Mason Bogard was a generous, kind 15-year-old whose parents believed they were keeping a close eye on his internet usage.
But the Bogards say all the parental restrictions available to them did not prevent their son from seeing, and attempting, the “choking challenge” — a social media trend that encourages individuals to use asphyxiation to achieve a “high.”
In May 2019, Mason’s father discovered his son’s lifeless body, along with a video the 15-year-old recorded of himself attempting the challenge. The teen’s death by asphyxiation has forever changed the Indiana family — and now they’re pushing for better guardrails to protect other kids like Mason from the dangers of social media.
The Bogard family and families like theirs that have lost their children to the harms of social media are petitioning Congress this week to pass the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a bill they say would mitigate social media’s dangers and help families navigate the new frontier of online parenting. Although the bill passed the Senate almost unanimously in July, it’s been stalled in the House for months, by Republicans who fear that the measure may limit free speech online.
Senators Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) co-authored KOSA. As the senators work to convince the House to pass KOSA, Big Tech companies have swarmed Capitol Hill, leveraging cultural debates such as abortion and LGBTQ rights to convince both Republican and Democrat representatives that KOSA might censor controversial opinions.
“We have worked really hard to take away any concerns that people have,” Blackburn said in a briefing on Monday, adding that she recently worked with Elon Musk and the CEO of X, Linda Yaccarino, to update and improve language on free speech protection in the bill. “Time’s running out.”
The new changes to the bill further “[safeguard] free speech online and [ensure] that it is not used to stifle expression,” the senators announced in an update on Saturday. Musk, Yaccarino, and President-elect Donald Trump’s son, Don Jr., all recently endorsed KOSA and urged the House to pass it before the end of the year. For parents like Joann Bogard, a safer internet is essential — and impossible to achieve without intervening measures like KOSA.
“I was that parent who had all the protections on. I had the candid conversations, we had the safety talks. I checked all of his devices. It wasn’t enough to save him,” Bogard said. “Parents cannot do this alone. This is a struggle every household has. Every family, there’s a screen time fight. In every home, there are struggles on, ‘How do we protect our kids?’ I get calls every week of the last five-and-a-half years, asking ‘How do I protect my kid?'”
“This is how we protect them,” she continued. “We all have a role to play, but KOSA is the biggest thing on the table right now, and without it, we don’t stand a chance in protecting our kids. We can put all those protections in place, but it’s not enough. We need KOSA to regulate Big Tech. It’s an industry that’s gone unchecked for too long, and it’s time that they have some guardrails put in place that they have to abide by.”
Although videos of individuals attempting the “choking challenge” violate content guidelines, such videos are still online despite having been flagged multiple times, Bogard said. With KOSA, Joanne “would have had the tools to parent,” and could have turned off the algorithm that fed her son a video of the challenge, she said.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has said that KOSA would have “unintended consequences” and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise has echoed his concerns.
“He’s a Christian man who cares about kids and protecting kids online,” Maureen Molak, whose son David committed suicide in 2016 after being severely cyberbullied, said of Johnson. “We just need just a few minutes of his time. And that’s all we that’s all we’ve been asking for. We want to see this pass this year. We don’t want to have to start all over again. Hopefully he can provide that gift of time to us in the next week.”