As U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal makes his latest pitch for the Kids Online Safety Act, some organizations still have reservations over what the bill could mean for LGBTQ+ youths and protected speech — and one of those groups is making the case from his home state of Connecticut.
A billboard truck drove around Hartford on Monday displaying messages criticizing Blumenthal’s push for KOSA, which aims to protect kids from the dangers of tech and social media. Against the backdrop of a pride flag, the billboard scrolled through posts on social media platform Bluesky and urged people to “tell him to stop betraying us.”
The digital rights group Fight for the Future, led by queer and transgender women, said they hired the billboard truck because they wanted to highlight how KOSA could censor and limit access to resources like gender-affirming care and reproductive health for vulnerable youths, particularly trans kids.
In response, the senator called the group a “pawn” of Big Tech, noting that he is still talking with LGBTQ+ groups about the way forward on the legislation.
The bill has undergone multiple revisions over the years to address their concerns, which led some groups, like GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign, to drop their opposition last year. But that hasn’t changed for all groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, which is still opposed.
Fight for the Future, which is part of a coalition of state-based LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights groups, said it focused its attention on Blumenthal compared to his co-sponsor, U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., because of his work on such issues.
“We specifically want to bring attention to how the community is feeling about his involvement and his insistence on KOSA as the answer for some of the problems that folks have been talking about in Congress around kids’ safety and social media,” said Sarah Philips, who works on KOSA and free expression at Fight for the Future.
“For us, Blumenthal is a pressure point because he professes to be an ally to these communities, but we want to show how you actually have to have your policies reflect that in order to say so,” Philips added.
The rare pushback against Blumenthal on such an issue comes amid debate over the Kids Online Safety Act, which was reintroduced last month. The bill got another big show of support from Senate leadership in both parties and a new endorsement from Apple.
The senators made an 11th-hour push to get it over the line before the end of last year but fell short. KOSA overwhelmingly passed the Senate in a 91-3 vote last summer. A few months later, a House committee approved a different version of the bill, but it ultimately didn’t come up for a full vote in the House. Because the session ended, proponents need to start the process over.
KOSA aims to put in place stricter settings by allowing children and parents to disable addictive features like infinite scroll and autoplay, enable privacy settings and opt out of algorithmic recommendations. It also has a “duty of care” section to mitigate harm to children when using such platforms.
The bill also orders the creation of an 11-member council with appointments made by the president and leaders in both parties to include academic experts, researchers, parents, youth representatives and others who are well-versed in social media and online safety.
The duty of care section has been at the heart of concerns, though it has been revised and narrowed in newer iterations.
Platforms covered under the bill must “exercise reasonable care” in creating and implementing design features “to prevent and mitigate the following harms to minors where a reasonable and prudent person would agree that such harms were reasonably foreseeable.”
Some of those harms include eating disorders, substance use disorders, suicidal behaviors, and depressive and anxiety disorders with “objectively verifiable and clinically diagnosable symptoms” that relate to compulsive usage of the platform by a minor. Sexual exploitation and physical violence and online harassment that is “severe and pervasive” are also included.
In pushing companies to reduce harm to minors, the bill says a government entity cannot enforce it “based upon the viewpoint of users expressed by or through any speech, expression, or information protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.”
Blumenthal has said that the changes made to the duty of care section show that KOSA is “content neutral” and would not allow the Federal Trade Commission or state attorneys general to sue over content or speech.
Groups like Fight for the Future saw some initial positive developments, saying at the time the enforcement of attorneys general was “narrowed” to prevent politicization of content, as well as limiting the duty of care section to product design. But they have continued to ask Blumenthal to reconsider the duty of care framework on content.
Philips pointed to the current push by some more conservative states over limiting online content. They see that as an indicator of how some in government may try to regulate what they deem inappropriate or controversial. And in turn, the group warned that companies may take down such information if they fear legal ramifications.
“It keeps the duty of care framework, which would make the enforcement so that the companies are held liable for user-generated content on their platforms. This framework does not work keeping information from marginalized communities safe because social media companies will always cover their own bottom line,” Philips said.
Parent-led organizations have been among the biggest supporters of KOSA. Advocates and parents who have attributed the deaths of their children to harmful content viewed on social media have come to Capitol Hill multiple times since 2022 to rally for the bill. Some teen and student groups have also come to Congress to ask for protections as they navigate the challenging landscape of social media.
“There is indisputable harm happening to children at an industrial scale — reaching literally millions of children,” Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and author of The Anxious Generation, said in a statement after KOSA’s most recent reintroduction. “KOSA would begin to address those harms. Parents say this is the No. 1 issue, above school violence, drugs and bullying. Free speech protections are enshrined in explicit language in the bill. I look forward to lauding the efforts of all who see this bill through.”
At a Monday press conference on broadband affordability in East Hartford, Blumenthal was asked about the billboard truck circling his Hartford office.
“I’m not surprised by it, but people should know we talk directly and constantly to the LGBTQ community,” Blumenthal told reporters Monday. “We’re listening to suggestions they have about the legislation, and we’re going to continue to be in direct conversations with them.”
Fight for the Future “is essentially a pawn or a tool of the big business interests that oppose the legislation because they have a strong business self-interest in the dollars and cents they reap from toxic content aimed at kids,” he added.
The nonprofit gets individual donations but has also received large donations from tech companies like Yelp, DuckDuckGo and Pinterest. Philips pushed back on Blumenthal’s characterization, arguing that he speaks more with tech companies than Fight for the Future does.
Companies like Microsoft, Snap and X, formerly known as Twitter, have backed the bill for some time now. Apple was the most recent one to throw its support behind the legislation, which was announced during the reintroduction of the bill last month.
The bill’s revisions in December came in part from X CEO Linda Yaccarino, which led to an endorsement from X owner Elon Musk. That was before Musk became part of the Trump White House, but the bill also secured support from other allies of President Donald J. Trump.
But some of the LGBTQ+ and digital rights groups aren’t the only skeptics of what it could mean for free speech.
Some conservatives in the House have shared concerns on this front. When it was up for consideration last year, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said he has seen some “great work” on KOSA but wants to address “whether it might lead to further censorship by the government of valid conservative voices, for example.” He indicated at the time a GOP-led Congress would keep working on online protections for minors next year.
“I think all of us, 100% of us, support the principle behind it. But you gotta get this one right when you’re dealing with the regulation of free speech. We are very optimistic that if it’s not done this year, that we can do that early next year with our Republican majorities,” Johnson said at a December press conference with House GOP leadership.
Now that KOSA is being considered in a different political environment — though they note that they were opposed to the bill during the Biden administration — critics are more worried about what it could mean for LGBTQ+ youths.
“That’s why LGBTQ youth who are fired up about KOSA and are so frustrated with him,” Philips said. “Because it felt dire last year and it feels unbelievably more dire now.”
The Connecticut Mirror/Connecticut Public Radio federal policy reporter position is made possible, in part, by funding from the Robert and Margaret Patricelli Family Foundation.
This story was originally published by the Connecticut Mirror.
