House passes KIDS Act, advancing child online safety legislation

The House passed sweeping kids' online safety legislation Monday night in a 267-117 vote (with 47 members abstaining), but the bill's path forward is far from settled.

The legislation, known as the KIDS Act (Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act), emerged as a bipartisan compromise out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, according to POLITICO. It would, among other policies, restrict minors' use of disappearing messages, require AI chatbots to disclose that they aren't human, and mandate age verification for platforms hosting pornographic content. Age-verification mandates typically require proof of age, such as submitting one's government ID or a facial scan.

The KIDS Act packages portions from 14 digital safety bills, The Hill reported, including the long-debated Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). This version of KOSA omits the "duty of care" provision central to the Senate's version, which would require platforms to actively prevent and mitigate harm to minors related to issues like self-harm, eating disorders, and substance abuse. Child safety advocates and senators from both parties are critiquing the absence, including the ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell, and the original KOSA co-sponsor, Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn, POLITICO reported.

KOSA itself has long been a flashpoint. In 2023, Blackburn said in an interview that protecting children from "the transgender [sic] in this culture and that influence" should be a top conservative priority, comments made shortly before she discussed KOSA — fueling concerns from LGBTQ advocates that the bill could be used to target queer content online even without saying so explicitly. Digital civil liberty groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, have also argued for years that KOSA endangers online rights. EFF's Jason Kelley called KOSA's age-verification mechanism a "giant censorship machine that also is privacy invasive" at the time.

In May 2026, a coalition of 45 state attorneys general also warned that the broader House package could limit states' authority to enact stronger child safety protections of their own, a concern that "weighed heavily" on Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who ultimately voted against the bill, according to POLITICO.

Age verification in the KIDS Act

Beyond the political fight over KOSA's text, the KIDS Act's reliance on age verification faces a more fundamental challenge.

Initial data suggest that age-verification laws simply don't accomplish what lawmakers intend. In a 2025 working paper (since published in the Journal of Law & Empirical Analysis), researchers analyzed Google Trends data across several states with age-verification laws already in effect. Researchers found a 51 percent drop in searches for Pornhub, the largest platform complying with such regulations. But that decline didn't reflect reduced demand — it reflected migration. Searches for XVideos, a major non-compliant platform, rose 48.1 percent in those same states, while searches for VPNs, commonly used to bypass geographic restrictions, climbed 23.6 percent.

Pornhub's parent company, Aylo, told Mashable at the time that traffic in Louisiana, one of the few states where it still operates while complying with verification rules, dropped roughly 80 percent. "These people did not stop looking for porn," the company stated. "They just migrated to darker corners of the internet that don't ask users to verify age, that don't follow the law, that don't take user safety seriously, and that often don't even moderate content."

Its authors acknowledged limitations, including an inability to isolate the search behavior of minors specifically — the population the laws are actually meant to protect — but another study published in Nov. 2025 reached similar conclusions.

As POLITICO notes, with the House and Senate still divided over which kids' safety proposal to advance, and Aug. recess narrowing the legislative window, it remains unclear whether the KIDS Act will pass in the Senate in its current form — or if concerns over its missing duty-of-care provision and its age-verification approach will force further changes.