Schumer, LGBTQ+ advocates back updated kids online safety bill

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced his support Thursday for a bill that would regulate how social media platforms operate for young users.

Along with Schumer’s support, several LGTBQ advocacy organizations dropped their opposition to the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) after the sponsors updated the text, inching the bill closer to passing.

Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) are the lead sponsors on the bill.

“Children and teens have been subjected to online harassment, bullying, and other harms for far too long. The Kids Online Safety Act will require social media companies to design their products with the safety of kids and teens in mind, provide parents tools to protect their kids and give families more options for managing and disconnecting from these platforms,” Schumer said in a statement.

“I look forward to working on a bipartisan basis with Senators Blumenthal and Blackburn to advance this bill in the Senate,” he continued.

The bill secured 15 new sponsors including Schumer, for a total of 62 co-sponsors in the Senate, Blumenthal and Blackburn announced Thursday. That would give the bill enough votes to pass in the Senate even with the filibuster rule in place.

A Blumenthal spokesperson said the update was drafted in close coordination with Congressional colleagues, including the bill’s House champion, Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.). A spokesperson for Castor did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the future of KOSA in the House.

The update to KOSA comes after a heated hearing at the end of January with the CEOs of Meta, TikTok, Discord, Snapchat and X, the company formerly known as Twitter.

The bill had bipartisan support and advanced out of the Senate Commerce Committee with rare unanimous support in August. But it faced fierce opposition, both from powerful tech industry groups and some human rights and LGBTQ+ organizations.

Seven LGBTQ+ advocacy groups — including GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign — sent a letter to Blumenthal withdrawing their opposition following updates.

“The considerable changes that you have proposed to KOSA in the draft released on February 14, 2024, significantly mitigate the risk of it being misused to suppress LGBTQ+ resources or stifle young people’s access to online communities. As such, if this draft of the bill moves forward, our organizations will not oppose its passage,” the groups wrote.

The LGBTQ+ and human rights groups opposed the bill’s duty of care standard, which aimed to mitigate the promotion of harmful content and the use of harmful or addictive features for teens and kids online.

Those groups expressed concerns that KOSA could be interpreted in a way that could limit teens from accessing information about gender identity, sexuality and reproductive health.

LGBTQ+ advocates were particuarly concerned with how different state attorneys general would interpret the law.

The update further clarified the duty of care to focus on the design features and components of the platform, rather than on the content hosted on their platforms.

Haley Hinkle, policy counsel at the online safety advocacy group Fairplay, said the bill would still hold companies accountable for how their algorithms promote harmful content, such as posts promoting suicide or eating disorders, to kids. Fairplay has been a vocal supporter of KOSA.

“This new version of the duty of care makes explicit that KOSA is addressing how a platform’s design choices, including their algorithms that promote harmful content to kids–impact a child or teen’s experience of the enumerated harms, which are still there in the duty of care,” Hinkle said in a statement.

The updated text also added in a limitation that the provisions in the bill can’t be the basis of any action brought by a state attorney general under a state law.

The update aimed to put the enforcement of the duty of care on the Federal Trade Commission to ensure there is a uniform standard in the enforcement of the provision to limit concerns about different interpretations by state attorneys general, said spokespeople for Blumenthal and Blackburn.

Updated at 10:46 a.m.