Unflinching Hope: The Fight for the Kids Online Safety Act
By: Alix Fraser and Isabel Sunderland
On December 12, 2024, over 100 parents, children, young adults, lawmakers, and supporters gathered on the southeast lawn of the U.S. Capitol. For nearly two hours, advocates shared intimate personal stories of sexual abuse, suicide, depression, eating disorders, and a myriad of other harms. At the heart of each story was a single thread: the manipulative tactics employed by social media companies to addict, exploit, and profit from young users. Repeatedly, platforms have deployed algorithms designed to maximize engagement by pushing the most inflammatory, harmful, and divisive content to children — all in pursuit of selling as much advertising space as possible. Most pernicious, not only have these design features targeted the most vulnerable in our country, but they have driven our society apart and undermined the heart of our democracy.
The rally came at a critical moment in a broader campaign to pass the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a crucial piece of bipartisan legislation aimed at holding social media platforms accountable for the harm inflicted by their design choices. At the end of July, KOSA was advanced out of the Senate with a nearly unprecedented vote of 91-3. The bill would require social media platforms to affirmatively mitigate key harms to minors — such as mental health issues, sexual exploitation, and bullying — by changing their products’ design and operations. It would also require the strongest safety and privacy settings by default, and provide users the option to turn off the engagement-based algorithms that trap children into addictive and depressive cycles.
The tremendous momentum surrounding KOSA is a testament to the persistent campaigning, lobbying, community-building, and media outreach of every one of the 200+ organizations involved in the broad bipartisan coalition working to get the bill across the finish line. The group has included grieving parents, children and teens, religious organizations, and tech reform advocates. Issue One came to this work in 2022 when we launched the Council for Responsible Social Media (CRSM), a cross-partisan group of leaders addressing the negative mental, civic, and public health impacts of social media in America. As a democracy reform organization, we entered this fight because we identified the impact of technology on society as being one of the most significant challenges to maintaining democracy around the world — particularly the U.S. Social media has amplified polarization through algorithmically enhanced information silos and helped fuel the spread of false and misleading information at an industrial scale. Today, young people get nearly all of their information from social media, even as the business model of engagement drives them towards sharper, more conspiratorial thinking in alarming ways. At the same time, Big Tech companies have constructed a political firewall around themselves, bolstered by immunity granted under Section 230 of the Communications’ Decency Act and reinforced by their immense lobbying power.
Pointedly because of Big Tech's influence, virtually no legislation has been passed since the 1990s to modernize the rules governing technology platforms. Breaking this legislative stalemate required a catalyst —and safeguarding kids’ online safety became the ideal starting point. In 2023, Issue One collaborated with the Senate Judiciary Committee to have two members of the CRSM — Kristin Bride and Emma Lembke — appear before Congress to testify on the harms of Big Tech. From that point forward, our team became a major stakeholder amidst a core coalition of parents, young leaders, and civil society from across the political spectrum pushing for the passage of KOSA. With our partners, the team again worked to organize a congressional hearing where five Big Tech CEOs, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and X’s Linda Yaccarino, testified on the pervasive sexual exploitation of children on their platforms. In the months following, the coalition launched advocacy days where parents, teens, and young adults from countless organizations came together to share their stories with lawmakers.
Still, behind the scenes Big Tech companies and CEOs funneled more than $51 billion into lobbying against the bill in just the first three quarters of this year. In June, exactly one minute before the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s scheduled hearing on KOSA, the markup was abruptly canceled with no explanation provided. Days after, an influx of essays decrying the legislation began to appear across trade publications and news outlets. Notably, many authors of the articles did not disclose ties to Meta and Alphabet, despite lobbying on their behalf. Less than 24 hours before the Energy and Commerce Committee reconvened again to review the bill in September, House Republican leadership swapped in new language that left supporters little time to review the changes. Nonetheless, in spite of Big Tech’s lobbying efforts, KOSA was successfully passed out of committee.
In October, as Congress went into recess prior to the election, the team launched a renewed offensive by organizing an on-the-ground campaign at Louisiana State University’s homecoming football game. In the summer and fall, paid media campaigns in the states were already running. The goal was to urge Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who was in attendance at the game, and Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) — the latter who received $11,000 from Meta in March — to pass KOSA. The initiative was a part of a larger push in the coalition to flood the state with parent and teen advocates sharing their stories. Issue One Action geofenced the stadium and surrounding area –— sending ads to users phones — and bought ad space on the screens around the stadium, garnering more than half a million impressions and receiving national and local earned media as a result.
In December, as the KOSA coalition worked to include the bill on the end-of-year package, Meta quietly pledged to build a $10 billion data center in Louisiana — though how much this influenced the outcome of the bill is still unclear. On Dec. 12, the day of the rally on Capitol Hill, Issue One joined partners in creating a display of 100+ gifts that will not be unwrapped during the holiday season — representing the lives lost since the introduction of KOSA. Despite the unprecedented bipartisan support, Speaker Johnson and Majority Leader Scalise continued to stymie KOSA’s passage in the House over concerns that the bill would limit free speech, and were unwilling to ever take a meeting with grieving parents advocating for KOSA. However, by that point, the legislation received hundreds of endorsements from across the political spectrum, including support from members who were close to or a part of President Biden’s administration and President-elect Trump’s incoming administration. Notably, on Dec. 10, the sponsors of KOSA worked closely with X (formerly Twitter) to produce new text clarifying that it did not implicate speech — Elon Musk and Donald Trump Jr. also followed-up with public support for the bill.
Nonetheless, five days after parents and teens shared their stories on the Hill, House leadership made the wanton, deliberate decision to not include KOSA in the last legislative package of the year — killing hope for the bill's passage this session. In truth, if the bill was put on the House floor, it would have passed by a similar margin to the Senate.
To be clear: KOSA will not be voted on in the House in the 118th Congress not because of any lack of effort, support, time, or capacity. Rather, it has been undermined at every turn by an insidious campaign, cold and calculated, by tech companies to pull every string available, spread any lie possible, and fill every pocket needed to evade any responsibility for the harms they perpetrate. This was not just opposition. This was political manipulation in its rawest form, driven by a perennial penchant to put profit over people.
Over the past two years, this community has experienced an extraordinary outpouring of support. A new wave of advocacy has emerged — rooted by shared loss, setbacks, victories, and unshakable resilience — that refuses to scare easily. Our democracy is strengthened when there is a diversity of voices and experiences. The fight to pass KOSA has embodied this vision, uniting parents and teens with a common crusade. CRSM alone boasts members across generations pushing the letter on kids’ online safety. Yet, our democracy is weakened when a select few, with unlimited resources, are able to dictate what legislation is or is not passed to regulate their industry. Even more challenging is when that industry, its business models and algorithms, have increased polarization, contributed to the spread of false narratives, monetized hyperpartisanship, sold the mental and physical health of children to their shareholders, and wielded lobbying dollars that rival the giants of Big Pharma and Big Tobacco. Issue One will continue to stand at the intersection of fixing this broken political system and building a democracy that works for everyone — especially the next generation of voters, advocates, legislators, and Americans.
Though today the road ahead may seem long, it is also broad and replete with people from every walk of life, united in a single purpose: protecting our children by building a better internet. That world is possible.
This is not the end — it is the beginning of an unflinching, unyielding, and unshakeable change.
Isabel Sunderland is an intern on Issue One’s Technology Reform team.
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