KOSA

On July 30, 2024, less than a day before this article’s publication, the United States Senate passed the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). First introduced (after many failed attempts) over a year ago, the bill now moves to the House of Representatives, which has an opportunity to pass the bill into law… except that the House just decided to start their month-and-a-half long recess a week early. The summer weather is just too pleasant, I suppose.

KOSA had almost universal bipartisan support in the Senate (passing 91-3). And looking at its contents, it is easy to see why. The bill would, among other things, make apps subject to liability if they don’t respect their “duty of care” of not delivering unsuitable content to minors.

That isn’t to say KOSA is without critics, many of whom believe that the bill would enable platforms to intentionally censor speech they deem inappropriate, thereby limiting children’s access to important material online.

As with everything else these days, online safety for children too has become politicized. But putting aside the political agendas on either side and the potential for censorship, I think (and hope) we can all agree that the time has come to take some form of action (whether it’s with KOSA or another version thereof).

Doctor’s Warning

If you haven’t yet read Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, I’ll gladly wait a minute while you go order your own copy.

The book details the devastating effects of unfettered internet access (particularly social media, and particularly particularly amongst Gen Z). And in its wake, we’ve seen this issue rightly rise to the forefront of concern, both amongst parents like myself and even government leaders.

Take the U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory issued two months ago that warned about the dangerous impact of social media on today’s youth, caused by exposure to “harmful content on social media, ranging from violent and sexual content, to bullying and harassment.”

So First Amendment considerations aside (which I believe are questions of implementation, not of the principle of the matter), it’s commendable that Congress has finally taken action (or at least half action in the Senate) to begin addressing the issues at hand.

The big question I have though is this: Why did it take so long?

Timelines

The last major legislation governing the use of the internet by children (wherein “child” is defined as 13 and under) was the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), passed in 1998.

Let’s visit what the world looked like in 1998. Computers looked like this:

Websites looked something like this:

Actually, that AOL screen-grab was from 1999, so websites didn’t even look that good in 1998.

And what COPPA did, well-intentioned as it was, was establish precedent for how minors would interact with a web that could not have even been conceived of at the time. Smart phones were non-existent. The company Google was just founded. Wikipedia wouldn’t exist for another three years. Facebook wouldn’t exist for another six years. TikTok wouldn’t exist for another eighteen years!

And so for the twenty-six years following the enactment of COPPA (twenty-six years being roughly the span of one entire generation, or what some might even call one entire “anxious” generation), this was the law that contracts and lawyers and courts interpreted when determining what was safe and unsafe for children online.

The reality is, technology moves fast, and government moves slow. But what’s more is that, these days, technology is actually accelerating, while government is decelerating.

Even COPPA was able to move from introduction in the Senate to being signed into law by Bill Clinton in a period of three months back in 1998. KOSA, by contrast, was first introduced to the Senate in mid-2023 nearly fifteen months before it passed in that same chamber. Who knows how long may pass before it is signed into law, or if it’s signed into law at all (and, by whom)?

I wrote an article at the start of 2024 about the impact of Mickey Mouse entering the public domain. And in it, I talked about divergent timelines and Back to the Future, about how timelines get shifted forward and backward in time on the basis of governments and the policies they enact:

I believe that, regardless of how you feel about the substance of KOSA and its pros and cons, we can all agree that waiting two and a half decades to address the critical issues around how children live online is too long.

We’ve missed an opportunity to branch off into a new timeline for a long time. Let’s take this seriously and not push that branch off any farther.