Sponsors (77)
Official title: Protect the safety of children on the internet.
Introduced May 14, 2025 by Marsha Blackburn · Last progress May 14, 2025
The bill strengthens protections, transparency, and enforcement to reduce online harms to minors and give parents and regulators more tools, but it raises compliance costs, litigation risk, potential privacy tradeoffs in audit reporting, and compliance complexity that could disadvantage smaller platforms and alter user experiences.
Parents and children: Stronger default privacy and safety controls for minors (under-13 defaults, time limits, opt-outs from personalized recommendations, geolocation limits) reduce exposure to harmful content and compulsive use.
Consumers and regulators: Greater transparency and accountability via annual third‑party audited reports on minors' use, required algorithmic notices/disclosures, and clearer FTC enforcement paths improves oversight and potential remedies.
State residents: State attorneys general can sue platforms to obtain damages or restitution for harmed residents, creating a concrete route to compensation for harms to users.
Platform operators and their users: Substantial compliance, engineering, and auditing costs plus increased litigation risk (FTC actions and state suits) could raise operating expenses, lead platforms to cut features, or shift costs to users/advertisers.
Smaller platforms and startups: Age verification, audit, and reporting requirements create barriers to entry and competitive disadvantages that could reduce consumer choice and slow innovation.
Parents and minors: Mandated limits or disabling of engagement features (autoplay, infinite scroll, personalized recommendations) will change user experience and may reduce perceived convenience or usefulness of platforms for families.
Based on analysis of 8 sections of legislative text.
Sets definitions and enforcement rules to regulate platforms' use of personalized algorithms and protect minors, adds FTC enforcement and state-AG civil authority, and creates a Kids Online Safety Council.
Creates a federal framework to limit how online platforms and algorithmic ranking systems can target and prioritize content for minors and to increase transparency about so-called “filter bubble” algorithms. It defines covered platforms and data types, narrows many common services out of coverage, enables state attorneys general to sue platforms for violations (with FTC oversight rights), and establishes a Kids Online Safety Council to advise Congress. Separately, it defines terms and scope for regulating opaque ranking algorithms and clarifies which user-provided data counts for ranking decisions.