House committee leaders strike elusive bipartisan deal on kids’ online safety legislation
by Lindsey McPherson · The Washington TimesHouse Energy and Commerce Committee leaders on Monday announced a bipartisan deal on a sweeping children’s online safety package that has stalled in the chamber for years amid partisan disagreements.
The deal could unlock enough support to pass the House, but it still faces competition with Senate legislation that takes a different approach.
Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie, Kentucky Republican, and ranking member Frank Pallone, New Jersey Democrat, said they knew the issue would be one of the committee’s most significant challenges this Congress.
That proved true, as the panel considered a package of bills in March called the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act that advanced without a single Democratic vote.
Mr. Guthrie and Mr. Pallone said they have spent the months since working across the aisle “and have now found common ground on policies to significantly improve the digital environment for kids.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson, Louisiana Republican, supports the deal, said a source familiar with his thinking.
That is a good sign that the House may hold its first vote on comprehensive legislation to address the issue. The chamber has not acted outside the committee since the Senate passed the Kids Online Safety Act in 2024.
The U.S. surgeon general has warned that the risk of mental health symptoms, such as depression and anxiety, doubles for youths who spend more than three hours a day on social media.
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Social media platforms are also rife with predators targeting young children and teens with illegal drug sales and soliciting inappropriate sexual content.
The House package aims to combat some of those challenges, but senators say it still does not go far enough without a legal “duty-of-care” standard to enforce against social media companies.
“We need a strong federal standard in place that will ensure Big Tech companies can’t design their products to addict, exploit, and harm America’s children,” said Sen. Marsha Blackburn, Tennessee Republican and lead author of KOSA.
One of the Democrats’ objections to the version reported out of the committee in March was that it included language to preempt states from enacting or enforcing their own children’s online safety laws.
The bipartisan deal would set a federal floor for online safety and privacy standards for minors that states cannot override, while allowing states to enact laws that exceed them.
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This benefits red and blue states alike that already have their own laws, such as Utah, New York, Texas, California and Florida.
The bipartisan deal also adds to the package a priority from Mr. Pallone: a federal data broker registry that will provide consumers with more transparency into companies that collect their data.
The revised KIDS Act contains more than a dozen individual bills authored by committee members, including another House rewrite of KOSA, the centerpiece of the years-long legislative effort.
KOSA requires social media companies to set safety and privacy settings for minors to the highest standards by default and to alter design features that drive compulsive use.
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The original bipartisan version of KOSA passed the Senate on a 91-3 vote in 2024 but stalled in the House.
House Republicans rewrote it at least three times over the past two years to make it more palatable to their conference and to fortify it against likely legal challenges.
That included dropping a “duty-of-care” provision that requires social media companies to implement design standards to protect minors from specific harms and authorizes the Federal Trade Commission to bring enforcement actions against companies that fail to do so.
The bipartisan agreement between Mr. Guthrie and Mr. Pallone still excludes the duty-of-care provision that several parental advocacy groups have said is a must-have mechanism to compel social media companies to comply with other requirements in the bill.
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Ms. Blackburn and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut Democrat, co-authors of the Senate version of KOSA, are not willing to abandon duty of care.
Doing so would give “a blank check to Mark Zuckerberg to exploit children,” Mr. Blumenthal said, referring to the CEO of Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook.
“The House’s toothless & tepid capitulation is dead in the Senate & a betrayal of families suffering from Big Tech’s greed,” Mr. Blumenthal posted on X.
Three-quarters of the Senate has co-sponsored the version of KOSA containing the duty-of-care provision, and the White House has also signaled its support, Ms. Blackburn said.
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“Without a duty of care, Big Tech companies will maintain the status quo of putting profit before the safety of our children,” she said in a statement.
Although Mr. Pallone has signed off on the House deal without the duty of care, it is not clear how many of his Democratic colleagues will fall in line.
The incentive is other pieces of the legislation that bipartisan coalitions have championed.
That includes measures to block private messaging for children younger than 13, to disable disappearing messaging features for teens younger than 17, and to safeguard minors interacting with AI chatbots and using interactive video game platforms.
The package also updates a 1998 law that restricts the online collection, use and disclosure of children’s personal information. The Senate unanimously passed its own version of that bill, called the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy and Protection Act, or COPPA 2.0, in March.
“Through empowering parents, establishing safety as a default, strengthening privacy for children and teens, increasing transparency around data brokers, and holding Big Tech accountable, the KIDS Act delivers the 21st-century protections parents have demanded and our kids deserve,” Mr. Guthrie and Mr. Pallone said.
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Lindsey McPherson
lmcpherson@washingtontimes.com
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