The Senate today unanimousl passed two children’s online safety bills in a rare show of bipartisan support.

One of the bills, the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, was introduced in 2022 following mounting criticism against Big Tech for what experts and politicians said was companies focusing much more on the bottom line than the safety of the young people who used their products.

CEOs were later roasted in front of a Senate Judiciary Committee, while a scathing report penned in 2024 by Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy helped push momentum in favor of reining in companies with legislation. Murthy likened social media to cigarettes, calling for warning labels on digital products.

Under KOSA, companies will be held accountable for the harm their products may cause. They will have a “duty of care” to protect young people from interacting with overly sexualized content, content that may lead to eating disorders, addictions, and content that promotes generally harmful behavior.

The firms will also be expected to be transparent about how their algorithms work and be able to show their products do not have psychologically manipulative features – go figure, that’s how social media firms generate money. The other bill, Children’s Online Privacy Protection Action, or COPPA 2.0, focuses more on advertising and data privacy. The dual package had massive support, with the vote going 91-3. Senate Finance Chairman Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, and GOP Senators Rand Paul of Kentucky and Mike Lee of Utah, were the only ones who gave it the thumbs down.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut, said such actions will “save lives.” He added, “What we’re doing is giving parents and kids the tools to disconnect from harmful content, bullying, eating disorders, stuff that really hurts them, and also impose a duty of care on Big Tech that for too long, has said ‘trust us’ and betrayed that trust. And now, they’re going to have to comply with a law that imposes a duty on them to mitigate or prevent harm.”

Meta Platforms Inc., one of the companies that has faced the most critical storms over allegedly damaging or dangerous content, said it supports the bills. The American Civil Liberties Union does not. It aired concern that what this really means is “nationwide attacks on young peoples’ right to learn and access information, on and offline.”

“As state legislatures and school boards across the country impose book bans and classroom censorship laws, the last thing students and parents need is another act of government censorship deciding which educational resources are appropriate for their families,” said Jenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel at the ACLU. “The House must block this dangerous bill before it’s too late.”

There’s still some way to go before the bills become law, and there will be plenty of opposition. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, this should never become a reality, with the foundation calling the bills “unconstitutional censorship.”

Photo: Freepik