‘Need to take commonsense steps’: Senate to vote on Warner, Kaine legislation to protect children

The Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act includes key provisions from legislation cosponsored by U.S. Sens. Mark R. Warner and Tim Kaine of Virginia, to help keep children safe online.

The legislation will receive a final vote in the U.S. Senate next week.

“I was thrilled to vote today to advance a commonsense set of online safety provisions for kids,” said Warner. “For years, I’ve been pushing for basic guardrails that would keep kids and teens safer online, because it’s clear the status quo isn’t working. Let’s get the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act across the finish line and then keep working towards a future where more Americans are safe from harassment, intimidation and dark patterns online.”

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.
• 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.

“We need to take commonsense steps to protect children from the adverse impacts of social media, which we know can include bullying, higher rates of anxiety and depression, and other issues,” said Kaine. “I’m glad to have voted today to advance bipartisan legislation that can help us do that, by banning targeted ads, disabling addictive product features, strengthening privacy settings, and more for minors online. I look forward to voting on the bill’s final passage next week and will continue to do all that I can to keep Virginians safe, both online and offline.”