A bipartisan pair of senators introduced an updated version of legislation to protect minors online that drops a controversial provision requiring social media platforms to verify a user's age, an omission meant to give the bill a better chance of clearing the Senate and becoming law.
Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) reintroduced the Kids Online Safety Act on Tuesday. The bill would implement several safeguards to protect children and teenagers online, a goal for many legislators because of rising concerns that social media outlets are damaging children's mental health and creating new forms of addiction.
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"Big Tech has proven to be incapable of appropriately protecting our children, and it's time for Congress to step in," Blackburn said in a statement.
The legislation would require platforms to take steps to prevent a defined set of harms to minors, including the promotion of suicide, substance abuse, sexual exploitation, and drug or alcohol use.
The legislation would also mandate social media companies to implement controls for users, such as options for limiting screen time, restricting addictive features, and limiting access to user profiles. The controls would be set by default to the strictest settings for users younger than 16.
Companies would have to give parents the tools to manage their children's use of the platform, including safety settings and time tracking. For children under age 13, those options would be enabled by default.
The measure also includes the requirement that third parties be allowed access to social media platforms' internal data for research purposes.
The bill is similar to versions from past years, but notably, it no longer requires websites to verify age — a mandate the industry had opposed. The bill would, however, create legal liabilities for social media platforms if they failed to block users who are 13 or younger.
The bill has 26 additional co-sponsors from both sides of the aisle. A version of the bill was introduced in February 2022 and was advanced through the Commerce Committee in a unanimous vote in July, but it failed to get to the floor.
Liberal advocates slammed the bill for implementing more controls over teenagers' access to online content. The act "wouldn't give kids more control," Fight For the Future Director Evan Greer tweeted. "It would let the government dictate their online experience. Read your own bill."
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"Parents, not the government, should be in charge of how their family uses online tools," NetChoice VP and General Counsel Carl Szabo said in a statement. NetChoice is a conservative-leaning tech advocacy group.
State governments have stepped up in the last few months to implement additional guidelines to regulate teenagers' access to social media. Gov. Spencer Cox (R-UT) passed a pair of bills in March that would require age verification for teenagers on social media and ban features that encourage addictive behavior.