There are few bigger threats to the safety and well-being of our children in the modern age than the Big Tech oligarchs who control the internet. As platforms such as Facebook and Snapchat have served as open drug markets for dealers and cartels, lethal fentanyl overdoses among minors have skyrocketed, up by a factor of 30 between 2013 and 2021.
On platforms like Instagram, sophisticated algorithms connect pedophiles who buy and sell child sexual abuse material with minors. And on sites like Chinese-owned TikTok, children have been bombarded with content that promotes suicide, eating disorders and self harm within minutes of opening the app.
For years, Big Tech evaded any accountability for the damage they inflict on American children. That’s now changed with the Senate passing the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), bipartisan legislation led by Republican Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn and Democratic Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, that would impose strict rules on social media sites to provide an environment that is safe for children.
Among its important provisions, KOSA will protect the online information of minors and allow them to opt out of addictive algorithms. KOSA will also provide parents the tools to identify and report online harms. Social media giants must provide independent audits to ensure Big Tech companies are actually protecting children online. Perhaps most importantly, KOSA creates a duty of care for platforms to prevent damage to children.
This bill now heads to the House, where every lawmaker must support it, especially Republicans. If you’re concerned about the outsized power of Big Tech, this is a no brainer. For far too long, Big Tech companies raked in record profits by keeping teens and children hooked as long as possible through addictive features, all the while ignoring the consequences. This bill represents the best opportunity we have to protect children from this abuse.
It should come as no surprise that parents, victims and major conservative groups, including the Article III Project, Internet Accountability Project, Heritage Foundation, Institute for Family Studies, Ethics and Public Policy Center and America First Policy Institute, have endorsed KOSA, while the Big Tech lobby has lined up all of its might against it. The same lobby that fights for the censorship of Republican and conservative ideals online now fights for more online abuse of our children.
Still, there exists some criticism of KOSA from the right, including the claim that the bill is a Trojan Horse for Big Tech censorship of conservative speech. This argument, while understandable given Big Tech’s record of silencing conservative voices, couldn’t be further from the truth.
KOSA does not create any legal liability for social media companies regarding the content on their sites. Instead, KOSA’s duty of care applies to Big Tech’s product features, like addictive algorithms, that direct young users to specifically defined harms that plague our youngest generations. In practice, for example, Facebook would likely face legal liability for refusing to fix its “People You May Know” feature after executives reportedly discovered that the algorithm connected pedophiles with young users. Political speech, meanwhile, would be entirely outside the purview of the bill.
In reality, Big Tech has spent tens of millions of dollars lobbying against bills to hold the industry accountable, including KOSA, because the legislation reins in Big Tech abuses, rather than empowering them. If there’s one thing conservatives should agree on, it’s that we should be putting our children’s safety ahead of Big Tech’s profits.
Mike Davis is the Founder and President of Article III Project, a conservative judicial group that includes the Internet Accountability Project’s mission to hold Big Tech accountable.
