As a member of our Fairplay community, you know how vital it is to pass federal legislation to protect kids online, and that we’ve been working with the survivor families in ParentsSOS to get the Kids Online Safety Act passed for years. So I’m writing to let you know that this week, we had a breakthrough with the bill — and we got some other good news, too.
On Monday evening, the US House voted to pass the KIDS Act, legislation that includes versions of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0). That means KOSA has finally passed the House after four years (six years for COPPA 2.0!), and both bills can now move on and grow stronger through House and Senate negotiations. Plus, in both the House and the Senate, Democrats and Republicans came to a crucial agreement that ensures all kids across the country can get the online protections they need.
The KIDS Act will help families in many ways, including by:
- Changing tech companies’ business incentives by banning data-driven targeted advertising to all minors. That means no more personalized ads based on a child’s interests or vulnerabilities.
- Raising the age requiring parental consent for data collection to 14, and giving the Federal Trade Commission much stronger tools to force social media platforms to actually remove users under age 14.
- Creating safeguards for kids that must be easy to use and turned on by default. Those safeguards include turning off algorithms, limiting disappearing messages, making profiles invisible to adult strangers, protecting geolocation information, and limiting compulsive use.
- Giving parents tools to restrict financial transactions and time spent online for all minors. Plus, the bill allows parents to restrict message settings for preteens and to see message settings and requests for all teens.
To be clear, the KIDS Act does NOT go far enough. Most critically, it removes the Duty of Care in KOSA that would force tech companies to act in children’s best interests. We need that Duty of Care to truly keep kids safe online, and its absence from the legislation gives us major concerns. But we and the parents we work with decided it was important for the bill to move forward so that we have a chance to keep negotiating with House and Senate leaders to get the Duty of Care put back in, and to make other improvements to the House version of KOSA, too.
I’m optimistic we can pull that off because of ParentsSOS, our amazing network of survivor parents. These inspiring moms and dads suffered the worst loss imaginable from online harms: the death of a child. But they have taken their grief and transformed it into action so that no other family has to suffer their pain. ParentsSOS members have been advocating for KOSA from the beginning, and over the past week, they managed to help secure one of the most impressive wins in this whole legislative process.
Thanks to the advocacy of ParentsSOS, House leaders removed “preemption” language from the KIDS Act that would have prevented states from enacting and enforcing their own laws to keep children safe online. That means there is now a broad, bipartisan consensus that federal online safety legislation should NOT preempt states in any way. That is a major victory for all of us in this movement — and it’s all thanks to the tireless work and endless determination of our hero moms and dads.
We still have a long way to go to give children the online protections they need, and there will be more fights ahead on the way to making KOSA and COPPA 2.0 stronger and getting them signed into law. But I hope you are encouraged by our wins this week. We are now closer than ever to finally having new federal laws that can save children’s lives in the digital age. And with your continued support, I know we can make it happen.