Senate may soon pass 2 child online safety bills, despite worries from LGBTQ+ advocates

The Senate will vote this week on two child online safety bills, both of which have gained rare bipartisan support but split LGBTQ+ advocates.

An initial vote on the Kid’s Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the Children’s and Teens Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0) is set for Thursday, and a final vote is likely happening next week.

Related:

The Kids Online Safety Act: Experts are divided on its likely effect on LGBTQ+ youth

Progressives are divided over the important internet legislation, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren on one side and the ACLU on the other. Will KOSA ruin the internet for LGBTQ+ youth. or will it protect them?

Both bills are set to pass the Senate but need to win votes in the House. While the pieces of legislation aim to stop children from being exploited or harmed by online activities, KOSA has come under fire from some LGBTQ+ activists and groups who fear the bill will enable Republicans to block queer youth from seeing age-appropriate LGBTQ+ content online.

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The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), authored by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), mandates that social media companies take measures to prevent recommending any content that promotes mental health disorders (like eating disorders, drug use, self-harm, sexual abuse, and bullying) unless minors specifically search for such content. KOSA also requires platforms to limit features that result in compulsive usage — like autoplay and infinite scroll — or features that allow adults to contact young users or track their location. The bill says platforms must provide parents with easy-to-use tools to safeguard their child’s social media settings and notify parents if their kids are exposed to potentially hazardous materials or interactions.

The act also stipulates that companies must provide users with a dedicated page to report harmful content.

COPPA 2.0, crafted by Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), aims to establish robust online privacy protections for minors under 17. Among its provisions, the legislation would prohibit targeted advertising directed at children and teenagers and introduce an “eraser button,” enabling parents and kids to delete personal information from company databases.

The American Civil Liberties Union opposes KOSA because it believes its definition of “harm” is too broad. The ACLU says that content about gender equality or abortion rights may be censored under KOSA because some legislators may see this content as “harmful” to young people’s mental health. KOSA’s supporters include President Joe Biden as well as 46 senatorial co-sponsors, 21 of whom are Democrats, including lesbian Sen. Tammy Baldwin (WI) and LGBTQ+ allies like Sen. Amy Klobuchar (MN) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (MA).

In a press release from February of this year, the ACLU’s senior policy counsel Jenna Leventoff said, “At its core, KOSA is still an internet censorship bill that will harm the very communities it claims to protect.”

“The First Amendment guarantees everyone, including children, the right to access information free from censorship,” Leventoff said. “We urge lawmakers to continue to amend this bill so the government is no longer the one determining what content is or is not fit for children.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is strongly in favor of KOSA.

“Nothing has galvanized me and so many others of us here in the Senate more to act on kids’ online safety than meeting with parents who’ve lost loved ones,” Schumer said. “Some of these kids were bullied, others were targeted by predators or had their personal, private information stolen — practically all of them suffered deep mental health anguish in some way and felt like they had nowhere to turn.”

One of KOSA’s co-authors Sen. Blackburn said “[social media] is where children are being indoctrinated” when speaking to the Family Policy Alliance, a conservative Christian organization, in a September 2023 speech. “They’re hearing things at school and then they’re getting onto YouTube to watch a video and all of a sudden this comes to them… They click on something and, the next thing you know, they’re being inundated with it.”

KOSA has undergone many changes, and while a past version of the bill was met with a letter from major national LGBTQ+ groups including the Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD, The Trevor Project and PFLAG opposing it, they withdrew their opposition at the most current version of the bill.

“You could argue that having information about gun violence, or having information about climate change, could make you anxious or depressed. But does that mean that young people shouldn’t have access to those things?” said Sarah Philips, a campaigner at the nonprofit Fight for the Future, which works to protect online privacy and freedom of expression, to The 19th News.

“What we believe is that right-wing politicians can still use that basis to argue that social media companies shouldn’t be — quote, unquote — pushing or platforming or hosting information that could get in front of kids that does encourage that list of problems,” said Philips. “And that obviously loops in gender-affirming health care, abortion content, all these things that politicians are fighting against.”

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