The Bipartisan Kids Online Safety Act of 2022 - KOAT News - February 21, 2022

New Act Proposed to Help Protect Kids Online

On ABC’s affiliate KOAT News Morning Show in New Mexico, our director Lisa Honold talked about the new bill proposed in Senate called The Kids Online Safety Act of 2022 (KOSA). This bipartisan act, co-sponsored by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) & Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), requires social media platforms to put the interests of children and teens first.

KOSA requires platforms to make safety the default for kids and to give kids and parents tools to help prevent the destructive impact of social media. KOSA also ensures that parents and policymakers can assess whether social media platforms are taking meaningful steps to address risks to kids.

Some specifics in the Kids Online Safety Act of 2022

• Parents and kids get access to safeguards and tools to protect kids’ experiences online.

  • Social media platforms must provide minors with options to protect their information, disable addictive product features, and opt-out of algorithmic recommendations—and requires platforms to enable the strongest settings by default.

  • Platforms must give parents easy to use tools to help support minors under 16 years old and spot harmful behaviors, including by providing children and parents with a dedicated channel to report harms to kids to the platform. These tools would help parents keep kids safe, limit screen time and protect their data. It would require platforms to create parental features to track how much time their kids spend on a service, or to opt out of features such as autoplay that might extend time online. Companies would also be required to offer parents and minors the ability to modify tech companies’ recommendation algorithms, allowing them to limit or ban certain types of content.

• Accountability for social media’s harms to kids.

  • Social media platforms must prevent and mitigate harms to minors, such as content promoting of self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, and sexual exploitation.

  • Platforms must perform an annual independent audit assessing risks to minors, their compliance with this Act, and whether the platform is taking meaningful steps to prevent those harms.

• Opens up platform algorithms to academic researchers and non-profit organizations to study the safety and well-being of minors.