Today, TechFreedom sent a letter to the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee reiterating our concerns about the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). Last year, joined by leading Internet law and First Amendment scholars, we explained that KOSA would force platforms to age-verify their users and impose an undefinable and unmeetable duty of care—violating users’ First Amendment rights to anonymous expression and ensuring that minors will be cut off from information they are constitutionally entitled to receive. This year’s iteration of KOSA poses those same problems, only with slightly different words. “Platforms will still have to age-verify users, violating their First Amendment right to speak and access content anonymously,” said Ari Cohn, Free Speech Counsel at TechFreedom. KOSA imposes obligations on platforms when it has “knowledge fairly implied” that a user is a minor, but provides no useful guidance on what circumstances will imply such knowledge. “The revisions made to KOSA just trade an explicit mandate for a vague one. Uncertainty about when knowledge of a user’s age will be implied leads to the same result as before: the only way a platform can be confident it is in compliance is by age-verifying every user. At best, language purporting not to require such verification ignores this practical reality. At worst, it is a deliberate obfuscation of the bill’s intended effect.”
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