Senate Approves Child Online Safety Legislation

 On Tuesday, the Democrat-led Senate passed legislation that seeks to shore up protections for children on the internet. In a bipartisan display, 91 senators voted in favor of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Action (COPPA) 2.0. Three senators opposed the bills while six members did not cast votes.

“The Senate kept its promise to parents and passed the Kids Online Safety Act ‘KOSA’ and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act ‘COPPA 2.0,'” Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in a post to X. “The most important update to federal laws protecting kids on the internet in decades The House must pass them now.”

KOSA would “require platforms to enable the strongest privacy settings by default, force platforms to prevent and mitigate specific dangers to minors, provide parents and educators new controls to help protect children, and require independent audits and research into social media companies,” according to a press release from the office of Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), who introduced the bill alongside Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT).

Blackburn’s website features a breakdown of the bill that further states it would create “a duty for online platforms to prevent and mitigate specific dangers to minors, including promotion of suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, sexual exploitation, and advertisements for certain illegal products (e.g. tobacco and alcohol).” It also says KOSA would require “social media platforms to provide minors with options to protect their information, disable addictive product features, and opt out of personalized algorithmic recommendations.”

The press release noted that Blackburn and Blumenthal “first introduced the Kids Online Safety Act in February 2022 following reporting by the Wall Street Journal and after spearheading a series of five subcommittee hearings with social media companies and advocates on the repeated failures by tech giants to protect kids on their platforms.”

A press release from the office of Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) said COPPA 2.0, which Cassidy and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) unveiled to update the original COPPA bill from 1998 that directed the Federal Trade Commission to enforce online privacy for minors, would “[b]uild on COPPA by prohibiting internet companies from collecting personal information from users who are 13 to 16 years old without their consent” and “[b]an targeted advertising to children and teens.”

 

COPPA 2.0 would also “[r]evise COPPA’s ‘actual knowledge’ standard to close the loophole that allows covered platforms to ignore kids and teens on their site; Create an ‘Eraser Button’ by requiring companies to permit users to eliminate personal information from a child or teen when technologically feasible; and Establish data minimization rules to prohibit the excessive collection of children and teens’ data,” the press release added.

Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT), Rand Paul (R-KY), and Ron Wyden (D-OR) comprised the trio who rejected the legislation. They each offered explanations for opposing KOSA in particular, raising concerns over free speech and censorship.

“Government mandates and censorship will not protect children online,” Paul said in a post to X, adding, “The internet may pose new problems but there is an age old solution to this issue. Free minds & parental guidance are the best means to protect our children online.” In a post to X of his own, Lee said he was “proud to have introduced the SCREEN Act, which would require pornographic websites to adopt real age-verification for visitors,” but “it was blocked from consideration and did not receive a vote” when he offered the legislation as an amendment to KOSA.

Wyden said he feared KOSA “could be used to sue services that offer privacy-enhancing technologies like encryption or anonymity features that are essential to young people’s ability to communicate securely and privately without being spied on by predators online” and took “seriously concerns voiced by the American Civil Liberties Union, Fight for the Future, and LGBTQ+ teens and advocates that a future MAGA administration could still use this bill to pressure companies to censor gay, trans and reproductive health information.”

The bills now head to the GOP-controlled House, which is in recess for the remainder of the summer. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) reportedly told CNBC earlier this month that he loved “the idea” behind them. “We’ll be looking at the details of the exact legislation, but I suspect it’ll have a lot of support,” he added.

President Joe Biden urged the House to quickly pass KOSA. “While my Administration has taken important steps to address the harms of social media and online platforms, we need action by Congress to protect our kids online and hold Big Tech accountable for the national experiment they are running on our children for profit,” he said in a statement.