Senate advances the latest Kids Online Safety Act out of committee

Senate advances the latest Kids Online Safety Act out of committee The House passed its own version of the contentious online safety bill in June. The Senate Commerce Committee has voted to advance the latest version of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), Politico reports, opening a path for a Senate floor vote. The House of Representatives already passed its own version of the bill as part of the larger Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act in June, which bundles KOSA with COPPA 2.0, a children-and-teens-focused privacy law. While pushing KOSA through committee opens up the possibility for a vote, the version of the bill the House passed features some key distinctions from the Senate's take. Disagreements in both houses over the finer details of the bill have led to it being abandoned in previous years, including in 2024, the last time the Senate passed KOSA. Across its drafts, the proposed law has generally sought to require social media companies and other online platforms to build in stronger protections for children. The Senate's current version requires social media apps to provide ways for children and teens to opt out of addictive features like algorithmic recommendations. It also includes language that says online platforms have a "duty of care" to mitigate harm from content that promotes things like sexual exploitation and eating disorders. The House version of the bill notably doesn't include the same provision. KOSA has been backed by companies like OpenAI, Apple, Microsoft, X and Snap — some of which contributed to the Senate's language — and opposed by industry groups like NetChoice as well as digital rights organizations. Opponents of the bill are primarily concerned with the ways it bills could be used to censor speech and endanger users' privacy. "Despite the usual and continued insistence that KOSA protects kids, the duty of care enforced by a Trump FTC would be a censorship and surveillance nightmare, especially for LGBTQ+ youth who need online communities now more than ever to connect, organize politically, and find resources that are being restricted in public space by the Trump administration and rightwing state governments," Fight for the Future said in a statement. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) expressed its own concerns with how KOSA and other bills could violate peoples' right to privacy. "Bills that incentivize or require age verification promise safety, but all they deliver is a future where everyone has to undergo invasive identity verification measures that will almost certainly put their sensitive data at risk," Jenna Leventoff, the ACLU's senior policy counsel, said in a statement. "We shouldn't need to fork over our IDs, biometrics, or personal information to access the Internet, but that's exactly what will happen if these bills become law."