The Senate Commerce Committee has advanced the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), despite warnings from civil liberties groups and LGBTQ advocates that the bill has been endorsed by The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, and could be used to censor LGBTQ content.
KOSA, introduced by Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee), has received widespread bipartisan support and is backed by President Joe Biden. During Biden’s address on Tuesday, he urged the Senate to “pass it, pass it, pass it, pass it, pass it.” It has not been lost on critics of the bill that Blackburn — who has made several anti-gay and anti-trans comments in the past — represents Tennessee, the state that tried to ban drag performances in the presence of children.
KOSA has been sold as a mechanism that would protect kids by placing a duty of care on online platforms to prevent the glorification of behaviors like eating disorders and suicide. But civil liberty groups have warned that platforms will also be incentivized to censor educational content under the bill.
The Heritage Foundation explicitly stated that it hopes to use the bill to censor LGBTQ content after being called out by transgender scholar Florence Ashley on Twitter.
“President Biden and Senate Dems are pushing KOSA, which the Heritage Foundation has boasted they will use to ban LGBTQ content online,” Alejandra Caraballo, a trans activist and clinical instructor at Harvard Law’s Cyberlaw Clinic, said in response. “This is a profoundly bad bill.”
Specifically, KOSA could be politicized by state attorney generals, who the bill grants power to enforce the law. If a state attorney general were to claim that content about trans health care, for example, poses risks to children, they could move to censor such content under the bill, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world.
Advocates are also concerned that platforms may preemptively block content about race, gender and sexuality in states that have already been restricting discussions on these topics. Libraries and schools around the country have pulled more than 1,600 books off the shelves so far in response to conservative states’ culture war on LGBTQ content, critical race theory, and diversity, equity and inclusion.
After the passage of FOSTA-SESTA in 2018, advocates saw platforms over-moderate and censor content that the platforms feared might be in violation of the law. Advocates anticipate this happening on a larger scale if KOSA is signed into law.
“Online services would face substantial pressure to over-moderate, including from state Attorneys General seeking to make political points about what kind of information is appropriate for young people,” explained a 2022 letter in opposition to KOSA from more than 90 LGBTQ and human rights organizations. “At a time when books with LGBTQ+ themes are being banned from school libraries and people providing healthcare to trans children are being falsely accused of ‘grooming,’ KOSA would cut off another vital avenue of access to information for vulnerable youth.”
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
After the election, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy