After years in which children’s online safety bills passed the Senate and then died quietly in the House, the House moved first this time, and immediately reopened the argument that has stalled the effort for half a decade.
On Monday it passed a sweeping youth online safety package by 267 to 117, the first time the full chamber has voted on the question, and it did so by leaving out the one clause the Senate considers the heart of the matter.
The package, the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act, bundles more than a dozen bills that members of the Energy and Commerce Committee have worked on for years. Its centrepiece is the Kids Online Safety Act, the measure better known as KOSA, which would require social media companies to set minors’ accounts to the strongest privacy and safety settings by default, expand parental controls, and alter the design features engineered to keep young users scrolling.
The rest of the package reaches into corners the headline bill does not. It would block private messaging for children under 13 and disappearing messages for teens under 17, impose safeguards on minors using AI chatbots and interactive gaming platforms, and require age verification on pornographic websites. Taken together it is the most expansive attempt Congress has made to legislate the experience of being young online.
The fight is over a single phrase. The House version strips out the duty-of-care provision, the clause that would impose a legal obligation on platforms to prevent specific harms to minors and let regulators sue when they fail.
Senators regard that obligation as the enforcement engine of the entire effort. Without it, KOSA becomes a settings mandate rather than a liability, and Senator Richard Blumenthal, KOSA’s lead author, declared the House version “dead in the Senate.”
The duty of care is contentious for a reason that has nothing to do with parental controls. Civil liberties groups have long warned that a broad obligation to prevent harm gives platforms an incentive to over-remove lawful content, particularly material about sexuality, mental health, and reproductive care, lest it be construed as harmful to a minor.
The House’s decision to drop the clause reflects that anxiety as much as any deference to the platforms. Earlier versions of KOSA drew opposition from across the political spectrum on exactly this point, with groups on the left fearing the suppression of LGBTQ resources and groups on the right fearing the reverse, an unusual alignment that has dogged the bill since its first introduction.
The platforms, for their part, have not been passive. Meta has been lobbying Congress for provisions that would shield platforms from liability over child-harm claims, a campaign that runs against the more than 2,000 active lawsuits it already faces from families, school districts, and state attorneys general. A KOSA without a duty of care is, conveniently, a KOSA that does little to strengthen those plaintiffs’ hands.
The American debate is also no longer happening in isolation. Australia has gone furthest, banning under-16s from social media accounts altogether, though its regulator has since said the major platforms are not complying with the law’s requirements.
Britain is weighing its own under-16 restrictions, and several European governments are moving in the same direction, which lends the congressional fight an audience well beyond Washington.
For now the package goes to the Senate, where the two chambers will have to reconcile versions that disagree on the provision that matters most. The House has done something it had never done before, which is vote.
If that produces a law, or another round of the deadlock that has defined this issue since 2022, depends on a clause the House just deleted and the Senate has refused to give up.
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