Kids Online Safety Act, KOSA for short, is a bipartisan bill which purports to “protect” minors on the Internet by effectively forcing covered platforms (i.e. social media, online video games, streaming services, and other online platforms) to verify whether a user is a minor or not.
The actual text of the law seems relatively innocuous, talking about things like giving a minor’s account the ability to limit other online accounts from communicating with it (aka blocking), preventing other users from seeing their personal data, limiting features that encourage use of a platform, and control personalized recommendation systems including being able to opt out of them. All of these are things that should be standard by default and not dependent on a person being a minor.
The problem is that because this specifies that the protections should be for minors, they will have to have a way to verify that a user is not a minor. As written, the law allows online platforms to require you to hand over virtually all of your personally identifying information to be able to use them. Given how reprehensibly we have seen them using our online data as it is, I don’t trust them one millimeter more than I have to.
I’m sure people have been following RFK Jr’s efforts to sue a Daily Kos user for “defamation”. This law would make doing so much easier by ensuring that their online identity is explicitly tied to their legal identity. Daily Kos has fought the good fight to prevent the user in question from being exposed to legal jeopardy, but most companies won’t even bother; they’ll just hand it over to avoid legal jeopardy for themselves.
In addition, if this becomes law, it will almost certainly be used against LGBTQ individuals. We’ve already seen how Republicans are busy selling “groomer” rhetoric about LGBTQ people and pushing anti-LGBTQ legislation. As written, this law is more of the same, since it will effectively out LGBTQ people online (or else push them into back into the closet as far as being able to express themselves).
The really scary and dangerous thing is that this law has forty sponsors in the Senate, both Democrats and Republicans. Which means stopping it is gonna be tough. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t have a good idea of what to do, so I’m putting this info out here so that we can get some good old fashioned liberal activism in place to stop this bill in its tracks.
