Senate prepares for key vote on kid’s online safety bills

The Senate is poised to take a key vote on major legislation to keep kids safe online Thursday- the most sweeping regulation of the tech industry in more than a decade.

The package is made up of two bills – both have strong bipartisan support, and one already has 69 co-sponsors, more than the 60-vote threshold needed to move forward in the Senate. 

If the Senate clears the measure today, they are likely to pass the bills early next week, before leaving D.C. for the month of August. 

Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) said the measures social media companies have put in place are “not sufficient.” He cited data from the centers for disease control that one in ten teenage girls and one in five LGBTQ youth have attempted suicide. 

 “Whatever safeguards are in place, they’re clearly not doing the job,” he told CNBC. 

The package consists of two bills. One, known as the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act, would ban targeted ads to kids and teens. Companies would be banned from collecting personal information from users under 17 and could erase data, and establish a new young marketing and privacy division at the FTC.

The other, know as the Kid’s Online Safety Act, would also require social media platforms to have a “duty of care” to prevent their products from harming children, including exposing them to content that promotes drugs and alcohol or exacerbating mental health issues including eating disorders, anxiety, depression and suicide. Social media companies would have to automatically enable the strongest privacy setting for kids. 

While the second bill has been endorsed by some major tech groups including Snap Inc., X and Microsoft, it has been opposed by NetChoice, a trade association whose members include Meta, Google and Yahoo!, said the bill’s restrictions go so far they would be impossible for companies to implement. 

While the bill’s language explicitly says websites do not need to verify a user’s age, NetChoice Vice President and General Counsel Carl Szabo said the law would effectively require websites to verify the age of everyone who used them, collecting massive amounts of data in the process. 

“All of a sudden, the government is requiring massive data collection which collides with things like several privacy laws that we’ve seen at the state level,” he said. 

While the bills are likely to clear the Senate, their fate is less certain in the House, where concerns about the broadness of the bills remain a concern. But House Speaker Mike Johnson said in an interview that Americans need to have more power over what their kids see online. 

“We’ll be looking at the details of the exact legislation, but I suspect it’ll have a lot of support. Obviously, we need to protect children with regard to online activity,” he said. “the internet is the wild wild west and some of these reforms are overdue.”