Why the Senate needs to abandon the Kids Online Safety Act 79%
By David B. McGarry91%
8/5/2026, 6:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 34 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Unattributed Quote, and Appeal to Emotion, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 66.4% saturation with 509 hits. Analysis detected 2,416 faulty-reasoning hits from 767 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 61.9% and a BS Rank of 79% (6,652 of 30,584 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 78.30% of the article peer group.
Like a bad rash, the Kids Online Safety Act keeps coming back.
The bill thus far has failed to become law in successive Congresses, and despite being beaten back repeatedly by reasoned arguments challenging its unconstitutionality , it reappears at irregular intervals.
On Wednesday, Aug. 5, the Senate Commerce Committee will consider KOSA at a markup, alongside four other technology bills and a handful of Coast Guard nominations.
The Senate’s version of KOSA is the pure form of the bill, duty of care intact.
The House of Representatives, alternatively, attempted to alter the bill to the point of unrecognizability — notably removing the duty of care, the central provision — testing whether proposed legislation can be salvaged by changing its fundamental character.
This is a fraught endeavor, and it raises the question of whether it would be better simply to abandon a corrupt premise and think up a new one.
A chef can so spoil the roux that no amount of artful seasoning will rescue the soup.
The Senate, however, has not shown the common sense of its sister chamber; it persists with a bill well understood to be censorial.
The opposition assembled after KOSA’s first introduction in 2022, and it has continued unabated and uninterrupted.
Even still, it has found itself from time to time constrained by constitutional objections to make alterations, clinging all the while to the duty of care.
“Seeing the imprudence and constitutional vulnerabilities of the bill, its supporters have continuously trimmed and reshaped the legislation, each time declaring that this time — finally — the bill had been rid of its deficiencies,” the Taxpayers Protection Alliance wrote last December.
But one need not resort to the statements of advocacy groups or academics or think-tankers or technology companies or trade groups to hear word of KOSA’s deficiencies, the dangers to free speech skulking in the duty of care.
Members of the House — even those with moderate views on tech policy — have opposed the Senate’s duty of care for what it is: an unconstitutional enormity.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), for one, has questioned “whether [KOSA] might lead to further censorship by the government of valid … conservative voices.”
His verbiage was, as usual, politic, but he has done valiant work to keep the Senate’s version of KOSA from obtaining more than a beachhead in the House.
More direct, Rep.
Kat Cammack (R-FL) said, rightly: “The Senate version, in my mind, is pretty unconstitutional.”
And when the House advanced its own version of KOSA, the duty of care was carved away and discarded like so much dead, termite-infested wood.
Although screaming from the legislative text, KOSA’s likelihood to facilitate censorship has not gone unacknowledged by Sen.
Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), the bill’s lead sponsor and leading advocate.
In 2023, Blackburn, in an indiscreet moment of frankness, lamented that children are “being indoctrinated” online and suggested that KOSA would put a stop to it.
She could not have better ratified her critics’ interpretation of the duty of care had she provided a supportive statement for publication on the website of the House Energy & Commerce Committee.
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Blackburn is not alone in harboring censorial intent.
As noted by the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Jessica Melugin, KOSA has, throughout its history, almost eerily reflected the recommendations of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, an outfit whose quest for a “safe” internet seems closer to advocating censorship than prudent regulation.
“Kill Musk’s Twitter” was one of CCDH’s prime objectives.
“The group has already successfully used that framework to influence policy, shaping the UK’s Online Harms Act and the EU’s Digital Services Act,” Melugin reported.
“Those laws have since been used, among other things, to target Elon Musk’s social media platform X for hosting ‘hate speech’ and ‘misinformation.’”
The streams that flow from poisoned headwaters are rarely untainted, and lawmakers in a nation whose speech is guarded by the First Amendment ought not imbibe the principles of European technology policy.
KOSA is a bill that should appeal to nobody.
Republicans decried the back-alley censorship of the Biden administration; such activities should not be given the imprimatur of statute.
Meanwhile, for Democrats, to vote for KOSA is to vote to vest such powers in a Republican administration.
On grounds legal, philosophical, and practical, the bill should be relegated to the dustbin of history and its printed copies to the garbage bins of Capitol Hill.
David B.
McGarry is the research director of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.
Speakers
6speakers28%attributed speech553writer words
Selected voice
100%flagged-word coverageTaxpayers Protection Alliance
42 attributed words20% of attributed speech90% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
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Analysis
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