KIDS public knowledge kids act
page 3 / 3
Equally important is what the package does not do. It strips out the duty of care that drove earlier versions of KOSA, which we feared would pressure platforms into over-censoring lawful speech, and it drops the message-monitoring mandate that would have traded teen privacy and autonomy for surveillance. It also takes the preemption ceiling in the first bill and turns it into a floor, allowing states to enact stronger online safety laws.
Remaining Concerns
To be clear, the KIDS Act is not perfect. We share concerns that broad knowledge standard language could, even if explicitly dissuaded by the bill’s language for KOSA, nevertheless give platforms the final nudge to implement privacy-invasive age-verification mechanisms. At the same time, our perspective on the bill is that it is written in a way to give platforms agency in how to approach age assurance – which can include age inference based on a user’s behavior taken as a whole; a simple request for a user’s age during account signup; deduction based on how long a user has had an active account; and any number of relatively privacy-preserving, non-invasive methods. The criticism that requiring large platforms to infer a user’s age somehow forces these platforms to collect more data is short-sighted – all major social media platforms that use recommendation algorithms or have an advertising-based business model already gather this data. Asking platforms to stop pretending they don’t know whether users are teenagers based on behavioral data already collected isn’t unreasonable, and it doesn’t necessarily worsen privacy. And because smaller platforms and new market entrants won’t necessarily have that behavioral data to infer age in the first place, KOSA scales its requirements to platform size and the technical feasibility of a given policy or procedure.
We’d prefer there be no definitive age verification requirements in this package at all – especially to block minors from certain categories of content. But the Supreme Court ruled in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton (2025) that requiring age verification on websites containing sexually explicit material passes the intermediate scrutiny standard on the First Amendment – meaning a federal law doing the same would probably pass intermediate First Amendment muster, too. All things considered, we have accepted the trade-off that, in order to ensure KOSA’s safe-by-design defaults proceed, we choose not to actively oppose a bill that aims to keep minors away from pornography. (What does need to happen, though, is the passage of data privacy laws to protect users who do choose to verify their age to access adult content, which is absent in this bill and in Congress generally.)
Bottom Line
Meeting every kids’ safety proposal with reflexive opposition, whatever its actual contents, amounts to an abdication of responsibility on our part at Public Knowledge. Young people are being harmed right now, as the thousands of lawsuits against these platforms document in painful detail, and they are asking for products designed with their safety in mind. And parents are overwhelmingly demanding accessible tools to help their kids navigate their social media use – and if they choose not to use those tools, parents still want their teens’ accounts set to the most protective defaults. This is precisely what the KIDS Act gets at.
After every iteration of this long debate on kids’ online safety, this version of the KIDS Act best holds the balance we have insisted on from the beginning: real protection for kids through safe design and protective defaults; respect for the privacy and autonomy of teenagers as rights-holders; and a steady refusal to reach for the blunt instruments of content bans or access bans. That is why Public Knowledge supports the KIDS Act.
Related
Insights
Celebrating 25 Years of Fighting for a Creative and Connected Future
Insights
A Call for People-Centered Policy: The Blueprint for Equitable Digital Participation
Insights
Congress Should Regulate AI Chatbots, But Not Who Can Use Them
Insights
From ‘Should We?’ to ‘How?’: A Framework for Getting Age Assurance Right
Insights
Inequity is Not Inevitable: Save the Digital Equity Act
Insights
Product Liability and PocketOS
-
-