Is the Kids Online Safety Act the ‘Social Reckoning’ We Are Looking For?

The Social Reckoning, the follow-up to David Fincher’s The Social Network (2010), comes out in theaters this October. The film dramatizes the 2021 release of the Facebook Files, which exposed the company’s research and neglect of teen mental health and the spread of misinformation on its platforms. The sequel arrives in a world almost unrecognizable from the one Fincher depicted in 2010. With scientific research still uncovering links between compulsive social media use and declining mental health, there’s a growing consensus that social media poses a serious danger to minors. Pew Research Center reported this past July that nearly 6 out of 10 adults in the US support a social media ban for those under 16, and 78% support requiring people to verify their age before using these platforms. And on Aug. 26, Meta settled a historic case over claims that the company intentionally designed features on Instagram and Facebook to foster addictive behavior in teens and misled the public about the safety of its platforms. With this momentum and public support, a national law regulating social media platforms has never looked more likely.

Two bipartisan bills are under consideration. The House of Representatives passed the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act (H.R.7757, the KIDS Act) in June. The Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee advanced the Kids Online Safety Act (S.1748, KOSA) in August. The full Senate has not voted on KOSA, and so the two chambers have yet to reconcile their approaches. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), a co-sponsor of the Senate bill, has been clear that she finds the House version unacceptable: “It is toothless, and it is a very pale imitation of the Senate version, and therefore it is a pale imitation of big tech accountability.”

The Senate KOSA supporters are shrewdly capitalizing on the public backlash against companies like Meta for “hacking our brains” to sell our information to advertisers, and marketing the regulation as a means to mandate safety by design measures across the industry. Some nuance missing from the coverage of this recent surge in social media regulation is that the bill does propose some real changes. But new research suggests it overlooks the most critical levers available to create safer online spaces, like the structure of the platforms themselves, while unleashing a whole new set of issues that arise with age verification and exposing platforms to legal liability.

Identifying the blueprint

KOSA’s aim is to ensure that online platforms prevent and mitigate specific dangers to minors, including eating disorders, depression, anxiety, online harassment, sexual exploitation, and compulsive use (Sec. 102(a)). For users the platform knows are minors, it would require the most protective privacy and safety settings by default, limiting design features such as infinite scroll and autoplay, and giving minors an option to opt out of personalized recommendation systems (Sec. 103(a)(1), (3)).

Social media regulations have up to this point attempted to target different aspects of digital platforms like the content published by users, the algorithm, and now these shiny trinkets that keep users entranced, like rewards for Snapchat streaks and autoplay. The platform’s architecture, on the other hand, is not any single feature but the structure which governs the extent to which users can connect and what actions are permitted. This connective tissue differs drastically between different online platforms and plays a large role in shaping what content can go viral and reach minors.

To help clarify that distinction, consider research from George Washington University Professors David Broniatowski and Lorien Abroms, Principal Researchers at the GW Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics (IDDP). Their recent work demonstrates how remedies like content moderation and targeting specific features can produce mixed results depending on a platform’s structure.

Studying the spread of misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic, Broniatowski and his colleagues at the University of Maryland found through a computer model, still under peer review, that the effects of shifting from a popularity-based algorithm to a chronological one can vary substantially by platform. On Facebook and Twitter, changing the algorithm produced a modest shift in content quality. In contrast, on a platform like TikTok, where any content can reach any user, the model estimated that the popularity-based algorithm reduced the average informativeness of the content users saw by 92%, because it promoted whatever happened to gain early traction. Reddit, organized by walled subreddit pages and moderators, had virtually no effect from changing the algorithm type.

Separate studies by Broniatowski, Abroms, and their colleagues observed that Facebook and Twitter’s attempts to remove anti-vaccine posts and profiles increased the virality and political polarization of the content and accounts that remained. The architecture of these platforms (Facebook’s linked pages and groups; Twitter’s unrestrained retweet network) permitted motivated users to construct new routes to anti-vaccine content once old ones were removed. Groups and retweeting networks could simply reconnect severed clusters. In other words, the types of actors on a platform (moderators, groups, followers) and how they can interact determined whether the interventions reduced negative exposure.

Protecting the children

Advocacy groups have raised other important shortcomings including KOSA’s “teeth,” its duty of care provision, which holds platforms liable for their design features contributing to clinically diagnosable symptoms (Sec. 102, 109). The House version notably excludes the duty of care standard, citing concerns over the impact on users’ freedom of speech. In response to these critiques, KOSA’s Senate sponsors have been adamant that the bill “does not give the FTC or state Attorneys General the power to bring lawsuits over content or speech.” They argue they are targeting the product features that are designed to keep minors hooked, not regulating the content that is posted on the platforms.

How companies may comply tells a different story. Although KOSA doesn’t directly regulate speech, design obligations can affect how platforms moderate, organize, and rank content. According to Kate Ruane, director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, KOSA in practice would require the companies to proactively reduce children’s exposure to content that can be deemed harmful. The legal exposure could incentivize companies to overcorrect, suppressing or restricting content. There’s precedent for the concern. Social media platforms reacting to the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (FOSTA/SESTA) incorrectly censored non-explicit content sometimes based on how much revenue the accounts generated and the user’s body type, which especially policed Black women’s bodies. A report from Forbes also found that 92% of the leading parental control apps blocked sites led by LGBTQ+ organizations or that provide sexual education. And as recently as 2024, Meta’s teen accounts restricted posts with hashtags like #queer, #transgender, or #lesbian, flagging them as unsafe for months.

One consequence, or arguably a necessity, of creating a safe space for minors online is that it requires correctly identifying who is an adult or the parent of a minor. KOSA does not explicitly mandate age verification or how companies should identify minors on the platform, but the legal exposure pressures companies to instill some method that is not easily circumventable. This can include requiring all users to provide either biometric data like a face scan or upload proof of age documents, threatening the anonymity users have enjoyed on the internet for decades.

As Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman shares in The “Segregate-and-Suppress” Approach to Regulating Child Safety Online, age authentication increases the vulnerability of sensitive data substantially. A new norm with age verification also puts people, and minors especially, in a position where they constantly have to decide whether they should share sensitive information online, and poses a great opportunity for bogus sites designed to extract authentication data. By not formally imposing an age verification regime, KOSA doesn’t have to address these risks.

This is not to say that reducing children’s exposure to features like infinite scroll is senseless. Rather, all users, whether they are 14, 22, or 45, should be empowered to opt out of a more engagement driven and addictive experience. KOSA takes steps to expand that agency but still operates a form of governance where safety (and plausible deniability) is dependent on knowing who is a child, pressuring platforms to make broad editorial decisions over algorithms. Researchers like Dr. Broniatowski suggest one alternative is to establish social media building codes that truly embody a “safety by design” approach. Such codes could discourage certain features, including late night notifications and infinite scroll, while requiring platforms to disclose how their structure and algorithms can cascade problematic content and how they seek to mitigate those effects.

KOSA has undergone several iterations to appease its critics, and this might be the year its opposition finally relents. But the vigorous efforts to protect minors can just as well be redirected toward bringing about a tangible change to the status quo for all users by adopting a structural approach that treats social media as the public forums they are. A true social reckoning calls for standards that prioritize safety over engagement, without sacrificing anyone’s privacy, agency, or free expression.