If Congress Wants to Protect Kids, It Must Protect Their Rights to Privacy and Expression Too
In advance of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade’s markup of 18 bills intended to protect children online, CDT sent a letter expressing our ongoing concerns with the preemption standard in many of the bills and further explaining the privacy and free expression risks presented by several of the other pieces of legislation before the subcommittee. The analysis is not exhaustive, but intended to provide information to the subcommittee on some of the bills that have not received as much attention in the press.
The letter again explained that many of the bills, particularly COPPA 2.0 and KOSA, would risk preempting a number of state laws that provide significant protections to children. Children should not come out of this process with fewer protections than they had before it started.
The letter also expressed concerns about Sammy’s Law, the Safe Messaging for Kids Act and the App Store Accountability Act. Each bill would either incentivize or require invasive age verification, would create new and overbroad access to children’s data, and would create a chilling effect for the use of essential communications services by children and adults in many circumstances. We urge the Committee to make changes to address these concerns.
On September 15, 2026, the Center for Democracy & Technology and Electronic Frontier Foundation filed an amicus brief along with the Wikimedia Foundation in Meta Platforms v. Bonta, challenging California’s SB 976.
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.
CDT Joins Letter Defending First Amendment Rights Amid Attack on Center for American Progress
The Center for Democracy & Technology joined more than 150 civil society, advocacy, and nonpartisan organizations in a joint statement led by Nonprofits Together supporting the Center for American Progress amid a recent legal action by the Trump administration. The statement emphasizes that independent organizations have a First Amendment right to publish evidence-based analysis and critique government policies, regardless of which administration is in power.
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.
