KOSA in Flux: Senate Sticks & House Shifts

Shae Gardner
Dec 9
4 min read

At last week’s House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee hearing, the Kids Online Safety Act , known as KOSA, once again took center stage. But this time, the focus was not only on what KOSA aims to do, but on how dramatically the just released House discussion draft diverges from the Senate version that passed last year.

For organizations working at the intersection of youth safety, civil rights, and digital governance, including LGBT Tech, this is an inflection point. The House version raises serious questions about effectiveness. The Senate version, meanwhile, still presents fundamental risks to LGBTQ+ youth and content, especially in the current political and enforcement environment.

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What Changed in the House KOSA Draft?

The most visible shift in the House discussion draft of KOSA is the removal of its core “duty of care” standard. In the Senate version, that duty of care is the heart of the bill: it obligates covered platforms to “exercise reasonable care” to prevent and mitigate a list of designated harms to minors, including anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance use, and exposure to self-harm or sexual exploitation.

In practice, that structure ties liability to outcomes: if platforms are seen as failing to adequately reduce those harms, they can face enforcement by the FTC and state attorneys general. Advocates, including LGBTQ+ groups like us, have long warned that in a politically hostile climate, the easiest way for platforms to demonstrate reasonable care will be to over-remove controversial content, impacting LGBTQ+ resources, gender-affirming care information, and queer community spaces.

The new House discussion draft attempts to sidestep some of those concerns by replacing a direct duty of care for process-focused obligations. Instead of requiring platforms to prevent and mitigate harms, the draft leans more heavily on transparency reports, independent safety audits, and “reasonable” safety policies.

Sponsors have framed these changes as an attempt to make KOSA more responsive to the First Amendment challenges raised by the Senate version. But the reaction at the hearing made clear that this is not a consensus fix. Several lawmakers who previously backed KOSA described the new draft as “weak” and “ineffectual,” arguing that, without a meaningful duty of care, the bill risks becoming more a reporting exercise than an enforcement tool. Senator Marsha Blackburn, co-sponsor of the Senate KOSA, has been blunt that she believes the House changes would “do nothing to protect children online.”

Broadly, the House draft occupies an uneasy middle ground: it drops the most controversial enforcement mechanism while leaving other core questions unresolved. It still centers federal definitions of “harmful” design and content, still relies on the FTC as the central arbiter, and risks that companies will limit minors’ access to whole categories of content that may be deemed risky in a highly politicized environment.

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Fundamental Danger Remains in the Senate Version

Last week, LGBT Tech joined an open coalition letter urging Congress to reject the current Senate version of KOSA. Led by the National Black Justice Collective and signed by a number of civil rights organizations and advocacy groups, the letter urges our legislators to consider our changed and worsened political reality and not dismiss the many constitutional and technical concerns that remain. The letter further calls on Congress to:

Reject any version of KOSA that enables content-based censorship and enforcement by partisan officials, or jeopardizes LGBTQ+ youth access to affirming resources.
Conduct comprehensive impact assessments examining how KOSA would affect marginalized youth populations across different age groups (acknowledging that the needs of toddlers, elementary school, preteens, 13-15, 16-17, and 18-21-year-olds are different) before any committee or floor consideration.
Hold hearings centered on LGBTQ+ youth voices across age, race, gender, disability, and language identities, ensuring that the young people most affected by this legislation testify on how it would impact their lives and well-being.
Pursue alternative approaches to youth safety that do not rely on government-defined content standards or create new censorship infrastructure that removes age-appropriate parental and youth consent and considerations.

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From the perspective of queer and transgender youth who rely on the internet to find language for their identities, connect with peers and crisis resources, and navigate hostile offline conditions, serious questions remain:

Who defines harm, and according to whose values? Whether the standard is a duty of care or “reasonable” safety policies, someone must decide which content is harmful and which is beneficial. In a political climate where LGBTQ+ existence is being cast as inherently dangerous to children, that power is anything but neutral.

What happens to affirming content at the margins? Systems built to minimize exposure to “risky” material often work by bluntly suppressing anything that could even vaguely trigger enforcement and thus may suppress much legitimate content. We have a long history of LGBTQ+ sexual health education and community resources being lumped together with pornography or “adult” material. That pattern is likely to repeat under any framework that incentivizes platforms to err on the side of removal.

How will enforcement intersect with existing bias? Automated moderation and risk-detection systems already misclassify LGBTQ+ content at high rates. Giving regulators and state officials new powers to punish platforms for “failing” to protect youth may push companies to ratchet up those systems, entrenching bias.

As KOSA moves forward on these parallel tracks, we know there are no easy answers.

Lawmakers are responding to real pain felt by young people and their families. But any durable solution has to be honest about trade-offs and power. A bill that creates broad content-based duties and places enforcement power in the hands of officials who have openly targeted LGBTQ+ communities is not a neutral safety measure and will not protect the communities it purports to care about.