Free Expression, Privacy & Data
Banning Kids from Social Media Remains a Bad and Unconstitutional Idea
Today, the Senate Commerce Committee is set to mark up the “Kids Off Social Media” Act of 2025 (“KOSMA”). The bill would prohibit children under the age of 13 from accessing certain social media services and would make changes to the Children’s Internet Protection Act that will increase surveillance in schools and disproportionately harm low income children and their families that rely on school-provided devices to access the internet. The 2025 version bill is nearly identical to a version the Committee passed in 2024. It was a bad idea then, and it’s a bad idea now. The Senate Commerce Committee should not advance this legislation without significant changes to protect children’s constitutional rights and students’ access to education.
Today, CDT joined other digital rights, civil liberties, and civil rights organizations, including ACLU, New America’s Open Technology Institute, EFF, and Fight for the Future, in a letter (also on ACLU’s website) detailing our concerns with the ways that KOSMA would harm children.
Most worrying among them is the ban on young people accessing social media services. Millions of young people are currently using these services, including common apps like Facebook Messenger, YouTube, Pinterest, and Snap to connect with peers, family, friends, and other trusted people. Banning access to these platforms would be an extraordinary infringement on young people’s First Amendment rights and would represent a large expansion of government authority over who can access which online services. Courts considering similar restrictions on children’s access to social media at the state level have found they likely violate the First Amendment.
Children have a right to express themselves and connect with others online, including via social media. KOSMA is an unconstitutional violation of those rights.
The bill’s expansion of the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) is also deeply concerning. KOSMA will codify invasive and unproven software in schools. Although CIPA’s monitoring requirement was never intended to authorize surveillance of children and families, research has shown that schools have interpreted CIPA’s past requirements to require AI-driven, persistent monitoring of students, despite the bill being enacted long before this technology even existed. This misinterpretation has given tech companies the opportunity to sell invasive and unproven online activity monitoring technologies to be used against kids in schools. The language in the “Eyes on the Board” section of KOSMA would reinforce that a school’s ability to access E-Rate funding, which provides discounts for internet services, depends on compliance with language that education agencies have misinterpreted as requiring the installation and use of AI-powered spyware to surveil what students are doing online during and outside of school hours.
Under the threat of lost E-Rate funding, schools have also turned to surveillance tech companies for content filtering technologies that are known to be overly restrictive of students’ ability to access critical information, even for things like schoolwork, leading to impairments in students’ ability to complete their coursework. CDT polling revealed that almost three quarters of teachers and students whose school uses this technology report that a student had trouble completing assignments because of it. Teachers also reported that this impacts marginalized students more, with about one-third agreeing that content associated with gender expansive students is more likely to be filtered or blocked.
Finally, as written, KOSMA would disproportionately impact students who rely on school-provided internet and devices to access online services. Reinforcing the misconception that it is mandatory to use these surveillance and filtering technologies on school-provided devices will exacerbate the digital divide by limiting these students’ ability to access certain sites outside of the classroom.