Overview
- Lawmakers set a subcommittee hearing for next week to consider a 19-bill slate targeting youth online harms and privacy.
- The House discussion draft of KOSA drops the Senate’s duty-of-care standard and requires platforms to maintain “reasonable policies, practices, and procedures” addressing violence threats, sexual exploitation, drug and gambling promotion, and deceptive financial harms.
- The package features an App Store Accountability Act that would require age verification at the app-store level and transmit age signals to developers, reflecting state experiments now tied up in court.
- COPPA 2.0 would extend privacy protections to users under 17 and ban targeted advertising to minors, while the RESET Act would prohibit social media accounts for those under 16 and curb features like disappearing messages.
- Prospects for final passage remain uncertain given the Senate’s prior 91–3 vote on a different KOSA framework and ongoing legal and technical disputes, even as recent unsealed filings and whistleblower reports intensify scrutiny of platforms that companies like Meta dispute.