Kids Online Safety Act
Current understanding
The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA, HR6484 in the 119th Congress) would impose a duty of care on covered online platforms to prevent and mitigate specified harms to minors (such as mental-health harms, addictive use, and sexual exploitation), require default safety settings and parental tools for minor accounts, and mandate transparency reporting and independent audits. For individuals, it would expand minors’ and parents’ rights to control account settings, data use, and algorithmic recommendations; for companies, it would create new design, disclosure, and enforcement obligations under FTC and state AG authority. Status: forwarded by subcommittee to full committee as an amended substitute on a 13–10 vote.
Evidence log
- 2025-04-10 — Online Consumer Protection Act: cross-connection with online-consumer-protection-act: Both impose federal duties on online platforms regarding user protection and disclosures, with overlapping FTC/state AG enforcement models. (novelty: 3)
- 2026-07-13 — KIDS Act: 2026 — The KIDS Act (introduced) proposes an overlapping but broader minor-safety package that extends beyond KOSA’s platform duty-of-care to explicitly cover video games and AI chatbots, adds age-gated access to harmful sexual material and AI-identity/suicide-hotline disclosures, and shares FTC and state AG enforcement. (novelty: 3)
- 2023-12-13 — Kids Online Safety Act: Finding elaborates KOSA’s scope to include restrictions on age-gated advertising to minors, mandatory disclosure of recommendation and ad practices, and a required non-personalized algorithm option on large platforms, alongside the previously noted duty of care, parental tools, and FTC/state AG enforcement. (novelty: 3)
- 2025-12-11 — Kids Online Safety Act: cross-connection with child-online-safety-software-access: Both address child online safety on platforms but via different mechanisms: KOSA imposes a substantive duty of care and default protections on platforms, while Sammy’s Law mandates interoperable APIs for FTC-registered third-party parental monitoring tools. (novelty: 2)