The KIDS Act would put Washington in charge of how we can communicate online

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Tech<br>The KIDS Act would put Washington in charge of how we can communicate online

Carolyn Iodice and John Coleman<br>Jun 29, 2026

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Shutterstock<br>​This week, the House of Representatives is considering a bill to radically expand the government’s power to regulate online speech platforms. Framed as a child safety measure, the KIDS Act imposes a litany of restrictions on social media apps and other platforms.<br>For decades, Americans have enjoyed broad freedom to build tools to communicate with each other on the internet. From the smallest message board to the biggest social media platform, the First Amendment protects our right to freely design and use platforms to talk and share content with each other online. The government can go after wrongdoers that use online platforms for illegal activity, but it does not get to decide how a platform is designed and operated in the first place.<br>The KIDS Act would fundamentally overturn this status quo by allowing the government to decide how platforms can be built and imposing restrictions that will censor the speech of adults and minors alike.<br>Social media regulations

Title II contains the House’s version of the Kids Online Safety Act. We’ve done a deeper dive on the problems with KOSA here, but the upshot is that the bill does two major things.<br>First, it requires most online speech platforms to maintain policies and procedures to “address” certain harms to minors: scams, physical threats, sexual abuse, and distribution or use of drugs, tobacco, gambling, or alcohol. The exact policies and procedures platforms must maintain are not spelled out. As with the entirety of the KIDS Act, enforcement lies in the hands of the Federal Trade Commission and all 50 states, which can sue any platform they claim violates these requirements.<br>This sounds benign on its face, but the implications are startling: The government asserts the power to decide how we can build and run platforms for speech on the internet — in other words, how we can communicate with each other online.<br>Any method by which humans talk to each other — whether it’s mail, telephones, websites, or apps — will inevitably be used by some people who want to cause harm. Platforms try to detect and remove them, but when you’re sifting through thousands, millions, or billions of users, there’s no way to find all of them. The only way to guarantee people will not misuse a channel of communication is to shut it down altogether. So there is an inevitable trade-off between the freedom to communicate on a platform and the prevention of misuse of the platform.<br>Everyone who operates one of these platforms has to decide which security measures make sense and which would put too great a burden on users’ ability to communicate, either by imposing excessive surveillance, banning too many people, or cutting off useful features. Those choices are protected by the First Amendment.

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The government, however, is now trying to seize the authority to force a different balance, to demand restrictions on speech in the name of greater security. That will burden the rights not just of minors (who enjoy robust First Amendment protections), but adults as well, since the platforms can’t know precisely which users are minors and which are adults.<br>The second major part of KOSA goes further in dictating a litany of specific features that anyone running a covered speech platform must build. These features must be offered to anyone whom the platform “know[s] or should have known” is a minor.<br>This includes things like:<br>limits on the ability of other accounts to contact the user;

limits on any design features that “result in compulsive usage” of the platform;

an opt-out of personalized recommendation systems;

a screen to view a list of other users who can directly message the account;

notifications when unknown accounts try to message the user; and

the ability to set the account to “hidden.”

These settings must be on by default for minors, and there must be a way for parents to view and control such settings.<br>The idea is that minors are spending too much time on their phones, and so the platforms have to offer settings that will nudge them off social media.<br>Again, on its face this sounds fine, but think about the implications. If the First Amendment means anything, it means we’re allowed to freely build and operate forums to communicate with each other. Yet the government...