The Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act Needs Our Help

Contact your representative today so that we can get this thing passed

It’s a big week on the kids and phones front, including an announcement by Meta that it is making major changes to the way teen accounts work on Instagram. I’m gong to share details about those changes later this week. But — as I rush to send this newsletter out before dinner — I need your help with RIGHT NOW:

ACTION NEEDED: Help Get The Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act Passed

TL;DR: The Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act (KOSPA, often also referred to as KOSA) is a bipartisan attempt to better protect our children online.

KOSPA was approved by the Senate in July, in an astonishing 91-3 vote and is now (as I type!) under consideration in the House Representatives — and in order for it to continue to move forward, our representatives need to know that it has our support.

So that’s my ask for you today: please click this button, follow the prompts, and tell your representatives that you support the bill! (This tool was built by the team at FairPlayForKids.org and it’s great: it will walk you through the whole process in just a few minutes.) Do it for yourself; do it for your kids (do it with your kids); do it for other people’s kids . . . JUST DO IT!

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Wait, what’s KOSPA?

Here’s more info; KOSPA is a proposed piece of legislation would both update and add to the only other major piece of legislation that addresses kids’ online privacy and safety— the Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act (COPPA) — which was passed in, wait for it, 1998 . . . and hasn’t been updated since.

Photo by Shashank Verma on Unsplash

The version of KOSPA that has already been passed by the Senate would, among other things:

• Create a “duty of care” for websites that would require companies to better protect children from harmful content and give parents more control over what their children see online

• Prohibit targeted advertising to children and teens under age 17 and require their consent for data collection

• Allow children and teens to easily delete their personal information

• Create “minimization rules” that would limit how much information can be collected from children and teens to begin with

  

  Graphic from FairPlayForKids.org

It would be a huge deal if it were passed, and would force major changes in how many websites and platforms (particularly social media) work. Perhaps unsurprisingly, tech companies are lobbying against it — and, right now, as I type, they are also trying to get changes made to the text that would gut some of the most important parts of the would-be law.

We cannot let this happen.

I know from previous advocacy work that when enough constituents speak up about an issue—ideally at once—it truly does influence lawmakers’ decisions. So . . . we need to speak up! More specifically, we need to ask our Congressional representatives to support and pass the Senate’s version of KOSPA. (It’s the stronger version of the bill.)

As I alluded to above, if you click on the button above, you’ll be directed to an amazing tool created by the team at FairPlayForKids.org. It asks you to enter your name, address, and phone number so that it can look up your representative and place a call on your behalf — in fact, just a few seconds after I hit “submit,” my phone rang and I was automatically connected to the office of my representative. A real person answered the call, and (using tips from the script they provided) I voiced my support for the bill.

Then, as soon as I had hung up, Fairplay’s website offered me the option to send a pre-written (but customizable) email to my representative’s office in support of KOSPA. And after I did that, I was given some text to use on my social media accounts. It was amazingly efficient—the whole process took less than 3 minutes—and, as someone who does not usually place calls to government officials, it felt very empowering to voice my support directly to my representative. (Democracy in action!)

Long story short: please, if you are concerned about anything regarding kids, smartphones or social media, click on that link and voice your support of the Senate version of the bill. Then leave a comment here saying that you’ve done so — so that we can feel each other’s support here, too.

Note: The tech companies have gotten very sneaky in trying to kill this bill — arguing, for example, that it will hinder free speech, or that it will harm children in the LGBTQ+ community, or other historically marginalized groups. This is very clever — and also not backed up by evidence — and, in fact, KOSPA has already been modified specifically to address these concerns. If you would like to read more on this, I recommend:

This page from FairPlayForChildren.org explaining their take on how, far from harming them, KOSPA would protect LGBTQ+ youth.

This essay in

After Babel

from Zach Rausch, Jon Haidt, and Lennon Tores, originally published in The Atlantic, explains—and then demolishes—the tech companies’ argument that KOSPA would hurt LGBTQ+ youth

This powerful essay by a mother whose child killed himself in response to bullying he experienced online

Okay! I’m in the midst of an allergy attack (and, as mentioned, need to deal with dinner) but the LAST thing I’ll say today is that my colleagues Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch have an excellent op-ed in the New York Times this week, written in partnership wtih the Harris Poll, about the percentage of people in Gen Z who say that they wish that social media platforms—most dramatically TikTok and Twitter/X—had never been invented.

And despite this, the same respondents reported spending a truly astonishing amount of time on the platforms—more than seven hours a day, in many cases. Here’s a graphic from the piece:

And a quote:

Our survey shows that many Gen Z-ers see substantial dangers and costs from social media. A majority of them want better and safer platforms, and many don’t think these platforms are suitable for children. Forty-five percent of Gen Z-ers report that they “would not or will not allow my child to have a smartphone before reaching high school age (i.e. about 14 years old)” and 57 percent support the idea that parents should restrict their child’s access to smartphones before that age. Although only 36 percent support social media bans for those under the age of 16, 69 percent support a law requiring social media companies to develop a child-safe option for users under 18.

It’s truly amazing—and disturbing—to realize that some of the very same people who hold these opinions nonetheless are spending, in some cases nearly half their waking lives using them. I mean, seriously: what has happened to our culture and society for this to be the case? How have we been manipulated into thinking this is normal or okay? One way to begin to rectify this contradiction is to protect young users by getting KOSPA passed.

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There’s much more to the op-ed than I can get into here — but for the sake of getting this newsletter out as quickly as possible (so that you can contact your representatives), I’ll simply urge you to check it out.

More on Instagram teen accounts later this week. (And remember, if you’re not interested in the Kids and Phones section of this newsletter, you can always adjust your subscription settings so that you don’t get posts about kids and phones, but do stay subscribed to the general How to Feel Alive list.)

To scrolling less, living more, and protecting our kids,

Catherine