The teens lobbying against the Kids Online Safety Act

Even before 86 senators voted to close debate on the bill, the Kids Online Safety Act was all but certain to pass in the Senate — KOSA had 70 cosponsors, after all. Still, more than 300 high school students met with lawmakers and their staff last Thursday, urging them to vote “no” on legislation putatively written to make the internet safer for them. By the end of the day, a cloture motion had passed, and in the following week, the bill passed out of the Senate with a staggering 91 votes in favor.

Lawmakers think that teens “don’t know what’s best for us,” said Damarius Cantie, a rising senior from Michigan. “But I think a lot of times, we do.”

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0) would impose new responsibilities on tech platforms accessed by minors. They are the first major internet protections for kids to pass the Senate in over two decades. 

KOSA, in particular, has generated hope and support among parent advocates, many of whose children died by suicide after experiencing cyberbullying. Congress doesn’t always listen to grieving parents: parents lobbying against guns, which are the leading cause of death among children and teens, have gained little to no ground. The parent advocates who support KOSA have found much more success. 

KOSA imposes a duty of care on tech platforms, requiring them to take reasonable measures to protect kids on their services from a list of harms, including cyberbullying, anxiety, and eating disorders.

Free speech organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) — which believes KOSA will stifle speech on the internet and endanger marginalized groups — have vocally opposed the bill. They fear that legal pressure on intermediary platforms will generate chilling effects — here, civil libertarian and industry interests align. For that reason, the ACLU is walking arm in arm with tech-funded groups. 

Some of KOSA’s most persuasive proponents were the parent advocates. Perhaps, for that reason, the ACLU brought students to Capitol Hill to lobby lawmakers from the other side. The teens visited as part of the ACLU’s National Advocacy Institute, a weeklong program for high school students interested in social justice advocacy.

KOSA is a rare piece of bipartisan legislation with overwhelming support on both sides of the aisle. “Duty of care” is a rather dry term of art that fails to encapsulate KOSA’s place in the culture war. KOSA might be about big tech to many lawmakers, but for a certain segment of the Republican Party, the issue of kids’ online safety is very much tied to gender. 

Early on, lead cosponsor Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) cited “protecting minor children from the transgender in this culture” as a top priority and, shortly after, brought up KOSA and how she thinks children are being “indoctrinated” on social media. Since then, the bill has been amended to pacify critics like the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), with language that theoretically limits enforcing the law on ideological grounds or using it to prevent access to resources for trans youth. GLAAD, the Human Rights Campaign, The Trevor Project, and others dropped their opposition, though they stopped short of endorsing the bill.

But gender identity and the politicization thereof have not left the conversation. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) voted no on the legislation — on the grounds that the new text of the bill defines “mental health disorder” according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which he says is published by “an extreme and politically driven organization that supports gender-transition treatment for children.” (The American Psychiatric Association, which publishes the DSM, is a professional group of nearly 40,000 people in psychiatric practice and research, and it does not recommend “medical affirmation” for “prepubertal children” with gender dysphoria.)     

The teens the ACLU brought to Capitol Hill don’t think the internet is all sunshine and rainbows. Their concerns are wide-ranging, and the content they care about differs from person to person. But one theme kept emerging — the sense that they were being disrespected by the adults in the room. 

There has always been a gap between the grown-ups who make policy and the youth who are affected, but the gulf is particularly wide at this moment in time. The average age in the Senate is the highest it’s been in over a hundred years (65.3 years old). 

Anjali Verma, a rising senior from Pennsylvania, said lawmakers underestimate her generation’s intelligence and digital literacy. “We take information online with a grain of salt, and we are able to evaluate sources and think critically and say, ‘Is this something that I want to take to heart? Is this something I want to absorb?’” 

Shradha Bista, a rising senior from Maryland, worried that being sheltered from information would leave young people unprepared when the floodgates of the internet fully opened as soon as they come of age. “We lose a lot of the skills that we could be learning at a younger age,” she said.

These students feel that having access to a wide range of resources and community groups online is especially important at a time when movements throughout the country are seeking to keep some narratives or resources out of schools. Verma said she’s seen close-up what it’s like to be in a school district that’s tried to ban books or aspects of their curriculum and worries that limiting teens’ access to information will endanger the “next generation of changemakers because we are not given the adequate information to be free thinkers that are ready to make changes in this world.”

The students were also worried about their ability to share information. “As a Brown woman, I post a lot about immigration. I post about content related to who I am and what my identities are,” said Bista. “And that is how I inform the people around me about the inner workings of my identity and the inner workings of systems in America that may be hurting me and who I am and what I stand for.” 

For these teens, their access to information and the ability to share it are not separate concerns. Bista said that, just as she shares information from her own point of view, she learns about the experiences of other communities on the internet. Identity is the ongoing project of understanding oneself and communicating it to the world around you; in the modern era, the internet has become a place to both be yourself and to discover yourself. For many LGBTQ teens, the internet becomes a lifeline to a community they may not otherwise have ready access to. 

Lux Matt, a rising junior from Louisiana whose parent previously worked for the ACLU, said that state “Don’t Say Gay” laws or book bans “are preventing students from being themselves in school. And [for] some of those students, [the internet] is their only place to be themselves.” 

Matt is part of a group for trans queer youth in New Orleans that they said relies on Instagram to get the word out about their events and advocacy. They fear KOSA could make it harder for others who could benefit from that community to find the group.

With the politicization of trans healthcare, there’s been a fair amount of attention on KOSA’s potential impact on trans health information, and the bill has been amended in response to those concerns. But the teens had other health information concerns as well. Violet Philhower, a rising senior from California, said she had found valuable information on social media about combating vaping addiction — something she said is common in her peer group. When she came across an Instagram post with 10 strategies to quit vaping, she shared it with several friends she wanted to encourage to quit — she worries that teens won’t be able to see content like that if social media platforms apply broad filters to their feeds on terms like “addiction” in order to avoid legal liability.

At the same time, students doubted how effectively KOSA could minimize the harms it purported to address. For example, even if KOSA limits the reach of posts that are explicitly pro-eating disorder, Matt said this wouldn’t eliminate body image issues that stem from social media. The social context in which kids live means that content like “smaller models just posting on their Instagram” can fuel anxiety and self-doubt. 

Matt said their mom was proactive in making sure they followed accounts that would make them feel safe and “happy about who I am” when they joined Instagram at age 15. “That is the parent’s job to protect their kids and decide how much freedom they want their kids to have. But it is not the government’s job to do that,” Matt said.

Philhower actually likes the idea that KOSA could mitigate addictive features like autoplay or infinite scroll feeds. But, she said, with KOSA’s approach, the harms outweigh the benefits. She hopes legislators keep working on ways to protect kids from online harms in a way that doesn’t limit valuable information.

To be sure, the ACLU helped shape the understanding of KOSA for these students, and there are other youth organizations that are advocating for KOSA to become law. 

Ava Smithing, advocacy and operations director of the Young People’s Alliance, for example, has been among KOSA’s most vocal supporters, sharing her story about how algorithmic recommendations pushed her toward eating disorder content. Isabel Sunderland, a youth advocate with Design It For Us, spoke at a press conference led by KOSA’s sponsors, saying that the bill would disrupt a business model that has resulted in a rabbit hole of content that focuses on physical appearance and social comparison, much to the detriment of young people like her.

“This legislation doesn’t ban social media. It doesn’t do away with the internet, doesn’t censor free speech, or deprive us of the ability to enjoy the fundamentally good parts of the internet. The parts where we see connection, compassion, and community,” Sunderland said. “But it does give us the power to shape our experiences online. It moves choice to the top of that priority list. It changes the dynamic and makes it a safer environment for our generation.”

KOSA doesn’t specify how platforms should mitigate risks of mental health disorders or other harms, and it doesn’t prevent them from surfacing either information that teens specifically search for or evidence-backed information meant to combat the harms it contemplates. But opponents like the ACLU believe it could incentivize tech companies to restrict a wide range of posts so as not to risk running afoul of the law. Their concerns aren’t just theoretical. Other large-scale regulatory regimes aimed at platforms, like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), have resulted in overenforcement by tech companies. Even if they aren’t required by law to censor content, from a business standpoint, it’s less risky to err on the side of censorship.

On Tuesday, the Senate passed KOSA in a landslide 91–3 vote. 

On the phone after the vote, Matt said they weren’t entirely surprised that the Senate voted the way it did. The students themselves had mostly talked to House legislators. According to the ACLU, the students met primarily with lawmakers from their home states — this included more than 15 senators and more than 60 House representatives from both sides of the aisle. 

“I do have faith that the House heard us and saw the impact that it would make on youth, and hopefully when it comes their turn to vote, they will reflect that in their votes,” Matt said.

“Lawmakers, they don’t only doubt our media literacy; I think they frankly doubt our literacy about life,” Philhower told The Verge last week. The adults she had spoken to that day were “so proud and so surprised” that she had shown up to lobby on an issue. “And while of course I’ll take the praise, I was kind of frustrated because I was like, ‘Why should this be surprising to you? Why is a youth speaking up about something that she cares about, why is that out of the ordinary?’”

“For a long time, kids were supposed to sit quietly at the dinner table and not say anything,” said Philhower. “So I think there’s kind of this image that youth can’t do anything. But that’s only because we haven’t been allowed to do anything.”

Philhower thinks that’s bound to change. “I think we have the power, and older generations don’t see that. And maybe it’s because they grew up in a world where they weren’t heard and seen. But we want to be heard, and we want to be seen, and it’s time for people to listen to us.”