House is overhauling KOSA in a new package for kids’ online safety

House Energy and Commerce Committee Issued a package of 19 bills It aims to protect children online, giving Congress an opportunity to pass some of the most substantive internet regulations in modern history, along with the fight over online expression rights.

The Commerce Subcommittee will consider bills during Tuesday’s hearing, including the controversial Children’s Online Safety Act (KOSA). It was a zucchini The focus of the call Of the surviving parents whose children died after suffering a range of online harms, including cyberbullying, sextortion and drugs bought online. But the new version of the bill Deletes the animated feature of the Senate version Which passed overwhelmingly last year: a duty of care, which would have made tech platforms legally responsible for mitigating harms caused by their services, such as eating disorders and depression. Critics warned that this would drown out a wide range of legal discourse, including resources seeking to mitigate the very harms that KOSA aims to resolve.

In a new House debate draft, the duty of care was replaced with a requirement that social media platforms have “reasonable policies, practices and procedures” to deal with four separate types of harm: “threats of physical violence,” “sexual exploitation and abuse,” “distribution, sale or use of narcotic drugs, tobacco products, cannabis products, gambling or alcohol,” and “any financial harm resulting from deceptive practices.” The extent of policies and procedures that a platform must follow must be appropriate to the size and complexity of the platform itself, and the technical feasibility of remediating damages. The new version also expands the definition of people covered by the bill to include non-profit platforms.

The package includes several other important bills. Among them is the App Store Accountability Act, the federal version of the bill It passed in several states Requires age verification at the App Store level and sends age signals to developers. The Children and Teens Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0) would raise the privacy protection age from under 13 to under 17 from under 13, and ban targeted advertising to those covered by the bill. The Reducing Exposure to Exploitative Social Media for Teens (RESET) Act, currently a draft for discussion, would prevent social media platforms from allowing any children or teens under 16 to maintain accounts.

It’s an important step after last year, when House Republican leadership squandered the opportunity to advance KOSA. in spite of The Senate approved it by a vote of 91-3House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) expressed concern about the bill’s constitutionality and free speech implications. Opponents accused them Of getting closer to the technology industry due to investments in their state. Now, it appears House leadership may be making good on its promises to revisit child online safety legislation — but it already looks a lot different than what was proposed last year, and there’s no promise it will cross the finish line.