The US House has recently come to a new agreement on the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA. This bipartisan deal pushes a new act, the KIDS Act, which forces overbearing restrictions on social media for minors, and causes social media companies to enforce digital ID for age verification. Reports are saying that the House could vote on this act as soon as Today, Monday June 29th. The restrictions from the KIDS Act are extremely harmful for youth, especially vulnerable youth who rely on social media for connectivity, support systems and exposure to alternative viewpoints. Youth deserve the same social media privacy that adults do, and should not have their freedom of speech limited just because they are young.
Table of Contents
- How Youth Access to Social Media Will Be Restricted Under KOSA and KIDS
- How These Restrictions Threaten Vulnerable Minors
- KOSA and KIDS Could be Used to Censor LGBTQ Content for Minors
- Call your Politicians NOW to Advocate Against the Passage of KOSA and KIDS
How Youth Access to Social Media Will Be Restricted Under KOSA and KIDS
Under this new framework, social media companies would be required to provide minors and parents with more safety controls. Platforms would need to offer tools that limit who can contact young users, restrict the visibility of their personal information, reduce personalized recommendations, limit certain addictive design features, and control location sharing. Platforms would also be expected to create stronger default privacy settings for users they know are minors. This means that companies like Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, Discord, and other large platforms would be forced to redesign parts of their apps so that teen accounts are automatically more restricted than adult accounts.
The deal also places a heavy emphasis on parental oversight. Platforms would be required to give parents tools to manage a minor’s privacy settings, restrict purchases, monitor time spent on the platform, and limit certain types of communication. Messaging features would also be affected. The KIDS Act includes restrictions on direct messaging for children under 13, parental controls for teen messaging, and a ban on disappearing message features for minors. In practice, this could make private online communication much harder for young people, especially on platforms where teens rely on messaging to talk with friends, seek help, or communicate privately about sensitive issues.
For teens, platforms that offer direct messaging would have to provide parental direct message controls. The default parental controls would let parents receive notifications when an unapproved contact tries to message the teen, approve or deny that contact before messaging begins, view and manage approved contacts, and be informed if the teen changes the age listed on their profile.
The deal also includes provisions aimed at online video games. Online video game providers would have to give parents safeguards to limit communication between a minor and other users. Parents, not minors, would be able to loosen those settings. Gaming platforms would also need tools to prevent a minor’s profile or personal information from being recommended to adults and to restrict purchases or financial transactions. That could affect multiplayer games, console networks, mobile games, digital storefronts, in game chat, friend recommendations, and in-game purchases.
How These Restrictions Threaten Vulnerable Minors
Unfortunately, the youth who will be harmed the most by these social media restrictions are the ones who are already living in vulnerable situations. I’ve discussed the harms of social media bans and restrictions for minors on several occasions, but it is important to understand these harms in the context of KOSA and KIDS. Social media has more benefits for teenagers than harms, and these main benefits include being able to connect with peers, be exposed to the free flow of information, and exercise their freedom of speech. All of these things will be harmed by KOSA and KIDS.
First of all, it is important to note that not all children are living in homes with healthy, happy families that support them. Many young people live in homes with oppressive parents, who do not have their best interests at heart, and do not act as a safe support system. In many instances, these parents will often try to exert overbearing control over their friendships, isolate them, emotionally abuse them, and overly shelter them from important information. The internet and social media are crucial to minors living in these types of homes, so they can mitigate the damage caused by their parents. If a minor is being restricted by their parents from interacting with their friends in person, they may turn to online communities and social media to be able to connect with peers there. In these cases, connecting with others online is extremely beneficial to them, and can act as a strong support system to substitute the lack of support system that they have at home. However, KOSA and KIDS are a direct threat to this, by purposely targeting minors’ ability to communicate and connect with others online.
Giving parents full control of minors’ social media accounts is a recipe for disaster. This will undoubtedly allow parents to view all of the content their child is accessing, and most likely be able to read private messages between the child and their peers. This can stop a teenager from feeling safe, and being able to communicate with others about their inner feelings, struggles or emotions. If a child’s parent is emotionally abusive, hangs a child’s struggles over their head, or will punish a child for speaking poorly about the parent, then the child has no way to vent to their peers about these things over social media without their parent seeing. Imagine, the perpetrator of the abuse you’re experiencing, being able to see everything you do online—every video you watch, every person in your contact list, every message you send to a friend. You’re not going to feel safe, you’re going to feel trapped and isolated.
Parents often have no clue just how much emotional support that their child actually needs. According to a report, “While almost 2 in 5 teens said they were not getting the support they needed, a whopping 93.1% of parents believed otherwise, reporting their child received adequate social and emotional support.” This shows that while parents are supposed to be there to support their children, in most circumstances, they have no clue if their child is struggling and in need of support. This is just another reason why we cannot put kids’ online support systems in the hands of parents who do not understand its importance.
I recently interviewed 17 year old Joule, a teenager in the UK, who described a first-hand story to illustrate this concern. Joule discussed how when she attempted to come out as bisexual to her mother, her mother dismissed her, saying things like “you’re too young” and “that’s not a real thing”. Joule then discussed how finding online communities related to LGBTQ helped her “figure out [her] identity”. Along with this, finding online communities related to being neurodivergent helped her as well. She stated, “that’s how I figured out I might be autistic, which it turns out I am, I got diagnosed.” She also talked about how much her online friends meant to her; she often thinks about how it would be “devastating” if she was a few years younger, affected by the UK’s under 16 social media ban, and was cut off from some of her closest friendships. Her story shows that parents often don’t understand, and dismiss crucial aspects of their child’s life, which leads them to find support in online spaces. If those places are taken from them, they’re simply trapped with nobody who truly understands them.
KOSA and KIDS operate under this faulty presumption that parents always have the best interest of their children at heart, and always know best when it comes to them. However, this is simply not the case. Parents can be narcissistic, vindictive, abusive, and oppressive. Youth living in these homes already have it hard enough, their lives should not be made more difficult by removing every aspect of privacy they have, and handing it to their parents on a silver platter. All this will do is isolate vulnerable young people, and contribute to their declining mental state. Parents do not deserve to have access to their children’s social media accounts, and youth should have the same right to digital privacy as adults do.
This also becomes a major issue in cases of oppressive parental sheltering. The internet and social media are crucial because of its ability to expose individuals to a free flow of ideas and information. A survey by Common Sense Media found that 54% of teenagers learn about news and current events through social media, and 65% stated that it helps them better understand what is going on. Social media provides minors with a way to receive all different types of viewpoints from real individuals speaking about issues, rather than from a centralized source. However, this is threatening to oppressive parents, who want to indoctrinate their children into their political or religious beliefs. If parents have complete control over what their children are allowed to see, this empowers corrupt and oppressive parents to censor anything they wish in order to indoctrinate their children.
And while people may argue there are alternatives to expose children to different viewpoints, they simply are less effective. When politicians tell youth to “just tune into traditional media,” they ignore how restrictive, monopolized, and sanitized it has become. A handful of conglomerates control the airwaves, wiping out diversity. Key examples include Sinclair Broadcast Group in television (infamous for top-down scripted “must-run” commentaries) and Educational Media Foundation (EMF) in radio, which aggressively buys up “heritage stations” to expand its standardized network. Along with this, linear broadcast TV has completely abandoned teenagers. Outside of federally mandated educational programming for toddlers, free over-the-air television is a programming desert for youth, catering strictly to older demographics. For youth living in provincial or rural areas, the radio dial offers zero variety. They are often trapped in a monoculture with no alternatives to country music and Christian broadcasting, while highly polarized conservative talk radio enjoys a disproportionately wider reach.
There is not an alternative to social media when it comes to access to information, and expression of ideas. Social media remains the only democratic, diverse, and accessible information ecosystem left for the younger generation. Giving parents overbearing control of what their children are allowed to access, will have one effect—empowering ignorant parents to force their child into the same cycle. But the sad part is, it’s not even just the parents that will be doing this. There is also a major concern with the government itself exercising this same type of censorship.
This threat is even more concerning because youth access to information is often politically contested. Topics like LGBTQ+ identity, sexual health, reproductive rights, abuse recovery, mental health, eating disorders, drugs, protest movements, religion, and political extremism can all be described as “sensitive” or “harmful” depending on who is in power. A government that dislikes certain viewpoints could pressure platforms to restrict minors from seeing that content, claiming that the material is dangerous or inappropriate. For example, after the Online Safety Act in the UK, UK users of the sobriety app I Am Sober reported that the app’s community feature was disabled while the company worked to implement age verification technology. This shows how content that is “sensitive” for youth, but still helpful and beneficial for them, could be taken away by age verification. Even if these laws are not written with that goal in mind, the enforcement system could still be used that way. The result would be a version of the internet where young people are not simply protected from exploitation, but shielded from information that officials, regulators, or politically motivated groups do not want them to see.
KOSA and KIDS Could be Used to Censor LGBTQ Content for Minors
One of the major talking points of KOSA and KIDS is that they are meant to “protect” children. However, protecting children is inherently subjective, because something that one person in authority deems harmful for minors, could be deemed entirely safe by a different individual. This is especially concerning when it comes to topics like LGBTQ issues for minors. Research has consistently shown that social media can be beneficial to marginalized and LGBTQ youth by helping them connect with others, and that being cut off from safe self expression of their identities is harmful to their mental health.
According to a study by The Trevor Project, a majority of LGBTQ+ youth use online platforms as a way to connect with others because it is difficult to do so in their daily lives. Along with this, a 2021 study on sexual and gender minority adolescents found that days involving more identity concealment were associated with more negative emotions. The study also found that family support helped weaken that harmful effect, suggesting that being forced to hide one’s identity is especially damaging when youth lack affirming support at home or among peers. A 2018 study found that transgender youth who were able to use their chosen name in more settings, such as home, school, work, and with friends, had fewer depressive symptoms and lower suicidal ideation and suicidal behavior.
These studies support the idea that being allowed to express one’s identity in ordinary daily life, and being connected to others in the same community, is associated with better mental health, while being denied that expression can increase distress. However, many prominent lawmakers have consistently expressed the idea that LGBTQ and transgenderism is inherently harmful for youth, and children should not be allowed to be exposed to it.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, one of KOSA’s sponsors, is also relevant because of her comments about transgender influence on children. WPLN reported that Blackburn told the Family Alliance that one of her priorities was “protecting minor children from the transgender in this culture and that influence.” Parents of transgender children cited that statement when warning that KOSA could be used to suppress trans-related online resources. This is a strong source for showing why LGBTQ advocates feared child online safety legislation could be used against trans content specifically.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has repeatedly framed LGBTQ related school content as harmful or inappropriate for children. His office described a 2023 bill package as protecting children from “permanent mutilating surgical procedures, gender identity politics in schools, and attending sexually explicit adult performances.” In the same release, Florida’s education commissioner praised the laws as keeping schools focused on education “not indoctrination,” and the state’s healthcare agency secretary said Florida was protecting children from “harmful drugs and surgeries.” CBS also reported DeSantis saying that “elementary school kids should not have woke gender ideology injected into the curriculum,” calling it “inappropriate.”
Donald Trump’s White House has used some of the strongest official language against transgender youth care and gender identity. A January 2025 executive order described gender affirming medical care for minors as “chemical and surgical mutilation,” said children were being “maimed and sterilized” under a “radical and false claim,” and declared that the federal government would not “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support” the transition of a child from one sex to another. This is a major official source showing the government itself framing trans identity related care as inherently destructive to children.
Because of the fact that the dominant political party in the country currently is being run by individuals who support the idea that gender identity expression and LGBTQ identities are harmful for children, it is reasonable to assume that if given the power, they will go to the effort to restrict this information from minors as much as possible. This is just another reason why KOSA and KIDS are dangerous, because they give the government far too much control over social media content, giving them broad authority to “protect children.” This could easily be used to deem all LGBTQ related content as “harmful for children”, leading to it being completely censored from minors’ social media accounts. Because of the fact that many queer youth grow up in homes with unsupportive parents, the only way for them to connect with other queer youth is through social media and the internet. But with KOSA and KIDS, this will become increasingly difficult, maybe even impossible if the government decides to further crack down on this.
KOSA and KIDS could just be a simple gateway to fully censoring LGBTQ content for minors. First, they force social media companies to establish digital ID and mandatory age verification to identify minors. Then, they begin more sweeping legislation on the content that minors are allowed to be exposed to. If several states have already instituted policies restricting students from being exposed to LGBTQ content in schools, it is reasonable to assume they will extend this to social media if given the chance. KOSA and KIDS opens that door, giving far too much power to conservative politicians looking to censor. Even though research has shown that this type of behavior will only negatively impact vulnerable queer youth, the politicians do not care about this—they only care about pushing their agenda and ideology. This will only lead to an increased youth mental health crisis, and possibly more young victims of suicide, as they have been completely cut off from their support system.
Simply put, KOSA and KIDS are harmful for young people, and will cause indescribably more harm to them than it will “protect them”. But when it comes to these sweeping online restriction bills, the government knows that it was never about “protecting children.” That’s the key phrase they use to market these bills and make them palatable… but we know it’s not the truth. Politicians simply want control over expression, and what information minors are allowed to see. The reason for this is incredibly clear. The youth are the future, and the information that they are exposed to influences who they are, and what types of governments they will support. If an administration can indoctrinate the youth, they secure the future for themselves. KOSA and KIDS are keys to government indoctrination, the death of free speech, and the end of online privacy.
Call your Politicians NOW to Advocate Against the Passage of KOSA and KIDS
Because of how much online restrictions for minors have been a hot topic recently, politicians are looking to capitalize on it and get bills passed before the population knows what hit us. If you don’t want KOSA and KIDS to be passed, we ALL have to be prepared to advocate against this. Call and write to your representatives now, tell them to vote against KOSA and KIDS. Discuss your concerns with privacy, and the collection of your personal information. Your representatives’ job is to represent your best interests, and the best interests of the American people are for KOSA and KIDS not to pass.
ACLU Link to contact your legislators: https://action.aclu.org/send-message/censorship-does-not-keep-kids-safe
If you’re interested in Youth Rights, consider volunteering with us. We are always looking for new members and would love to have you on board. If you have a personal story to share, of how social media has positively impacted you as a teenager, or about a general youth rights violation, consider sending us an email at nyra@youthrights.org. We’d love to help get your story out to the world.
The text of How the KOSA and KIDS Acts will Harm Vulnerable Teenagers © 2026 by Zane Miller is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
