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Are you a young person fighting back against bad bills like KOSA? Become an EFF member at a new, discounted Neon membership level specifically for you–stickers included!
For the past two years, Congress has been trying to revise the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) to address criticisms from EFF, human and digital rights organizations, LGBTQ groups, and others, that the core provisions of the bill will censor the internet for everyone and harm young people. All of those changes fail to solve KOSA’s inherent censorship problem: As long as the “duty of care” remains in the bill, it will still force platforms to censor perfectly legal content. (You can read our analyses here and here.)
Despite never addressing this central problem, some members of Congress are convinced that a new change will avoid censoring the internet: KOSA’s liability is now theoretically triggered only for content that is recommended to users under 18, rather than content that they specifically search for. But that’s still censorship—and it fundamentally misunderstands how search works online.
Congress should be smart enough to recognize this bait-and-switch fails to solve KOSA’s many faults
As a reminder, under KOSA, a platform would be liable for not “acting in the best interests of a [minor] user.” To do this, a platform would need to “tak[e] reasonable measures in its design and operation of products and services to prevent and mitigate” a long list of societal ills, including anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance use disorders, physical violence, online bullying and harassment, sexual exploitation and abuse, and suicidal behaviors. As we have said, this will be used to censor what young people and adults can see on these platforms. The bills’
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