Congress is faced with a controversial piece of legislation: the Kids Online Safety Act. Designed to mitigate internet-based harms to children, the bill has been negatively compared to another similarly named piece of legislation, Britain’s Online Safety Act. This comparison is misguided at best, and it should be dismissed by Congress as it considers the KOSA.

Britain’s Online Safety Act is, to be clear, a truly abominable piece of legislation. The bill requires “user-to-user” and “search services,” essentially any website or online messenger service, to block material that could be harmful to children. At the time of passage, the British technology minister said the bill would take “a zero-tolerance approach to protecting children from online harm, while empowering adults with more choices over what they see online.”

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Far from having more choices, adults now need to show ID in order to access websites such as X. Critics have noted that it bans minors from accessing Reddit threads about brewing cider until they are 18, while they can drink at 16. Plus, the British OSA’s broad-based nature meant any discussion of sexual activity is blocked by providers who want to avoid the bill’s massive penalties — just over 24 million dollars or 10% of yearly profits, whichever is greater. This resulted in absurdities such as the blocking of parliamentary speeches discussing Britain’s horrific Pakistani rape gangs.

Concerningly, the bill allows the British government to effortlessly add new categories of banned content so long as such material relates to “national security, public safety, public health,” or relations with another country. These are immense exceptions that allow the United Kingdom to ban any speech.

This has significantly increased concerns over the Kids Online Safety Act in the United States. The KOSA had great momentum, passing the Senate with broad support last year. But the House was slow to pick it up, and the session ended without passage.

Anti-KOSA activists have used the OSA to attempt to weaken support for the KOSA. Journalist Taylor Lorenz published a piece comparing the two, while attacking state-based laws that ban minors from accessing websites that devote at least one-third of their content to pornography. Other KOSA critics, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argued that there is “no scientific consensus that online platforms cause mental health disorders.”

These arguments are faulty. Only pornography sites devote one-third of their content to pornography. And minors have been blocked from accessing pornography, from buying magazines to renting films, for decades. It is reasonable to extend that prohibition to websites. Such bans are also extremely popular, with one recent poll finding 83% of Americans support banning children from pornography sites.

It is also laughable to argue that unrestricted internet access has not affected youth mental health. There are a plethora of studies, chief among them work done by New York University’s Jonathan Haidt, who collected his work in his recently published The Anxious Generation, which reveal the toll that widespread, open access to the internet has had on young people. Depression, suicidal thoughts, and suicides have dramatically increased, and researchers such as Haidt have linked those increases to unrestricted internet access.

Something has to be done. This should not be an excuse to go far overboard, as the British have done with the OSA. The cry of “Do something!” can often be incredibly dangerous to liberty.

THE KIDS ONLINE SAFETY ACT IS A DANGEROUS BAIT AND SWITCH

But the KOSA does not go too far by any means. It explicitly rules out banning content on the basis of political speech. It narrowly forces websites to give young people the ability to turn off addictive features such as infinite scrolling and mandates that those addictive features be turned off by default. It also ensures that material that could contribute to eating disorders, depressive disorders, or financial harm, or that contains severe physical violence, sexual exploitation, and the sale of drugs, is not recommended to minors by the algorithm. If minors directly search for that content, websites are not obliged to ban access. Plus, unlike the OSA, the KOSA does not allow the federal government to add new bannable categories later on.

Britain clearly went too far. But just because another country foolishly overstepped does not mean the U.S. should sit on its hands and watch as its youth are overtaken by waves of noxious online content. Congress should pass the Kids Online Safety Act this session.