This article was originally published by Them.
After being passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in the Senate on Tuesday, the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) is effectively dead after Republican House leadership indicated that they would not consider the bill as currently written.
However, advocates warn that KOSA — which was extensively criticized by LGBTQ+ organizations and free speech advocacy groups, including the ACLU, for its potential to censor useful online information amid its targeting of legitimately harmful content — will likely return to Congress in another form.
Punchbowl News was the first to report on the House GOP’s decision not to consider the bill on Thursday morning. A leadership aide told the outlet, “We’ve heard concerns across our Conference and the Senate bill cannot be brought up in its current form.” (Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer also posted to X on Thursday afternoon about the House’s reported refusal to vote on KOSA, saying it would be “an awful mistake.”)
Though Punchbowl didn’t name any of Republicans’ specific objections, various lawmakers, including Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), have voiced fears that KOSA “raises significant First Amendment concerns, imposes vague, undefined requirements on internet platforms, and empowers politically motivated enforcers to advance their own ideological interests to the detriment of the American people,” as he wrote in a “Dear Colleague” letter in July.
He raised the hypothetical examples of whether platforms should “stop children from seeing climate-related news because climate change is one of the leading sources of anxiety among younger generations,” and whether they should “stop children from seeing coverage of international conflicts because it could lead to depression.”
Because the House just went on early recess, and won’t return until September, advocacy groups like Fight for the Future, which focuses on digital privacy rights, have called KOSA “officially dead.” In a phone interview, Fight for the Future director Evan Greer told Them that while she was glad that KOSA appears to be “stalled” for the time being, it also felt “hard to celebrate because in the end, we really need actually good legislation that does address the harm of big tech.”
“The bad thinking behind this bill is very much alive and well in Washington D.C.,” Greer said, “and so we will absolutely see KOSA itself come back, and we’re going to see more bills like it until we push for lawmakers to present a more progressive vision for how to regulate big tech companies and address their harm without focusing on censorship.”
KOSA, introduced by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) in 2022, would have required online platforms to remove content that could ostensibly harm minors. However, as Fight for the Future emphasized on its campaign site against the passage of KOSA, “there is no consensus on what is inappropriate for minors.” For example, in the past several years, Republicans have used broad definitions of “harm” to minors in legislation that has sought to criminalize drag, ban trans women and girls from gendered sports teams, remove LGBTQ+ books from libraries, and more.
Advocates feared that KOSA would be wielded to similar ends to prevent LGBTQ+ youth from accessing vital online resources — a fear that appeared to be confirmed in comments that Blackburn made in an interview with the right-wing organization Family Policy Alliance last September. When asked about what conservatives’ top priorities should be, Blackburn responded, “Protecting minor children from the transgender in this culture,” adding that social media platforms are “where children are being indoctrinated.”
Additionally, as Greer pointed out in a July op-ed for Them, there have been prior internet regulation bills that have had seemingly noble aims, only to cause harm to the populations they claimed to protect. FOSTA-SESTA, a pair of Congressional bills that passed with bipartisan support in 2018, similarly purported to fight online sex trafficking, especially of minors. In fact, some researchers have argued that FOSTA-SESTA may have actually increased instances of actual sex trafficking by taking down online resources that sex workers relied on to find clients, while also dealing a massive blow to LGBTQ+ online content creators.
Greer said that as the parent of a teenager themself, there are many parents like them “who share concerns about the harms that Big Tech companies and their business practices are doing, but don’t support the vision of an internet that is embodied by legislation like KOSA.” In fact, in September, over 100 parents of trans children signed an open letter voicing opposition to the bill, expressing concern that it would “put our children in further danger.”
“We need to make kids safer by empowering them and ensuring they have access to information and online community rather than going back to abstinence-only sex education, but about every important topic young people need to be able to talk about,” Greer said.
There are concrete measures that Congress can pass to actually make the internet safer for children, she added, such as passing legislation that strengthens privacy measures and breaks up tech monopolies. “It’s deeply frustrating that the Senate steamrolled over experts and human rights groups when we could have spent time and energy on something substantive,” she said.
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