I'm writing about the Kids Online Safety Act, and about the letter 45 state attorneys general sent to Congress on November 3rd urging its passage with the "duty of care" provision intact. I'd ask you to weigh their arguments carefully, because I think they're wrong, and the organizations that actually work on digital rights day in and day out—the ACLU, EFF, FIRE, and dozens of civil society groups—are right.
Here's the problem in plain terms. KOSA's duty of care sounds harmless, but it forces platforms to guess who might be a minor, which means verifying the age of every single user. That means uploading an ID, or handing your face to a facial age estimation system, just to browse. The Meta settlement the attorneys general point to as a model is exactly this trajectory: an identity check for every adult.
And where does all that verified identity data live? On servers that get breached constantly. The attorneys general want it both ways—a uniform federal standard plus room for states to pile on their own rules—but the predictable result is platforms deleting lawful speech wholesale to avoid lawsuits. Critics warned about precisely this when the House stalled KOSA over First Amendment concerns, and nothing about that concern has changed.
It also won't protect children. Any teenager with a VPN, a borrowed birthdate, or ten minutes of patience gets around an age check. What it does do is build surveillance infrastructure that follows everyone—including kids, who lose the anonymity that has been a lifeline for vulnerable young people seeking help.
The House already passed a bundled version of this in the KIDS Act. Please don't let the Senate follow along. There are better ways to protect children online—privacy by default, real enforcement of existing child safety laws, and funding for parents' tools—without turning every American into a verified account.
I urge you to oppose KOSA in any form.
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