Imagine the following situation: There is a toy that kills dozens or hundreds of children every year 1 and harms millions more. 2 The toymaker makes

Congress Must Pass KOSA By Christmas. The Only Obstacle Seems to be Meta’s Influence

submited by

Style Pass

2024-12-14 02:30:03

Imagine the following situation: There is a toy that kills dozens or hundreds of children every year 1 and harms millions more. 2 The toymaker makes the toy available for free to any child who can reach the Internet, so parents cannot stop their children from playing with the toy unless they tightly monitor and control their children’s access to the Internet, even at school. Because parents feel so powerless, 3 the toy becomes their greatest fear, 4 and the vast majority 5 want the government to compel the toymaker to remove a few of the toy’s most dangerous features. Year after year, the government does nothing.

After more than a decade of mounting evidence of harm and rising parental concerns, Congress finally acts in a stunningly bipartisan fashion to craft a modest bill that would remove a few (just a few) of the toy’s most dangerous features, without restricting children’s continued access to the toy. The bill is designed and modified carefully over several years and many hearings to take into account every conceivable objection from the left and from the right. It passes the Senate by a landslide vote of 91 to 3 and is then sent to the House of Representatives, where it also enjoys strong bipartisan support. And then, after all that work and all that support, the House leadership kills the bill without giving any believable justification.

This situation would be a travesty of democracy and common sense, and yet it is exactly what is happening with social media and the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which has only one more week to be enacted. Speaker Mike Johnson said that he is killing the bill because he still has free speech concerns, but as we’ll show, this objection is not grounded in reality.