Congress Should Protect Children Online Without Sacrificing Privacy and Free Expression
Ahead of the Senate Commerce Committee’s August 5 markup on children’s online safety, CDT is urging lawmakers to pursue protections that address the underlying incentives and data practices that place young people at risk—without imposing broad censorship mandates or forcing people to surrender their privacy to access online services.
Comprehensive consumer privacy legislation remains the strongest path toward protecting children and adults alike. In its absence, Congress should prioritize targeted measures that minimize the collection and use of minors’ data, limit profiling and advertising, and give young people and their families greater control over their digital experiences. The Youth AI Privacy Act takes a more appropriate approach by focusing on these underlying data practices, including the use of minors’ information for AI training, profiling, and advertising. CDT supports those safeguards, although the bill still needs further work to ensure it can withstand judicial review and fully protect minors’ privacy and rights to seek information.
In a letter to the Committee, CDT explains that three other proposals under consideration — the Kids Online Safety Act, the CHATBOT Act, and the SCREEN Act — raise serious privacy, free expression, and constitutional concerns. Among other problems, the bills would impose or incentivize age-verification systems, restrict young people’s access to lawful information, and create risks that adults could lose access to accounts or data after being mistakenly identified as minors. Legislation that is struck down in court or cannot be implemented effectively will not make children safer.
Children deserve an internet that supports their safety, privacy, autonomy, and access to information. Congress should advance legislation that protects all four.
Not All Guardrails Are Created Equal: Comparing Content Safety and Copyright Filtering
As courts and policymakers work through questions about chatbot liability, they should be wary of analogies that flatten meaningful technical differences. Copyright filtering and safety intervention share real challenges around ambiguity and evasion, but they diverge in what each control must assess, how each manifests over the course of a conversation, and how much can be verified from the outside.
Op-Ed: France’s Constitutional Council Ruling Tests the Limits of Social Media Bans
Read our analysis the legal and policy significance of the Constitutional Council’s decision on ongoing social media age restriction and age assurance debates ahead of the most-anticipated EU-wide approach on child online safety due by December 2026.
The brief explains that Section 230’s liability protections are essential to enable free expression online and they extend to the use of automated systems to engage to rank and order content as part of traditional publishing activities.
