Big News: KOSA is Being Marked Up Today While Meta Tries to Show (Too Late) That It Can Self-Regulate

An extraordinary month is unfolding in the international movement to roll back the phone-based childhood.

The Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act (KOSPA) is up for markup today in the House of Representatives, and it could be brought to a House floor vote by the end of the month. Under mounting pressure from child safety advocates and the bipartisan push for  regulation, Meta has announced the release of a teen version of Instagram, which we see as a welcome step forward.¹

Meanwhile, multiple U.S. states are implementing phone-free policies in schools. Australia is likely to raise the minimum age for social media use to 16, Greece is enforcing a nationwide phone ban in schools, and France has implemented a bell-to-bell phone-free policy across 180 middle schools. Additionally, one of England’s largest school academy trusts, with over 35,000 students, is phasing out phones in its schools.² We are particularly excited about the phone-free school initiatives that are going bell-to-bell and beyond instructional time bans—the policy that most teachers want and that we have long recommended.

In response to these growing initiatives, Meta and other social media companies (along with their lobby groups and the digital rights groups that they subsidize) have intensified their marketing campaigns, attempting to downplay the harm their platforms cause to teens and resist regulatory efforts.

We have published two essays (one in The Atlantic and one in The New York Times) in the past week to expose these companies' disingenuous arguments, particularly those used to oppose KOSPA. These arguments include:

1. Social media is actually beneficial for teens.

2. It is especially beneficial for teens from historically marginalized communities.

3. Nearly any regulation of social media will harm teens from historically marginalized communities.

4. KOSPA is a “censorship bill” that will violate young users' free speech.

All of these claims are misleading and misrepresent the real-world impact of these products.

In our first piece, for The Atlantic, we (Zach and Jon) and Lennon Torres (an LGBTQ+ advocate and campaign manager at The Heat Initiative) argue that social media harms teens in disadvantaged communities more than others and that KOSPA may, in fact, benefit these teens the most. We also show the hypocrisy of tech leaders who protect their own children from their products (by delaying their access to devices, sending them to Waldorf schools, and making their nannies sign screen time contracts), while publicly saying that their products are harmless. 

You can read the full article here, or here on After Babel.

Image. Mark Zuckerberg apologizing to those impacted by child sexual exploitation during a Senate hearing. You can see Lennon sitting just above and to the left of Zuckerberg's hands. Source: New York Times. Photo: Kenny Holston/The New York Times.

In our second piece, published in The New York Times, we present the findings of a nationally representative survey of 1,006 Gen Z adults (ages 18-27) that we conducted in partnership with The Harris Poll. We wrote the essay with Will Johnson, the CEO of the Harris Poll. The survey reveals that over half of Gen Z spends more than four hours a day on social media, with 23% spending more than seven hours daily. Most support child safety regulations, and nearly half wish that TikTok, X/Twitter, and Snapchat had never been invented. 

You can read our overview of the survey results in our New York Times essay, and you can find the full survey results at the Harris Poll website.

The implication from these many developments is that the tide has turned. The tipping point is here. Collective action is happening at a speed beyond anything we could have imagined when we published The Anxious Generation back in March. It’s happening in schools around the country and around the world. It’s happening in state capitals and—finally, perhaps—in the U.S. Congress. And it's happening among groups of parents who are linking up and syncing up to say: No more. Not with my kids. Parents, teachers, and politicians everywhere have had enough and seen enough. They are taking action to roll back the phone-based childhood and restore a more play-based childhood. Join them, join us, by signing up at Anxiousgeneration.com and LetGrow.com.

1. Text drawn from Jon’s tweet about the announcement: We are cautiously optimistic about Meta’s new teen accounts. It is the biggest and best step forward we have seen from them. It establishes the principle that minors are not adults and must not be exploited in the ways that adults can be exploited. It establishes 16 as an important age threshold below which teens need more parental supervision in the virtual world. It establishes that there is something deeply wrong about any platform where adults from all around the world can so easily get into direct contact and photo sharing with children who lie about their age and say that they are 13.

Of course, this is just a first step in reforming an ecosystem that badly needs a simpler, more robust way to identify minors and install real age gating, especially for those under 13. Most of the problems with social media will still plague teens on Instagram. But this is a good start, and we hope it is just the first of many steps from Meta.

These new teen accounts will make it easier for Meta to create differentiated experiences for youth and comply with the requirements of KOSPA, which Congress is currently considering. It is vital that Congress pass KOSPA, to establish a duty of care and a set of other requirements for ALL of the platforms that now own our children’s attention and their childhoods. KOSPA puts all the companies on a level playing field with minimum safety standards.

2. Read this helpful and informative Substack post by Katherine Martinko for a longer discussion on these international initiatives.