WASHINGTON—Over the weekend, sponsors of the misleadingly titled “Kids Online Safety Act” (KOSA) released an “updated version” of the bill’s text in a last-ditch effort to pass this digital speech regulation before the end of the year. However, the alterations to this bill do not address the core concern of KOSA—it still regulates protected American speech online and empowers bureaucrats to censor speech on platforms, importing European-style censorship rules to the U.S. KOSA still creates an Orwellian-style “online safety” council that will replace parents with bureaucrats. It additionally still poses a significant cybersecurity risk to all Americans and children.
“KOSA is a false promise to all Americans and our families—it fails to meet required protections for American speech, and it fails parents because it won’t help a single child with online safety or address parents’ concerns. Congress should reject KOSA and pursue policy solutions that actually achieve lawmakers’ stated goals to help children be safer online, such as funding law enforcement to appropriately prosecute online predators through the bipartisan Invest in Child Safety Act and more,” said Amy Bos, NetChoice Director of State & Federal Affairs.
Bos continued: “Stripping American parents and guardians of their authority and choice, replacing them with a council of bureaucrats to parent their kids online, and compelling them to surrender personal information for themselves and their children to exercise free speech is a perilous path and a breach of protected rights. We urge Congress to say NO to KOSA and pursue meaningful and legal solutions to online safety.”
This bill clearly places content-based restrictions on the online speech of Americans, importing ideas from UK and European censorship regimes that have already been used to silence speech in other countries. Its new iteration merely tweaks the language around these speech restrictions without fundamentally eliminating this problem. Under the amended KOSA, bureaucrats will be in charge of determining which “harms” platforms must restrict through an Orwellian digital speech council, and Democrat AGs in the states will still have the power to censor conservative speech. That’s not the American way—lawmakers should reject it.
Moreover, KOSA is still a children’s cybersecurity disaster in the making. It contains a de-facto age verification mandate where all companies covered by the law will need to gather and retain users’ personal identification to properly determine who is and is not a minor. This is a serious threat to children’s safety, as kids’ information is already a number-one target for cybercriminals, identity thieves and predators online. Ransomware attacks targeting school districts’ data affected 2.9 million American students in 2023, an increase of over 144% from the previous year. KOSA will force online platforms to create a honeypot of data on Americans and children that will increase prime targets for these criminals.
NetChoice has halted similar laws related to KOSA in six states so far, with rulings demonstrating that these types of laws clearly violate the First Amendment, parental rights and data security. Read more about the rulings in those lawsuits and their implications for KOSA’s constitutionality here.
Instead of replacing parents with bureaucrats, Congress should act to strengthen law enforcement to stop cybercriminals targeting children, ensure existing federal laws are being properly enforced to stop online predators, and pass a federal data privacy framework that protects the data of ALL American families.
Learn more about NetChoice’s meaningful and legal recommendations for policymakers on online safety here.
Please contact press@netchoice.org with inquiries.