• by Wendy Davis , Yesterday

House lawmakers said Monday they have revised a package of bills aimed at protecting teens online, including the controversial Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA).

"We worked across the aisle for many months and have now found common ground on policies to significantly improve the digital environment for kids,” Representatives Brett Guthrie (R-Kentucky) and Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-New Jersey) stated Monday.

But the new House version of KOSA, which is weaker in some respects than the Senate version, appears unlikely to pass in the Senate.

"The House’s toothless & tepid capitulation is dead in the Senate & a betrayal of families suffering from Big Tech’s greed," Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), who sponsored the Senate bill, posted to X on Monday.

The original iteration of the Kids Online Safety Act, introduced in 2022, would have required platforms to use “reasonable care" to implement design features in a way that would "prevent and mitigate" a host of harms to minors under 17 -- including anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance use disorders, suicidal behaviors, "addition-like" behavior, violence, sex abuse and drug use. The specific design features at issue included push alerts, appearance-altering filters and videos that play automatically.

The Senate passed that version of the bill in 2024.

Late last year, a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce advanced a watered-down version of KOSA (HR 6484) that would have required platforms to establish "reasonable" policies addressing specific harms to minors -- including threats of violence, sex abuse, drug use and financial loss caused by fraud.

At the time, backers of the original bill argued the House version wasn't strong enough because it removed the mandate that platforms use "reasonable care" when implementing design features.

The newest House version of the bill, like the one that advanced last year, does not "impose a duty of care" on platforms.

Blumenthal noted that report in his post to X.

"KOSA without a duty of care isn’t KOSA -- it’s a blank check to Mark Zuckerberg to exploit children," he wrote.

The new bill would override weaker state laws, but allow states to pass more stringent restrictions. 

The prior version of KOSA would have prevented states from passing stronger laws. Pallone said last year that he couldn't support a law that would "forever close the door on greater state protection for kids."