Congress moves forward on the Kids Online Safety Act

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) will finally get its moment on the Senate floor this week after Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) announced he’d move for a procedural vote on the bill as soon as Thursday. It fulfills a promise Schumer made to parent advocates who have championed the bill, which would impose a duty of care for online platforms to mitigate certain risks to kids. But the timing means that even if KOSA passes the Senate before the week is out, the House will only have a week to consider the measure, with the August recess close at hand.

At a press conference on Tuesday, advocates and bill sponsors urged other senators to quickly vote to pass the bill, without other amendments that could stall its progress once again. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), a lead sponsor of the bill along with Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), said he hoped the floor vote would be “quick and clean” and “without amendments.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) plans to announce in a speech that he will bring the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0) to the Senate floor this week for a procedural vote. This tees up the biggest step yet on the federal level to move forward with a law in the area of children’s online safety legislation.

“Over the past few months I’ve met with families from across the country who have gone through the worst thing a parent could endure – losing a child,” Schumer said in a statement. “Rather than retreating into the darkness of their loss, these families lit a candle for others with their advocacy. I am proud to work side-by-side with them and put on the floor legislation that I Believe will pass and better protect our children from the negative risks of social media and other online platforms. It has been long and daunting road to get this bill passed, which can change and save lives, but today, we are one monumental step closer to success.”

Last week’s Supreme Court decision in the NetChoice cases was overshadowed by a ruling on presidential immunity in Trump v. US that came down only minutes later. But whether or not America even noticed NetChoice happen, the decision is poised to affect a host of tech legislation still brewing on Capitol Hill and in state legislatures, as well as lawsuits that are percolating through the system. This includes the pending First Amendment challenge to the TikTok “ban” bill, as well as a First Amendment case about a Texas age verification law that the Supreme Court took up only a day after its NetChoice decision.

The NetChoice decision states that tech platforms can exercise their First Amendment rights through their content moderation decisions and how they choose to display content on their services — a strong statement that has clear ramifications for any laws that attempt to regulate platforms’ algorithms in the name of kids online safety and even on a pending lawsuit seeking to block a law that could ban TikTok from the US.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee suddenly canceled a markup to discuss and vote on 11 bills, including the American Privacy Rights Act (APRA) and the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA).

The committee did not provide a reason for the cancellation in its online notice, and committee members appeared surprised by the change, according to reporters in the room. But disagreements on the bill with Republican House leadership seemed to play a role, according to recent reporting and the top Democrats on the committee. Some Republican House members have recently expressed concerns with the bill, Politico reported last week, adding that House Majority Leader Steve Scalise’s (R-LA) top aide said an earlier version of APRA wouldn’t get a floor vote in its current form, even if it passed out of the committee.

Just a couple of weeks after the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) surged with enough support to position it to clear the Senate, the path to new child protections on the internet suddenly looks more complex. Seeing the momentum, other lawmakers and outside groups sense it might be time to promote their own favored solutions, which could snarl KOSA’s Senate passage.

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI), for example, sees this as an opportune moment for his own Protecting Kids on Social Media Act, which would only allow teens under 18 to use social media with their parents’ consent. “I imagine there’s only going to be one moment for all of the tech bills,” Schatz told The Washington Post in a story published Thursday. “I imagine that all of these efforts are going to be merged in the floor process.”

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) has surpassed 60 Senate co-sponsors, enough supporters for it to pass through the chamber, the bill’s authors announced on Thursday.

The support marks a major milestone for the legislation, which seeks to create a duty of care for tech platforms to mitigate certain dangers to young users and allow them to opt out of algorithm-based recommendations. If it becomes law, it would be among the most significant kids’ online safety statutes since the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which went into effect in 2000.

Today, the US Senate Judiciary Committee will hear testimony from five CEOs of major tech companies: Linda Yaccarino of X, Shou Zi Chew of TikTok, Evan Spiegel of Snap, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, and Jason Citron of Discord. The executives will answer questions on the topic of “Big Tech and the online child sexual exploitation crisis,” an ongoing issue for a Congress that’s introduced numerous child safety bills in recent years.

The hearing has been months in the making and apparently involved a little strong-arming from Congress, which reportedly sent US Marshals to subpoena Yaccarino and Citron. It begins at 10AM ET and will likely last several hours as lawmakers seize their opportunity to yell at some of both parties’ favorite bêtes noires. Chew and Zuckerberg have both been the subject of congressional hearings — Zuckerberg starting in 2018 after Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, Chew in 2023 amid efforts to ban TikTok in the US. (Zuckerberg was also nearly held in contempt of Congress last year, too.)

Today, I’m talking with Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii. He’s been in the Senate for a little more than a decade now, and he’s seen a lot in that time. 

We joke that Decoder is ultimately a show about org charts, but there’s a lot of truth to it. A CEO can upend their whole company’s org chart if they think it will improve their business, but a member of the federal government — especially a senator — can’t unilaterally ditch the structures that have been woven into the fabric of our country for more than 200 years. That can lead to… some inefficiencies, let’s say, and you’ll hear Schatz talk about the four separate offices he has to balance against each other and the concessions he has to make to work within that structure.

Google responded to congressional child online safety proposals with its own counteroffer for the first time Monday, urging lawmakers to drop problematic protections like age-verification tech. 

In a blog post, Google released its “Legislative Framework to Protect Children and Teens Online.” The framework comes as more lawmakers, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), are lining up behind the Kids Online Safety Act, a controversial bill intended to protect kids from dangerous content online. 

By the end of this month, porn will get a lot harder to watch in Texas. Instead of clicking a button or entering a date of birth to access Pornhub and other adult sites, users will need to provide photos of their official government-issued ID or use a third-party service to verify their age. It’s the result of a new law passed earlier this summer intended to prevent kids from seeing porn online. But it’s also part of a broad — and worrying — attempt to age-gate the internet. 

Texas may be the biggest state rolling out anti-porn rules, but it’s not the first. In the last year alone, more than half a dozen states have passed similar legislation and even more are looking to follow suit. While these rules are focused on adult content, another raft of laws is aimed at locking down minors’ access to the internet more generally — including banning teens from social media without parental consent. 

This is Platformer, a newsletter on the intersection of Silicon Valley and democracy from Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer. Sign up here.

Today let’s talk about a right we currently take for granted that may soon disappear: the ability to browse and post to most websites anonymously.

Congress is closer than ever to passing a pair of bills to childproof the internet after lawmakers voted to send them to the floor Thursday.

The bills — the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and COPPA 2.0 — were approved by the Senate Commerce Committee Thursday by a unanimous voice vote. Both pieces of legislation aim to address an ongoing mental health crisis amongst young people that some lawmakers blame social media for intensifying. But critics of the bills have long argued that they have the potential to cause more harm than good, like forcing social media platforms to collect more user information to properly enforce Congress’ rules.  

State lawmakers in Louisiana passed a new bill Tuesday banning minors from creating their own social media accounts.

The bill, HB61, would ban “interactive computer services” from allowing people under 18 to sign up for their own accounts without parental consent. The bill’s definition of online services is extremely broad, seemingly barring minors from creating social media accounts on sites like Instagram, accessing popular online games like Roblox and Fortnite, or even registering for an email address. The bill also goes as far as allowing parents to cancel the terms of service contracts their children entered into when signing up for existing accounts.