US House approves online safety legislation for children, paving the way for a Senate showdown.

      After years in which bills aimed at ensuring children’s online safety passed in the Senate only to falter in the House, the House took the initiative this time and reignited the debate that has hindered progress for the last five years.

      On Monday, it passed an extensive youth online safety package by a vote of 267 to 117, marking the first occasion the full chamber has voted on the issue. However, it did so without including the clause that the Senate sees as central to the discussion.

      The package, known as the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act, consolidates more than a dozen bills that members of the Energy and Commerce Committee have been working on for years. At its core is the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which would mandate that social media companies set the highest privacy and safety settings for minors' accounts by default, enhance parental controls, and modify design features intended to keep young users engaged.

      The remaining parts of the package address areas that the main bill does not cover. It aims to prohibit private messaging for children under 13 and disappearing messages for teenagers under 17, implement safeguards for minors using AI chatbots and interactive gaming platforms, and require age verification on pornographic sites. Together, this represents Congress's most extensive effort to regulate the online experience of youth.

      The contention centers on a single phrase. The House's version eliminates the duty-of-care clause, which would create a legal responsibility for platforms to prevent specific harms to minors and allow regulators to pursue legal action in cases of failure.

      Senators view this responsibility as crucial for enforcement. Without it, KOSA transforms into a settings requirement rather than a liability. Senator Richard Blumenthal, the main author of KOSA, declared the House’s version “dead in the Senate.”

      The duty of care is a contentious issue for reasons unrelated to parental controls. Civil liberties organizations have long cautioned that a broad responsibility to prevent harm could encourage platforms to excessively remove legal content, especially regarding topics like sexuality, mental health, and reproductive care, for fear it might be seen as harmful to minors.

      The House’s choice to omit this clause reflects both that concern and an acknowledgment of the platforms' influence. Earlier iterations of KOSA faced opposition from various political groups based on this very issue, with left-leaning groups worried about the censorship of LGBTQ resources and right-leaning organizations concerned about potential biases in opposite directions, creating an unusual coalition that has plagued the bill since its inception.

      The platforms themselves have not remained idle. Meta has been lobbying Congress for provisions that would protect them from liability in child-harm cases, a campaign that runs counter to the more than 2,000 active lawsuits they currently face from families, school districts, and state attorneys general. A KOSA that lacks a duty of care conveniently minimizes the impact on those plaintiffs.

      Furthermore, the American discussion is now taking place in a broader context. Australia has made significant strides by banning social media accounts for those under 16, although its regulator has since stated that major platforms are not adhering to the law's guidelines.

      The UK is considering its own restrictions for those under 16, and multiple European governments are moving in the same direction, which gives the congressional struggle an audience extending beyond Washington.

      At this point, the package moves to the Senate, where both chambers will need to reconcile their differing versions on the critical provision. The House has achieved something unprecedented by voting. Whether this results in new legislation or another stalemate, which has characterized this issue since 2022, hinges on a clause the House has just removed and the Senate is unwilling to relinquish.