The US Senate passed major online child safety reforms in a vote on Tuesday, but the legislation faces an uncertain fate in the House of Representatives.
Two bills – the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act and the Kids Online Safety Act, nicknamed Coppa 2.0 and Kosa – would need to pass in the Republican-controlled House, currently on recess until September, to become law.
The Senate approved the bills in a rare bipartisan 91-3 vote.
The bills have drawn mixed reactions from the tech industry. The first bill, Coppa 2.0, would ban targeted advertising to minors and data collection without their consent, and give parents and kids the option to delete their information from social media platforms.
Top US social media platforms made an estimated $11bn in advertising revenue from users younger than 18 in 2022, according to a Harvard study published last year.
Kosa, the second bill, would make explicit a “duty of care” that social media companies have when it comes to minors using their products, focusing on design of the platforms and regulation of the companies.
“Kids are not your product, kids are not your profit source and we are going to protect them in the virtual space,” Marsha Blackburn, a Republican senator and co-sponsor of Kosa, said in a press conference after Tuesday’s vote.
Executives at the social media sites Snap Inc and X said at a congressional hearing in January they supported Kosa, while Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook and Instagram owner Meta Platforms and Shou Zi Chew, the chief executive of TikTok, said they disagreed with parts of it.
Tech industry groups and the American Civil Liberties Union have criticized the bill, saying that differing interpretations of harmful content could result in minors losing access to content related to vaccines, abortion or LGBTQ+ issues.
Senators amended the language of the bill in response to such concerns earlier this year, in part by limiting the enforcement responsibility of states’ attorneys general.
However even after the changes, critics remained. “They made improvements, but not enough,” Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator, told reporters on Monday night. “I still think it is going to harm a lot of LGBTQ+ kids because of the way it’s going to make it difficult for them to get information.”
He was one of the three votes against the bill on Tuesday.
Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a thinktank that receives funding from Meta, Google and other major technology companies, called the bills flawed. Kosa would open the door to censorship and Coppa 2.0 would cut off revenue for services aimed at teens, the group said.
“This country needs children’s online safety and privacy legislation that strikes the right balance between protecting consumers without infringing on their free speech rights or stifling innovation,” Ash Johnson, the senior policy manager at ITIF, said.
Josh Golin, executive director at Fairplay for Kids, a group that supports the bills, said Kosa requires companies to mitigate specific risks, such as content that promotes eating disorders.
“Obviously government officials can do things that are not legal, but this does not give government officials any legal basis for censorship,” he said.
Maurine Molak, co-founder of ParentsSOS, a group of parents who’ve linked their children’s deaths to social media, called the vote a “historic and emotional milestone for myself and for all parents who have fought tirelessly to protect our children”.
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