Kids Online Safety Act
The bill has been criticized by civil rights organizations for potentially enabling censorship, including of material important to marginalized groups. Blackburn has argued that resources on topics such as racism and the civil rights movement overlap with critical race theory, which she sees as "dangerous".
Bill summary
The Kids Online Safety Act, if passed, would require social media platforms to reduce online dangers by changing their design or opting out of algorithm based recommendation systems. It aims to create liability or a "duty of care" for apps and social networking platforms for specfic content that may not be suitable for minors. If the entities behind these Internet platforms fail to filter said content from minors, they might be open for legal action against them.
History
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. 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."
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). 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.
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. KOSA along with COPPA 2.0 were approved by the Senate Commerce Committee on July 27, 2023. By February 2024, the bill had gained over 60 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.
Reception
KOSA has been supported by over 200 groups, including the National Education Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Foundation on Suicide Prevention and the American Psychological Association. The bill has been criticized by members of the "Don't Delete Art" (DDA) movement and anti-censorship groups due to the chances of increased online surveillance and censorship of artists' work. Along with support from the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Coalition Against Censorship, Fight for the Future, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, DDA has encouraged people to signal their opposition through an online petition that labels KOSA as one of several "Bad Internet Bills."
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. Fight for the Future has set up a Stop KOSA website for people to sign a petition and contact lawmakers against the bill.
Interpretation of harms
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, likening it to the FOSTA-SESTA bills. 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.
The conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation wrote that the initial 2022 iteration of KOSA didn't go far enough, as the bill didn't explicitly list transgender health care as a harm. The inclusion of the phrase "consistent with evidence-informed medical information" 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. Senator Blackburn, co-author of the bill, has argued that some education about racism and the civil rights movement overlaps with critical race theory, which she labels a "dangerous ideology" that can inflict "mental and emotional damage" upon children. She has also explicitly stated that the bill will be used to censor content involving the transgender community. 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.
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." This drew criticism from LGBT advocacy groups, fearing that the bill would allow LGBT information for minors to be censored. A spokesperson for Blackburn stated that KOSA was not intended to censor LGBT information. 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. 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.