US child safety bill reignites debate over age verification

House Energy and Commerce Committee leaders have reached a bipartisan agreement on legislation intended to strengthen online protections for children, reopening a path for congressional action on the long-stalled Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA).

The agreement, which could be raised on the House floor next week, was announced Monday by committee Chairman Brett Guthrie and Ranking Member Frank Pallone, assembles KOSA and other child safety and online privacy measures into a broader House package, the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act (KIDS Act).

“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,” Guthrie and Pallone said in a joint statement.

“In the tradition of the Energy and Commerce Committee, we worked across the aisle for many months and have now found common ground on policies to significantly improve the digital environment for kids,” the two lawmakers said.

Critics have raised concerns over how a federal safety mandate could affect speech, privacy, parental authority, and platform moderation.

While the House agreement marks the most concrete bipartisan movement on children’s online safety legislation in months, it does not settle disputes over how best to address child safety online. Lawmakers must still move the package through committee and secure passage in both chambers.

A separate Senate version of KOSA, S. 1748, remains pending, and the new House package hasn’t been well received in the Senate.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, an advocate for strong online protections for children, said “KOSA without a duty of care isn’t KOSA – it’s a blank check to Mark Zuckerberg to exploit children. The House’s toothless and tepid capitulation is dead in the Senate and a betrayal of families suffering from Big Tech’s greed.”

“Without a duty of care, Big Tech companies will maintain the status quo of putting profit before the safety of our children,” added Sen. Marsha Blackbur. “We need a strong federal standard in place that will ensure Big Tech companies can’t design their products to addict, exploit, and harm America’s children.”

“The bill will incentivize age verification to access online services, putting the privacy of all internet users – kids and adults alike – at risk, and it threatens Americans’ right to access constitutionally protected materials,” said Kate Ruane, director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology.

“All users, including kids, deserve strong privacy protections, not mandates to hand over more and more personal details whenever they go online,” Ruane said.

In the days leading up to the House’s action, Meta lobbied House members for legal immunity from child harm claims. The company faces numerous lawsuits.

The new package would apply to social media style services that use engagement features and personal information to advertise, market, or recommend content.

Rather than creating a broad “duty of care,” the bill would require platforms that know a user is under 17 to maintain policies addressing severe physical threats, sexual exploitation, age-restricted drugs and products, gambling, alcohol, and deceptive financial practices.

It expressly would not require platforms to stop minors from deliberately searching for content.

Those platforms would have to provide minors with privacy and safety settings that can limit direct and disappearing messages, prevent youth profiles from being recommended to adults, restrict location sharing, reduce compulsive-use design features, control personalized recommendation systems, and limit time spent online.

The most protective settings would be the default. Parents would receive tools to manage children’s settings, restrict purchases and disable direct or disappearing messages for younger users, while teens would be able to approve or reject messaging requests from unknown contacts.

Platforms also would face annual independent audits and would have to respond substantively to reports of harm within 10 days, except in emergencies.

The package would separately require commercial pornography sites to use age verification technology to block minors, while limiting retention and reuse of verification data and declining to require government issued identification.

The bill would impose default communication safeguards in online games, require consumer chatbots to disclose that they are AI, provide crisis resources, avoid falsely claiming professional credentials, and prompt minors to take a break after three hours of continuous use.

The bill also includes revisions to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act restricting individual-specific advertising to children and teens and would establish a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) registry for data brokers that knowingly sell minors’ data.

The FTC and state attorneys general would enforce the measure, while stronger state child safety laws and encryption protections would remain in place.

Article Topics

age verification  |  Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act (KIDS Act)  |  Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA)  |  legislation  |  U.S. Government  |  United States