Child Online Safety Legislation – A Primer is the first comprehensive academic study to examine the likely effectiveness of legislation like the Kids Online Safety Act on the goals of keeping young people safe online. A research collaboration between the Center for Information Technology Policy (Princeton University), the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (UNC Chapel Hill), and the Sanford School of Public Policy (Duke University), Child Online Safety Legislation – A Primer provides expert guidance for international, federal, and state policymakers online safety proposals.

With so much at stake, it’s important to get the policy right. This brief is intended to provide a summary of key points raised in the research paper.

Why Act Now?

Concerns about youth media consumption have existed as long as media has existed. The emergence of digital technology has fueled similar concerns. The report authors suggest that past legislative attempts to limit young people’s online risks, such as those in the late 1990s, were fueled by media hysteria, misinterpreted research, and inaccurate statistics. Renewed criticisms have led to repeated calls for greater regulation of technology, resulting in a range of proposals and actions by Congress and the Administration.

Legislative Landscape

International Legislation

Multiple countries have recently enacted national-level regulations and laws regulating online child safety through direct restrictions on design and content. For example, the United Kingdom implemented the Children’s Code, an internet safety and privacy code of practice created by the Information Commissioner’s Office. In 2023, the United Kingdom passed the Online Safety Act (OSA) which set up a range of legal obligations, including a duty of care, on internet platforms.

 

Federal Legislation
The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA)  is a major federal bill that purports to set out requirements to protect minors from online harms, and is applicable to “covered platforms.” Its main areas of intervention are a duty of care, the establishment of a set of safeguards for minors, parental tools, and age verification. The authors outline how KOSA has been influenced by the OSA and that the UK has a different legal framework governing free speech than the First Amendment. The “duty of care” provisions in KOSA lack clear reference to any sort of physical corollary like one that exists in UK law. This creates ambiguity in the scope of its application, and implications for free speech.

State Legislation

State-level proposals range from legislation controlling minor access to social media through age verification, child privacy bills aimed at increasing privacy protections for children, and anti-pornography bills that use age-gating as a mechanism for restricting under-age users from accessing online pornography. While there is a significant degree of variation in the requirements and platforms covered by these state laws mandating age verification, they demonstrate an increase in state-level power over minors’ online experiences. These laws give state-level governments, attorneys general, and parents increasing discretion on when and how minors access information. The threats to privacy and free speech enabled by government-mandated access to surveillance of minors is additionally alarming.

Arguments for Child Online Safety Legislation

One main argument presented in favor of children’s online safety legislation suggests that increasing rates of depression, loneliness, and anxiety are due to social media and its addictive design created by “Big Tech.” In public discourse, this allows the legislation to present as a solution to the need to regulate technology rather than focus on the specifics of the bill.

Mental Health
Rates of anxiety and depression among young people have increased significantly for various reasons, but policy and thought leaders in the U.S. have largely ignored the complicated context and have instead pointed to social media as the cause. However, factors that contribute to an issue as complex as youth mental health must be accounted for beyond the impact of simply new technology. The authors provide extensive analysis on existing research and come to the conclusion that addressing mental health amongst adolescents is complicated and isolating one variable is simplistic.

Sexual Exploitation and Abuse
The fear that young people will be abducted or assaulted by “online predators” or subject to sex trafficking is a constant modern concern. KOSA and similar bills attempt to reduce the “sexual exploitation and abuse of minors,” although the mechanisms for doing so are unclear. Preventing young people from communicating with adults or peers is a drastic measure, and one that will likely only marginally decrease the rate of online sexual abuse, but instead, cut them off from potential sources of support and friendship.

Eating Disorders and Self-Harm
Eating disorders (EDs) are often directly mentioned as proof that platforms need regulation. While there are connections between social media and EDs, politicians and lobbying groups frame the relationship as clear-cut and solvable by regulatory solutions like KOSA. While these claims are worthy of research and policy, the relationship between social media and eating disorders is complex and cannot be reduced to a simple causal claim that asserts social media produces eating disorders.

Social Media Addiction
Legislative proposals have characterized social media as addictive or addiction-like. The scholarly evidence concurs that some social media users exhibit addiction-like behaviors, or what some scholars call “problematic social media use.” However, the extent to which “addiction-like behaviors” exist are currently tied to social media use overall and not simply algorithmic feeds. Additionally, the idea that social media produces “hits” of “dopamine” which facilitate addiction is not supported by research.

Arguments Against Child Online Safety Legislation

Age Verification

Most of this proposed or passed legislation will necessitate some form of age verification, or “age-gating,” either explicitly or implicitly. Age verification is simple in theory, but difficult to enact effectively without sacrificing privacy, free expression, equity, accuracy, or all of the above. Solutions fit within one of three categories: self-assertion, ID verification, and estimation. There are many complexities involved in implementing any of these policies, and young people are likely to subvert many of these requirements relatively easily.

Privacy and Surveillance

Although many child online safety bills are categorized as “privacy bills,” they in actuality present significant challenges to online privacy and enable wide-scale surveillance. First, wide-scale implementation of mandatory age verification would have devastating consequences for internet privacy, making it more or less impossible to browse the web anonymously. Second, there is little information on the companies that would administer age verification systems. Third, under many state bills, anyone under 18 could have anything they do online surveilled by their parents.

Parental Control

Parental control aspects of child online safety legislation are more likely to survive First Amendment review than age verification or duty of care, but concerns remain. While parental tools are important to protect the privacy and safety of children, parental monitoring is not intrinsically safe. Legislation that allows parental monitoring may facilitate abuse and conflict in situations where parents are abusive or hold different cultural and political views than their children. Moreover, the rhetoric of parental rights has recently returned as a central element of conservative lobbying against Critical Race Theory (CRT), DEI efforts, and LGBTQ+ content. Child online safety legislation, even when well-intended, fuels this rhetoric and will likely be used to similar ends.

Chilling Effects on Information Access and Free Expression

Increased parental control over social media usage can result in a chilling effect, particularly on young people seeking essential information (including sexual health information) and community. In addition to the “duty of care” provision, it is worrisome that many types of child safety bills seek to expand the monitoring of young people’s actions online, given the data privacy concerns around reproductive rights. Similarly, undocumented immigrants may be subject to arrest or deportation for providing information for age verification, given that ICE regularly uses commercial databases, social media platforms, and cellphone records to identify undocumented people. As a result, widespread age verification would negatively impact access to information for marginalized groups.

Weaponization of Duty of Care

One central concern is the ability of KOSA’s duty of care provision to be weaponized against certain types of content as a means to protect children. KOSA relies on the FTC to litigate whether a platform is causing harm, which can often swing largely based on the political winds of the time. This vagueness in defining “harm” thus allows state attorneys general to pressure the FTC to define different types of content as “harmful,” and opens the door to state bills which would make it impossible for youth to access content that KOSA would allow. KOSA, as written, requires supporters to trust that the guidelines produced within 18 months would prevent the duty of care from being weaponized, without any clarification on how those guidelines might be formulated. Advocacy groups on both sides of the political spectrum are concerned with how this could negatively impact young people and Americans at large.
First Amendment Concerns

Civil rights organizations, including the EFF, the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and the ACLU have all cited First Amendment concerns with KOSA. At the state level, many of the bills which proposed age verification have been challenged on First Amendment grounds. Additionally, there is a long history of internet legislation requiring age verification that has been struck down because of the First Amendment, and it remains unclear how these concerns that the court have already addressed have been addressed by KOSA.

Recommendations

There is enormous concern about the impact of the online experience on young people, but existing proposals are not appropriate ways to address these issues. Instead, these are recommendations for effective methods of tackling online safety for children:

Center Young People: Establish a better understanding of young people’s root struggles that they are experiencing and turning to technology to fix or address.

    •     Increase Access to Mental Health Services: Increase access to free or low-cost mental health services and address the nation’s shortage of social workers, therapists, and counselors.
    •     Rebuild the Social Fabric: We also need to support the presence of concerned adults in our children’s lives and encourage more in-person social interaction among our youth.
    •     Create Digital Street Outreach Programs: Our youth’s activity online shows us that they are in pain. We need outreach programs that meet them where they are physically in their communities to help them find the services and help they need.
    •     Better Individual and Parental Tools: Current parental tools on streaming services, video games, and smartphones are ineffective. Technology companies should invest in improving parental tools through user testing with parents and children.
    •     Limit the Scope of Acceptable Advertising: Rather than trying to carve up what children can and cannot see, social media should be treated like a public billboard. There should be explicit restrictions on what kinds of goods and services cannot be advertised on social media—to anyone—due to its role as a digital town square.
    •     Pass Privacy Legislation: We need comprehensive privacy legislation, and there must be clear limits on how data collected by platforms and other tech companies can be used. But this is true for everyone, not just people under 18.

Find more information at https://citap.pubpub.org/pub/cosl/release/5.