WASHINGTON — Legislation advanced in the last Congress to protect children from certain online pockets including violent images, bullying, suicidal ideation, eating disorders and sexual exploitation.
After the package cleared the Senate, 91-3, it fizzled in the House.
Now in the 119th Congress, a revived version of the legislation is moving on Capitol Hill, with clearance in the House. Prospects for Senate passage are uncertain, though, after objections by civil liberties advocates and influential senators.
“The internet, social media and now artificial intelligence have profoundly changed how kids and teens connect with family and friends, learn about what’s happening around them and participate in an ever-changing online world,” Rep. Frank Pallone (D-6th) said during floor debate on the legislation.
“For too long, Big Tech has had a free pass while kids and teens face real harm online, including predatory design features, dangerous AI chatbots, and data brokers profiting off their personal information,” said Pallone, one of the lead sponsors behind the bill (H.R. 7757). “We simply cannot allow this to continue.”
The House voted, 267-117, on June 29 to pass the bill, drawing broad bipartisan support along with objections from the outer edges of both parties.
Among New Jersey’s House members, Reps. LaMonica McIver (D-10th), Rep. Analilia Mejía (D-11th) and Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-12th) voted against the legislation. Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-7th) did not vote.
Spokespeople for McIver and Watson Coleman did not respond to requests for comment about their votes.
Chatbot limits
The bill, a patchwork of 14 pending measures that includes elements of the legislative package that stalled in the last Congress, covers broad regulatory territory. The legislation would ban advertising directed at minors, require online platforms like social-media and gaming products to default to their most protective settings and establish limits on artificial intelligence-powered chatbots.
The compromise legislation omitted a central provision that cleared the Senate in 2024: a “duty-of-care” section to require tech companies to “exercise reasonable care” to prevent harm to children.
The package is “dead in the Senate” without that element, said Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, who, along with Tennessee Republican Marsha Blackburn, has pushed for that provision’s inclusion in whatever bill emerges from Capitol Hill.
“This bill has no real duty of care. In other words, it has no standard to hold accountable the Big Tech companies that can drive addictive, toxic content through their algorithms and other technologies at children,” Blumenthal said after the House vote. “The duty of care in the House bill is completely absent. There is none,” he said.
Mejía said she voted against the bill in part because that section was removed. “The House stripped out the duty of care requirement, which would have required platforms to design their products with children’s safety in mind, and without it, companies face no real consequences for the addictive algorithms and design choices that harm kids,” Mejía said in a statement to NJ Spotlight News.
“Instead of accountability, this bill mandates age verification for every user, meaning more Americans will be forced to hand over IDs and personal data to Big Tech, resulting in more surveillance and less responsibility for the very companies profiting off harm to children,” Mejía said. “Nearly a hundred civil liberties and child safety organizations opposed this bill for exactly that reason.”
Pallone and Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, have framed the legislation as a pragmatic starting point.
“It is an important milestone, not a finish line, in the effort to better protect children online and hold bad actors accountable,” Guthrie said.
More intrusive?
The legislation mandates limits on digital design including push notifications, autoplay and infinite scrolling. It would regulate data brokers, or businesses that assemble and sell digital information about people, by requiring they register with the Federal Trade Commission.
Civil liberties groups take issue with a requirement for websites to determine who is a minor.
“While supporters insist the bill does not require age verification and have included language saying so, multiple parts of the package impose obligations that depend on websites taking steps to know who is under 18 years old,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group, said after House passage. It called the legislation “disjointed” and “misguided.”
“Most companies are likely to respond to this legal risk by collecting much more personal information from users, like drivers’ licenses or passports,” the group said. “Others will rely on age-estimation systems that guess users’ ages based on user activity or facial scans, and inevitably make mistakes.”
The legislation directs the Department of Health and Human Services to study how social media platforms affect children and gather information about them, how long kids spend each day on social media sites and potential harms of social media use.
“In my 20 years as a pediatrician, I have seen the rise of mental and behavioral health concerns for kids and teens coincide directly with the rise of screen time and social media.” — Rep. Kim Schrier
Democratic congresswoman Kim Schrier, a physician from Washington and influential member on health policy, voted for the bill.
“In my 20 years as a pediatrician, I have seen the rise of mental and behavioral health concerns for kids and teens coincide directly with the rise of screen time and social media,” Schrier said during floor debate.
While Schrier said she wants a more aggressive bill — “I am continuing to call for a duty of care and language that goes further to hold social media companies accountable for the many harms that their platforms are causing” — the legislation cleared by the House is worthwhile, she said.
“This package represents the first time in decades that we have had a change in the House to take a step forward, to finally passing comprehensive legislation to protect our kids,” said Schrier, a member of Congress since 2019.
