Queer Youth Are Derailing the Controversial Kids Online Safety Act

As millennials become parents and Gen Z grows up glued to smartphones, Congress has come under massive pressure to do something, anything, to protect children and teens from online harm and hold Silicon Valley accountable.

Since Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s infamous testimony before the Senate in 2018, determined parents have met with lawmakers in both parties and showed up for contentious hearings with Big Tech CEOs carrying photos of children who died after facing cyberbullying and other hazards on popular apps. Meanwhile, research has seemed to confirm society’s worst fears about the mental health impacts of endless scrolling, especially for young people.

The conversation has been emotional and the stakes high, but lawmakers failed to agree on any meaningful regulation of social media and internet companies until last month, when the Senate passed the contentious Kids Online Safety Act or “KOSA” with overwhelming bipartisan support. The bill would empower federal regulators to file legal challenges against apps and websites they claim are causing kids and teenagers mental distress, but digital rights groups warn that allowing bureaucrats to decide what content is appropriate is a slippery slope toward illegal censorship. The problems KOSA sets out to address — anxiety, depression, drug use and eating disorders, for example — were widespread before the internet and won’t be solved by filtering content recommendations.

Indeed, some of the “yea” votes for KOSA in the Senate were likely cast by lawmakers who simply did not want to be seen voting against a legislation containing the words “kids,” “online” and “safety” during an election year. Lawmakers in both parties have spoken out against KOSA in recent weeks, including Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, a leading voice for tech accountability and one of the lone Democrats who voted against the bill. Surrounded by controversy, KOSA is now expected to stall in the House, where the GOP majority has struggled to pass even basic legislation.

Despite many changes to the bill’s language since it was first introduced in 2022, KOSA continues to face stiff opposition from LGBTQ and digital rights groups. They take umbrage with the bill’s so-called “duty of care” provision for content recommendation, which makes internet companies responsible for designing their products to mitigate for broad threats to minors, such as “suicide,” “gambling” and “sexual exploitation.”

Across the internet, communities of queer and trans youth have mobilized to oppose KOSA as the legislation became increasingly entangled in longstanding culture war debates over sex education and queer visibility in schools.

Digital rights groups argue the provision would encourage tech companies to overcorrect and respond to threats from politicians by censoring reproductive and mental health resources, particularly for transgender youth and others who rely on the internet for support and information to navigate the marginalization of their identities. Across the internet, communities of queer and trans youth have mobilized to oppose KOSA as the legislation became increasingly entangled in longstanding culture war debates over sex education and queer visibility in schools.

“The changes that I, LGBTQ+ advocates, parents, student activists, civil rights orgs, and others have fought for over the last two years have made it less likely that the bill can be used as a tool for MAGA extremists to wage war on legal and essential information to teens,” Wyden recently wrote on social media. “While constructive, these improvements remain insufficient.”

Wyden and LGBTQ rights groups have reason to worry. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee who worked with Democrats on KOSA, said in 2023 that the bill could be used to censor content and shield young people from “indoctrination” and, as she put it, “the transgender.” After Democrats updated the bill earlier this year in an attempt to appease LGBTQ groups, Republicans, fed a diet of online misinformation about queer people, began to see KOSA as part of some liberal conspiracy to promote gender nonconformity, which does not exist.

Some parts of KOSA are uncontroversial, such as regulations requiring apps to automatically provide the highest level of security to users under 18 and shut down incentives and alerts designed to keep them scrolling. It’s KOSA’s vague “duty of care” provision for content recommendation that is frustrating lawmakers and stoking opposition from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other groups.

What exactly is the “wrong thing” to recommend to kids online is not a settled issue, as the far right’s online furor over queer and trans youth makes disturbingly clear.

“At its core, KOSA is still an internet censorship bill that will harm the very communities it claims to protect,” said Jenna Leventoff, ACLU senior policy counsel, in a statement after Democrats offered further revisions to KOSA in February. “The First Amendment guarantees everyone, including children, the right to access information free from censorship.”

The bill would allow the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to sue companies that expose kids to harmful material that could impact their mental health through vaguely defined “design features.” KOSA proponents say the bill is “content neutral” and would not limit what kids can search for on an app or website, but opponents say this is impossible. Fearful of lawsuits, internet companies will simply filter out certain material from recommended content. If partisans are in charge of the FTC, they could target certain platforms with lawsuits as part of a broader attack on LGBTQ people and content, for example. KOSA is meant to target material that could cause symptoms such as “depression,” but parents and researchers do not agree on what exactly about social media is making kids depressed.

Proponents of the legislation point to a carve-out for search bars that is supposed to ensure teens can access what they search for, but the carve-out is contradicted by other language in the bill, according to Evan Greer, a director of the digital rights group Fight for the Future. The group has mobilized youth activists against KOSA.

“As currently written, #KOSA’s duty of care covers content recommendation,” Greer wrote on social media on Monday. “It effectively says, ‘your algorithm can’t recommend content that we think makes kids depressed.’ That’s not content neutral. We’ve proposed language that would be. It was rejected.”

“How does a company know exactly what a user is searching for? They make a best guess,” Greer continued. “That means they are algorithmically recommending content in search results and could be liable if an FTC decides they recommended the wrong thing.”

What exactly is the “wrong thing” to recommend to kids online is not a settled issue, as the far right’s online furor over queer and trans youth makes disturbingly clear. Lawmakers and parents broadly agree that something must be done to rein in powerful social media companies that target young people and suck up their data, but an agreement on how to do so within the confines of the First Amendment remains elusive.

Greer says lawmakers should focus on regulations that protect everyone from companies eager to exploit our data and screentime, rather than setting up a two-tiered system with age verification and content filters for people under the age of 18. Greer points to the American Innovation and Choice Online and the Open App Markets Act, which take an anti-trust approach to regulating giant social media companies, or the American Privacy Rights Act, which would regulate data collection without interfering with First Amendment rights.

“This is the problem with attempting to regulate recommendation of speech on social media,” Greer said. “The First Amendment makes it almost impossible, whether you like it or not.”