Any bipartisan agreement in 2023 comes as somewhat of a surprise. In a political system deeply divided, bipartisan bills can seem like a monumental achievement in unity. However, even though such consensus may seem like a good thing, bipartisanship doesn’t always produce worthwhile bills. A prime example of this is the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a bill authored in 2022 by Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN). On July 27th of this year, the Senate Commerce Committee unanimously voted to send a modified version of KOSA to the Senate floor; the bill is now closer than ever to being passed. While its proponents say that the bill is a huge step towards creating safer conditions for children online, a deeper look at the bill reveals many problems that pave the way for censorship and discrimination through vague wording and potential abuses of power.
Unfortunately, “keeping children safe” has long been used to justify bigotry. A prime example of this comes from infamous anti-gay activist Anita Bryant, who was a semi-popular singer before she began an ultimately successful campaign in 1977 to repeal a Miami ordinance that banned discrimination based on sexual orientation. Bryant and other members of the coalition she started believed homosexuality was immoral because it went against their conservative Christian beliefs, and that it was a threat to children. They feared that children would be “recruited” to homosexuality, and (of course) believed that homosexuality was intrinsically linked to child molestation. In her fight, Bryant weaponized religion in the name of stopping homosexuality and “saving the children.” Even the name of her coalition pushed her “morality”-focused ideology: “Save Our Children”. While Bryant did not invent this kind of rhetoric, she put it to political use in a very public and very influential way.
Apart from its use against homosexuality in the ’70s, “think of the children” rhetoric has also been used to justify many other forms of bigotry. As Fieldston History teacher Dr. Paul Heideman points out, “Segregation itself was justified that way. President Eisenhower told Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren during the deliberations for Brown v. Board that ‘These are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big black bucks.’ All the protests against school integration in the late 1950s were very much centered around the cause of protecting (white) children…The satanic child abuse moral panic in the 1970s and 1980s ruined a lot of people’s lives over absolutely nothing, as the country convinced itself that there was a mass satanic child abuse cult, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. Today, all of the really noxious anti-gay and anti-trans mobilizing from the right is very explicitly about protecting children from “groomers.”
Dr. Heideman makes an important point not just about the history of such rhetoric, but of its place in the modern world. In the current day, conservative politicians often call for anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in the name of protecting kids. They call members of the LGBTQ+ community groomers as a way to frame them as dangerous and out to get children. While the general public may be more accepting of homosexuality compared to the ’70s, there has been a distinct shift towards targeting transgender people. Frighteningly, much of the same language from the days of Anita Bryant has been repurposed for this use. The idea that kids are being converted to thinking that they are transgender by “gender ideology” online is extremely popular in right-wing circles: perhaps most evidently, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-GA) 2022 bill that sought to effectively ban gender-affirming care was called the “Protect Children’s Innocence Act”. In parallel, conservatives target any reference to race in education because they believe it is corrupting kids. It is this continuance of deceptive “think of the children”-based arguments that sets the stage for the majority of the problems with KOSA.
On the surface, KOSA is a bill about youth safety online, which is definitely an important issue. In the age of the internet, kids are often able to access content that they probably should not be exposed to, and with youth mental health issues at the forefront of public discussion, it’s no surprise that something like KOSA has come into existence. When I asked rising Form V student Margot Stone to share her thoughts on mental health and the internet, she talked about her experience during quarantine, saying that “At 12-13 years old, I was comparing myself to fitness influencers, models, and other people whose bodies were different from mine. Especially during the first lockdown, I was living on the internet, and I was deep into ‘self care’. As a preteen, I had more growing to do, yet I was comparing what I looked like to someone who was in a completely different stage of life than me. I did an ab workout every day, I made healthy versions of recipes, and I still didn’t look how I wanted to. It took a lot of in-person discussion to realize that social media has a way of deceiving people in terms of diets, exercises and body image.” The idea that there are issues with youth mental health due to the internet is not controversial, mostly ubiquitous, and highly evident within our own community. The problem with KOSA, then, is not with what it wants to prevent, but with the mechanisms it offers.
There are two major issues with KOSA. First, the bill aims to hold platforms liable if they don’t “prevent and mitigate” problems like depression, anxiety, and eating disorders through their designs and services. With this first aim comes the first problem: what exactly is content that promotes these societal ills? According to KOSA, it will be up to the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general to make this decision. This is a recipe for disaster; if attorneys general decide what constitutes dangerous and harmful content, the possibilities for politically motivated censorship through KOSA are endless. A particularly possible and terrifying result is that content that promotes discussions of race, sexuality, or gender could all be classified as unsafe should an attorney general declare it mentally harmful to children. Without specificity ingrained in the bill, platforms will be in the dark about what they can allow to exist without fear of being sued, which will likely lead to preemptive censorship of controversial topics in fear of legal action. Margot’s response yields an interesting example that helps illuminate this issue. While workout and health-related content can undeniably cause body image issues, it can also help people who are looking to learn about exercise and health. Is it inherently dangerous to children? It can certainly cause damage, but does that justify its censorship? While the modified version of the bill tries to alleviate some of these concerns around ambiguity and complexity by adding a clause that says any claims under the law must be consistent with evidence-based medical information, this is not a suitable fix; evidently, many anti-trans laws in the United States already claim that gender-affirming care is child abuse based on studies outside the general medical consensus of its necessity for treating dysphoria.
KOSA also poses major privacy issues. While the text has been revised to clarify that platforms are only liable if they know or should “reasonably” know that someone is a minor, there really is only one way to determine age: age verification. Section 9 of the bill is all about conducting a study after the bill is passed in order to determine the best way to implement age verification. The problem with this is that any true form of age verification requires the submission of personal information to platforms, not only by minors but by everyone. This is an extreme violation of privacy, and while modifications to the bill say that “Nothing in this Act shall be construed to require a covered platform to implement an age gating or age verification functionality”, this only makes the bill more confusing and ambiguous. If there is no requirement for age verification, how will it be determined that a platform should have reasonably known that someone was a minor should a case be brought against them? Ambiguities like this could easily lead to platforms proactively implementing age verification out of caution, creating privacy concerns for everyone.
While many of these issues are technically hypothetical, they are highly feasible due to the current state of anti-LQBTQ+ rhetoric. The hyper-fixation of the Republican party on anti-trans advocacy makes this bill a perfect opportunity for Republican attorneys general to abuse their power in order to censor any discussions of gender from the internet. Conservative news and commentary outlets tend to support the bill as a means of discriminating against the LGBTQ+ community. Most glaring is The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank filled with such gems of writing as “Justice Thomas Champions Our Colorblind Constitution”, and my personal favorite, “Pride Comes Before the Fall”. In a piece of commentary entitled “How Not To Keep Children Safe Online”, the author deems “gender ideology” a glaring omission from the bill and uses its omission as an example of the bill not doing enough. They want to use the bill to censor discussions of transgender healthcare, and ironically, The Heritage Foundation misses the most obvious workaround already pervading right-wing circles: that discussions of gender confuse children and lead to mental health problems. Indeed, in a tweet from May, they confirmed that they want to use the bill to “keep trans content away from children”. The bill is also supported by the National Center on Child Exploitation, which is a misleading name for an organization that has strongly lobbied against sex workers and LGBTQ+ rights for decades.
This is the crux of the problem with KOSA. In a political climate that has classified LGBTQ+ people as dangerous to children, an ambiguity-filled child safety bill that lacks specificity will promote politically motivated censorship and discrimination. Add that to other alarming prospects like conservative backlash against anti-racism (and education around race in general) and the fact that the bill is supported by various far-right anti-LGBTQ+ groups, and KOSA cannot become law without a considerable overhaul.
With its vast potential for harm, it’s clear that KOSA in its current form will not protect children if passed. Its well-seeming title and description make widely popular promises, but its contents fail to follow through. While the question of how to protect kids online remains an important one, KOSA cannot be the answer. We cannot afford to fall into the trap that bipartisanship offers and we cannot disregard the current and historical manifestation of what “protecting children” has looked like. Luckily, there is some outcry over the bill: the non-profit digital rights advocacy group the Electric Frontier Foundation has published an article condemning it, more and more news outlets are covering it, and some Senators have raised concerns over its contents. They, along with many across social media, send a clear and essential message: safety without the sacrifice of privacy and censorship is not only possible, but necessary.
