The Senate Should Reject KOSA's Privacy Risks
The Senate Commerce Committee is once again considering legislation that would dramatically expand age verification, and undermine privacy for everyone. Alongside the SCREEN Act, the CHATBOT Act, and the Youth AI Privacy Act, the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) would push companies to collect more information about their users while creating new incentives to restrict lawful speech.
Tell Congress: KOSA endangers the privacy of all
KOSA Pushes Platforms Toward Age Verification
The Senate version of KOSA imposes a “duty of care” on online services, including social media, to avoid exposing young people to certain material the law deems harmful. But those obligations only work if online services know which users are minors. That means more platforms will be pressured to implement age verification or age estimation systems.
That’s not a bill that increases privacy—it’s one that creates new privacy problems. Whether companies verify ages by checking government IDs, performing facial analysis, checking your bank records, or collecting other personal information, all of these systems require the handing over of more sensitive data, simply to access lawful online speech and services. They also create new databases of personal information that can be breached, misused, or demanded by governments.
Everyone deserves privacy online. Congress could push for a bill that protects privacy for all users, but that’s not what they’re doing here. Instead, KOSA and the other bills coming up for a vote this week push online services to adopt systems that require people to identify themselves before they can speak, read, or participate online.
KOSA Still Creates Incentives to Censor Lawful Speech
Some online content isn’t appropriate for minors. Families, schools, and communities all have important roles to play in helping children navigate the internet. But KOSA takes those decisions away from families and the young people who have a First Amendment right to speak and access information online. It instead empowers government officials to enforce how online services handle lawful speech.
And by empowering elected attorneys general in states across the country to enforce KOSA, the bill means those elected officials, rather than your family, deciding what’s appropriate online content for teens. Even more likely, it will lead to limits on what minors and adults are able to see at all, as companies shut down potentially controversial forums in order to avoid legal action from government bureaucrats.
The latest version of KOSA once again includes a broad "duty of care" requiring platforms to mitigate a wide range of alleged harms to minors.
Whatever disclaimers and exceptions the bill includes, the practical effect is unchanged. When platforms face liability for content that someone later claims contributed to harms like anxiety, eating disorders, or substance use, the safest response is to remove lawful speech or shut down forums discussing those topics altogether.
More worrisome, the potential liability KOSA creates may push online services to either remove speech well in advance of a young person seeing it, or block young people’s access so they never see it. That will likely include forums where people try to help each other, find community and recovery resources for the exact harms listed in the bill, like gambling and drug addiction. In trying to protect young people, KOSA may actually cut them off from valuable sources of support.
We've explained these censorship risks in detail before, and they remain just as real in the latest version of the bill.
Congress Should Reject KOSA
Minors deserve meaningful privacy protections online—as do adults. But KOSA moves in the opposite direction by encouraging more age verification, as well as more legal pressure for platforms to monitor and restrict lawful speech.
The Senate Commerce Committee should reject KOSA, along with the other bills in this legislative package, and instead pursue comprehensive privacy legislation that protects everyone—not just minors—without undermining privacy, security, or free expression.
- • KOSA imposes a duty of care on platforms to mitigate perceived harms to minors.
- • Compliance likely forces companies to implement invasive age verification systems like facial analysis or government ID checks.
- • The bill empowers state attorneys general to regulate online content, potentially leading to widespread censorship of lawful speech.
The Senate Commerce Committee is considering KOSA to protect children from online harms. While the text avoids explicit age-gating mandates, the legal obligations create a functional necessity for platforms to identify users by age.
Christian Perspective
The Bible places the responsibility of training and protecting children squarely on the shoulders of parents and the family unit. KOSA subverts this natural order by transferring parental authority to government bureaucrats and state officials. True protection comes from godly guidance within the home, not state-mandated digital surveillance.
Implications
This legislation threatens the privacy of the American family and the sanctity of the home. By forcing digital identification, the state gains unprecedented access to the private lives of citizens. It risks creating a censored digital landscape where traditional values and controversial truths are suppressed by corporate fear of liability.
Broader Trends
This bill is part of a larger globalist push to increase state control over information and individual autonomy. It reflects a move toward a managed society where the government dictates moral standards and monitors all interactions. Such measures serve to weaken the independence of the American people and the strength of the traditional family.
Takeaway
Americans must reject KOSA to defend the sovereignty of the family and the right to private, unmonitored speech. We must demand policies that empower parents rather than those that expand the reach of the administrative state. Protect the bloodline and the home by opposing any law that trades liberty for a false sense of security.
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