The technology industry, in the meantime, has been pouring millions of dollars into lobbying efforts to kill not only KOSA, but a whole host of online safety bills aimed at protecting children. A lobbying disclosure analysis by Issue One reveals that tech companies spend more than $230,000 per day to buy influence for a combined $41.8 million in lobbying between April and June of this year. Last year, Meta alone spent $26.29 million on federal lobbying and hired 89 lobbyists. That is one for every six members of Congress. 

That investment appears to have paid dividends. The version of KOSA that recently emerged from the House as part of the broader Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act legislation was significantly weaker than the Senate version. 

The industry’s PR offensive has been just as vigorous, including strategically placed op-eds raising the specter of “censorship,” and preying on fears that conservative voices will be silenced on social media platforms under the “imprimatur of statute.” One recent piece suggested that the bill should be “relegated to the dustbin of history and its printed copies to the garbage bins of Capitol Hill.”

Are you scared yet? 

The problem with this line of attack is that it conflates two vastly different legal and Constitutional questions. The first is whether private social media companies may decide what speech to host. The second is whether Congress may require those companies to take reasonable steps to protect children who use their products. They are not the same question.

For years, critics on the political Right have correctly complained that companies such as Meta, YouTube, and X exercised their enormous editorial discretion in ways that disproportionately affected conservative speakers. During the COVID-19 pandemic, platforms removed or suppressed content questioning the origins of the virus or challenging prevailing public health guidance and safety of the mRNA vaccines. Other politically sensitive stories were downgraded or restricted. 

The real question then is not whether or not platforms can lawfully moderate content. They plainly can and do. It is whether KOSA compels them to suppress protected speech in ways that violate the First Amendment.

Critics contend that it does. They argue that, faced with potential liability, platforms will simply censor more lawful speech for everyone rather than maintain separate experiences for adults and minors. It is a serious concern and one worthy of careful consideration. But it also overstates both the scope of the bill and the nature of its obligations.

KOSA is not principally a speech regulation. It does not prohibit adults from discussing controversial subjects online. It does not authorize the government to decide which political viewpoints may be expressed. Nor does it require platforms to remove lawful content because it is controversial or unpopular.

Instead, the bill is directed primarily at the way platforms design and operate products used by minors. Its provisions focus on matters such as stronger default privacy protections, parental tools and controls, limiting unwanted contact from strangers, greater transparency, and reducing design features that encourage compulsive or addictive use. In other words, much of KOSA concerns the architecture of the product itself rather than the viewpoints expressed by third-party users.

That distinction matters. Every communications platform makes editorial decisions about what users see. Newspapers decide what belongs on the front page. Television producers determine which stories lead the evening news. Social media companies make those decisions through recommendation systems that rank, prioritize, and amplify billions of pieces of content every day. KOSA does not create that editorial function. It asks whether companies should exercise it differently when the user is a child instead of an adult.

Nor is there anything constitutionally novel about treating children differently from adults. U.S. law has long recognized that minors occupy a distinct legal status. Children possess constitutional rights, but those rights have never been understood to be identical in every respect to those enjoyed by adults. Society routinely imposes special protections for minors, from compulsory education laws and age restrictions on alcohol and tobacco to children’s privacy laws and limits on minors’ access to sexually explicit material. The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized that government has a compelling interest in protecting children, even while insisting that laws affecting speech must remain consistent with the First Amendment.

BEHIND THE RECOVERY: WHAT IT TAKES TO FIND A MISSING CHILD

KOSA fits squarely within that longstanding tradition. Its protections are directed at the online experiences of minors, not the speech rights of adults. Indeed, many of the bill’s safeguards operate through default settings and parental controls, allowing parents, not government bureaucrats, to determine the level of protection appropriate for their own children.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether every provision of KOSA is carefully drawn or whether additional safeguards are needed to ensure that lawful speech is not inadvertently burdened. But it is a mistake to characterize the legislation as a wholesale assault on free expression. At its core, KOSA asks whether companies that have spent years optimizing their products to maximize children’s engagement should bear any corresponding responsibility to design those products with children’s well-being in mind. That is a debate about corporate responsibility and child protection, not about silencing political speech.

Melissa Henson is the Senior Policy Advisor for Media and Culture for Concerned Women for America, the nation’s public policy women’s organization, dedicated to promoting biblical values and constitutional principles in public policy. On X: @CWforA