Congress May Empower Internet Censorship With New Bill

Lawmakers are rushing to pass the “Kids Online Safety” Act (KOSA) before Congress adjourns. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), claims it will protect children from harmful information on the Internet. But, as I’ve previously written, the bill would actually open the door for the government to censor political speech.

The legislation’s sponsors are aware of the criticism, so they’ve tried to alter it to look more respectful toward free speech. But the core of it remains the same. If passed, the KOSA would empower lawyers and government bureaucrats to curtail free speech on social media.

The bill’s sponsors made a big deal about the changes they made to it. Blackburn and Blumenthal announced in a joint statement earlier this month that the amendments would “eliminate once and for all the false narrative that this bill would be weaponized by unelected bureaucrats to censor Americans.”

These changes were made to further make clear that KOSA would not censor, limit, or remove any content from the internet, and it does not give the FTC or state AGs the power to bring lawsuits over content or speech, no matter who it is from.

The most significant change to the bill comes in regard to the section on “Prevention of Harms to Minors.” In the original version, it stated:

A covered platform shall take reasonable measures in the design and operation of any product, service, or feature that the covered platform knows is used by minors to prevent and mitigate the following harms to minors:

…

(3) Physical violence, online bullying, and harassment of the minor.

The new version changed it to this language:

(4) Physical violence or online harassment activity that is so severe, pervasive, or objectively offensive that it impacts a major life activity of a minor.

The changes are meant to allay concerns that a broad inclusion of “online bullying” and “harassment” would allow a wide range of opinions to be censored. As I wrote in my previous article, Big Tech entities such as Google already use these standards to suppress speech they don’t like. Left-wing groups such as the ADL and the ACLU both demand that tech platforms censor posts based on “harassment.”

KOSA sponsors had the good sense to realize this was a bad metric. So they eliminated “online bullying” and made the standard for harassment much higher. The problem is that it’s still a subjective standard. What would “impact a major life activity” is in the eye of the beholder. Censors could claim that “fat shaming” would constitute a major impact as it could cause negative feelings in many users. Anything that harms “self-esteem” could be put in this category.

“Online harm” is already a standard used in Europe. The institutions involved include “extremism,” “hate,” and “disinformation” as items that would count as online harm. That standard could be established in America with KOSA.

What constitutes severe harassment is all left in the hands of the law’s interpreters—and those will be people who would love nothing more than to suppress conservative views on the internet. The bill, according to its own language, would rely on reports crafted by “academic experts with specific expertise in the prevention of online harms to minors.” That should raise eyebrows. All of the “experts” described here are leftists who will use this newfound power to focus more on “online extremism” rather than genuine threats to children. This whole field is a product of the “Censorship Industrial Complex.” No Republican should support a bill that gives more power to it.

We all want to keep children away from horrible content. But KOSA is not the way to go about it. It only invites the government to censor protected speech. Elon Musk turned censorious Twitter into pro-free speech X. It helped Trump win the election and pushed conservative ideas to thrive in the marketplace of ideas. KOSA threatens to upend that on behalf of a noble, yet misguided, end.