Congressional lawmakers are poised to unveil a sweeping overhaul of social media laws aimed at protecting children and implementing guardrails to hold companies accountable for potential harms.
Leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee announced on Monday they had reached a bipartisan deal on the massive framework, bringing an end to months of negotiations over whether the legislative package violates First Amendment protections. The Kids Internet and Digital Safety, or KIDS, Act encompasses more than a dozen bipartisan bills that have been introduced over the last two years and unifies both parties on a number of issues.
“Coming into this Congress, we knew that protecting children and teens online would be one of the most significant challenges this committee would have to address,” Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., and ranking member Frank Pallone, D-N.J., said in a joint statement. “Through empowering parents, establishing safety as a default, strengthening privacy for children and teens, increasing transparency around data brokers, and holding Big Tech accountable, the KIDS Act delivers the 21st century protections parents have demanded and our kids deserve.”
At the center of the legislative package is the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, which seeks to establish safeguards protecting users under the age of 17. Guthrie and Pallone have been working for months to draft bipartisan language for the contentious issue.
The package will incorporate language from 14 different bills that would establish age verification for sexually explicit websites, increased safety settings for children’s accounts on social media platforms, and constraints on some social media features such as disappearing messages, among other things.
Overall, the KIDS Act would establish minimum federal standards for states to incorporate into law, overriding any state law that does not meet that level of scrutiny. Individual states can choose to enact stronger restrictions if they so choose.
Finalized text of the bill is expected as soon as this week, and the House could bring it to the floor for a vote before lawmakers adjourn for the Fourth of July recess.
The legislative package comes after the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved another version of the KIDS Act, although that initial draft passed along partisan lines. Guthrie then worked with Pallone to draft updated bipartisan language, which will receive expedited consideration.
“I’m proud to say that our continued negotiations, since that initial agreement and then following our full committee markup in March, have led to a bipartisan agreement that would establish the strongest protections to date,” Guthrie said in a separate statement. “The bipartisan KIDS Act addresses the proven harms from online platforms ranging from social media to gaming to artificial intelligence and pornography, establishes new privacy protections for children and teens, and gives parents the necessary tools to fight back against Big Tech.”
But the package may still face an uphill battle in the Senate, where a bipartisan group of senators is working on their own version of KOSA.
In the Senate version, senators are pushing for language that would “generally require” social media apps to “exercise reasonable care” in its design and features that typically cause teenagers to become addicted to the online sites. It would also require companies to meet certain requirements before implementing algorithms that “select, order, or prioritize information presented to users based on user-specific data.”
The House package does not include that language due to concerns from some lawmakers that would result in a suppression of free speech.