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Two years ago, Maurine Molak visited Capitol Hill for the first time to support a proposed law she believes could have saved her son. David Molak was a lanky teen who loved basketball — “a joy of a kid,” she says. Then, as she’s recounted respective times to legislators, he got injured while playing. He began spending more and more time on social media and video games, and according to Molak, his online life became a compulsion.

David would check his telephone in the mediate of the night and bargain money from his parents to spend on in-game items. He became a mark of cyberbullying on Instagram, which she says failed to respond even erstwhile friends reported the harassment. In 2016, at age 16, he died by suicide.

Molak was no alien to stately halls or legislators. Within 2 years of her son’s death, she’d successfully advocated in Texas for David’s Law, which let schools analyse cyberbullying outside their walls. The US legislature felt more opaque and little accessible: “I was apprehensive, and truly frankly tense about it,” she says. But she was joined by a group of another parents, all of whom had descended on Washington to pass the recently announced Kids Online Safety Act: a bill meant to rise the standards for how social media companies defend kids.

When I met up with Molak at a cafe in December 2024, she was on her 14th journey to legislature — and exhausted. She was getting ready to join a rally for KOSA outside the US Capitol, the latest in what seemed like an endless series of pushes for the bill. She kept a sticker on her telephone commemorating the fight against cyberbullying: a chat bubble with 3 red dots in the middle, which she says stand for “stop and think.”

Since 2022, KOSA has become simultaneously 1 of the most popular and most controversial bills in Washington. It cleared the legislature with uncommon bipartisan support, earning a nearly unanimous vote of 91–3 erstwhile it passed in July. But months later, as 2024’s legislative session draws to a close, it’s on life support in the House.

Despite broad support for KOSA’s overall aims, Republicans and Democrats alike have expressed reservations about the power it could grant regulators over the internet. Tech companies are divided on it: Microsoft and Elon Musk’s X are lobbying openly in favor, while Meta and Google have quietly opposed the bill. As parents like Molak argue it’s the best way to prevent intellectual wellness crises, sexual abuse, and even suicide among young people, civilian liberties advocates inform it could cut online lifelines for any of the country’s most susceptible teens.

Now, both sides are down to the last week, and the odds of a vote look increasingly small.

KOSA emerged in the aftermath of a congressional crisis over how to handle social media and kids, sparked by a erstwhile Facebook worker named Frances Haugen.

In late 2021, The Wall Street Journal began reporting on what it dubbed the “Facebook Files”: a series of papers released by Haugen, laying out what the company (since renamed Meta) knew about its impact on young users. Haugen tells The Verge she hadn’t sought out information about the subject — for her and many of her colleagues, “it just wasn’t a thing on top of our minds.” But erstwhile a Journal reporter asked her about it, she was afraid by what she found. One file, for instance, detailed Instagram’s research into how its platform made teen girls feel about their bodies. It found that, among another things, 32 percent reported “when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.”

The company

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defended its work

, saying the reports demonstrated a “commitment to knowing complex and hard issues young people may conflict with.” But lawmakers were furious. The legislature Commerce Committee marched in Haugen, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, and Facebook’s then-global head of safety, Antigone Davis, to learn more about what the company knew about social media’s risks and how legislature should respond.

In February 2022, after months of hearings, committee members Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) introduced the Kids Online Safety Act.

The bill was designed to put the onus for children’s safety on the social platforms that supported them. It proposed imposing what’s known as a “duty of care” — a work that would require tech companies to take reasonable steps to mitigate harm for their youngest users. If sites breached that work by recklessly rolling out a fresh feature that predictably put kids at risk, (perhaps by making them more accessible to adult strangers, facilitating harassment, or promoting self-harm content), they could be sued by state attorneys general or the national government.

Conversely, sites could limit their liability by constraining algorithms that might service eating disorder content to teens, limiting features that encourage kids to spend excessive time on their services, or restricting advertising toward teens that could be considered deceptive.

Beyond the work of care, KOSA required social media sites to install safeguards for minors’ accounts, including default privacy settings, parental tools, and responsive mechanisms to study bullying and harassment. While mainstream platforms commonly had any of these tools in place, the bill would make these kinds of mechanisms mandatory and guarantee reports actually got responses in a “timely manner.”

This wasn’t the first effort to legislate kid safety. In 2018, legislature passed FOSTA-SESTA, meant to remove protections for sites that host sex trafficking content (including trafficking of minors). Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), who authored the long-standing Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), has long sought to update it to rise the age of its protections and grow its scope. And a bipartisan group of lawmakers including Blumenthal and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) pushed for the EARN IT Act, meant to spur a crackdown on kid sexual abuse material.

The Facebook Files, though, granted the first KOSA draft a uncommon sense of momentum. “We are on the cusp of a fresh era for large Tech imposing a sense of work that has been completely lacking so far,” Blumenthal announced.

To parents like Molak, the bill was a salve to years of frustration. Had KOSA been in place, Molak believes, David might not have become so compulsively attached to games and social media. erstwhile he was bullied online, platforms might have been legally required to respond in a “reasonable” amount of time.

To others, however, KOSA was misguided — and dangerous.

Over the course of 2022, KOSA racked up just over a twelve cosponsors on both sides of the aisle. But it besides racked up fierce opposition from digital rights groups, free expression advocates, and LGBTQ+ rights organizations. In November of that year, more than 90 groups warned legislature leaders that KOSA would effectively instruct platforms “to employment broad content filtering to limit minors’ access to certain online content.”

On top of that, they said, KOSA could become a tool for political vendettas. “Online services would face crucial force to over-moderate, including from state Attorneys General seeking to make political points about what kind of information is appropriate for young people,” wrote the signatories, including Fight for the Future, GLAAD, the Wikimedia Foundation, and others. “At a time erstwhile books with LGBTQ+ themes are being banned from school libraries and people providing healthcare to trans children are being falsely accused of ‘grooming,’ KOSA would cut off another vital avenue of access to information for susceptible youth.”

Conservatives, meanwhile, argued KOSA didn’t go far enough. In March 2022, conservative think tank and, later, task 2025 organizer the Heritage Foundation argued that “gender ideology” — a mention to trans issues and providing gender-affirming care — was a “glaring omission” from the list of online harms in the bill. (Heritage has more late praised KOSA, which has gone through respective rounds of changes.)

KOSA was already showing up in large tech lobbying disclosures, too. (Those filings don’t indicate how much was spent specifically on it.) But tech companies didn’t request to say much publically erstwhile so many civilian liberties groups were already fighting at the front lines.

Despite this opposition, in July 2022, KOSA unanimously passed out of the Commerce Committee. The massive show of bipartisan support was significant, and different for a substantive part of legislation. After that… it stalled. KOSA advocates who’d been excited and hopeful grew anxious.

As the months ticked away, KOSA was starting to look like the countless another net regulations that had been announced to large fanfare, only to meet a quiet demise. Then, its creators brought it back to life.

In May 2023, Blackburn and Blumenthal refreshed and reintroduced KOSA in a fresh legislative session, aiming to address criticism of their first try. Most significantly, the bill stated that it would not prevent platforms from serving teens content they specifically searched out, nor would it punish services for recommending resources meant to mitigate the kinds of harms that it named — keeping kids distant from suicide content, for instance, shouldn’t mean locking distant suicide prevention posts.

The fresh bill had more than 2 twelve cosponsors, and president Joe Biden had mentioned children’s intellectual wellness at the State of the Union earlier that year. Soon, KOSA had more than 40 cosponsors in the Senate and support from groups including the American intellectual Association, Eating Disorders Coalition, and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

But groups including Fight for the Future and the American civilian Liberties Union — as well as LGBTQ+ groups afraid about censorship — maintained their opposition to the bill. “KOSA’s core approach inactive threatens the privacy, safety and free expression of both minors and adults by deputizing platforms of all stripes to police their users and censor their content under the guise of a ‘duty of care,’” ACLU elder policy counsel Cody Venzke said in a message at the time.

For nearly another year, KOSA remained in limbo. Europe was marching steadily toward fresh online regulations: the European Commission was gearing up to enforce the massive Digital Services Act, and the UK passed its Online Safety Act, which covered any of the same ground as KOSA. But the US was barrelling toward a presidential election while war in the mediate East (and the reaction to the US government’s response) distracted from many home issues. Opponents of KOSA could take a breath. Then, erstwhile more, the bill came back.

After more months of uncertainty, KOSA went through another revision in February 2024 — which made 2 crucial changes. It removed the ability of state AGs to enforce the work of care, a peculiar concern for LGBTQ+ groups that feared legal attacks from red states. And it added a definition of what “design features” companies should be wary of rolling out, emphasizing a focus on companies’ business motives. Its nonexhaustive list included infinite scrolling, notifications, and in-game purchases.

The changes appeased any longtime critics of the bill. respective LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, including GLAAD, the Human Rights Campaign, and The Trevor Project, formally removed their opposition, telling Blumenthal that the “considerable changes … importantly mitigate the hazard of it being misused to suppress LGBTQ+ resources or stifle young people’s access to online communities.” KOSA gained more than 60 legislature cosponsors, all but ensuring passage. legislature Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said he’d work with the bill’s sponsors to advance it.

Despite all this, though, months went by without a vote. Advocates pestered Schumer to put KOSA on the calendar. But the bill competed for level time with a never-ending list of alternate priorities — a foreign aid package and even a bill that could ban TikTok on national safety grounds were among them.

Finally, just before legislature would take its summertime break, Schumer acted. He put KOSA to a vote, bundled with the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0), which raised the age for net privacy protections for kids. On the day that Schumer announced he’d decision the bill forward, Molak said that “seeing this bill across the finish line is my second-greatest wish” — second, of course, to getting David back.

KOSA passed with remarkably strong support in the Senate, receiving just 3 no votes from Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR), Rand Paul (R-KY), and Mike Lee (R-UT). Their circumstantial concerns varied, but all 3 feared unintended consequences for online speech.

As legislature adjourned for the summer, it yet seemed like KOSA would truly become law, as long as home leadership took it up. But past repeated itself yet again: months ticked by, and legislators never got the chance to cast their votes.

Nearly all social networks are, at a fundamental level, speech platforms: places where people congregate to chat, vent, pursuit viral fame, and find like-minded associates. A large amount of that speech is arguably harmful, like disinformation, hatred speech, and the glorification of risky or violent acts. A nontrivial condition is illegal, including threats, harassment, and kid sexual abuse material. But any law that alters the incentives for platforms to police speech will face questions about unintended consequences — and whether it will actually work.

Over years of debate, supporters of KOSA have promoted 1 fundamental message: social media is dangerous to children, and if tech companies aren’t legally forced to take work for harm, they — and the legislators who failed to halt them — will have blood on their hands.

“It is baffling to me that there is hesitation to pass this life-saving legislation,” says Erin Popolo, whose 17-year-old daughter Emily died by suicide following Instagram and Snapchat bullying in 2021. On the legislature level last week, Blumenthal recounted the communicative of teenager Jesse Harrington, who he says displayed addictive behaviors toward social media before his death by suicide just months ago. “Anybody saying, let’s wait until next session so we can get it truly right, that is saying they’re okay with more kids dying,” he said.

At a rally outside the Capitol last Tuesday, KOSA supporters spoke in front of a pile of 150 gifts stacked like a Christmas tree, meant to represent the children lost to online harms since KOSA’s reintroduction in May 2023. Shama Reed and her daughter Shamail Henderson told the communicative of how a 15-year-old Henderson was kidnapped by a 27-year-old man she’d met on social media and, over 30 days, forced to have sex with “hundreds” of men.

“My mom could tell me not to talk to adult strangers, but she couldn’t control those who contacted me,” Henderson says at the rally. “Tech companies should absolutely not be recommending content from adult accounts to teenage accounts. There should be no debate about this.”

KOSA advocates have a long list of complaints about social media. any are tied to a circumstantial instance of harm: cyberbullies whose harassment wasn’t removed, for instance, or predators that weren’t kicked out before targeting a child. Others are much broader, like claims that advice algorithms and another features are designed to addict teens at the cost of their intellectual health. “They were targeted to keep us on apps longer, to profit off our pain,” says youth advocate and advanced schooler Vanessa Li. “No 1 truly knew about the harms of social media until it started happening.”

Katie Queen, a pediatrician, said it utilized to be “rare” to see a patient with anxiety, depression, or an eating disorder in her practice. Now, she says, “over half of my patients are suffering with any kind of behavioral wellness or intellectual wellness disease.”

The technological case against social media isn’t clean-cut. While there’s been a well-documented rise in intellectual wellness concerns among children, it’s difficult to draw a causal link to social media use. People like wellness and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra have connected the most fresh upticks to the covid-19 pandemic, which he said placed “an exceptional burden on the intellectual well-being of our nation’s families.” Another researcher, Boston College prof. Peter Gray, has said the overall trend “long preceded the internet” and links it to the decline of independent play. US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has called for informing labels on social media, but critics have responded by pointing to mixed investigation about social media’s effect on kids — including affirmative impacts on children from marginalized groups who may have less in-person outlets for support. Murthy’s own study on the topic, published in 2023, noted social media besides provided “positive community and connection” for teens, peculiarly for “racial, ethnic, and sexual and sex minorities.”

Despite the bill’s many rounds of changes, critics inactive fear that handing the government power to regulate social media will backfire. Julie Jones, who got active in the opposition to KOSA through Fight for the Future, is the parent of a 20-year-old transgender boy and a nonbinary 16-year-old. Jones has watched conservative politicians agitate for years against allowing children (and in any cases, adults) to transition, down to encouraging kid protective services to analyse parents like her. She’s seen the reassurances that KOSA won’t be weaponized — but an early comment by Blackburn appearing to propose utilizing the work of care to “protect” children from trans content inactive rings in her head.

A little frequently discussed issue is age verification. While KOSA doesn’t formally require sites to verify whether users are over or under 18 years of age, critics fear that setting peculiar standards for minors will encourage or even require privacy-invading methods for confirming age. (Blumenthal has denied this claim and objects to age verification, saying the “potential for exploitation and misuse would be huge.”)

“KOSA in general, and these sorts of bills, I think are born out of good intentions,” says Jones. “But what are you willing to sacrifice for that?” Jones fears how President-elect Donald Trump’s national Trade Commission might choose to enforce the law, questioning how enforcers will find what is harmful to kids.

These aren’t idle fears. Trump’s FTC chair pick, Andrew Ferguson, has said he plans to “fight back against the trans agenda” in a document leaked by Punchbowl News. The Heritage Foundation, the Project 2025 organizer that now supports KOSA, said in a May 2023 post that “keeping trans content distant from children is protecting kids.”

Asked about that statement, Wes Hodges, an advisor for coalitions at Heritage, says KOSA doesn’t cover trans content and that a “fair reading of the bill” would not let for a “blanket prohibition” of distributing specified information. “This bill is very limited to [that] list of concerns” detailed in the bill, he says. “We don’t want KOSA to have mission creep.”

Sarah Philips, who works on campaigns for digital rights group Fight for the Future, is dubious. “We should believe them erstwhile they compose it down,” says Philips. “At this point, I’m not even asking for people to fight back. I’m asking for them to not hand them the reins and give them the ability to do whatever they want.”

KOSA doesn’t mandate a certain course of action by tech companies, and Philips worries that, as happened following FOSTA-SESTA, platforms will proactively purge content to limit their risks, even if it’s not unambiguously banned. In FOSTA-SESTA’s case, it’s not even clear there were real benefits. The bill was meant to reduce trafficking, but it’s more frequently credited with simply putting non-trafficked sex workers at risk.

Wyden, 1 of just 3 senators to vote against KOSA and the only politician to do so, compared it to FOSTA-SESTA in an op-ed explaining his vote. “I warned at the time that bill would do small to catch predators or aid victims, and would only drive sex work to darker corners of the web, or the streets. Unfortunately, I’ve been proved right.”

Prior to the latest KOSA revision, Wyden acknowledged any progress, including the addition of language that it will not preempt tech’s legal liability Section 230. But he told Axios he inactive feared KOSA could be utilized to attack encryption and anonymity, which teens can besides usage to communicate securely.

The bill’s supporters frequently point to its language explicitly protecting children’s ability to search out information on their own and say it only targets the platforms’ own harmful features. Rep. Kim Schrier (D-WA), a cosponsor of the home version of the bill who practiced as a pediatrician before entering Congress, says social media can be helpful for kids who don’t have any another way to get crucial questions answered or find community. But in general, she says, social media is not truly “something that kids need.” After all, “there’s many ways to find information, and it doesn’t request to be social media.”

Jones disagrees. She says she’s seen besides many kids for whom their online friends are their “lifeline.”

While progressives fear conservatives weaponizing KOSA, tech manufacture groups have pushed Republicans to consider the risks posed to them as well. Amy Bos, manager of state and national affairs for tech manufacture group NetChoice, warns that KOSA could give Democratic AGs “power to censor conservative speech.” The group frequently opposes Republican-backed net speech regulations, but it’s besides raised the alarm against laws signed by Democratic governors — like a California regulation encouraging sites to police hatred speech and disinformation.

“Should platforms halt children from seeing climate-related news due to the fact that climate change is 1 of the leading sources of anxiety amongst younger generations?” asked Paul, another of KOSA’s uncommon dissenters in the Senate, in a dear colleague letter shortly ahead of the vote. “Should pro-life groups have their content censored due to the fact that platforms worry that it could impact the intellectual well-being of teenage mothers? This bill opens the door to nearly limitless content regulation.”

As KOSA has advanced to the House, it’s Republicans that now endanger to scuttle it.

Once the Republican-controlled home became KOSA’s final hurdle, conservative speech suppression emerged as a chief concern. Even at the committee level, passing KOSA was far more of a slog than it had been in the Senate. home Energy and Commerce Committee members managed to advance the legislation in September, but they emerged with a product that many acknowledged inactive needed work and any inactive appeared to consider fundamentally censorious. “Doesn’t all political speech induce any kind of emotional distress for those who disagree with it?” quipped Texas Republican Dan Crenshaw.

These concerns came to a head in October. In a Punchbowl News report, home talker Mike Johnson (R-LA) called the bill “very problematic,” with the possible for “unintended consequences,” casting uncertainty on whether it would get a vote. The consequence has been a force run on Johnson in the final weeks of the 118th Congress, with weary KOSA supporters anxiously making their final pleas.

Johnson seems inclined to wait until Trump resumes office in January to consider any movement. But doing so would send legislature back to square one. The bill would request to be reintroduced in both houses, and there’s no promise the momentum and coalition Blackburn and Blumenthal brought together would hold. Plus, with a unified government under Republican leadership, priorities could shift to passing government that could only get through under single-party control.

KOSA did not appear in the draft stopgap backing bill released by home leadership on Tuesday evening, shrinking its shot at passage this year. Blackburn and Blumenthal seethed at the snub and placed blame squarely on home Republican leadership. “To be clear: the blockade against safeguards and accountability was about padding large Tech’s financial bottom line, not principle,” they wrote in a joint statement. “Falsehoods crafted in Silicon Valley boardrooms and parroted by Washington politicians, along with millions of dollars spent along the way, held up KOSA in the home to advance Meta and Google’s goal of profiting off our children.” Still, they resolved to proceed their fight for the bill.

Before the backing bill was released, Blackburn and Blumenthal made 1 final effort to get KOSA passed this session. With support from Elon Musk and later the president-elect’s boy Don Jr., they undertook a last-minute revision that further narrows the definition of a intellectual wellness disorder and bars censorship based on viewpoint. “No 1 is most likely more qualified to talk on the issue of free speech than Elon Musk,” Blackburn said on the legislature floor.

But tweaks like that do small to ameliorate censorship fears, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) writes in a blog post. “The viewpoint of users was never impacted by KOSA’s work of care in the first place,” the EFF writes. “The work of care is simply a work imposed on platforms, not users … The FTC could inactive hold a platform liable for the speech it contains.”

The EFF worries the fresh language could inactive be utilized to punish platforms for almost anything that might provoke sad and anxious feelings — as long as the feelings “disrupted someone’s sleep, or even just changed how individual socializes or communicates.” That could cover anything from school shooting information to tackle football, the EFF says.

While companies like X, Snap, Microsoft, and Pinterest have come out in support of the bill, the largest social media companies that would be subject to KOSA, like Meta and Google, have not offered their support. Advocates claim their money is behind the bill’s troubles, noting that Meta is erecting a fresh data center around Johnson’s district in Louisiana. Sacha Haworth, executive manager of the Tech Oversight task and a erstwhile Hill staffer, says erstwhile a company sends in a lobbyist after it’s spent money in a way that benefits a lawmaker, “There’s no mistaking that connection.” She adds, “It is very hard to fight against specified deep-pocketed, unlimited money.”

But tech lobbying on the bill cuts both ways, says Philips. “At the same time that we’re being criticized [for] being aligned with large Tech due to the fact that we argue KOSA on censorship grounds, co-sponsors Blumenthal and Blackburn are putting out statements with the CEO of X,” she says.

If KOSA doesn’t pass, lawmakers will gotta decide whether to start over next year. It’s a acquainted exercise in tech policy — 2 years ago, a package of tech antitrust bills gained crucial momentum but more or little died on the vine.

The home is scheduled to adjourn later this week, leaving an ever-narrowing window for KOSA to be negotiated into the must-pass bill to clear the chamber this Congress. Johnson had responded tepidly to the fresh X-endorsed iteration, calling himself “passionate about addressing children’s online safety” but saying he looked forward to “working with the Trump Administration to get the right bill into law.”

In the penultimate week before the holidays, I asked advocates and lawmakers about the future of KOSA — could it pass before the end of the year, and was this the end of the road if not? The almost universal consequence was a strained grin or a grimace. Walking off the home floor, home Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) told me getting Republican leadership to take up KOSA “might take an act of God,“ though she was inactive pushing for a vote. “In order to be in this job, you should be an optimist, you gotta stay hopeful,” said Schrier in her office — but also, she added, “clear-eyed.”

What’s easy to lose in these deliberations is the stress it’s put on average parents who have become activists — both the ones who have spent years repeating their children’s tragedies to advocate for fresh laws, and the ones who have spent those same years dreading the result if the laws pass.

In the final days of the 2024 legislative session, Molak is exhausted. She’s holding out hope but finds it hard to imagine continuing the travel and fight in legislature next year if it doesn’t pass now. possibly she’ll turn back to advocating in Texas, where she’s already seen any success, she says. Rodgers, who is retiring from legislature and is no alien to obstruction, bluntly says “no” erstwhile I ask if there’s any hope for the bill next year if it fails to get through in the next fewer days.

“It’s heartbreaking to the families, due to the fact that we know what’s at stake,” says Molak. “We know that if KOSA was implemented, then kids’ lives would be saved.”

For Jones, 2 things can be actual at the same time. She says she’d never deny the pain of parents who have lost their kids after experiencing online harms and is empathetic to their fight for a solution they believe could have spared them. But she fears the bill could put her own kids further in harm’s way. “I would never tell a parent survivor they’re incorrect for feeling the way they do,” says Jones. “And I don’t think they’re wrong. But I don’t think I’m incorrect either.”

Haugen, whose disclosures toppled that first domino toward KOSA, is unsurprised about where it’s ended up. Since the release of the Facebook Files, Haugen has focused her efforts in places like Canada and Australia, which last period banned social media for kids under 16. “I personally am not going to feel bad if KOSA doesn’t pass this year,” she tells me on Monday. “And that’s due to the fact that my expectations for what is possible in the United States anymore are really, truly low.”