After decades of inadequate digital safeguards, toothless federal regulation, and little legal recourse, American families may finally witness the most comprehensive update to kids online safety law in decades.
This week, after years of hard work by advocates and lawmakers, the House Energy and Commerce Committee advanced a package of kids online safety legislation to the House floor, and the Senate unanimously passed the Children and Teens Online Privacy Protection Act. If enacted, these bills would strengthen parents' abilities to effectively protect their kids online while also providing the means to hold commercial pornography websites, social media platforms, AI chatbot companies, app stores, app developers, and other entities accountable for failing to protect children.
The legislative package is a critical step in the right direction, but there is a lot more work to be done. The legislative package suffers from some serious flaws that, if passed as is, would end up doing more harm than good.
The Senate bill makes important changes to the 1998 Children's Online Privacy Protection Act by updating the liability standards for websites and apps that violate the privacy of minors. However, these standards still only require that these digital services obtain verifiable parental consent for minors under 13 years old.
Unfortunately, online harm doesn't stop when a child turns 13. Mason Edens was fed pro-suicide content by TikTok for thirteen straight days before he took his own life at age 16. Adam Raine, who was encouraged to take his own life by ChatGPT, was 16. So, too, was Carter Bremseth, when he took his own life after being "sextorted" by an online predator on Snapchat -- an experience that 20 percent of 13- to 20-year-olds report having experienced.
The tragic loss of Adam Raine inspired Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) to draft their chatbot bill, the GUARD Act, to have protections for all minors under 18. Stories like these just skim the surface. An entire generation is being exploited systematically. That's why Australia's new law keeps kids off of social media until 16, and why presidential hopeful Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has expressed support for similar legislation in California.
These stories are also why 81 percent of U.S. adults favor parental consent for minors to use social media; why more than half of Americans want verification for social media and AI companions; why 80 percent of voters want pornography age-restricted; and why, by a nine-to-one ratio, voters want Congress to support children's safety over technological innovation.
The legislative package also strips out the Kids Online Safety Act's duty of care for social media companies, which is the heart of the bill. A duty of care would legally require these companies to take reasonable measures to preemptively design their products to prevent and mitigate harm to kids. Without this, these companies will only continue to prioritize maximizing profit over protecting kids. And we already know what disastrous road this leads down.
Moreover, if passed as is, the current preemption provisions would have the effect of creating a ceiling for kids' online safety nationwide, rather than a floor upon which states can build. For example, the SCREEN Act would preempt state laws like Wyoming's age verification law, which has a stronger standard for which websites and platforms are required to age-gate obscene content.
The goal of any federal preemption of a kids online safety package should be more safety, not less. Congress should therefore preempt laws that directly conflict with federal legislation without prohibiting other laws that establish greater digital protections for minors. Fortunately, the Senate version of the Kids Online Safety Act has already refined the language by expressly prohibiting such legislation from being used to block "greater protections" for minors.
Here, a further warning must be issued. Lobbyists in Washington are openly stating that the purpose of this package is to mollify child safety advocates so industry can pressure Congress into passing legislation that broadly preempts the artificial intelligence industry from state regulation while also keeping federal regulation to an utter minimum. One insider spoke of "leveraging, or using, possibly, a kid's package ... to get AI across the finish line." This maneuver would cynically exploit a broken generation of children in pursuit of the interests of the AI industry.
Should leadership cater to Big Tech and make this a bargaining chip for sweeping federal preemption of state AI regulations, this legislation will have the opposite of its intended effect. Not only that, it would betray the Americans who need protection the most: our children.
Congress is right to want to overhaul federal kids online safety law. But American families need real, effective solutions. Lawmakers can pass robust protections or they can do industry's bidding. They can't do both.