What Passed and What It Does
On June 29, 2026, the US House of Representatives passed the KIDS Act (H.R. 7757) by a 267-117 bipartisan vote—consolidating 14 separate child online safety measures including the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), COPPA 2.0, the SCREEN Act, the SAFE BOTs Act, the SPY Kids Act, and the Safer GAMING Act. The package cleared a two-thirds threshold under suspension of the rules, the House fast-track procedure, with 47 members not voting.
The package enacts several substantive changes. COPPA 2.0 updates the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act's framework: the formal "child" threshold rises from under-13 to under-14, while a new "teen" category extends the ban on individual-targeted advertising to minors under 17 and adds data minimization, deletion, and parental consent requirements. The SCREEN Act requires websites where more than one-third of content qualifies as "harmful to minors" to implement age-verification systems capable of determining "whether it is more likely than not" that a user is a minor. The SAFE BOTs Act mandates that AI chatbots disclose their non-human status at the start of any interaction, prohibits claims of professional credentials (medical, legal, therapeutic), and requires crisis hotline referrals for self-harm queries. The revised KOSA component requires platforms to adopt "reasonable policies" addressing enumerated harms—sexual exploitation, drug and gambling distribution, financial scams, severe violence threats—with a 10-day response window for harm reports and immediate escalation for imminent threats.
The Case for the Bill
To steelman supporters: the problem they are solving is real. Online child exploitation, algorithmically-amplified self-harm content, and the commercial surveillance of minors are documented harms, not hypothetical ones. The KIDS Act includes explicit safeguards that distinguish it from more aggressive proposals: it does not modify Section 230, contains no encryption backdoors, prohibits viewpoint-based enforcement, and bars platforms from collecting more age data than they already hold. The 267-117 margin—far beyond a party-line majority—reflects genuine cross-ideological concern that existing law, largely frozen in 1998's original COPPA framework, has not kept pace with the social media and AI-driven platforms that children actually use.
Where the Mechanics Break Down
The civil liberties critique is also legitimate. EFF has characterized the KIDS Act as an "age surveillance bill," pointing to a structural gap: the "knows or should have known" constructive knowledge standard embedded throughout KOSA creates market pressure on all platforms—not just pornographic sites—to proactively collect age data on every user. Age-estimation systems, EFF notes, "fail more frequently for people of color, people with disabilities, and trans and nonbinary people"—meaning the verification burden falls hardest on populations already underserved by existing law.
NetChoice has raised First Amendment concerns about the platform design standards, arguing that federal directives on how platforms organize and present information can harden into de facto government editorial mandates. The ACLU flagged that vague harm categories—particularly "sexual exploitation"—risk suppressing sex education, LGBTQ+ information, and harm-reduction content that minors have a constitutionally-protected right to access. The KOSA "reasonableness" standard is offered as a First Amendment-friendly alternative to prescriptive rules—but courts applying open-ended reasonableness tests will lack clear limiting principles, and what qualifies as reasonable shifts with enforcement priorities.
The Senate Standoff
The most immediate obstacle is political, not judicial. The House KIDS Act arrived in the Senate missing the provision that its most powerful backers care about most: a duty of care requiring platforms to affirmatively prevent minors from suffering eating disorders, depression, anxiety, and compulsive-use harms—categories the House version does not cover.
The Senate KOSA—co-sponsored by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and backed by more than 75 Senate co-sponsors—covers these mental health harms explicitly. Blumenthal and Blackburn called the House bill "hollow reforms" that leave "Big Tech's predatory business model intact" and have pledged to block the House version. Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA), ranking member of Senate Commerce, urged the House to slow down before the vote. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz (R-TX) has indicated a potential markup in July 2026 but has set no firm date. The chamber's divide—Senate Democrats opposing federal preemption of state laws, Senate Republicans insisting on it—adds a second axis of conflict beyond the duty-of-care gap.
The Proportionality Question
The KIDS Act's core tension—protecting minors without building generalized surveillance infrastructure for adults—cannot be resolved through political splitting of the difference. Narrowing age-verification liability to highest-risk contexts (the SCREEN Act's explicit adult content sites) rather than spreading constructive knowledge liability across every platform is the more proportionate approach. Clear, enumerated harm categories—as KOSA already applies to illegal conduct—are more defensible than a generalized duty of care extended to legal but uncomfortable speech. The House bill moves partially in this direction; the Senate version does not.
Whether both chambers can reconcile that gap before the 119th Congress ends is the question that actually determines whether this package becomes child safety law or a campaign talking point. A bill of this scope—covering AI disclosure, age verification, targeted advertising, platform design standards, and data brokerage in a single vehicle—deserves a rigorous conference process rather than a take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum. The children it is meant to protect deserve no less.