EFF: The KIDS Act Would Force Age Checks on Everyone, Not Just Minors

Congress is fast-tracking the KIDS Act, a bundle of internet bills anchored by a revised Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and pushed through an expedited process that skips debate on the individual measures. The package layers several incompatible age-gating regimes on top of one another, and the EFF argues the practical result is that platforms—facing tangled compliance rules and litigation exposure—will simply verify the age of every user across their services.

The core mechanism is a ‘knows or should have known’ negligence standard for whether a user is a child (under 13) or teen (13–16). Even though the KOSA text disclaims any age-verification mandate, that low bar means operators can be held liable after the fact, so most will collect age data up front through ID checks or facial age-estimation systems. Those estimation tools are error-prone precisely for the minors they aim to protect, and fail more often for people of color, people with disabilities, and trans and nonbinary users. Companion provisions in the SAFE BOTS Act and SCREEN Act add further age-gating pressure, meaning adults will routinely have to prove they are adults.

Beyond surveillance, the EFF warns of two downstream harms. The revised KOSA drops its ‘duty of care’ but requires platforms to police broad categories of lawful speech—drugs, tobacco, cannabis, gambling, alcohol, and financial fraud—which could sweep up legitimate discussion of addiction recovery, harm reduction, or scam victimization, prompting platforms to over-remove content. The bill also reaches into direct messages, ephemeral messaging, and encrypted chat; its encryption carve-out is incomplete because the requirement to ‘address’ enumerated harms still applies, creating pressure to weaken or limit private communications that providers cannot read.