What’s next for KOSA, the controversial ‘child safety’ bill that could change online speech

We’ve talked a lot on Decoder about various attempts to regulate the internet in the United States and how they all run into the very simple fact that almost everything on the internet is speech, and the First Amendment prohibits most speech regulations in this country. Literally, it says, “Congress shall make no law...” and that’s why we don’t have any laws.

But there’s a major internet speech regulation currently making its way through Congress, and it has a really good chance of becoming law. It’s called KOSPA: the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act, which passed in the Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support late last month. You’ve probably heard of KOSPA’s predecessor KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act — it got bundled up with another bill called COPPA 2.0, the Children and Teen’s Online Privacy Protection Act, and that’s how you get KOSPA.

At a broad level, KOSPA is supposed to tackle two big issues: better protecting the privacy of minors online and making tech platforms more responsible for what those minors see and do.

COPPA 2.0 is basically a spec bump — the first COPPA, passed in 1998, made it so websites and social media apps couldn’t knowingly have users under the age of 13 on the platform without their parents’ consent. Of course, that hasn’t stopped kids from using any of these things, and there’s been a host of research and experiences with kids on the internet since, so COPPA 2.0 bumps that age up to 17 and bans things like showing targeted ads to minors. This feels relatively straightforward.

It’s the second part, the KOSA part, that’s been controversial for some time and remains controversial even as the bill gathers momentum. KOSA creates what’s called a “duty of care” for platforms like Meta, Google, TikTok, and others, effectively making them liable for showing harmful content to kids. That’s a speech regulation, through and through — and like every speech regulation, that means KOSPA has to get over the First Amendment.

KOSPA certainly has opponents making that argument. But there’s also a strong argument that the government’s interest in protecting children is enough to overcome that problem and that the political power of parents being worried about the effects of the internet will push KOSPA through.

But KOSPA is far from a done deal. It hasn’t passed the House of Representatives, which is now in recess until September, and House leadership has indicated they may not even consider the bill in its current form.

So, there’s a lot to talk about. To break it all down, I invited on Verge senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner, who’s been covering these bills for months now, to explain what’s going on, what these bills actually do, and what the path forward for this legislation looks like.