WASHINGTON — Two days after the U.S. Senate passed the controversial Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) on a bipartisan 91-3 vote, uncertainty looms over the future of the bill, as House Republicans have indicated they do not intend to bring it up for a vote.
A House GOP leadership aide told congressional news site Punchbowl News, “We’ve heard concerns across our Conference and the Senate bill cannot be brought up in its current form.”
As XBIZ reported, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) have been marketing KOSA for years as a bipartisan effort, selling it to their colleagues as a “protect the children” measure.
On Tuesday, Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) cast the only three votes against the KOSA. Wyden, the author of Section 230, and Lee are the only two senators with in-depth technical knowledge of internet issues. Both have warned in the past about KOSA’s overreach in regulating online content — including much adult content — and disastrous potential for being used to police speech.
Presumed Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris endorsed KOSA on Tuesday, writing on her X account, “I applaud the Senate for passing the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act today. This bipartisan legislation will help protect children’s mental health, safety, and privacy online. I have spent my entire career fighting for the wellbeing of children, and I urge Congress to pass this bill as we continue to invest in our children and their health.”
Several sex worker groups, individual sex workers and digital rights activists criticized Harris for her support of the bill, a reminder of her staunch advocacy for FOSTA-SESTA between 2016 and 2018, which was widely condemned by the community as endangering sex workers.
Fight for the Future Celebrates ‘Death’ of KOSA
Digital rights organization Fight for the Future celebrated Thursday’s comments by the House majority leadership aide with a post noting that KOSA “is officially dead in the House of Representatives” because it encountered “significant opposition to the bill within the Republican caucus, and it faced vocal opposition from prominent progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rep Maxwell Frost.”
FFTF director Evan Greer called KOSA “a poorly written bill that would have made kids less safe. I am so proud of the LGBTQ youth and frontlines advocates who have led the opposition to this dangerous and misguided legislation. It’s good that this unconstitutional censorship bill is dead for now, but I am not breathing a sigh of relief. It’s infuriating that Congress wasted so much time and energy on a deeply flawed and controversial bill while failing to advance real measures to address the harms of Big Tech like privacy, antitrust and algorithmic justice legislation.”
On Tuesday, industry attorney Corey Silverstein of Silverstein Legal praised Senators Wyden, Paul and Lee for voting against KOSA and “seeing past the rhetoric and viewing this legislation for what it is — a trampling of the First Amendment, Section 230 and individual privacy rights online.”
Silverstein explained to XBIZ that under KOSA, companies’ obligations to mitigate potential harms to children, known as a “duty of care,” will make it necessary for social media platforms to collect even more user data than they currently do.
“It’s mind boggling to me how the same Senate that has been so vocal about large social media platforms’ data collection practices and privacy concerns would now vote to actually require the very same companies to collect even more sensitive data,” he said. “I sympathize with all victims of any type of bullying or abuse online and share in the belief that children need to be protected, but KOSA and the trampling of the U.S. Constitution is not the way to do it.”
