The Kids Online Safety Act’s last stand

Two years ago, Maurine Molak visited Capitol Hill for the first time to support a proposed law she believes could have saved her son. David Molak was a lanky teen who loved basketball — “a joy of a kid,” she says. Then, as she’s recounted several times to legislators, he got injured while playing. He began spending more and more time on social media and video games, and according to Molak, his online life became a compulsion.

David would check his phone in the middle of the night and steal money from his parents to spend on in-game items. He became a target of cyberbullying on Instagram, which she says failed to respond even when friends reported the harassment. In 2016, at age 16, he died by suicide.

Molak was no stranger to stately halls or legislators. Within two years of her son’s death, she’d successfully advocated in Texas for David’s Law, which let schools investigate cyberbullying outside their walls. The US Congress felt more opaque and less accessible: “I was apprehensive, and really frankly nervous about it,” she says. But she was joined by a group of other parents, all of whom had descended on Washington to pass the newly announced Kids Online Safety Act: a bill meant to raise the standards for how social media companies protect kids.

When I met up with Molak at a cafe in December 2024, she was on her 14th trip to Congress — and exhausted. She was getting ready to join a rally for KOSA outside the US Capitol, the latest in what seemed like an endless series of pushes for the bill. She kept a sticker on her phone commemorating the fight against cyberbullying: a chat bubble with three red dots in the middle, which she says stand for “stop and think.”

Since 2022, KOSA has become simultaneously one of the most popular and most controversial bills in Washington. It cleared the Senate with rare bipartisan support, earning a nearly unanimous vote of 91–3 when it passed in July. But months later, as 2024’s legislative session draws to a close, it’s on life support in the House.

Despite broad support for KOSA’s overall aims, Republicans and Democrats alike have expressed reservations about the power it could grant regulators over the internet. Tech companies are split on it: Microsoft and Elon Musk’s X are lobbying openly in favor, while Meta and Google have quietly opposed the bill. As parents like Molak argue it’s the best way to prevent mental health crises, sexual abuse, and even suicide among young people, civil liberties advocates warn it could cut online lifelines for some of the country’s most vulnerable teens.

Now, both sides are down to the last week, and the odds of a vote look increasingly small.

The bombshell

KOSA emerged in the aftermath of a congressional crisis over how to handle social media and kids, sparked by a former Facebook employee named Frances Haugen.

In late 2021, The Wall Street Journal began reporting on what it dubbed the “Facebook Files”: a series of documents released by Haugen, laying out what the company (since renamed Meta) knew about its impact on young users. Haugen tells The Verge she hadn’t sought out information about the topic — for her and many of her colleagues, “it just wasn’t a thing on top of our minds.” But when a Journal reporter asked her about it, she was concerned by what she found. One file, for instance, detailed Instagram’s research into how its platform made teen girls feel about their bodies. It found that, among other things, 32 percent reported “when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.” 

The company defended its work, saying the reports demonstrated a “commitment to understanding complex and difficult issues young people may struggle with.” But lawmakers were furious. The Senate Commerce Committee marched in Haugen, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, and Facebook’s then-global head of safety, Antigone Davis, to learn more about what the company knew about social media’s risks and how Congress should respond. 

In February 2022, after months of hearings, committee members Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) introduced the Kids Online Safety Act.

The bill was designed to put the onus for children’s safety on the social platforms that supported them. It proposed imposing what’s known as a “duty of care” — a responsibility that would require tech companies to take reasonable steps to mitigate harm for their youngest users. If sites breached that duty by recklessly rolling out a new feature that predictably put kids at risk, (perhaps by making them more accessible to adult strangers, facilitating harassment, or promoting self-harm content), they could be sued by state attorneys general or the federal government.

Conversely, sites could limit their liability by constraining algorithms that might serve eating disorder content to teens, limiting features that encourage kids to spend excessive time on their services, or restricting advertising toward teens that could be considered deceptive.

Beyond the duty of care, KOSA required social media sites to install safeguards for minors’ accounts, including default privacy settings, parental tools, and responsive mechanisms to report bullying and harassment. While mainstream platforms commonly had some of these tools in place, the bill would make these kinds of mechanisms mandatory and ensure reports actually got responses in a “timely manner.”

This wasn’t the first attempt to legislate child safety. In 2018, Congress passed FOSTA-SESTA, meant to remove protections for sites that host sex trafficking content (including trafficking of minors). Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), who authored the long-standing Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), has long sought to update it to raise the age of its protections and expand its scope. And a bipartisan group of lawmakers including Blumenthal and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) pushed for the EARN IT Act, meant to spur a crackdown on child sexual abuse material.

The Facebook Files, though, granted the initial KOSA draft a rare sense of momentum. “We are on the cusp of a new era for Big Tech imposing a sense of responsibility that has been completely lacking so far,” Blumenthal announced.

To parents like Molak, the bill was a salve to years of frustration. Had KOSA been in place, Molak believes, David might not have become so compulsively attached to games and social media. When he was bullied online, platforms might have been legally required to respond in a “reasonable” amount of time. 

To others, however, KOSA was misguided — and dangerous.

Over the course of 2022, KOSA racked up just over a dozen cosponsors on both sides of the aisle. But it also racked up fierce opposition from digital rights groups, free expression advocates, and LGBTQ+ rights organizations. In November of that year, more than 90 groups warned Senate leaders that KOSA would effectively instruct platforms “to employ broad content filtering to limit minors’ access to certain online content.”

On top of that, they said, KOSA could become a tool for political vendettas. “Online services would face substantial pressure to over-moderate, including from state Attorneys General seeking to make political points about what kind of information is appropriate for young people,” wrote the signatories, including Fight for the Future, GLAAD, the Wikimedia Foundation, and others. “At a time when books with LGBTQ+ themes are being banned from school libraries and people providing healthcare to trans children are being falsely accused of ‘grooming,’ KOSA would cut off another vital avenue of access to information for vulnerable youth.” 

Conservatives, meanwhile, argued KOSA didn’t go far enough. In March 2022, conservative think tank and, later, Project 2025 organizer the Heritage Foundation argued that “gender ideology” — a reference to trans issues and providing gender-affirming care — was a “glaring omission” from the list of online harms in the bill. (Heritage has more recently praised KOSA, which has gone through several rounds of changes.) 

KOSA was already showing up in big tech lobbying disclosures, too. (Those filings don’t indicate how much was spent specifically on it.) But tech companies didn’t need to say much publicly when so many civil liberties groups were already fighting at the front lines.

Despite this opposition, in July 2022, KOSA unanimously passed out of the Commerce Committee. The massive show of bipartisan support was significant, and unusual for a substantive piece of legislation. After that… it stalled. KOSA advocates who’d been excited and hopeful grew anxious.

As the months ticked away, KOSA was starting to look like the countless other internet regulations that had been announced to great fanfare, only to meet a quiet demise. Then, its creators brought it back to life.

In May 2023, Blackburn and Blumenthal refreshed and reintroduced KOSA in a new legislative session, aiming to address criticism of their first try. Most significantly, the bill stated that it would not prevent platforms from serving teens content they specifically searched out, nor would it punish services for recommending resources meant to mitigate the kinds of harms that it named — keeping kids away from suicide content, for instance, shouldn’t mean locking away suicide prevention posts.

But groups including Fight for the Future and the American Civil Liberties Union — as well as LGBTQ+ groups concerned about censorship — maintained their opposition to the bill. “KOSA’s core approach still threatens the privacy, security and free expression of both minors and adults by deputizing platforms of all stripes to police their users and censor their content under the guise of a ‘duty of care,’” ACLU senior policy counsel Cody Venzke said in a statement at the time.

For nearly another year, KOSA remained in limbo. Europe was marching steadily toward new online regulations: the European Commission was gearing up to enforce the massive Digital Services Act, and the UK passed its Online Safety Act, which covered some of the same ground as KOSA. But the US was barrelling toward a presidential election while war in the Middle East (and the reaction to the US government’s response) distracted from many domestic issues. Opponents of KOSA could take a breath. Then, once more, the bill came back.

The path to passage

After more months of uncertainty, KOSA went through another revision in February 2024 — which made two important changes. It removed the ability of state AGs to enforce the duty of care, a particular concern for LGBTQ+ groups that feared legal attacks from red states. And it added a definition of what “design features” companies should be wary of rolling out, emphasizing a focus on companies’ business motives. Its nonexhaustive list included infinite scrolling, notifications, and in-game purchases. 

The changes appeased some longtime critics of the bill. Several LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, including GLAAD, the Human Rights Campaign, and The Trevor Project, formally removed their opposition, telling Blumenthal that the “considerable changes … significantly mitigate the risk of it being misused to suppress LGBTQ+ resources or stifle young people’s access to online communities.” KOSA gained more than 60 Senate cosponsors, all but ensuring passage. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said he’d work with the bill’s sponsors to advance it. 

Despite all this, though, months went by without a vote. Advocates pestered Schumer to put KOSA on the calendar. But the bill competed for floor time with a never-ending list of alternate priorities — a foreign aid package and even a bill that could ban TikTok on national security grounds were among them.

Finally, just before Congress would take its summer break, Schumer acted. He put KOSA to a vote, bundled with the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0), which raised the age for internet privacy protections for kids. On the day that Schumer announced he’d move the bill forward, Molak said that “seeing this bill across the finish line is my second-greatest wish” — second, of course, to getting David back. 

KOSA passed with remarkably strong support in the Senate, receiving just three no votes from Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR), Rand Paul (R-KY), and Mike Lee (R-UT). Their specific concerns varied, but all three feared unintended consequences for online speech.

As Congress adjourned for the summer, it finally seemed like KOSA would really become law, as long as House leadership took it up. But history repeated itself yet again: months ticked by, and legislators never got the opportunity to cast their votes.

The great debate

Nearly all social networks are, at a fundamental level, speech platforms: places where people congregate to chat, vent, chase viral fame, and find like-minded associates. A large amount of that speech is arguably harmful, like disinformation, hate speech, and the glorification of risky or violent acts. A nontrivial portion is illegal, including threats, harassment, and child sexual abuse material. But any law that alters the incentives for platforms to police speech will face questions about unintended consequences — and whether it will actually work.

Over years of debate, supporters of KOSA have promoted one fundamental message: social media is dangerous to children, and if tech companies aren’t legally forced to take responsibility for harm, they — and the legislators who failed to stop them — will have blood on their hands. 

“It is baffling to me that there is hesitation to pass this life-saving legislation,” says Erin Popolo, whose 17-year-old daughter Emily died by suicide following Instagram and Snapchat bullying in 2021. On the Senate floor last week, Blumenthal recounted the story of teenager Jesse Harrington, who he says displayed addictive behaviors toward social media before his death by suicide just months ago. “Anybody saying, let’s wait until next session so we can get it really right, that is saying they’re okay with more kids dying,” he said.

At a rally outside the Capitol last Tuesday, KOSA supporters spoke in front of a pile of 150 gifts stacked like a Christmas tree, meant to represent the children lost to online harms since KOSA’s reintroduction in May 2023. Shama Reed and her daughter Shamail Henderson told the story of how a 15-year-old Henderson was kidnapped by a 27-year-old man she’d met on social media and, over 30 days, forced to have sex with “hundreds” of men.

“My mom could tell me not to talk to adult strangers, but she couldn’t control those who contacted me,” Henderson says at the rally. “Tech companies should absolutely not be recommending content from adult accounts to teenage accounts. There should be no debate about this.”

KOSA advocates have a long list of complaints about social media. Some are tied to a specific instance of harm: cyberbullies whose harassment wasn’t removed, for instance, or predators that weren’t kicked out before targeting a child. Others are much broader, like claims that recommendation algorithms and other features are designed to addict teens at the cost of their mental health. “They were targeted to keep us on apps longer, to profit off our pain,” says youth advocate and high schooler Vanessa Li. “No one really knew about the harms of social media until it started happening.”

Katie Queen, a pediatrician, said it used to be “rare” to see a patient with anxiety, depression, or an eating disorder in her practice. Now, she says, “over half of my patients are suffering with some sort of behavioral health or mental health disease.”

The scientific case against social media isn’t clean-cut. While there’s been a well-documented rise in mental health concerns among children, it’s difficult to draw a causal link to social media use. People like Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra have connected the most recent upticks to the covid-19 pandemic, which he said placed “an exceptional burden on the mental well-being of our nation’s families.” Another researcher, Boston College professor Peter Gray, has said the overall trend “long preceded the internet” and links it to the decline of independent play. US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has called for warning labels on social media, but critics have responded by pointing to mixed research about social media’s effect on kids — including positive impacts on children from marginalized groups who may have fewer in-person outlets for support. Murthy’s own report on the topic, published in 2023, noted social media also provided “positive community and connection” for teens, particularly for “racial, ethnic, and sexual and gender minorities.”

Despite the bill’s many rounds of changes, critics still fear that handing the government power to regulate social media will backfire. Julie Jones, who got involved in the opposition to KOSA through Fight for the Future, is the mother of a 20-year-old transgender son and a nonbinary 16-year-old. Jones has watched conservative politicians agitate for years against allowing children (and in some cases, adults) to transition, down to encouraging child protective services to investigate parents like her. She’s seen the reassurances that KOSA won’t be weaponized — but an early comment by Blackburn appearing to suggest using the duty of care to “protect” children from trans content still rings in her head.

A less frequently discussed issue is age verification. While KOSA doesn’t formally require sites to verify whether users are over or under 18 years of age, critics fear that setting special standards for minors will encourage or even require privacy-invading methods for confirming age. (Blumenthal has denied this claim and objects to age verification, saying the “potential for exploitation and misuse would be huge.”)

“KOSA in general, and these sorts of bills, I think are born out of good intentions,” says Jones. “But what are you willing to sacrifice for that?” Jones fears how President-elect Donald Trump’s Federal Trade Commission might choose to enforce the law, questioning how enforcers will determine what is harmful to kids.

Asked about that statement, Wes Hodges, an adviser for coalitions at Heritage, says KOSA doesn’t cover trans content and that a “fair reading of the bill” would not allow for a “blanket prohibition” of distributing such information. “This bill is very limited to [that] list of concerns” detailed in the bill, he says. “We don’t want KOSA to have mission creep.”

Sarah Philips, who works on campaigns for digital rights group Fight for the Future, is dubious. “We should believe them when they write it down,” says Philips. “At this point, I’m not even asking for people to fight back. I’m asking for them to not hand them the reins and give them the ability to do whatever they want.”

KOSA doesn’t mandate a certain course of action by tech companies, and Philips worries that, as happened following FOSTA-SESTA, platforms will proactively purge content to limit their risks, even if it’s not unambiguously banned. In FOSTA-SESTA’s case, it’s not even clear there were real benefits. The bill was meant to reduce trafficking, but it’s more frequently credited with simply putting non-trafficked sex workers at risk.

Wyden, one of just three senators to vote against KOSA and the only Democrat to do so, compared it to FOSTA-SESTA in an op-ed explaining his vote. “I warned at the time that bill would do little to catch predators or help victims, and would only drive sex work to darker corners of the web, or the streets. Unfortunately, I’ve been proved right.”

Prior to the latest KOSA revision, Wyden acknowledged some progress, including the addition of language that it will not preempt tech’s legal liability Section 230. But he told Axios he still feared KOSA could be used to attack encryption and anonymity, which teens can also use to communicate securely.

The bill’s supporters often point to its language explicitly protecting children’s ability to seek out information on their own and say it only targets the platforms’ own harmful features. Rep. Kim Schrier (D-WA), a cosponsor of the House version of the bill who practiced as a pediatrician before entering Congress, says social media can be helpful for kids who don’t have any other way to get important questions answered or find community. But in general, she says, social media is not really “something that kids need.” After all, “there’s many ways to find information, and it doesn’t need to be social media.” 

Jones disagrees. She says she’s seen too many kids for whom their online friends are their “lifeline.” 

While progressives fear conservatives weaponizing KOSA, tech industry groups have pushed Republicans to consider the risks posed to them as well. Amy Bos, director of state and federal affairs for tech industry group NetChoice, warns that KOSA could give Democratic AGs “power to censor conservative speech.” The group frequently opposes Republican-backed internet speech regulations, but it’s also raised the alarm against laws signed by Democratic governors — like a California rule encouraging sites to police hate speech and disinformation.

“Should platforms stop children from seeing climate-related news because climate change is one of the leading sources of anxiety amongst younger generations?” asked Paul, another of KOSA’s rare dissenters in the Senate, in a dear colleague letter shortly ahead of the vote. “Should pro-life groups have their content censored because platforms worry that it could impact the mental well-being of teenage mothers? This bill opens the door to nearly limitless content regulation.” 

All eyes on the House

As KOSA has advanced to the House, it’s Republicans that now threaten to scuttle it.

Once the Republican-controlled House became KOSA’s final hurdle, conservative speech suppression emerged as a chief concern. Even at the committee level, passing KOSA was far more of a slog than it had been in the Senate. House Energy and Commerce Committee members managed to advance the legislation in September, but they emerged with a product that many acknowledged still needed work and some still appeared to consider fundamentally censorious. “Doesn’t all political speech induce some kind of emotional distress for those who disagree with it?” quipped Texas Republican Dan Crenshaw. 

These concerns came to a head in October. In a Punchbowl News report, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) called the bill “very problematic,” with the potential for “unintended consequences,” casting doubt on whether it would get a vote. The result has been a pressure campaign on Johnson in the final weeks of the 118th Congress, with weary KOSA supporters anxiously making their final pleas.

Johnson seems inclined to wait until Trump resumes office in January to consider any movement. But doing so would send Congress back to square one. The bill would need to be reintroduced in both houses, and there’s no promise the momentum and coalition Blackburn and Blumenthal brought together would hold. Plus, with a unified government under Republican leadership, priorities could shift to passing legislation that could only get through under single-party control.

KOSA did not appear in the draft stopgap funding bill released by House leadership on Tuesday evening, shrinking its shot at passage this year. Blackburn and Blumenthal seethed at the snub and placed blame squarely on House Republican leadership. “To be clear: the blockade against safeguards and accountability was about padding Big Tech’s financial bottom line, not principle,” they wrote in a joint statement. “Falsehoods crafted in Silicon Valley boardrooms and parroted by Washington politicians, along with millions of dollars spent along the way, held up KOSA in the House to advance Meta and Google’s goal of profiting off our children.” Still, they resolved to continue their fight for the bill.

Before the funding bill was released, Blackburn and Blumenthal made one final attempt to get KOSA passed this session. With support from Elon Musk and later the president-elect’s son Don Jr., they undertook a last-minute revision that further narrows the definition of a mental health disorder and bars censorship based on viewpoint. “No one is probably more qualified to speak on the issue of free speech than Elon Musk,” Blackburn said on the Senate floor.

But tweaks like that do little to ameliorate censorship fears, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) writes in a blog post. “The viewpoint of users was never impacted by KOSA’s duty of care in the first place,” the EFF writes. “The duty of care is a duty imposed on platforms, not users … The FTC could still hold a platform liable for the speech it contains.”

The EFF worries the new language could still be used to punish platforms for almost anything that might provoke sad and anxious feelings — as long as the feelings “disrupted someone’s sleep, or even just changed how someone socializes or communicates.” That could cover anything from school shooting information to tackle football, the EFF says.

While companies like X, Snap, Microsoft, and Pinterest have come out in support of the bill, the largest social media companies that would be subject to KOSA, like Meta and Google, have not offered their support. Advocates claim their money is behind the bill’s troubles, noting that Meta is erecting a new data center around Johnson’s district in Louisiana. Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project and a former Hill staffer, says when a company sends in a lobbyist after it’s spent money in a way that benefits a lawmaker, “There’s no mistaking that connection.” She adds, “It is very difficult to fight against such deep-pocketed, unlimited money.”

But tech lobbying on the bill cuts both ways, says Philips. “At the same time that we’re being criticized [for] being aligned with Big Tech because we oppose KOSA on censorship grounds, co-sponsors Blumenthal and Blackburn are putting out statements with the CEO of X,” she says. 

If KOSA doesn’t pass, lawmakers will have to decide whether to start over next year. It’s a familiar exercise in tech policy — two years ago, a package of tech antitrust bills gained significant momentum but more or less died on the vine.

The House is scheduled to adjourn later this week, leaving an ever-narrowing window for KOSA to be negotiated into the must-pass bill to clear the chamber this Congress. Johnson had responded tepidly to the new X-endorsed iteration, calling himself “passionate about addressing children’s online safety” but saying he looked forward to “working with the Trump Administration to get the right bill into law.”

In the penultimate week before the holidays, I asked advocates and lawmakers about the future of KOSA — could it pass before the end of the year, and was this the end of the road if not? The almost universal response was a strained smile or a grimace. Walking off the House floor, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) told me getting Republican leadership to take up KOSA “might take an act of God,“ though she was still pushing for a vote. “In order to be in this job, you have to be an optimist, you have to remain hopeful,” said Schrier in her office — but also, she added, “clear-eyed.” 

What’s easy to lose in these deliberations is the stress it’s put on ordinary parents who have become activists — both the ones who have spent years repeating their children’s tragedies to advocate for new laws, and the ones who have spent those same years dreading the outcome if the laws pass.

In the final days of the 2024 legislative session, Molak is exhausted. She’s holding out hope but finds it hard to imagine continuing the travel and fight in Congress next year if it doesn’t pass now. Maybe she’ll turn back to advocating in Texas, where she’s already seen some success, she says. Rodgers, who is retiring from Congress and is no stranger to obstruction, bluntly says “no” when I ask if there’s any hope for the bill next year if it fails to get through in the next few days.

“It’s heartbreaking to the families, because we know what’s at stake,” says Molak. “We know that if KOSA was implemented, then kids’ lives would be saved.”

For Jones, two things can be true at the same time. She says she’d never deny the pain of parents who have lost their kids after experiencing online harms and is empathetic to their fight for a solution they believe could have spared them. But she fears the bill could put her own kids further in harm’s way. “I would never tell a parent survivor they’re wrong for feeling the way they do,” says Jones. “And I don’t think they’re wrong. But I don’t think I’m wrong either.”

Haugen, whose disclosures toppled that first domino toward KOSA, is unsurprised about where it’s ended up. Since the release of the Facebook Files, Haugen has focused her efforts in places like Canada and Australia, which last month banned social media for kids under 16. “I personally am not going to feel bad if KOSA doesn’t pass this year,” she tells me on Monday. “And that’s because my expectations for what is possible in the United States anymore are really, really low.”