The KIDS Act Would Require Age Checks To Get Online, EFF Warns

Congress is preparing to vote within the next week on the KIDS Act, a sprawling package of legislation that, in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's reading, seeks to control Americans' web browsing and private messaging. It combines a revised Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) with other internet bills, study bills, reporting requirements and new regulations — and lawmakers are attempting to move them all at once under an ultra-expedited process.

Age checks for everyone

The KOSA section states it should not be read to require age verification, but the rest of the text imposes obligations whenever a platform “knows or should have known” a user is a child (under 13) or a teen (13 to 16). That is a low, negligence-style standard: courts and regulators decide afterwards whether a service should have known. To avoid liability, services must work out which users are teenagers. Some may ask for driver's licences or passports; others will rely on age-estimation systems that guess from activity or run facial scans. EFF notes those systems make mistakes estimating children's ages — the very population the bill aims to protect — and fail more often for people of color, people with disabilities, and trans and nonbinary people.

The same logic runs through the SAFE BOTS Act, which applies that standard to chatbot features, and the SCREEN Act, which requires services hosting sexually explicit content to determine whether users are “more likely than not” under the relevant age limit before granting access. The consequences will not stop at minors: if platforms must reliably identify teenagers, adults will be asked to prove they are adults.

Policing lawful speech

The revised KOSA removes the bill's infamous “duty of care” provision, but requires covered platforms to “establish, implement, maintain, and enforce” policies addressing several categories of content and conduct. Some, such as true threats and sexual exploitation, involve unlawful activity; others are far broader, covering the “sale or use” of narcotic drugs, tobacco, cannabis, gambling and alcohol, and discussions of financial fraud. EFF asks how a 15-year-old should post that she worries a friend is drinking too much, or seek advice about a parent's gambling problem. The bill does not ban those conversations outright, but it pressures platforms to moderate broad categories of lawful speech — and when legal risk rises, platforms take down more speech.

Encrypted messages

The package also creates new rules around direct messages, disappearing or “ephemeral” messages, and AI chat services. It states that certain KOSA requirements should not override strong encryption, but the protection is incomplete: the carve-out does not cover KOSA's separate requirement that platforms “address” a list of harms to minors. The bill never answers how a platform should address activity inside encrypted communications it cannot read, which EFF says creates pressure to weaken private messaging or limit features. Disappearing messages, it notes, are not a loophole but a useful privacy feature — and these provisions too depend on knowing who is a minor: more age checks and less privacy online.