Kids online safety bill clears Senate hurdle

Landmark legislation aimed at keeping kids safer online cleared a major hurdle Thursday, when the Senate voted 86-1 to advance the bill.

The measure is the most sweeping regulation of the tech industry in more than a decade. Final passage is expected next week.

Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., said the safeguards that social media companies have put in place are “not sufficient.” He cited data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that 1 in 10 teenage girls and 1 in 5 LGBTQ youth have attempted suicide. 

 “Whatever safeguards are in place, they’re clearly not doing the job,” he told CNBC Tuesday in a Senate office building.

The measure, technically labeled S. 2073, is made up of two bills that are moving as one through the chamber.

The first one, known as the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act, would ban targeted ads to kids and teens, ban companies from collecting personal information from users under 17, and allow users to erase personal information collected about them. It would also establish a new division at the FTC focused on youth marketing and privacy.

The second bill, known as the Kids Online Safety Act, would also require social media platforms to have a “duty of care” to prevent their products from harming children, including exposing them to content that promotes drugs and alcohol or exacerbating mental health issues including eating disorders, anxiety, depression and suicide. Social media companies would have to automatically enable the strongest privacy setting for kids. 

This bill has been endorsed by major tech companies including Snap Inc., X and Microsoft. But NetChoice, a trade association whose members include Meta, Google and Yahoo, opposes the bill, saying its restrictions go so far they would be impossible for companies to implement. 

While the bill’s language explicitly says websites do not need to verify a user’s age, NetChoice Vice President and General Counsel Carl Szabo said the law would effectively require websites to verify the age of everyone who used them, collecting massive amounts of data in the process. 

“All of a sudden, the government is requiring massive data collection, which collides with things like several privacy laws that we’ve seen at the state level,” he said. 

While the bills are likely to clear the Senate, their fate is less certain in the House, where the broadness of the bills remains a concern. But House Speaker Mike Johnson said in an interview that Americans need to have more power over what their kids see online. 

“We’ll be looking at the details of the exact legislation, but I suspect it’ll have a lot of support. Obviously, we need to protect children with regard to online activity,” he said. “The internet is the wild, wild West, and some of these reforms are overdue.”