Could online child safety bills become law in the US?
In a historic 91-3 vote last week, the US Senate passed the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0).
For Maurene Molak, who lost her son David to suicide after years of cyberbullying, last week’s passage in the Senate of two bills aimed at child safety online represented “a historic and emotional milestone for myself and for all parents who have fought tirelessly to protect our children from the dangerous environments created by Big Tech,” she said.
But to become law, the bills now make their way to the House. Will the House approve them? Or will their passage stall due to concerns over privacy and speech? We break down the latest legislative news.
// Two bills, one vote
The passage of KOSA and COPPA was the most significant restriction on tech platforms to clear a chamber of Congress in decades.
- Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass), who led the push to pass the original COPPA bill in the 1990s, said, “This is the first time in 26 years that we’ve been able to come back and to put the protections that were needed then, and are even more needed today, on the books.”
- The overwhelming bipartisan support in the Senate is the result of many factors including increasing concern about the harms of social media, a Congressional hearing where big tech leaders testified, and pressure from a chorus of voices: parents like Molak, teachers, child advocacy groups, and other organizations seeking to build a safer web.
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“We’re simply creating an environment that is safe by design. And at its core, this bill is a product design bill.”
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// The bills
KOSA and COPPA, which were combined into one legislative vehicle called KOSPA, expand online privacy and safety protections for children.
Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA)
KOSA was first introduced in 2022, as a direct result of Frances Haugen, a Facebook whistleblower and Project Liberty Fellow, leaking files showing how Facebook was aware of the harm it caused to teens.
- KOSA creates a “duty of care” that places the responsibility on tech companies to ensure their platforms are safe. This means proactively designing their platforms and products in ways that mitigate the risks for minors facing online bullying, sexual exploitation, or other harmful content.
- Beyond the duty of care, KOSA introduces other safeguards, such as preventing unknown adults from being able to communicate with kids, restricting the ability to share minors’ geolocation data, ensuring that kids’ accounts have the strictest level of safety, by default, and requiring independent audits and research into how these platforms impact the well-being of kids and teens. It also gives the Federal Trade Commission, rather than state attorneys general, who have been busy filing a raft of lawsuits against big tech, the ultimate power to sue tech companies over content.
Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0)
COPPA 2.0 builds on the original COPPA, which was passed in 1998 to strengthen child privacy. The 1998 law required that websites and other online services obtain parental consent before collecting data from minors. COPPA 2.0 raises the age of those eligible for protections from 13 to 17 years old.
According to Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), COSPA isn’t aimed at blocking users or censoring content. “We’re simply creating an environment that is safe by design. And at its core, this bill is a product design bill,” he said.
// Opposition
The bills have faced opposition for years. As we explored in our series on age verification last month, there are fundamental trade-offs between safety, privacy, and speech.
- Critics of online safety bills like KOSA and COPPA 2.0 have raised concerns that the duty of care provisions that require platforms to install the strictest safety and privacy settings by default could be used to chill free speech, heighten surveillance, and serve to censor online conversations.
- Before the Senate vote last week, The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sent 300 high school students to Capitol Hill to petition lawmakers on the dangers of censoring important online conversations, particularly for groups like LGBTQ+ communities.
- Opponents of the bills are not opposed to child safety. Instead, they believe the laws could have unintended consequences. To stay in compliance, a tech platform might remove or hide content, both raising free speech concerns and prompting objections about who gets to decide what content is unsafe. For example, Fight For The Future has argued that KOSA amounts to censorship because there is no consensus about what constitutes inappropriate content. LGBTQ+ groups have protested that KOSA could not only enable the government to censor LGBTQ+ affirming content by claiming that such content is harmful, but that queer and trans youth would be cut off from online resources.
In a letter to senators before the bill was passed, The ACLU, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and LGBT Tech wrote that “this could lead to aggressive filtering of content by companies preventing access to important, First Amendment-protected, educational, and even lifesaving content.”
// No easy road to passage
The bills face an uphill battle to get passed in the US House. Late last week, House Republicans indicated that they had no plans to take up the bill. With an upcoming recess and national presidential election, it’s possible the House won’t schedule a vote or could make changes to the bills that would require them to go back to the Senate. Given the sensitivity of issues surrounding speech, privacy, and safety, the bills face an uncertain fate.
But for parents who have lost children to the harms online, passage is an imperative. Ian Russell and Christine McComas, who each lost a daughter to suicide, made their case in op-ed in Tech Policy Press last week:
“KOSPA will demonstrate US leadership around the world. If enacted, the bill would help pave the way for similar efforts in other countries—like the UK’s newly passed Online Safety Act—and help protect kids across the globe.”
// The voices of kids
KOSA and COPPA 2.0 represent an enormous effort by adults to protect minors from the harms online. But as teenagers themselves descended on Washington last week, some advocated for lawmakers to tread with caution in passing bills that purportedly protected them.
Anjali Verma, a high-schooler from Pennsylvania, told senators that after being cyberbullied, the resources she found online had been a major source of support. Better, she argued, to invest in ways to train and educate youths about how to be critical thinkers online than censor content.
“It’s called the Kids Online Safety Act, but they have to consider kids’ voices, and some of us don’t think it will make us safer,” she said.
It’s a reminder of the principle of “nothing about us without us.” To build a better and safer web, we need the voices of everyone—even the internet’s youngest users.
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