Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) plans to bring S.1409, the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), to the Senate floor for a vote this week. KOSA attempts to set privacy protections for children online by requiring companies to mitigate the content they see. It proposes to use invasive filtering, monitoring tools, and increased data collection of both children and adults to achieve this goal.

KOSA's approach is seriously flawed, and threatens to harm vulnerable groups of children. It will introduce a new era of internet restrictions and censorship that impedes everyone's ability to access vital information and resources, regardless of age. To prove your age, platforms will likely require sharing a form of government ID or other identifying document that shows your date of birth. Private companies should not be compelled, and enabled by, the government to collect even more of your personal data than they already do.

We need you to call your Senator and urge them to vote NO on KOSA. We've provided scripts and more info to guide your call. There are many reasons to oppose KOSA, and they tend to fall along partisan lines. Therefore, depending on who your Senators are, you should choose to follow the appropriate script below.

Regardless of party, lawmakers should oppose KOSA because of its significant privacy impacts. Protecting teenagers online should not mean forcing them to de-anonymize, insist that their parents or guardians should be able to see whatever they're looking at, or incentivize platforms to pre-emptively sterilize their content for fear a teenager might look at it.

If you are represented by a Democratic Senator...

I am a constituent calling to voice my concern about the Kids Online Safety Act, S.1409, ahead of its imminent vote. I am concerned about KOSA's privacy impacts, its dangerous censorship mechanisms, and the disproportionate impact it will have on LGBTQ+ youth.

While KOSA’s aims of preventing harassment, exploitation, and mental health trauma for minors are laudable, the legislation is unfortunately likely to have damaging unintended consequences for young people. KOSA would require online services to “prevent” a set of harms to minors, which is effectively an instruction to employ broad content filtering to limit minors’ access to certain online content.

Content filtering is notoriously imprecise; filtering used by schools and libraries in response to the Children’s Internet Protection Act has curtailed access to critical information such as sex education, resources for LGBTQ+ youth, or reproductive health services. Online services would face substantial pressure to over-moderate, including from state Attorneys General seeking to make political points about what kind of information is appropriate for young people.

Moreover, KOSA would counter-intuitively encourage platforms to collect more personal information about all users. KOSA would require platforms “reasonably likely to be used” by anyone under the age of 17—in practice, virtually all online services—to place some stringent limits on minors’ use of their service, including restricting the ability of other users to find a minor’s account and limiting features such as notifications that could increase the minor’s use of the service. However sensible these features might be for young children, they would also fundamentally undermine the utility of messaging apps, social media, dating apps, and other communications services used by adults.

KOSA presents significant consequences that its drafters have yet to adequately address. I urge you to protect the privacy, safety, and access to information rights of young people and adults alike by voting NO on KOSA. Thank you.

If you are represented by a Republican Senator...

I am a constituent calling to voice my concern about the Kids Online Safety Act, S.1409, ahead of its imminent vote. I am concerned about KOSA's privacy impacts, its dangerous censorship mechanisms, and its potential to chill online free speech.

While KOSA’s aims of preventing harassment, exploitation, and mental health trauma for minors are laudable, the legislation is unfortunately likely to have damaging unintended consequences for young people. KOSA would require online services to “prevent” a set of harms to minors, which is effectively an instruction to employ broad content filtering to limit minors’ access to certain online content.

However sensible these features might be for young children, they would also fundamentally undermine the utility of messaging apps, social media, dating apps, and other communications services used by adults. Service providers will thus face strong incentives to employ age verification techniques to distinguish adult from minor users, in order to apply these strict limits only to young people’s accounts. Age verification may require users to provide platforms with personally identifiable information such as date of birth and government-issued identification documents, which can threaten users’ privacy, including through the risk of data breaches, and chill their willingness to access sensitive information online because they cannot do so anonymously.

Both children and adults alike should have the liberty to access important and useful information. And all internet users should feel free to express their thoughts and opinions without fear of censorship or repression. There are better ways to protect children from online harms, like a comprehensive data-privacy bill.

KOSA presents significant consequences that its drafters have yet to adequately address. I urge you to protect the privacy, safety, and access to information rights of young people and adults alike by voting NO on KOSA. Thank you.