United States Senate Passes the Kids Online Safety Act

Senate passes the Kids Online Safety Act
The landmark piece of legislation heads to the House.

By Lauren Feiner, a senior policy reporter at The Verge, covering the intersection of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. She spent 5 years covering tech policy at CNBC, writing about antitrust, privacy, and content moderation reform. theverge.com, July 30, 2024

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images

The Senate passed the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (also known as COPPA 2.0), the first major internet bills meant to protect children to reach that milestone in two decades. A legislative vehicle that included both KOSA and COPPA 2.0 passed 91–3.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called it “a momentous day” in a speech ahead of the vote, saying that “the Senate keeps its promise to every parent who’s lost a child because of the risks of social media.” He called for the House to pass the bills “as soon as they can.”

KOSA is a landmark piece of legislation that a persistent group of parent advocates played a key role in pushing forward — meeting with lawmakers, showing up at hearings with tech CEOs, and bringing along photos of their children, who, in many cases, died by suicide after experiencing cyberbullying or other harms from social media. These parents say that a bill like KOSA could have saved their own children from suffering and hope it will do the same for other children.

United States: Throwing Kids’ Health Under the Bus? FCC Wants to Put Wi-Fi on School Buses

Throwing Kids’ Health Under the Bus? FCC Wants to Put Wi-Fi on School Buses
By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., childrenshealthdefense.org, 3 May 2024

Citing mental and physical health concerns, parents, politicians and safe technology advocates are pushing back against an FCC initiative to put Wi-Fi on school buses.

Parents, politicians and safe technology advocates are pushing back against a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) initiative to put Wi-Fi on school buses.

Patricia Burke of Safe Tech International in an April 29 Substack post accused the federal regulatory agency for telecommunications of being “the bully boarding the bus.”

Burke cited evidence of eye damage from excessive screen time and the risk of exposing kids to increased cyberbullying and addictive social media apps via unsupervised internet access while riding to and from school.

“It is time to stop throwing children’s health, including eyesight and mental well-being, under the bus,” Burke said.

12-Year-Old Girl's Suicide Points to Rise in Apps Used by Cyberbullies

A memorial for 12-year-old Rebecca Sedwick has sprouted at the
abandoned cement plant in Lakeland, Fla., where she
committed suicide.

Girl’s Suicide Points to Rise in Apps Used by Cyberbullies
by Lizette Alvarez, The New York Times, 13 September 2013

MIAMI — The clues were buried in her bedroom. Before leaving for school on Monday morning, Rebecca Ann Sedwick had hidden her schoolbooks under a pile of clothes and left her cellphone behind, a rare lapse for a 12-year-old girl.

Inside her phone’s virtual world, she had changed her user name on Kik Messenger, a cellphone application, to “That Dead Girl” and delivered a message to two friends, saying goodbye forever. Then she climbed a platform at an abandoned cement plant near her home in the Central Florida city of Lakeland and leaped to the ground, the Polk County sheriff said.

National Awareness Campaign Launched in Switzerland Against Cyber-Bullying

A nationwide “Stop Cyber-Mobbing” campaign will be conducted  in all Swiss schools via billboards, television adverts, a Facebook page and information sessions. The next school campaign should be one on the health risks of cell phones and precautionary measures to take when using them. More Swiss probably remain ignorant of cell phone dangers for children than of cyber-bullying (half the population does not know what cyber-bullying is ). 

Cyber-bullying pulled out of the shadows
swissinfo.ch and agencies, 22 October 2012

The [Swiss] youth organisation Pro Juventute has found that that one in five teens has been bullied online and most don’t know where to turn to for help. Bullying-related calls to its hotline have also jumped, prompting a national awareness campaign.

Pro Juventute’s emergency “147” telephone hotline, designed to serve young people in need, has reported a significant increase in calls from troubled teens who have become the targets of name-calling, teasing and verbal abuse via the internet.

Cyber-bullying is particularly threatening to teens because it continues away from school, is not monitored by adults and can often be conducted anonymously.