Congress Should Protect Kids Online Without Eroding Privacy and Free Expression

Tomorrow, the Senate Commerce Committee will mark up a handful of bills pertaining to minors’ online safety and privacy. Our work at the Open Technology Institute (OTI) has always prioritized protecting youth online and strengthening accountability requirements for social media and AI companies. But we are concerned that many of the bills the Senate will mark up do less to protect kids and more to imperil our privacy, data security, and free expression.

Two of the bills that we have tracked closely — the Kids Online Safety Act (S. 1748) and the SCREEN Act (S. 737) — raise these serious concerns. They also incentivize and require, respectively, the spread of age verification widely across the internet. As OTI has explained before, we expect KOSA’s “duty of care” provision to incentivize platforms to engage in anticipatory censorship by heavily moderating or otherwise suppressing content that they think the FTC would find objectionable. The definition of content deemed to contribute to anxiety or depression could prove especially elastic in the hands of an FTC motivated to shape online platforms’ speech, raising First Amendment and fundamental democratic concerns. Such content could include information related to gun violence, reproductive rights, racial justice, or political views. These risks aren’t theoretical, given the assault on the FTC’s independence and the FCC’s extensive efforts to punish disfavored speech, which have only intensified since this version of KOSA was introduced in May 2025. And while KOSA does not mandate age verification, the bill’s strict duty of care would effectively pressure platforms to verify the age of every user to identify minors or risk litigation. 

The SCREEN Act would require covered platforms to verify people’s ages before permitting them to access a platform that hosts any speech deemed “harmful to minors” as defined in the bill. The SCREEN Act’s approach is both constitutionally suspect and risky to the data security and privacy of adults and minors alike. First, the SCREEN Act wouldn’t just apply to adult content websites; it would require age verification for any website that hosts any such content regardless of whether that is the primary purpose — potentially sweeping in streaming services, social media, and more. 

But the bill likely goes beyond what the Supreme Court’s opinion in FSC v. Paxton permits by requiring those platforms to exclude minors entirely, rather than just keeping them from accessing obscene content. Under FSC v. Paxton, laws that require age assurance before allowing someone to access adult content still need to be tailored to avoid restricting access to content that children are constitutionally entitled to access. In addition, the SCREEN Act fails to require sufficient protections for privacy and data security in its age verification mandates.

By contrast, the Youth AI Privacy Act (S. 4199) thoughtfully grapples with chatbots’ privacy impacts on minors. It requires some welcome data protections for minors, establishes important whistleblower protections, and requires further research on how chatbot use impacts minors’ health and development. OTI welcomes the bill’s overall approach and looks forward to engaging further to help strengthen protections for privacy and free expression. 

Bills like KOSA and the SCREEN Act aren’t the only paths to making our kids safer. Members of Congress could instead refocus their attention on other meaningful actions. Passing comprehensive federal privacy legislation protecting Americans of all ages, refining the version of COPPA 2.0 that the Senate already passed, imposing greater requirements for algorithmic transparency and accountability on companies, and improving privacy, security, and safety-by-design practices—all would improve online safety for youth without putting their rights, privacy, and data security at risk.