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THE Child Safety Online Act (KOSA) is poised to become law that would make social platforms much more accountable for protecting children who use their products. With 62 senators supporting the bill, KOSA appears poised to clear the Senate and advance in the House.
KOSA creates a duty of care for social media platforms to limit addictive or harmful features that have obviously affected children’s mental health. The bill also requires platforms to develop more robust parental controls.
But in a previous version of KOSA, LGBTQ advocates pushed back on part of the bill that would give each state’s attorneys general the ability to decide what content is inappropriate for children. This raises alarm bells at a time when LGBTQ rights are under threat. attack at the state level, and books with LGBTQ characters and themes are in the works censorship in public schools. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), who introduced the bill with Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), said that a top priority for conservatives should be to “protect minor children from transgender people” [sic] in this culture”, including on social networks.
After several amendments, KOSA’s new draft allayed some concerns from LGBTQ rights groups like GLAAD, the Human Rights Campaign and the Trevor Project; On the one hand, the FTC will instead be responsible for nationwide enforcement of KOSA, rather than state-specific enforcement by attorneys general.
A letter to Senator Blumenthal of seven LGBTQ rights organizations said: “The significant changes you proposed to KOSA in the draft released on February 15, 2024 significantly mitigate the risk that it will be misused to suppress LGBTQ+ resources or stifle the young people’s access to online communities. Therefore, if this bill moves forward, our organizations will not oppose its adoption.
Other privacy-minded activist groups, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Fight for the Future, remain skeptical of the bill even after the changes.
In a statement shared with TechCrunch, Fight for the Future said these changes are promising, but don’t go far enough.
“As we have been saying for months, KOSA’s fundamental problem is that its due diligence covers content-specific aspects of content recommendation systems, and the new changes fail to address this problem. In fact, personalized recommender systems are explicitly listed under the definition of a design feature covered by duty of care,” Fight for the Future said. “This means that a future Federal Trade Commission (FTC) could still use KOSA to pressure platforms to automatically filter important but controversial topics like LGBTQ issues and abortion, claiming that algorithmic recommendation of this content “causes” mental health problems that are covered by the duty of care such as anxiety and depression.
Blumenthal and Blackburn’s offices said changes to the duty of care were made to regulate the business model and practices of social media companies, rather than the content posted there.
KOSA was also changed last year to address previous concerns about age verification requirements for users of all ages, which could put privacy and security at risk. Jason Kelley, the EFF’s director of activism, fears these amendments will not be enough to avoid dangerous interpretations of the bill.
“Despite these latest amendments, KOSA remains a dangerous and unconstitutional censorship bill that we continue to oppose,” Kelly said in a statement to TechCrunch. “It would still leave federal and state officials to decide what information can be shared online and how anyone can access lawful speech.” It would still take a considerable number of websites, apps and online platforms to filter and block legal and important speech. This would almost certainly always result in age verification requirements.
The issue of child safety online has remained at the forefront of lawmakers’ minds, especially after five top tech CEOs testified before the Senate a few weeks ago. With growing support for KOSA, Blumenthal’s office told TechCrunch he intends to accelerate the bill’s advancement.
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