The Kids Online Safety Act of 2022
Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) & Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN)
The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) empowers kids and parents to take control over kids’
online experiences to better protect their health and well-being.

The Problem
Over the past decade, we have witnessed a teenage mental health crisis in America—skyrocketing suicide
rates, hospitalizations for self-harm, and depression among children and teens. This decade alone, suicide
and hospital admissions for self-harm have doubled among younger teen girls.
As five hearings in the Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, extensive academic research, media
reporting, and heartbreaking stories from families have shown, social media platforms play a role in themental health crisis for children and teens. Social media can foster body image issues, create addictionlike patterns of use, promote products that are harmful or illegal for young audiences, and fuel destructivebullying. The vital importance of mitigating the harmful effects of social media has been made all themore urgent by the pandemic as more educational and social activities have moved online.

The Solution
KOSA provides families with the tools, safeguards, and transparency they need to protect against threats
to children’s health and well-being online. The legislation would require social media platforms put theinterests of children first by requiring platforms to make safety the default and to give kids and parents
tools to help prevent the destructive impact of social media. KOSA also ensures that parents andpolicymakers can assess whether social media platforms are taking meaningful steps to address risks tokids. To that end, the bill:Provides parents and kids safeguards and tools to protect kids’ experiences online: The billrequires social media platforms provide minors with options to protect their information, disable
addictive product features, and opt-out of algorithmic recommendations—and requires platforms
to enable the strongest settings by default. The bill also gives parents new controls to help support
their children and spot harmful behaviors, including by providing children and parents with adedicated channel to report harms to kids to the platform.

Creates accountability for social media’s harms to kids: The bill creates a duty forsocial media platforms to prevent and mitigate harms to minors, such as content promoting of selfharm, suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, and sexual exploitation. It also requires social
media platforms perform an annual independent audit assessing risks to minors, their compliancewith this Act, and whether the platform is taking meaningful steps to prevent those harms.

Opens up black box algorithms: The bill provides academic researchers and non-profit
organizations with access to critical datasets from social media platforms to foster research
regarding harms to the safety and well-being of minors.

Endorsements
The Kids Online Safety Act has been endorsed by Common Sense Media, the American PsychologicalAssociation, the 5Rights Foundation, American Compass, the Internet Accountability Project, American
Principles Project, and the Digital Progress Institute.