The Kids Online Safety Act won’t make kids safer online. Speaker Johnson should kill it.

Since when do Republicans believe it should be the job of federal bureaucrats to parent children?  

That’s the question millions of American parents are asking right now, as they worry that the House of Representatives might take up and pass the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a bill that Energy & Commerce Committee Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) pushed through her committee on a voice vote in mid-September. 

As a result of that committee action, members of the Parents Matter coalition will be working this issue, meeting and talking with their members of Congress while they are back home, in hopes they can prevent the bill’s passage when Congress returns for its lame duck session. 

Despite its name, this legislation will not make kids safer online. In fact, if enacted, it would make protecting kids more difficult for their parents, because it would move decision-making over what kids see online out of parents’ hands and into the hands of government bureaucrats — specifically, at the Federal Trade Commission. 

It’s wrong to move decision-making power from parents to bureaucrats. Safety begins at home, with parents empowered and enabled to make decisions for their own children over what they see online. Any bill that Congress passes in this subject area should make parents’ jobs easier, not harder. 

Families pick all sorts of tech tools to fill their needs. Some like to use social media to keep in touch with family, to organize activities with their local church, and learn from trusted educational resources. 

With heavy-handed government control of the Internet, many of these pro-family uses of technology could be outlawed or curtailed. 

This bill’s authors apparently take the view that parents cannot be trusted to make online access decisions for their own children. Instead, they seem to think government bureaucrats can do a better job of making those decisions — and government bureaucrats, therefore, should be authorized and empowered to do so. 

Wait. Government bureaucrats making decisions regarding children’s safety? That sounds vaguely familiar. Ah, yes, I remember — it was government bureaucrats who insisted that children couldn’t go to school, and who then insisted, when they eventually said it was “safe” for children to return to school, that the children had to wear masks, which made learning difficult — all this, despite the fact that COVID-19 posed much less of a threat to children than it did to adults. 

The result of those school closing and mandated-masking decisions? As The New York Times editorial board put it, “The school closures that took 50 million children out of classrooms at the start of the pandemic may prove to be the most damaging disruption in the history of American education. It also set student progress in math and reading back by two decades and widened the achievement gap that separates poor and wealthy children.”  

So color me skeptical when it comes to giving government bureaucrats more power, not less, over children’s online access. 

But that’s not all.  

Consider: In order to comply with the age-verification requirements this bill will lead to, social media sites would have to collect sensitive personal information to verify ages. Platforms would be required to collect government-issued identity documents, and would have to keep them in a database. Such databases are both vulnerable and attractive — a dangerous combination in a world full of malicious hackers.

Moreover, the legislation would grant the federal government broad and sweeping powers to conduct studies — to learn how individuals, including children, use social media. Such studies would necessitate the government requiring social media companies to share sensitive user data with the government’s researchers, without any regard for privacy. Consequently, the government — which has its own history of massive data breaches — would then be in control of another massive database full of sensitive personal information, just waiting to be hacked. 

Former Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas) once appeared on a television show with a woman from the education establishment. He declared, “My educational policies are based on the fact that I care more about my children than you do.” She replied, “No, you don’t.” Gramm ended the argument by responding, “OK, what are their names?” 

It’s parents who know their own children, not government bureaucrats. It’s parents who should be empowered, not government bureaucrats. 

Just because a piece of legislation has a nice name doesn’t mean the legislation does what its name implies. The “Inflation Reduction Act” made no dent on inflation, and the “Affordable Care Act” certainly didn’t make health care more affordable.  

Similarly, the “Kids Online Safety Act” isn’t going to make kids any safer online. It’s a bad bill, and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) should save parents across the country a lot of worry over the next several weeks by simply declaring he will not allow it on the floor of the House in the lame duck session. 

Bill Pascoe, a political consultant, has been working to defend and extend individual liberty for more than 40 years.