The Kids Online Safety Act is back

is a senior policy reporter at The Verge, covering the intersection of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. She spent 5 years covering tech policy at CNBC, writing about antitrust, privacy, and content moderation reform. The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a bill imposing sweeping obligations on tech platforms to protect children that use them, has been revived in the Senate after a failed sprint to become law late last year. The bill’s lead sponsors, Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), reintroduced the bill roughly five months after it died in the House of Representatives after a 90+ vote to pass it in the Senate. KOSA would require online platforms to take steps to mitigate harms like depression and eating disorders to children that use their services, and would also require certain default privacy settings for their accounts. Parents who have lost children to drug overdoses they trace back to social media platforms and suicide following relentless bullying have ... Read full article.