• by Steven Rosenbaum , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

It's summer. Families are busy, hopefully taking time off. Mark Zuckerberg is counting on that.

Last week I was in D.C. at Issue One’s Section 230 Strategy Convening sessions. The two-day event opened with advocates forming a coalition to change Section 230, the law that has shielded social media platforms from liability for 20 years. Then came the Social Media Victims Memorial, parents who have lost children to social media harms, gathering to grieve and organize at once.

Both events happened against a backdrop most people never see: a legislative push bankrolled by Zuckerberg's expanding political operation.

Last week, House leaders quietly released a 115-page package called the KIDS Act. The title sounds reassuring. The politics behind it are anything but.

If Congress passes this bill, many Americans will assume Washington has finally acted to protect children online. They will be wrong.

House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Brett Guthrie (R-KY) and Ranking Member Frank Pallone (D-NJ) announced a bipartisan deal on the KIDS Act this week, folding in the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), COPPA 2.0, and more than a dozen related bills. The compromise drops the "duty of care" standard that would have legally required platforms to exercise reasonable care to prevent harm to minors.

Nearly 100 advocacy organizations protested, including the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, ParentsTogether Action, and Common Sense Media. In a letter to House leadership this week, they pointed to specifics. The bill's list of covered harms skips eating disorders, substance use, suicidal behavior, depression, and addiction -- the exact harms driving the wave of litigation against these companies right now. Coverage itself has a hole big enough to drive a platform through: video games, messaging apps, and streaming services are excluded. Roblox, despite years of documented exploitation on its platform, falls outside the bill entirely.

That's the House. There's a quieter fight happening in the Senate, and it's worse.

The Senate track: immunity, not just omission

Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) is negotiating directly with the White House right now. The goal: attach state AI preemption, a long-standing Meta priority, to her version of KOSA. Reuters reviewed the actual legislative language. It would make platforms immune from liability under state law for claims involving the safety or privacy of anyone under eighteen. Meta has offered to drop its opposition to KOSA in exchange.

Julia Duncan represents the American Association for Justice. Her read is blunt: this is clear-cut immunity, shielding companies from every parent and school district trying to hold them accountable. No other way to read it, she says. Meta disputes that framing, calling it a uniform national standard rather than blanket immunity. Blackburn's office claims it hasn't seen the specific language and wouldn't go near it if it had.

We'll find out who's telling the truth once actual bill text shows up.

Why this is the real target

None of this is theoretical. In March, a New Mexico jury found Meta liable under the state's Unfair Practices Act, ruling that the company misled the public and failed to protect kids from predators. Penalty: $375 million, the legal ceiling. This was the first state to beat a major tech company at a trial on child safety. There's a second phase going now, with the state asking for $3.7 billion more and structural changes in how Meta operates inside its borders.

A day later in Los Angeles, a different jury reached a different verdict on the same basic question, finding that Meta and YouTube were negligent in how they designed their products. The plaintiff started using both apps at six years old. Jurors split the liability 70/30 against Meta and awarded $6 million. The companies asked for a new trial in June. Denied. And this was just the bellwether. More than 1,600 plaintiffs are lined up behind it, including over 350 families and upward of 250 school districts.

Forty-plus state attorneys general have filed similar cases. A federal immunity clause covering minors' safety and privacy claims doesn't avoid this litigation. It's built to end it.

Same play, different chamber

Drop duty of care in the House. Negotiate immunity in the Senate. Either way, you land in the same place: a bill with a reassuring name, a press conference, and a tech company business model that never has to change.

Meta isn't picking one chamber of Congress over the other. It spent $26.29 million lobbying in 2025, more than any other tech company, and now runs roughly one lobbyist for every six members of Congress.

Get either provision through, and families lose twice. First they're told their kids are safe, while the practices causing the harm stay legal. Then Congress checks the box and walks away for years, because as far as anyone in Washington is concerned, the problem's been solved.

Meta knows exactly what it's negotiating for. So do the parents who buried their kids because of these platforms. Congress is the only party in this story still pretending not to know.