Tag Archives: Kids Online Safety Act

Kids and Social Media

There is legislation moving through Congress that will change the way that everybody uses the Internet. On June 29, the House of Representatives passed the Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act, H.R. 7757. This includes new rules from the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which requires online platforms to adopt default safeguards for minors, and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0), which would expand federal privacy protections for minors. In early August, the Senate Commerce Committee passed the KOSA bill and sent it to the full Senate for a vote. Even if the Senate version passes, it is different than the House bill. Legal critics say there are some flaws with the House bill language that should be corrected during a reconciliation process.

There are a lot of good arguments for the legislation. Research has shown that access to social media has led to cyberbullying and other activities that are creating anxiety and depression in young people. There is also a lot of evidence that being online can lead to compulsive behavior like infinite scrolling and addictive notification loops. The law also wants to protect young people from exploitation.

Much of the rest of the world is coming to this same realization, and a lot of other countries have passed or are considering similar legislation. France enacted a law that bars children under 15 from creating new social media accounts and requires full compliance for existing accounts. The UK has announced legislation looking to block children under 16 from major social media platforms. Canadian legislators have proposed the Safe Social Media Act to restrict users under 16 and mandate strict age verification. Austria is working on a bill aimed at restricting social media access for children under 14 along with other digital literacy school reforms. Denmark announced plans to implement a national social media age floor for children under 15.

The reason I say this will change the Internet is that there is no way to implement this kind of regulation without requiring everybody on the Internet to verify their age. There are several downsides to an Internet that requires age verification. One is that this won’t just apply to social media. I have to think this is going to apply to newspapers, magazines, blogs, and a lot of other content.

The only way to verify age is to upload verifiable personal data. Some age verification processes ask for things like a copy of a government ID. Others use biometric scans that use an algorithm to guess a user’s age based on facial images or online behavior. The problem with creating age verification profiles is that they can be hacked, meaning unknown parties can use that data to pretend to be you. There are already known cases of such hacking. In 2024, the company AU10TIX was hacked. The company did age verification for various online platforms. The hackers got access to information including name, date of birth, nationality, identification number, and images of documents like drivers’ licenses. I can’t imagine that I will ever be willing to upload a picture of my driver’s license or social security number to any website.

Another issue is the lack of privacy, because this probably means that social media platforms will know the identity of everybody who visits them. The law will force them to know who you are to prove they are complying with the law.

The laws have other downsides that are a huge problem for online platforms. They will require online platforms to shield children from “dangerous” content. First, that makes each platform have to decide what is dangerous. Their attorneys are likely to advise them to block a huge amount of things that might be construed as dangerous. This probably will lead to a further dumbing down of web content. More dangerous is that governments can define what’s dangerous, which could mean being forced to block political and social information a government doesn’t like.

It seems inevitable that this is going to become a law since there were 76 sponsors of the legislation in the Senate. Any final legislation will be challenged in the Courts, which could take a while. But sometime in the next few years, this will become the law. While implementing this will be a challenge for social media companies, in the long run, this will significantly improve their ability to track people who use their site.

The FCC and Section 230

One of the oddest areas of law under the jurisdiction of the FCC is 47 U.S.C. § 230. This is the law that shields ISPs and social media platforms from liability for content created by users. Since this law falls under the FCC’s jurisdiction, it means that the FCC has a role in regulating the Internet and the large companies that operate there. That is far outside the scope of everything else the FCC does.

Congress clearly intended to give the authority to regulate Section 230 to the FCC. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 included section V, which was titled The Communications Decency Act of 1996 that included the new language for Section 230. When Congress placed Section 230 law into the Communications Act, it was clear that it wanted the FCC to oversee the nascent Internet that was just starting to reach public awareness. The FCC’s jurisdiction over Section 230 was bolstered by two Supreme Court Decisions authored by Justice Antonin Scalia—AT&T Corp. v. Iowa Utilities Bd. in and City of Arlington v. FCC, in 2013.

The most important provision of Section 230 says, “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” It further says that no “provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of . . . any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.”

The term “interactive computer service” is commonly understood to include websites that host or moderate content generated by others, such as social media platforms. It also covers a wide range of other content like comments made by readers in online newspapers, customer reviews of products on Amazon, and anywhere else where the public gets to express an opinion on the web.  Section 230 has been used to shield online platforms against most civil suits that are based on what users say. Without Section 230, social media sites would be subject to lawsuits from those who find any content to be unacceptable. It’s not a stretch to say that the Internet, as we know it, could not function without the protections provided by Section 230.

Section 230 is very much in the political news these days. There were 25 bills introduced in Congress over the last two sessions to modify Section 230 language. The bills look at a range of different topics. One set of proposed regulations would provide more protection for children online. The Senate recently passed the Kids Online Safety Act which would create a duty of care for online platforms to take steps to protect young users. If passed by the House, this would be the most significant online safety statute since the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act in 2000.

Other proposed laws deal with content moderation by online platforms. Republican lawmakers are asking for less content moderation to fight what they believe is bias and censorship of conservative views. Bills from Democratic lawmakers want platforms to take a more active role in removing disinformation.

Congress has also been discussing how to deal with content generated by AI. When Section 230 law was written in 1996 there was no concept that computers could direct generate content. It’s not clear that AI content has or should have the same kinds of protections afforded to human users. There has already been numerous examples of AI generating controversial content.

There is even a movement in Congress to kill Section 230, with the thought that a repeal would force lawmakers to get serious about creating a modern replacement law. In the current environment, lawmakers are not only squabbling with each other about these issues but have to contend with intense lobbying by big tech companies that resist any changes to Section 230.

To anybody who follows the FCC, the idea of the agency getting involved in these kinds of messy controversies seems alien to the rest of its mission statement. But since issues related to content moderation are heating up, and it’s likely the FCC will get pulled into the fray.