Why the Kids Online Safety Act isn't

Here's one I have been intending to post about for awhile!

A bill called the "Kids Online Safety Act" sounds like motherhood and apple pie, right? Surely we all want kids to be safe online?

But much like housing developments that are named "Fox Run" or "Maple Grove" or otherwise after things that are not there, KOSA would in fact make kids--and a very particular kids about whom we already have reason to worry--much less safe online. 

This is Shadow.
Shadow is a sheep who lives in Worcester and is not a wolf pretending to be a sheep.

Ars Technica in a piece from August has a history of where we've been with this bill in previous sessions of Congress before turning to some of the issues with the current bill: 

...when Blumenthal introduced KOSA last year, the bill faced immediate and massive blowback from more than 90 organizations—including tech groups, digital rights advocates, legal experts, child safety organizations, and civil rights groups. These critics warned lawmakers of KOSA's many flaws, but they were most concerned that the bill imposed a vague "duty of care" on platforms that was "effectively an instruction to employ broad content filtering to limit minors’ access to certain online content." The fear was that the duty of care provision would likely lead platforms to over-moderate and imprecisely filter content deemed controversial—things like information on LGBTQ+ issues, drug addiction, eating disorders, mental health issues, or escape from abusive situations.

So, regulators took a red pen to KOSA, which was reintroduced in May 2023 and amended this July, striking out certain sections and adding new provisions. KOSA supporters claim that the changes adequately address critics' feedback. These supporters, including tech groups that helped draft the bill, told Ars that they're pushing for the amended bill to pass this year.

What are the issues still? Critics note that the "duty of care" section is still vague. As TechFreedom outlined in their letter opposing the bill:

The unconstitutionality of KOSA’s duty of care is highlighted by its vague and unmeetable nature. Platforms cannot “prevent and mitigate” the complex psychological issues that arise from circumstances across an individual’s entire life, which may manifest in their online activity. These circumstances mean that material harmful to one minor may be helpful or even lifesaving to another, particularly when it concerns eating disorders, self-harm, drug use, and bullying. Minors are individuals, with differing needs, emotions, and predispositions. Yet KOSA would require platforms to undertake an unworkable one-size fits-all approach to deeply personal issues, thus ultimately serving the best interests of no minors. 

As Fight for the Future notes in their November letter of opposition: 

...KOSA would counter-intuitively encourage platforms to collect more personal information about all users. KOSA would require platforms “reasonably likely to be used” by anyone under the age of 17—in practice, virtually all online services—to place some stringent limits on minors’ use of their service, including restricting the ability of other users to find a minor’s account and limiting features such as notifications that could increase the minor’s use of the service...Age verification may require users to provide platforms with personally identifiable information such as date of birth and government-issued identification documents, which can threaten users’ privacy, including through the risk of data breaches, and chill their willingness to access sensitive information online because they cannot do so anonymously. 

The piece, though, that I find most concerning is the empowerment of state attorneys general. It is not news that we have attorneys general in some states who are actively limiting the rights of, well, just about everyone. Under the bill as proposed, if an attorney general finds content harmful to minors, that attorney general could sue. It is not hard to see how this leads to loss of access for information about LGBTQIA support (note that's Senator Blackburn who is a co-sponsor confirming it could be used this way), birth control and abortion (that Jezebel piece is quite good in running through the issues), racial inequity (Blackburn also thinks what she thinks is critical race theory is dangerous), and on and on. 

And from a specific Massachusetts perspective, the worst part? Senator Elizabeth Warren is a co-sponsor (check the list). 

So, what is there to do?

Well, Massachusetts, we have to get Warren off this, for sure. You can contact her office here, There are phone numbers for her offices here.

Should it pass the Senate, it would go to the House, so get in touch with your House reps, as well.

If you aren't in Massachusetts, the above holds for you, as well. 

The other thing we can do, though, is share all over that the Kids Online Safety Act doesn't. People need to understand that this would deny first young people but quite likely all of us access to information that is, in many cases, life-saving and affirming.