After passing the Senate nearly unanimously last week, the future of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) appears uncertain. With Congress now on a six-week recess, Punchbowl News reports that the Republican leadership of the House of Representatives may not prioritize bringing the bill up for a vote when lawmakers return.
In response to Punchbowl's reporting, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer issued a statement saying, “Just a week ago, Chairman Johnson said he wanted to make KOSA a success. I hope that hasn't changed. By making KOSA a success, we're making sure that we're not losing our minds.” [the Children and Teens’ Online Protection Act] “It would be a terrible mistake and a slap in the face to these brave, wonderful parents who have worked so hard to get to this point if this bill were to sit in the House of Representatives and gather dust.” The bill has also received support from Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
But the bill created a huge divide between the digital rights and tech accountability communities. If passed, the legislation would require online platforms to block users under 18 from viewing certain types of content that the government deems harmful.
Supporters of the measure, including the Tech Oversight Project, a nonprofit that focuses on accountability in the tech sector through antimonopoly laws, saw the bill as an important step in holding tech companies accountable for the ways their products affect children.
“Too many young people, parents and families have suffered the terrible consequences of social media company greed,” Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, said in a statement in June. “The accountability that KOSA would provide these families is long overdue.”
Others, like the digital rights nonprofit Center for Technology and Democracy, said the law, if passed, could be used to prevent young users from accessing crucial information on topics like sexual health and LGBTQ+ issues. That meant some organizations that regularly lobby to hold Silicon Valley to account sided with tech companies and their lobbyists in trying to defeat the law.
“KOSA is not ready for a floor vote,” Aliya Bhatia, a policy analyst at the Center for Technology and Democracy’s Free Expression Project, said in a statement in July. “In its current form, KOSA could still be abused to target marginalized communities and politically sensitive information.”
Evan Greer, executive director of the nonprofit Fight for the Future, which opposed the bill, tells WIRED that KOSA and similar legislation “divides our coalition” while allowing tech companies “to get away with murder and evade regulation.”
“This was never really about protecting children,” Greer says. “It was more about legislators wanting to say they’re protecting children, and that doesn’t really help children.” Instead of lawmakers focusing on the “flawed” legislation, Greer says Congress could have spent the same time and energy on antitrust legislation like the American Innovation and Choice Online and the Open App Markets Act, or the American Privacy Rights Act.
“When our coalition is divided and fighting against each other, we will be defeated by Big Tech every time,” she says.
Meanwhile, X CEO Linda Yaccarino has said she supports KOSA, as does the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit that advocates for tech accountability, which was sued by X last year for exposing hate speech on its platform.
While the House Republican leadership's decision may mark the beginning of the end for KOSA itself, Gautam Hans, an associate professor of law at Cornell University, says that “given the bipartisan interest in passing this law, I suspect other proposals will follow — hopefully with more extensive safeguards against potential state censorship.”
