Seth J. Meyer 🏳️‍🌈✡

ALT According to the American Psychological Association, KOSA “would establish a duty of care for social media companies to protect minors from mental health harms, sexual trafficking, and narcotics. Additionally, the bill would require companies to go through independent external audits, allow researcher access to platform data assets, and create substantial youth and parental controls to create a safer digital environment.” If social media sites do not sufficiently protect children under the age of 13 from harmful materials, they can be sued. According to Senator Blumenthal, one of the cosponsors, KOSA:

ALT There are fears that this bill will be used to censer LGBTQIA+ content on social media, based on comments by Sen. Blackburn, one of the coauthors of said bill. Indeed, the bill is being supported by such far-right, anti-LGBTQIA+ organizations such as the Heritage Foundation and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. The Heritage Foundation said that they hope this bill will stop kids from seeing trans content. KOSA would empower state attorneys general to decide what is good for bad for kids. As we have talked about before on this blog, some attorneys general and state politicians are actively working to make the lives of LGBTQIA+ individuals worse. Filtering, which would be required for kids, tends to be overly broad, leading to many sites that provide information on LGBTQIA+ identities being blocks for children.