KOSA Won't Save Your Kids. You Will: Why internet restrictions, age verification, and censorship are no substitute for parenting.

By Cat Hadley, Founder of RE/STRICT Film Festival 

This week the Senate Commerce Committee voted on two bills sold as ways to protect kids online. KOSA (Kids Online Safety Act) passed unanimously and is now heading to the senate floor for a vote. The SCREEN (Shielding Children’s Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net) Act which details a requirement to verify your identity with a government ID just to use half the internet, narrowly failed to advance. Not because enough senators voted no, but because too few of them bothered to show up. It'll be back. Both bills come from a place I understand: the internet is scary, and we want to protect our kids from it. But neither one will actually do that. And I say this as a mom of two young kids. 

I was a child of the early internet. I raced home from school to login to AIM under the screen name COOLGURL77 every day. I watched things I shouldn't have on a dare from a friend and, generally, saw more than any kid probably should. Was that impactful to me? Sure. But so was watching Aliens at 8, to which my father said Sigourney Weaver was a great role model for me. Whatever you say, Dad. 

Now, I have kids of my own and the general discourse offers parents two options: turn off the internet forever, or hand over the iPad and hope for the best. My co-parent and I landed somewhere in the middle. I've watched my kids learn coding, stop-motion animation and how to actually think through a game. That's been a real plus. But the middle road is harder because it means balance and that involves handling the end-of-screentime meltdown. We also know our kids are smart enough, and will eventually be capable enough, to get around any of the bans we have in place online if they really want to. 

So what did we actually do? We talked to our kids. We sat them down and talked about the dangerous parts of the internet. Most importantly we told them the deal: If you see something weird or scary, you come to us. No trouble, no shame — just come tell me. If your kid can't come to you when something online confuses or scares them, that's a gap in the relationship, not a gap in the parental controls. No app setting fixes that. 

Here's the thing lawmakers pushing these bills don't want to hear: Telling kids something is banned only makes them want it more. Age-restrictive labels and stronger parental warnings on media and video games have been shown to increase how desirable that content is to kids. Sonia Livingstone, a London School of Economics researcher who has spent decades studying kids and technology, has found the same thing again and again: holding back access doesn't protect kids. Instead, it makes the forbidden thing more tempting and pushes them to go find it

in secret, without the guidance a parent could have given them if the conversation had happened instead. 

And it's not just theory. States that already have porn age-verification laws are a preview of what happens nationally if these bills pass. In Louisiana, Pornhub's parent company reported traffic dropping around 80% after the law took effect, but the company was blunt about where those users actually went, stating they "migrated to darker corners of the internet that don't ask users to verify age, that don't follow the law, that don't take user safety seriously, and that often don't even moderate content." Researchers at NYU call this the substitution effect — block the front door and people don't stay outside, they find a window. The UK government's own impact assessment on its version of this law admitted the same risk: Age-checks could push kids toward the actual dark web, where they'd be "exposed to illegal activities and more extreme material." That's not a safer internet for your kid. That's the same content with both moderation and age gates stripped away, somewhere you'll never think to look. 

It's also not just porn sites these bills gate off. According to research, 69% of LGBQTIA2+youth report information relevant to their sexual orientation is not included in the sexual health curricula provided by their schools, and 12% say it is discussed in a negative manner. For a lot of queer kids, that late-night search is the only sex ed they're going to get. Take it away in the name of "protecting" them, and you haven't protected anything. You've just made the information that keeps them alive and healthy harder to find than the disinformation that doesn't. 

Education, on the other hand, actually works, and it works because it doesn't stop. A longitudinal study out of the Education University of Hong Kong found that teens with stronger digital literacy were meaningfully less vulnerable to online harm and the protective effect held up over time, but only when the education continued rather than being a one-and-done lecture. That's the part nobody wants to hear, because it's not a bill you pass once and walk away from. It's Tuesday. And then it's Wednesday. And then it's every day after that, for years, in your actual house, with your actual kid. 

So let's get into what these bills actually do. 

KOSA creates what's called a "duty of care,” meaning that platforms have to prevent content that might cause anxiety, depression, or other harm to minors. Sounds reasonable, until you ask: Who decides what "causes" that? More than 90 human rights and LGBTQ organizations, the ACLU, GLAAD, and the American Library Association among them, have warned this duty of care could be weaponized by state officials to censor resources for queer and trans kids. Senator Blackburn, co-sponsor of KOSA all but admitted transgender content is exactly the kind of thing state officials could go after under this framework despite the actual research showing gender-affirming care improves mental health and lowers suicide risk in trans people, not the reverse. So, a bill written to protect kids' mental health could be used to cut off the exact resources that protect it. It just passed the committee unanimously. And it's not just KOSA. In

Michigan, House Bill 4938, proposed a ban on online pornography and would work to criminalize any depiction of transgender individuals on the internet. 

The SCREEN Act doesn't even bother with that pretense of nuance. Unlike most state age-verification laws, it doesn't require a website be mostly explicit content, a single piece of restricted content anywhere on a site is enough to trigger it. Netflix. Reddit. Discord. Handing your government ID to a private verification company just to stream something rated PG-13. And "private verification company" isn't a hypothetical risk, it's already gone wrong. AU10TIX, the age-verification vendor used by TikTok and X, left credentials exposed for over a year, during which anyone could have pulled users' government ID numbers and photos. A Discord vendor breach exposed roughly 70,000 users' ID photos. This bill stalled in committee this week on a technicality, a quorum failure, not a no vote, which means it's coming back. 

And as for who's actually shaping these bills? Meta has spent millions lobbying Congress, not exactly against child safety, but for legal immunity from the thousands of lawsuits parents have already filed against it over harm to their kids. Meta reportedly offered to drop its opposition to KOSA in exchange for that immunity being written into the bill itself. Read that twice. The company being sued for harming kids is trying to get itself protected by the same law that claims to save them. 

I'm queer and my kids have grown up surrounded by queer joy — they've seen me speak at Pride, they know exactly who I am. I don't need a government agency's definition of "harmful content" deciding what's appropriate for my family to see online, and I don't trust the people writing these bills to draw that line where I would. 

The reality is bans don't work. The evidence is right there, and lawmakers know it. All these bills will actually do is funnel more of our data into the hands of corporations who will monetize it, hurt the communities already most vulnerable, and hand the government a tool that can put a moving target on the back of any citizen they want to, with no due process, with a few taps on a keyboard. We cannot give away our First Amendment rights because we don't want to have a hard conversation with Brayden. A free internet is a lifeline for so many of us. For a queer kid finding out at 1 a.m. that they're not alone, for anyone who needs information they can't safely ask for out loud. And that's exactly why I don't buy that this was ever about kids. It's about control. 

I can empathize with how scary the world feels right now, raising kids in the middle of all this. But scared or not, we still have to parent. That's the job. Lawmakers who genuinely want to keep kids safe should be investing in digital literacy education and actual parental support, not building a surveillance apparatus that Big Tech gets to help write. 

The reality of parenting is that we can't control everything around our kids. We never could, not before the internet, not after. What we can control is whether they trust us enough to come ask. Parents are still human. Kids are still human. None of us: Not me, not the FTC, not a Meta

lobbyist get to fully decide what a curious kid finds. We just get to decide whether they're alone when they find it, or whether they've got somewhere to bring it back to. 

Our freedom to raise our kids as we see fit, and our freedom to speak, to read, to exist online without a government ID checkpoint, is worth fighting for. It's worth fighting the hardest for our kids to have those freedoms in the future. 

So, do that hard parenting. And then do this other hard thing too: Look up your senators and representative — it takes about ten seconds and only needs your ZIP code — and call or email them. Tell them you oppose KOSA and the SCREEN Act. Tell them a free internet is worth more than the illusion of a safe one. Tell them no.