Parents are desperate to protect kids on social media. Why did the US let a safety bill die?

The Guardian

16-02-2025

When Congress adjourned for the holidays in December, a landmark bill meant to overhaul how tech companies protect their youngest users had officially failed to pass. Introduced in 2022, the Kids Online Safety act (Kosa) was meant to be a massive reckoning for big tech. Instead, despite sailing through the Senate with a 91-to-3 vote in July, the bill languished and died in the House.
Kosa had been passionately championed by families who said their children had fallen victim to the harmful policies of social media platforms and advocates who said a bill reining in the unchecked power of big tech was long overdue. They're bitterly disappointed that a strong chance to check big tech failed because of congressional apathy. But human rights organizations had argued that the legislation could have led to unintended consequences affecting freedom of speech online.
Kosa was introduced nearly three years ago in the aftermath of bombshell revelations by former Facebook employee Frances Haugen about the scope and severity of social media platforms' effects on young users. It would have mandated that platforms like Instagram and TikTok address online dangers affecting children through design changes and allowing young users to opt out of algorithmic recommendations.
'This is a basic product-liability bill,' said Alix Fraser, director of Issue One's Council for Responsible Social Media. 'It's complicated, because the internet is complicated and social media is complicated, but it is essentially just an effort to create a basic product-liability standard for these companies.'
A central – and controversial – component of the bill was its 'duty of care' clause, which declared that companies have 'a duty to act in the best interests of minors using their platforms' and would be open to interpretation by regulators. It also would have required that platforms implement measures to reduce harm by establishing 'safeguards for minors'.
Critics argued that a lack of clear guidance on what constitutes harmful content might prompt companies to filter content more aggressively, leading to unintended consequences for freedom of speech. Sensitive but important topics such as gun violence and racial justice could be viewed as potentially harmful and subsequently be filtered out by the companies themselves. These censorship concerns were particularly pronounced for the LGBTQ+ community, which, opponents of Kosa said, could be disproportionately affected by conservative regulators, reducing access to vital resources.
'With Kosa, we saw a really well-intentioned but ultimately vague bill requiring online services to take unspecified action to keep kids safe, which was going to lead to several bad outcomes for children, and all marginalized users,' said Aliya Bhatia, a policy analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology, which opposed the legislation and which receives money from tech donors including Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
When the bill was first introduced, more than 90 human rights organizations signed a letter in opposition, underscoring these and other concerns. In response to such criticism, the bill's authors issued revisions in February 2024 – most notably, shifting the enforcement of its 'duty of care' provision from state attorneys general to the Federal Trade Commission. Following these changes, a number of organizations including Glaad, the Human Rights Campaign and the Trevor Project withdrew opposition, stating that the revisions 'significantly mitigate the risk of [Kosa] being misused to suppress LGBTQ+ resources or stifle young people's access to online communities'.
But other civil rights groups maintained their opposition, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the ACLU and Fight for the Future, calling Kosa a 'censorship bill' that would harm vulnerable users and freedom of speech at large. They argued the duty-of-care provision could just as easily be weaponized by a conservative FTC chair against LGBTQ+ youth as by state attorneys general. These concerns have been reflected in Trump's FTC chair appointment of Republican Andrew Ferguson, who said in leaked statements he planned to use his role to 'fight back against the trans agenda'.
Concerns around how Ferguson will manage online content is 'exactly what LGBTQ youth in this fight have written and called Congress about hundreds of times over the last couple of years', said Sarah Philips of Fight for the Future. 'The situation that they were fearful of has come to fruition, and anyone ignoring that is really just putting their heads in the sand.'
Opponents say that even with Kosa's failure to pass, a chilling effect has already materialized with regards to what content is available on certain platforms. A recent report in User Mag found that hashtags for LGBTQ+-related topics were being categorized as 'sensitive content' and restricted from search. Legislation like Kosa does not take into account the complexities of the online landscape, said Bhatia, of the Center for Democracy and Technology, and is likely to lead platforms to pre-emptively censor content to avoid litigation.
'Children's safety occupies an interesting paradoxical positioning in tech policy, where at once children are vulnerable actors on the internet, but also at the same time benefit greatly from the internet,' she said. 'Using the blunt instrument of policy to protect them can often lead to outcomes that don't really take this into account.'
Proponents attribute the backlash to Kosa to aggressive lobbying from the tech industry, though two of the top opponents – Fight for the Future and EFF – are not supported by large tech donors. Meanwhile, major tech companies are split on Kosa, with X, Snap, Microsoft and Pinterest outwardly supporting the bill and Meta and Google quietly opposing it.
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'Kosa was an extremely robust piece of legislation, but what is more robust is the power of big tech,' Fraser said, of Issue One. 'They hired every lobbyist in town to take it down, and they were successful in that.'
Fraser added that advocates are disappointed in Kosa failing to pass but 'won't rest until federal legislation is passed to protect kids online and the tech sector is held accountable for its actions'.
Aside from Ferguson as FTC chair, it is unclear what exactly the new Trump administration and the shifting makeup of Congress mean for the future of Kosa. Though Trump has not directly indicated his views on Kosa, several people in his close circle have expressed support following last-minute amendments to the bill in 2024 facilitated by Elon Musk's X.
The congressional death of Kosa may seem like the end of a winding and controversial path, but advocates on both sides of the fight say it's too soon to write the legislation's obituary.
'We should not expect Kosa to disappear quietly,' said Prem M Trivedi, policy director at the Open Technology Institute, which opposes Kosa. 'Whether we are going to see it introduced again or different incarnations of it, more broadly the focus on kid's online safety is going to continue.'
Richard Blumenthal, the senator who co-authored the bill with the senator Marsha Blackburn, has promised to reintroduce it in the upcoming congressional session, and other advocates for the bill also say they will not give up.
'I've worked with a lot of these parents who have been willing to recount the worst day of their lives time and time again, in front of lawmakers, in front of staffers, in front of the press, because they know that something has to change,' said Fraser. 'They're not going to stop.'