The U.S. Senate on Thursday advanced a pair of bills aimed at protecting children online, giving a jolt of momentum to a bipartisan measure championed by Sen. Richard Blumenthal that has stalled for years.
Congress has not passed legislation regulating the use of online platforms for minors in decades, despite a growing desire to do so in both parties. But in recent years, The Kids Online Safety Act and the Children’s and Teens Online Privacy Protection Act, also known as COPPA 2.0, amassed more bipartisan support.
Thursday’s procedural vote is the first step in a long road for the legislation to become law. The bills passed initial consideration on Thursday in a 86 to 1 vote, easily surpassing the 60-vote threshold to overcome a Senate filibuster and garnering more support than just the 70 co-sponsors which includes U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn.
The Kids Online Safety Act, commonly referred to as KOSA, has been several years in the making for Blumenthal and his co-author U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn. It was spurred in large part by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s congressional testimony in 2021 about the harmful effects of social media on children and teenagers and how tech giants kept users engaged to turn profits.
KOSA aims to put in place stricter settings by allowing children and parents to disable addictive features, enable privacy settings and opt out of algorithmic recommendations. It establishes a “duty of care” for sites used by young individuals “to prevent and mitigate the following harms to minors” related to certain mental health disorders, physical violence, online bullying, eating disorders and sexual exploitation.
“We are no longer going to trust Big Tech to do the job. We are determined that we will make this product safer by empowering young people and their parents and create a duty of care,” Blumenthal said.
Blumenthal and Blackburn held an emotional press conference minutes before the vote with parents who have attributed the deaths of their children to harmful content on social media. Many of them have worked with the pair of lawmakers to help craft KOSA and have lobbied Congress to focus on reining in major tech and social media companies that have profited from their children viewing their content.
“We’ve heard some opponents of the bill talk about how this is being done in haste and how it’s rushed. Not one of us who have gone through what we have gone through … would agree with that,” said Todd Minor, a founding member of Parents for Safe Online Spaces, whose 12-year-old son Matthew died after viewing a viral TikTok challenge. “I stand before you as a witness of the challenging work and sleepless nights it took to get here.”
With persistent concerns from critics over censorship and free speech, Blumenthal and Blackburn made additional changes to the bill in February. Those tweaks eased the concerns of some groups who were initially opposed, while other civil rights and LGBTQ+ groups remain deeply unsatisfied with KOSA as well as COPPA 2.0.
COPPA 2.0, led by Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., updates existing law from 1998 to protect children online who are under the age of 13. The current bill would ban targeted advertising to minors and extend protections to users between ages 13 and 16. COPPA 2.0 was also updated earlier this year.
The legislation is running up against the clock with Congress out for the month of August and limited time before and after the November elections. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said he expects the upper chamber to tackle final passage next week. But the bills’ fates in the House are uncertain.
Blumenthal said he feels hopeful that the House will quickly take them up when Congress returns in the fall, especially after a wide margin of support in the Senate. The authors of KOSA said they have spoken with colleagues in the House about moving it forward.
“Getting here wasn’t easy. I worked for years with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to prepare these bills for the floor,” Schumer said ahead of Thursday’s vote.
“So today as we begin voting on these bills, I want to thank the parents who turned their grief into grace,” he continued. “Nobody would blame these parents if they preferred to process their pain in privacy. … But instead they’ve shared their stories, pushing the Senate into action, lit a candle to make sure other families won’t suffer as they have been suffering and always will.”
But criticism of the bill on and off Capitol Hill still persists.
Speaking from the floor, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., argued that the legislation would “block free speech” and believes that it would not hold up in court if it faces legal challenges. Blumenthal has pushed back that KOSA is “constitutionally bulletproof.”
The authors of KOSA point to the clarifications made to the duty of care provision, arguing that they focus more on product design features of the site or app over content. It was also updated to reflect the Federal Trade Commission as the only authority to enforce the duty of care through civil action, instead of state attorneys general.
In response to Paul’s opposition, Blackburn said the bill is geared toward social media platforms, multi-player online video games, social messaging apps and video streaming and will not apply to news outlets, personal blogs and nonprofits.
“This is not a speech bill. This is not a content bill,” Blackburn said Thursday. “I think the fears are unfounded. This is a good product, good legislation.”
But since KOSA’s introduction, civil liberties, digital privacy and LGBTQ+ rights groups have raised ongoing concerns about the potential censorship of younger users and the debate over what content is deemed “appropriate.”
“Mitigating such harms is worthwhile, but KOSA doesn’t do the job,” said India McKinney, director of federal affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “It’s an unconstitutional censorship bill that would give the Federal Trade Commission, and potentially state Attorneys General, the power to restrict protected online speech they find objectionable.”
The Connecticut Mirror/Connecticut Public Radio federal policy reporter position is made possible, in part, by funding from the Robert and Margaret Patricelli Family Foundation.
This story was originally published by the Connecticut Mirror.
