When lawmakers wrapped up the 118th Congress to head home for the holidays, they left a lot undone. One of the biggest issues that didn’t get checked off the to-do list was legislation to protect kids from the harmful effects of social media, despite a last minute press to get it through.
The Kids Online Safety Act passed the Senate this summer, 91-3. By mid-December, after some tweaks to the language, it even had conservative heavyweights like Elon Musk and Donald Trump Jr. urging Speaker Mike Johnson to give it a vote in the House.
But in the end, that didn’t happen, much to the chagrin of its backers.
For co-sponsor Brittany Pettersen, who is expecting her second child in January, this issue hits close to home.
“I met with a constituent locally who talked about her daughter who was 8 years old, who was dared to do things online and ultimately unfortunately died,” the Jefferson County Democrat recalled. “And so what duty of care are we going to put on the social media platforms for identifying harmful messages like this?”
The bill would have required social media companies to create stronger controls to protect the data of minors, default to the highest privacy settings for their accounts and give parents new controls to protect their kids online. It also would have created a duty of care, meaning companies would have been required to take reasonable steps to prevent harm from the use of their platforms.
House Speaker Mike Johnson defended his decision not to bring the bill to the floor at a press conference earlier in the month, saying that, as a parent, he’s passionate about protecting children online, but has concerns about how the Kids Online Safety Act could impact free speech.
“I think all of us, 100 percent of us, support the principle behind it, but you’ve got to get this one right,” he said. “When you’re dealing with the regulation of free speech you can’t go too far and have it be overbroad, but you want to achieve those objectives. So, it’s essential that we get this issue right ”
Johnson predicted that the new Congress would be able to tackle the issue without delay, saying he is optimistic they would act early next year.
For proponents, the idea of having to restart the bill in the next Congress is frustrating given the wide bipartisan support, as seen by the Senate vote.
Democratic Sen Richard Blumenthal, who introduced the bill with conservative GOP Sen. Marsha Blackburn, said there’s an urgency to addressing this issue, as kids are being “deeply and desperately” harmed daily by things they encounter on social media.
But he also acknowledged getting the bill through was never going to be easy.
“We’re prepared to fight Big Tech. It’s mustering armies of lawyers and lobbyists against us, and it would like to kill the bill,” he said.
Just like there’s wide bipartisan support for the bill, its opposition is also made up of strange bedfellows. The ACLU, tech lobbyists and LGBTQ advocacy groups, to name just a few. They worry the bill could open the door to politicians policing the internet.
In a press conference this summer, Evan Greer, executive director of the digital rights group Fight for the Future, said KOSA purports to focus on the design flaws and privacy violations of social media companies, “but in fact, unfortunately, is effectively a blank check for censorship of any piece of content that an administration could claim is harmful to kids.”
Some LGBTQ groups worry information about gender identity and sexual orientation could be targeted for censorship under the bill. But at the same time, others argue LGBTQ youth face greater dangers from social media.
“We want kids to be able to access information (and) find their community online,” said Zach Zaslow, vice president of advocacy and community health at Children’s Hospital Colorado, which supports KOSA. “We know that some of the kids that are gay, non-binary transgender, they may be the most likely to be at risk of suicide. They're the kids who are most (in) need of protection from some of the harms that kids are encountering online.”
The last time Congress passed a bill trying to protect kids on the internet was in 1998, when the world wide web was just nascent.
Dr. Sandra Fritsch, medical director at the Pediatric Mental Health Institute at Children’s Hospital Colorado, said a lot has changed for young people since then. The hospital declared a youth mental health emergency in May 2021, during the coronavirus pandemic.
“The child mental health pandemic really predates COVID-19. It was on the rise between 2009 and 2019 pretty significantly. That corresponded and went along with the association with rising screen time,” she explained. While Fritsch added correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation, the two things — the decline in kids’ mental health and their increased internet usage — have gone hand in hand.
For backers of KOSA, the time has come for the industry to be regulated, to try to reduce everything from bullying and suicide to child sexual exploitation.
“This industry has now grown up. It is now thriving. It's time for the U.S. government to start to regulate the internet industry so that they too have to create products that are designed for child safety, at least those spaces where children are expected to participate,” said Dr. Warren Binford, a professor of pediatrics at the CU School of Medicine who has studied how technology is being used to abuse children.
Advocates liken this political push to the seatbelt moment, when society recognized it was safer for people to wear seatbelts and used the power of the government to require automakers to install them and drivers to wear them.
But whether Congress will meet this moment with the same resolve is an open question.
Last January, Lori Schott of Sterling brought her family’s tragedy to Capitol Hill; she and other parents who blame their children’s deaths on social media attended a Senate hearing with the heads of top social media companies.
She said the issue for her is cut and dry; right now, the industry is unregulated, and risky.
“We're in agriculture out in Eastern Colorado. We have regulations to abide by and they are on a free-for-all because they're hiding behind the Section 230,” she said, referencing a part of federal law that protects internet platforms from being punished for the content their users post. “They can't be held liable. And these social media companies need to be held liable.”
Urged on by a Senator, META head Mark Zuckerberg created a viral moment when he turned to the crowd of parents, holding photos of their children, to apologize. But Schott, who had a photo of her daughter Annalee in her arms, noted he doesn’t support KOSA.
“Where’s their moral compass in all of this?” she asked at the time.
If Congress does not act, many following this issue expect states to start stepping in to crack down on online content on their own.
