaiting a vote in the House of Representatives.

Here’s 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 internet access in some form. There are several ways KOSA would change online platforms.

It establishes a “duty of care” that platforms must abide by. This means that under KOSA they would need to prevent certain harms from occurring on their platforms. These harms include:

• Mental health disorders such as anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance use disorders, and suicidal behaviors.
• Usage of social media that encourages addictive behaviors.
• Physical and online bullying or harassment.
• Sexual abuse and exploitation of minors.
• The marketing or promotion of illegal narcotics, tobacco products, alcohol or gambling.

KOSA mandates that platforms under its purview must also have safeguards. These safeguards include directives such as:

• A limitation on users messaging or contacting minors.
• Prevention of public and private access to a minor’s user data.
• Limiting potentially addictive app or platform features such as “automatic playing of media, rewards for time spent on the platform, notifications, and other features that result in compulsive usage of the covered platform by the minor.”
• Creating options to permanently delete a minor’s account and the data that was collected from said account, and the ability for parents or guardians to limit a minor’s time on the app.

KOSA also has a subsection dedicated to parental tools that the bill will require platforms to have. These include the ability for parents to manage a minor’s privacy, change and control their account settings, and limit their purchases.

Why now?

In 2021, former Facebook Product Manager Frances Haugen revealed that the company knew that Instagram had a destructive impact on the psyche of teenage girls, with an algorithm that often led them to accounts that promote disordered eating and anorexia.

“What we saw from the documents, as soon as we began reviewing them from the whistleblower and other sources, led us to dig even deeper and conclude that legislation was necessary for reform,” said Blumenthal.

Also, in 2023, the video roulette platform Omegle shut down after numerous lawsuits accused the site of serving as a haven for child sexual abuse and other crimes.

Blumenthal said another reason he moved forward with KOSA were the “pleas we received from parents and children, about the devastating impact of toxic content that has ruined lives and even been attributed to death.”

What concerns were raised about KOSA?

In the initial draft, state attorneys general alongside the Federal Trade Commission had the authority to enforce the duty of care the bill establishes.

But LGBTQ+ rights organizations across the nation raised alarm bells about the potential for it to lead to the censorship of LGBTQ+ content online, as they argued attorney generals across a variety of states have attempted to attack these organizations and their allies in recent years.

Then The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, released 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 minors’ physical and mental health,” and “guard against the harms of sexual and transgender content.”

Alongside this, Blackburn was recorded in an interview with the conservative Christian organization Family Policy Alliance saying that the top issue for conservative lawmakers should be “protecting minor children from the transgender in this culture, and that influence. And I would add to that, watching what’s happening on social media, and I’ve got 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.”

Over 90 organizations encompassing a variety of causes like LGBTQ+ rights and freedom of speech then signed a letter against KOSA. One of the organizations that helped put together the letter was Fight For the Future, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting “basic rights in the digital age.”

“We fundamentally believe that, as it’s currently written in the version that passed the Senate, if it were to go into effect, it would actually make kids less safe online, rather than more safe,” said Evan Greer, the nonprofit’s director.

How has the bill changed?

After concerns were raised about the potential partisanship of attorneys general, KOSA was updated to establish the FTC as the sole authority on duty of care enforcement.

State attorneys general would now just have the power to take civil action related to protections for minors, clarity from platforms on how they would mitigate harm against minors and disclosure about a platform’s policies.

After U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, questioned whether KOSA or state law took precedence, KOSA was edited to establish itself as preemptive unless a state had protections stronger than federal statute.

Changes to KOSA led some activists and nonprofit organizations like GLAAD, The Trevor Project, and the National Center for Transgender Equality to drop their opposition to the bill.

How could this bill change online platforms?

Tracy Mitrano, current professor and former director of Internet Culture Policy and Law at Cornell University, said she expects online platforms may create new ways to verify user age and moderate content to protect themselves from legal action. The bill, however, does not require these measures.

“They’re going to have to create a lot of administrative processes to establish the age of users, they’re going to have to create all kinds of content moderation, administrative processes to be watching for content, and that is again, very tricky, because the volume is so great on these sites,” she said.

Meanwhile, concerns over the duty of care provision have been raised by prominent groups, like NetChoice, a tech lobbyist group that represents online giants like Meta, Snapchat and X.

“The bill sets a dangerous precedent that would grant the government greater power over free speech online and would hand 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 also have worries about censorship. “KOSA has a duty of care that covers content recommendation, which will lead to companies effectively over censoring broad swaths of information just because they’re afraid that they might get in trouble with the Federal Trade Commission,” said Greer.

Blumenthal refuted these concerns, saying, “There is no provision, none in this bill for blocking content by any government agency or, frankly, by anyone else. There’s no censorship.”

What are the next steps?

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

“The legislation does seem to be a bit vague, and vague is one of the sins of legislation that makes it objectionable on First Amendment grounds. It may already be causing people in the House of Representatives who may not want it for other reasons such as 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’m getting a lot of money from Meta to oppose it,’” Mitrano said.

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

“If it gets a vote, it will pass,” he said.

Clarification: This story has been updated to reflect that some LGBTQ+ dropped their opposition to KOSA after the bill was revised.

Correction: A previous version of this story reported that Tracy Mitrano, current professor and former director of Internet Culture Policy and Law at Cornell University, said that under KOSA online platforms will have to create new ways to verify user age and moderate content. The story has been updated to reflect the statement was an opinion, not something required by the federal bill.

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3. Blumenthal tweaks Kids Online Safety Act to ease concerns