Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union sent 300 high school students to Capitol Hill to lobby against the Kids Online Safety Act, a bill aimed at protecting children online.
The teens told the staff of 85 lawmakers that the legislation could censor important conversations, particularly among marginalized groups like the LGBTQ community.
“We live on the Internet, and we’re afraid that important information that we’ve had access to our entire lives is no longer available,” said Anjali Verma, a 17-year-old high school senior from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, who was part of the student lobbying campaign. “Regardless of your political perspective, this is like a censorship bill.”
The effort was one of several escalations in recent months by those opposed to the bill. In June, a progressive nonprofit called Fight for the Future organized students to write hundreds of letters urging lawmakers to kill the bill. Conservative groups like Patriot Voices, founded by former Republican Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, are also protesting with an online petition.
What should have been a simple law to protect children online has been dragged into a heated political war. At the heart of the battle are concerns about how the law could impact free speech on culturally divisive issues, which both sides of the spectrum fear could be weaponized in the guise of child safety. Liberals worry about censorship of transgender care, while conservatives worry about the same thing with anti-abortion efforts. The tech industry has also latched on to the same First Amendment arguments to oppose the law.
The controversy stems from the specific terms of the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA. The legislation would require social media platforms and other sites to restrict features that could increase cyberbullying, harassment and the glorification of self-harm. The bill would also require tech companies to enable the highest privacy and safety settings for users under 17 and give them the ability to opt out of some features that have been shown to lead to compulsive use.
Opponents of the bill fear that these measures could have unintended consequences, causing social media companies to remove or hide important and life-saving content.
While KOSA passed the Senate on Tuesday by a vote of 91-3, passage in the House of Representatives could be more difficult as debates over free speech continue to flare.
“This bill has gone unnoticed as a great way to protect kids online, and everyone wants that,” said Alice Marwick, a communications professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “But people are also realizing that this bill is more like a wolf in sheep’s clothing and could have major implications for free speech.”
If passed, it would be the first law aimed at protecting children online since the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998. Previous efforts have been stuck in Congressional debate for years.
KOSA has gained momentum as Washington becomes increasingly concerned about the effects of social media on children’s mental health and safety. In January, lawmakers questioned the CEOs of Meta, Snap, X and TikTok about toxic content on their platforms that involved suicidal thoughts, eating disorders and sexual exploitation. This spring, the Surgeon General linked social media to a crisis in youth mental health.
Dozens of parents have lobbied Congress to pass KOSA, carrying photos of children they say have died from exposure to harmful online activity.
We are “making social media platforms accountable for the harm they caused with the product design and business decisions they made — not for the third-party content that happens to be on their platforms,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat and co-author of the Senate version of the bill, said in a statement last week.
The bill has faced opposition from the start. In February 2022, Mr. Blumenthal and Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, introduced KOSA during hearings on child online safety by the Consumer Protection Subcommittee.
While many child advocacy groups, teachers and parents voiced early support, free speech groups quickly raised concerns, arguing that the bill would give social media sites and regulators too much latitude in defining what is harmful to young people.
Transgender-friendly health care is under pressure and is at the center of the political agenda for some Republicans, said Evan Greer, campaign manager for Fight for the Future.
In November 2022, Fight for the Future sent a letter to Senate leaders with the signatures of more than 100 LGBTQ and human rights activists opposing the bill. The group also launched websites where nearly 400,000 people have used automated email features to influence their lawmakers. The bill failed to pass that year.
In May 2023, after Mr. Blumenthal and Ms. Blackburn reintroduced the bill, the conservative Heritage Foundation posted on X that “keeping trans content away from children keeps them safe.”
Ms Greer, who is transgender, feared that a Conservative government could elect regulators who defined transgender and reproductive rights issues as harmful to children. That could lead to social media companies blocking or removing that content, making it unavailable to people who need help, she said.
“This is not a safety bill, but it could put a lot of LGBTQ+ youth at risk,” Ms. Greer said in an interview.
Some conservatives have also expressed concerns.
This year, Patriot Voices posted a link to an online petition protesting KOSA, which they said would “institutionalize federal censorship standards for medical information,” including vaccinations, masks, and transition surgery for minors.
KOSA’s goal of protecting mental health is not specifically defined, leaving the federal government free to focus on anti-abortion initiatives, Students for Life Action, an anti-abortion activist group, reported on X last week.
According to several congressional aides, tech lobbyists have echoed some of the arguments made in the speeches and public concerns from LGBTQ groups to stoke concerns about the bill.
“KOSA fails to meet the core tenets of the Constitution and fails parents by failing to make any child safer online,” said Carl Szabo, the chief legal officer of NetChoice, a tech trade group that has sued states over laws similar to KOSA over free speech concerns. Last year, the group won a preliminary injunction against California’s Child Safety Act, which a federal judge called overbroad and a violation of the First Amendment.
The authors of KOSA revised the bill to address First Amendment implications and to legislate the proposed law at the federal level so that conservatives or liberals cannot use it politically at the state level.
Yet there are still teenagers who oppose KOSA.
Jax, 13, of New Jersey, posted online that he worries about how the law might affect other transgender youth. When he first began questioning his gender identity, he said, he was afraid to tell his friends and family, instead turning to TikTok, where he found dozens of videos about being transgender. They changed his life, he said, helping him understand that he felt closer to being male despite being assigned female at birth.
KOSA “makes me angry,” said Jax, who asked that his full name not be used for fear of retaliation. “The videos were like a learning tool,” he said, adding that they “made me feel a little bit better about myself.”
During congressional hearings last week, many teens sent by the ACLU shared how meeting peers online had helped them with their feelings of isolation.
Ms. Verma, the senior in Pennsylvania, met with the staff of two legislators, including Rep. John Joyce, a Republican from her state. She described how the Internet had been a vital source of information and support after she was cyberbullied. She asked lawmakers to focus on ways to train and educate young people to think critically about their experiences online.
“It's called the Kids Online Safety Act, but they have to take into account the voices of children, and some of us don't think it will make us safer,” Ms. Verma said.
