OPINION:
Everybody agrees that children need to be safe online. But the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) is not the solution it’s little more than a grab bag of concerns and mandates not up to the task.
In the eyes of proponent policymakers, digital platforms like online gaming, video streaming, and social media are inherently harmful to minors. KOSA’s drafters intend to protect kids by wrangling online platforms with rules to limit addictive and harmful content exposure.
However, broad mandates and unclear definitions could accidentally limit access to beneficial products and services. One example is the prohibition of “dark patterns,” or internet design practices aimed at circumventing the agency of a user. The term is vague enough that it’s not clear where a dark pattern ends, and useful design decisions, aimed at helping users navigate a platform, begin.
Using a mixture of mandates and disclosure requirements, KOSA relies on a “general theory of harm” that dark patterns and personal recommendations expose minors to harmful content in an online ecosystem where bullies and other nefarious actors lurk. Yet how exactly online activity harms children is unclear and still hotly debated.
A quick Google search reveals no shortage of headlines confirming a negative correlation between social media and mental health. Popular academics like Jonathan Haidt are leading the charge. Haidt’s most recent book, The Anxious Generation, outlines what he believes to be a causal relationship between increased social media use and rising mental health disorders.
As any good researcher should, Haidt overviews many studies in an attempt to establish a causal relationship between social media and declining mental health, including the empirical gold standard of research, randomized control trials.
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In statistics, the absolute value of the correlation coefficient ranges from zero to one, with zero describing no correlation and one describing a perfect correlation. The closer the coefficient to one, the stronger the correlation. Haidt describes a measly 0.17 correlation as “not trivial”—but it is. Any correlational relationship below 0.2 is considered weak.
So it is unsurprising that a Consensus Study Report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concludes that the connection between social media and mental health in adolescents is mixed and weak. The report also highlighted how the pervasive nature of social media makes it difficult to separate the positive aspects from the negative for research purposes.
KOSA’s authors recognize this unsettled debate intuitively, acknowledging the problem with a requirement to contract with the National Academy of Sciences for research “on the risk of harms to minors by use of social media and other online platforms” But that research already exists, disagrees on impact, and is ignored.
KOSA’s objective is admirable: we should take steps to ensure children are safe online. But that noble pursuit is sullied by lawmaker eagerness to “just do something” rather than to do something well.
Rather than rush to action, lawmakers should prioritize effective legislation. This means waiting for a consensus rather than rushing to conclusions based on mixed evidence. Without more research, KOSA offers nothing more than vague solutions and unintended consequences in search of problems.
• Tirzah Duren is the Vice President of Policy for the American Consumer Institute, a nonprofit educational organization. For more information about the Institute, visit TheAmericanConsumer.org or follow us on X @ConsumerPal.
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