Law to protect children, teens online passes U.S. Senate with Sen. Kaine provisions

The U.S. Senate passed the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act, which includes key provisions to help keep children safe online.

The legislation passed with a vote of 91 to 3, however its future in the U.S. House is uncertain, as reported by USA Today, because of the short legislative time left in the summer session. The legislation is the first significant attempt to protect children and teenagers online in more than 25 years.

“I’m glad the Senate passed this bipartisan bill — which includes legislation I’ve cosponsored—to help protect children from the negative impacts of social media, which can lead to higher rates of bullying, anxiety, depression, and other harms,” said U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, who voted in favor of the legislation. “This bill would increase transparency, accountability, and oversight to help ensure we’re keeping kids safe online, by limiting addictive product features, strengthening privacy settings, banning targeted ads, and requiring additional reporting mechanisms. I encourage my colleagues in the House of Representatives to pass this legislation as quickly as possible so we can send it to President Biden’s desk for signature.”

The Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act would:

• Ban advertisements targeted toward children.
• Require social media platforms to provide minors with options to protect their information, disable addictive product features, and opt out of algorithmic recommendations.
• Require social media platforms to enable the strongest privacy settings by default on accounts created by minors.
• Provide parents and children with a dedicated channel to report harms to kids—such as anxiety, depression, physical violence, online bullying, or sexual exploitation — to the platform.
• Create a responsibility for social media platforms to prevent and mitigate harms to minors, such as promotion of suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, sexual exploitation, and unlawful products for minors (e.g. gambling and alcohol).
• Require social media platforms to perform an annual independent audit that assesses the risks to minors, their compliance with this legislation, and whether the platform is taking meaningful steps to prevent those harms.
• Provide academic and public interest organizations with access to critical datasets from social media platforms to foster research regarding harms to the safety and well-being of minors.