How the Kids Online Safety Act Would Hand A Win to Trump and Project 2025
This week, the Senate is set to vote on the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), intended to promote children’s safety online. The reality is that this legislation would cause tremendous harm to the most vulnerable young people and make the internet worse for users of all ages — which is why many progressive advocates, including civil society and LGBTQ+ groups have spoken out in opposition.
It would also empower a President Trump and Project 2025 — the governing plan written by Trump loyalists.
KOSA chills online speech — and hands a win to Trump
KOSA is well-intentioned. The internet should be a safe place for young people — especially considering how more and more kids rely on the internet every day. This is especially true for vulnerable teens, considering how LGBTQ+ young people often depend on the internet to connect with support they cannot find at home or in their offline communities. If enacted, KOSA could threaten this lifeline for minors.
KOSA would hand critical decisions about what is allowed online to politicians and political appointees — subjecting all internet users to the whims of our most regressive policymakers.
KOSA sponsor Sen. Marsha Blackburn even said the quiet part out loud, declaring that the bill would “protect minor children from the transgender in this culture.”
KOSA would require platforms to use “reasonable care” when designing their products, even though the term is not defined anywhere in the bill. Instead, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is left to decide what’s safe for young people online.
And a future regressive Trump FTC could decide that online information about reproductive health or gender-affirming care is not in the best interests of children — and sue social media platforms for hosting it.
Social media companies would face an awful dilemma: remove constitutionally protected speech or face protracted and expensive investigations by an anti-choice and anti-LGBTQ+ administration.
Project 2025 is a warning
These are not speculative threats. Former Trump administration officials at the regressive Heritage Foundation recently published Project 2025, a policy agenda for a second Trump term. It’s a 900-page anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ+ screed. It even includes a “personnel database” to fill key roles in a second Trump administration.
Like Marsha Blackburn, the authors of Project 2025 are committed to harming trans kids. Pearl-clutching bigotry that “children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism” appears on the very first page.
And that’s just the start — transphobia pervades Project 2025. This should come as no surprise. After all, the Project 2025 Advisory Board lists a Who’s Who of vehemently anti-LGBTQ+ organizations, including the American People Project, the Center for Family and Human Rights, and Stephen Miller’s America First Legal.
KOSA and Project 2025: an awful combination for our kids
Project 2025 lays out a dangerous blueprint for a second Trump administration, asserting that “abortion” is “not health care.” Empowered by KOSA’s vague “duty of care” and “harmful to minors” language — which suppresses a wide range of content including gender-affirming care, abortion, contraceptive access, civil rights and DEI protections, marriage equality, and more — KOSA would empower a Project 2025-infused FTC to restrict access to critical information further and block young people from accessing reproductive health resources altogether.
It gets worse. KOSA vaguely requires social platforms to “prevent and mitigate the following harms to minors: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance abuse disorders, and suicidal behaviors.” As well-intentioned as that might be, under KOSA, a future Trump FTC could seek to limit access to anything that doesn’t fit their arch-regressive worldview that reproductive care is violence and that LGBTQ+ people are mentally unwell.
This table shows how KOSA enables the Project 2025 agenda:
We’ve seen this at the state level — Project 2025 would harm kids nationwide
Project 2025 would both accelerate and expand the trend of anti-choice and anti-LGBTQ+ state bills in 2024 to the national level.
For example, Florida’s recent legislative actions reflect an effort to target and marginalize LGBTQ+ youth. The state has introduced numerous anti-LGBTQ+ bills, including those that restrict gender-affirming care and discussions of gender identity and LGBTQ+ topics in educational settings. This includes Florida’s spree of book bans, accounting for 3,135 of the 4,349 school bans nationwide in the 2023–2024 school year alone.
Even more alarming, the conservative push to ban specific content extends beyond school libraries and has now infiltrated online spaces. Florida’s recently enacted social media bill, HB 3, restricts LGBQT+ youth by limiting their ability to access supportive communities and resources online under the guise of protecting kids online. Florida’s anti-LGBTQ+ bills and restrictive social media bills reflect the aim of a KOSA-Project 2025 partnership to double down on censorship and impose an extremist far-right agenda nationwide.
Florida shows what happens when you empower regressive public officials to censor and silence. KOSA would enable Project 2025 and extend Florida’s draconian policies nationwide, further marginalizing LGBTQ+ youth and silencing their voices.
Extreme right-wing lawmakers see KOSA as an opportunity to enact the awful Project 2025 agenda. Taken together, they would censor and silence LGBTQ+ youth while carrying out their anti-choice, anti-civil rights agenda. Disguised as safeguarding minors, KOSA’s measures do quite the opposite and further endanger vulnerable youth.
Our children deserve better. We must not empower a regressive future administration to censor and silence our most vulnerable youth. Senators should vote no on KOSA.
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