A Rare Bipartisan Vote, With a Catch
On June 29, 2026, the House passed the Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act, H.R. 7757, by a lopsided 267-117 margin. The bill, introduced by Energy and Commerce Chairman Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., and Ranking Member Frank Pallone, D-N.J., bundles 14 separate child-safety proposals — including a rewritten Kids Online Safety Act — into a single package covering social media, gaming platforms, and AI chatbots (IAPP). Guthrie and Pallone called it a bipartisan solution to years of searching for how to protect kids online. They're not wrong that the underlying problem is real. But the bill they landed on trades a targeted accountability standard for a blunter instrument: near-universal age verification.
What the Bill Actually Does
The package requires platforms to verify users' ages, restricts targeted advertising to minors, mandates parental controls showing time-on-platform, and — new to this round — requires AI chatbots to disclose they aren't human, offer mental-health resources, and prompt users to take breaks (CNBC). Crucially, it drops the original KOSA "duty of care" — a legally enforceable requirement that platforms take reasonable steps to mitigate specific, documented harms like eating-disorder promotion or self-harm content. In its place, the bill leans on a "knows or should have known" standard for identifying minor users, which functions less like a narrow child-protection rule and more like a general mandate to figure out everyone's age.
The Case For It
The strongest argument for this trade is that duty-of-care language, however well-intentioned, invited exactly the criticism that sank earlier KOSA drafts: vague "reasonable care" standards handed regulators and state attorneys general discretion to target lawful content they disliked, from LGBTQ resources to political speech, under the banner of harm prevention. Age verification, proponents argue, is a bright-line, content-neutral alternative — it doesn't ask platforms to police what teenagers see, only who they are. Bipartisan appetite for that trade-off — Democrats and Republicans alike — is precisely why the bill cleared the House with votes to spare.
Where It Overshoots
The problem is that no deployed age-verification method is both accurate and privacy-preserving. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation has documented, platforms responding to this kind of mandate typically choose between government ID or credit-card checks (accurate, but identity-linking) and facial-age-estimation or behavioral inference (less invasive, but error-prone and demonstrably worse at estimating the ages of people of color, people with disabilities, and trans and nonbinary users) (EFF). Because the bill applies a negligence-style "should have known" trigger rather than a narrow, content-specific test, EFF argues it pressures general-audience platforms — not just adult sites — to verify everyone's age to avoid liability: "If websites and apps are expected to reliably identify teenagers, adults will be asked to prove they are adults. The result is a less private internet for everyone" (EFF). Common Dreams reports that press-freedom advocates raised a related concern: identity-linked age checks create a durable record connecting online accounts to real-world identity, a resource that could be used to unmask anonymous sources and whistleblowers, not just underage users (Common Dreams).
The Constitutional Backdrop the Bill Ignores
Supporters point to Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, the June 27, 2025 Supreme Court decision that upheld Texas's age-verification law for adult content sites, 6-3, applying intermediate rather than strict scrutiny. But EFF's own read of that ruling is that its logic is narrow: it applies to commercial sites where a substantial share of content is obscene to minors, not to general-audience social media or messaging apps. "No person — adult or child — has a First Amendment right to access speech that is obscene to minors without first submitting proof of age," the Court held — but EFF warns lawmakers are already stretching that holding to justify age-gating the entire internet (EFF). The KIDS Act's universal, platform-agnostic age-check trigger does exactly what the Court didn't authorize.
The Better Trade
A duty-of-care standard narrowly scoped to documented, specific harms — not vague "design feature" liability — combined with data-minimization rules that limit what platforms can collect on any user, would do more to protect minors than a mandate that hands every visitor's identity to a third-party verification vendor. The Senate, which now takes up H.R. 7757, has an opportunity to narrow the age-verification trigger to the kind of content Paxton actually addressed, restore a tightly defined duty-of-care obligation, and drop the identity-verification default for general-audience platforms. Congress can still protect kids without requiring every adult to hand over a driver's license to watch a video.