US House Reaches Agreement on KOSA – This Threatens Everyone

Recently, it seems like the entire world has been moving all at once to launch extremely strict social media bans and restrictions for minors. Just over a week ago, the UK announced that it was going to ban all social media for minors under 16 years old. Now, the US has followed suit with a similar package of restrictions. The latest development in the fight over the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, is that House lawmakers have moved toward a different bipartisan deal known as the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act, or KIDS Act. While KOSA has been promoted for years as a way to make social media safer for minors, the House version takes a different approach than the Senate bill. Most importantly, the new deal reportedly removes the broader “duty of care” provision that would have required platforms to design their products with children’s safety in mind. Instead, the House version focuses more on specific rules, tools, parental controls, reporting systems, and age-based restrictions that social media companies would have to build into their platforms.

Social media for teenagers has more benefits than harms, and restricting social media for minors is inherently harmful to them in many ways. However, in this article, I don’t just want to focus on how youth rights are being violated by these acts. I want to focus on how everyone—that’s right—every US citizen’s rights and privacy are being threatened by regulations like KOSA and KIDS. Even if you’re an adult, you need to care about this, because it will affect you and put your privacy at risk all the same.

These restrictions and requirements for social media would push digital ID and age verification throughout the entire internet, practically ending online privacy and safety as we know it today. This doesn’t just threaten the rights of minors online; this threatens everyone. Once digital ID becomes the norm, there is no going back. The government should not have the authority to impose such heavy restrictions on social media, because all this will do is violate the privacy of US citizens, restrict access to information, limit freedom of speech, increase censorship, and allow increased government surveillance. The US House is set to vote early next week on this bipartisan deal, which should be bone chilling news for the country. KOSA and the KIDS act are a threat to everyone, and if you care about online privacy, youth rights, or free speech, you should contact your representatives immediately and tell them to vote against it.

The Dangers of Digital ID and Age Verification – This Threatens Everybody
Digital ID is a Gateway to Fascism and the Enemy of Free Speech
Other Organizations Agree on The Harms and Dangers of KOSA and KIDS
Call your Politicians NOW to Advocate Against the Passage of KOSA and KIDS

The Dangers of Digital ID and Age Verification – This Threatens Everybody

Although these requirements are presented as “child safety” protections, they create a major practical problem: platforms cannot enforce age-based rules unless they know who is a minor and who is an adult. That means these laws could push platforms toward more aggressive age-verification systems. In some cases, that may involve app-store-level age checks, government ID uploads, facial age estimation, third-party identity verification companies, or other forms of digital identification. Even if the law does not explicitly say every user must upload a driver’s license or passport, the pressure to separate adults from minors could lead platforms to demand more personal information from everyone.

That is where the danger of digital ID becomes serious. Once online platforms begin requiring users to prove their age or identity before accessing basic parts of the internet, anonymous or private internet use becomes much harder. People may be forced to hand sensitive information to private companies just to use social media, watch videos, join online communities, or access controversial information. This creates new risks of data breaches, identity theft, surveillance, and misuse of personal information. It also creates a chilling effect, because users may avoid searching for or discussing sensitive topics if they know their identity is tied to their online activity.

The danger of digital ID is not theoretical. A recent Reclaim The Net report described how hackers obtained the driver’s license and passport numbers of more than 3 million people from a Texas Parks and Wildlife Department licensing system, along with information such as email addresses, phone numbers, and home addresses. The breach shows the central problem with forcing people to verify their identity online: every ID check creates another database, another vendor relationship, and another target for hackers. Unlike a password, a passport number or driver’s license number cannot simply be reset once it is exposed. If governments and platforms require people to upload sensitive identity documents to access websites, social media, apps, or age-restricted content, then ordinary internet use becomes tied to permanent personal records that can be leaked, stolen, sold, or misused for years. The Texas breach is a warning that digital ID systems do not just verify identity; they also create massive stores of identity data that can put millions of people at risk.

Persona, a third party ID verification company, has been caught storing IDs for up to 3 years despite the storing of IDs being illegal in the UK, no regulatory action has been taken by the UK government to come after them because ‘child safety’ is seen as more important than protecting people from surveillance and identity theft. Along with this, Persona has also previously suffered data breaches, specifically with the IDs of Discord users that they were handling. These instances both show how digital ID is not safe, and will be exploited by hackers, and the very companies storing the data.

These regulations also open the door to increased government surveillance coming from the infrastructure these laws would pressure platforms to build. Once social media platforms are forced to compile identifying data on all of their users, it can become accessible through subpoenas, law enforcement requests, regulatory investigations, or future expansions of the law. Even if the original purpose is deemed as “child safety”, the practical result could be a much more traceable internet, where users’ identities, ages, online activity, and content-access history are stored in ways that government agencies may later demand access to.

This risk becomes even greater if platforms rely on digital ID or third-party age verification. A user may have to prove their age with a driver’s license, passport, facial scan, app-store identity check, or other verification method before accessing certain online spaces. That creates a link between a real-world identity and online activity that might otherwise have remained anonymous. In the future, the government could use that infrastructure to investigate who accessed certain political content, who communicated in particular online communities, or who viewed material labeled harmful, extremist, sexual, or inappropriate for minors. The danger is not just that the government will directly monitor everyone in real time. The danger is that these laws could force companies to build the databases, identity checks, and compliance records that make broader surveillance much easier later.

Digital ID requirements can be especially harmful for young people. Many minors do not have government identification, and many cannot safely involve their parents in every online decision. A teenager seeking information about abuse, mental health, sexuality, religion, politics, gender identity, reproductive health, or family conflict may not be able to access that information privately if platforms require parental approval or identity checks. For vulnerable youth, privacy is not just a convenience. It can be the difference between getting help and being trapped in silence.

One of the biggest dangers of KOSA and the KIDS Act is not only what the bills say today, but what kind of regulatory structure they create for the future. Once that kind of infrastructure exists, the government would have a much easier path to pressure platforms into restricting more types of content under the claim that it is protecting children. This creates a serious risk of mission creep. A law that begins by targeting obviously harmful conduct, such as exploitation, threats, drug sales, or predatory behavior, can gradually expand into broader restrictions on lawful speech. Platforms that face legal penalties or regulatory scrutiny may not wait for a court to decide whether a specific post is protected speech. Instead, they may remove, suppress, or age-gate anything that could be considered controversial, risky, or politically inconvenient. This is especially likely when the rules depend on vague concepts like harm, safety, addictive design, or inappropriate content. In practice, overcompliance can become a form of censorship, where platforms block more speech than the law clearly requires because doing so is safer than risking punishment.

Digital ID is a Gateway to Fascism and the Enemy of Free Speech

KOSA and the KIDS Act also increase government power by normalizing age-based access controls across the internet. The House debate has already been tied to age-verification and app-store accountability proposals, with critics warning that these systems would require age checks to get online. The broader danger is that child safety can become a justification for building a permission based internet. Instead of users freely accessing websites and platforms, they may have to pass through identity checks, parental approval systems, algorithmic filters, and government influenced safety rules. That power could be abused by future administrations, state governments, or regulators who want to suppress disfavored speech. A law aimed at protecting children from real online harms could become a tool for controlling what young people are allowed to learn, discuss, and believe.

If you believe in freedom of speech, if you’re a true American, you would see past the propaganda pushed by these politicians under the guise of “protecting children”. It’s not about children, it’s about controlling information, increasing surveillance, and getting an excuse to censor information. Various courts in the US have already ruled that social media restrictions for minors violate the first amendment. For example, Ohio’s Social Media Parental Notification Act required social media platforms to get parental consent before allowing children under 16 to create or maintain accounts on covered platforms. A federal judge permanently blocked the law in April 2025, finding that it infringed First Amendment rights. Judge Algenon Marbley ruled the law improperly placed government authority over minors’ speech. This instance, and many others like it, show that acts like KOSA and KIDS, requiring age verification and parental control over minors’ social media, are ALREADY unconstitutional, and already infringe on free speech rights.

While some may argue that digital ID wouldn’t actually limit speech, considering the way western governments have been moving, it is actually extremely likely they would be used in this way. The UK is a perfect example of this. They already do not have the same free speech protections as America does, and therefore, they can punish citizens for social media posts they deem offensive or hateful. Statistics obtained by The Times showed that police made approximately 12,183 arrests in 2023 under laws such as Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and the Malicious Communications Act 1988. That equates to roughly 33 arrests per day related to online messages deemed grossly offensive, menacing, or distressing.

The UK began to lead the charge on online restrictions for minors, with its online safety act, that pushed the idea they would only be focusing on banning pornographic and inappropriate websites for minors. However, this turned out to be a lie, and as previously mentioned they are now banning social media for anyone under 16, which forces digital ID onto all social media sites. This gives the government an easy way to access the identities of its citizens from social media posts, opening up the door for them to punish more individuals for speech. More recently, the UK government has pushed Apple, Google, and other major technology companies to go beyond platform-level moderation and build child-safety controls directly into smartphones and tablets. This would allow scanning of messages and images directly on the phone, without the user needing to upload any data. Using this, a corrupt government could punish citizens even for private communications over devices.

And while some may argue that this is a slippery slope, we’ve been sliding down it for years. What started with “just porn”, became “all social media”, and then “all messages on your device”. The US is headed down the same route. First, they’ll put heavy restrictions on social media, and use digital ID to increase surveillance and eliminate privacy. Then, once online privacy is a thing of the past, they can begin to initiate more legislation to censor all ideas they don’t agree with, and punish individuals for speaking out. Right now, our first amendment is the only thing protecting the US from ending up like the UK, but that amendment is slowly being eroded. Despite the fact that social media is the main way that citizens exercise their free speech, the US is placing strict regulations on it, which shows that they no longer care about free speech. It starts with regulations, and ends with total censorship and punishment. We, as a society, need to stop this before it’s too late.

Other Organizations Agree on The Harms and Dangers of KOSA and KIDS

Other digital rights and civil liberties groups have raised similar concerns about how KOSA and KIDS Act style regulations could create a more surveilled internet. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has repeatedly warned that child-safety bills can become age-gating mandates in practice, even when they are not written as direct ID requirements. EFF argues that once a law requires platforms to treat minors differently from adults, platforms need a way to determine who is a minor. That pressure can lead to invasive age-verification systems, broader surveillance, and restrictions on access to lawful information. EFF has also warned that KOSA could make government officials the arbiters of what young people are allowed to see online, creating a serious risk of censorship in the name of safety.

The ACLU has made a similar argument from a First Amendment and privacy perspective. It warned that even revised versions of KOSA could require platforms to treat minors differently from adults, which may force platforms to verify users’ ages. The ACLU explains that age-verification systems do not only affect minors; they also affect adults by making anonymous browsing harder and discouraging people from accessing lawful content. In other words, a law written to regulate children’s online experiences could end up requiring everyone to prove who they are before accessing parts of the internet.

Policy groups such as the Center for Democracy & Technology have also warned that age verification creates privacy and free-expression risks unless it is designed with strict safeguards. CDT has argued that age-verification systems can increase data collection, undermine data minimization, and create risks for users who need to access information privately. Reuters has reported on the privacy problems already appearing in real-world age-check laws, including systems that require users to submit digital driver’s licenses or rely on third-party verification before accessing websites. These examples show that once governments require online age checks, private companies and vendors often become gatekeepers for access to information.

Reporting on an open letter from more than 400 privacy and security experts similarly described warnings that mandatory age verification can increase data-breach risks, weaken privacy, expand surveillance potential, and encourage restrictions on privacy tools like VPNs. Together, these sources support the same conclusion: child safety is a real issue, but forcing identity-based access controls across the internet can create long-term risks to privacy, anonymity, and free expression.

Call your Politicians NOW to Advocate Against the Passage of KOSA and KIDS

Because of 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 interest of the American people is for KOSA and KIDS not to pass.

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.