WASHINGTON — Two Washington lawmakers are making a last-minute effort to pass landmark legislation intended to protect minors on social media platforms and other parts of the internet, but opposition from the left and right may keep the bill from reaching the finish line by the end of the year.
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Spokane, and Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., lead the committees in their respective chambers charged with regulating the online world, which for years has proven to be one of the most vexing legislative challenges facing Congress. They both see the Kids Online Safety Act, which passed the Senate with overwhelming support in July before stalling in the House, as a key piece of a broader set of reforms designed to rein in the tech companies whose products have become integral to the lives of Americans young and old.
After a statement on Monday from House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., suggested that his chamber wouldn’t take up the legislation before Congress departs D.C. at the end of next week, Cantwell urged her House counterparts to bring the bill to the floor.
“The urgency to protect our kids online doesn’t change depending on who is in the White House,” she said in a statement Monday. “The Senate acted by a vote of 91 to 3 and parents have been waiting long enough. The House should act accordingly.”
The bill, known as KOSA, would require social media companies to disable some of the more addictive features of their platforms and would make the companies responsible for reducing other harms to minors. It was crafted after a former Meta employee came forward in 2022 to reveal that the company behind Facebook and Instagram knew its products harmed the mental health and well-being of minors.
While the bill has bipartisan support in the House and Senate, it also has critics on the left and right who have warned that it could enable censorship.
McMorris Rodgers, a close Johnson ally who is retiring at the end of the year, said in an interview Tuesday that she has been making the case to GOP leaders that they need to act. Her panel approved KOSA in September with amendments intended to address critics’ concerns, sending it to the full House for a vote that won’t happen until Johnson and his leadership team decide to bring it up.
“We moved a bill out of committee that was amended to address some of the concerns that had been raised at the time by House Republican leadership,” McMorris Rodgers said. “So we amended that bill, and now they’re still saying they’re not supportive.”
In an interview with The Spokesman-Review on Wednesday, Johnson expressed confidence that the bill can pass but suggested that it may not happen until the next Congress begins in 2025.
“She and I are aligned and agree 100% about the need to address children’s online safety, and I’ve been working on the issue myself. The only drawback, or the concern at the moment with KOSA, is that I’ve got a pretty large contingency that is concerned about the free-speech rights.
“Because of her influence and her impact, that’ll largely be the reason this gets done, whether now or a couple of months from now. So I’m very optimistic we’ll get that over the line, and it’ll be one of Cathy’s great achievements.”
The effort to pass KOSA got a boost over the weekend, when Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of the social media platform X, revealed that Elon Musk — the company’s owner and an adviser to the incoming Trump administration — had been involved in revising the bill to assuage its critics.
McMorris Rodgers and Cantwell have argued that KOSA should be passed along with broader legislation that would limit how companies collect and use the personal data of Americans of all ages, which the two lawmakers unveiled together in April. That bill, the American Privacy Rights Act, was torpedoed by House leadership on the eve of a committee meeting when McMorris Rodgers had planned a vote to advance it to the House floor.
On Wednesday, Johnson said he was “in support of the principle” of the broader data privacy bill and that it would get done eventually.
“The details really, really matter,” the speaker said. “And particularly in a moment where we have these small majorities, I mean, I have to build consensus on everything.
“So when you have pockets of resistance on bills, it just takes sometimes an extraordinary amount of time and effort to work through it and come to a compromise.”
